Day thirty-nine: The heat is on

Posted on | September 14, 2009

I don’t know if I mentioned this (see my last post) but I was seriously panicked about today’s black box test.

See, today was the first day of our two-day final exam. This morning, we had a written test. This afternoon we had what they call a black box test. This meant the Chef gave all the students surprise ingredients and required us to cook some of them using cooking methods they specified (different students got different combinations of different ingredients and different cooking methods). The panic part? The ingredients and cooking methods could be anything. Just anything.

Wanna know how I did? Lemme tell you.

“A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that’s when cuisine is truly exciting.”
~ Charlie Trotter

I can’t wait to talk about the black box test, so let me tell you about that today and the written test in my next post. S’right? Okay.

The black box test: As soon as we got into the kitchen we all drew a card. The cards are all different and each card tells you what you have to make for your entree. This is what I drew:

• Poached salmon
• Julienne carrots
• Green beans
• Rice pilaf
• Hollandaise sauce

Beyond the entree, we were also required to make a salad and a dessert. The salad had to have greens, vinaigrette, and at least two other components. And the dessert had to be crepes with a fruit sauce and whipped cream.

And we had to make two identical plates of everything: Two salads, two entrees, two desserts.

“To be tempted and indulged by the city’s most brilliant chefs. It’s the dream of every one of us in love with food.”
~ Gael Greene

The first thing I did was think about, and prep, my entree. Now, I wanted a flavor theme. So, looking at the ingredients I had to work with, I came up with lemon.

I have never poached anything in my life. (Remember I said that, over the course of the term, different students get different recipes? Well, as luck would have it, I never got a recipe for poaching. But, smart girl that I am, I reviewed a bunch of cooking methods last night, including poaching, just in case. So I knew, at least, theoretically, what to do.) But it was easy to prepare the poaching liquid: Very thinly sliced lemons, julienne carrots, white wine, duck stock, julienne anise, salt and pepper.

Then I made my rice pilaf: Shallots sweated in butter with bruinoise of carrots (very small cubes) with lemon juice, lemon zest, and salt and pepper. Then I rinsed my rice, threw in some water, and covered the pan and popped it into the oven.

(Forty-five minutes later I discovered I burned a helluva nasty crust where the rice met the pan. Luckily, the pilaf in the middle was just fine. So that’s what I served. Oh, and when I got home I checked a pilaf recipe — I overcooked it by a good 20 minutes!)

I snapped the ends off the green beans, blanched them in boiling water, then shocked them in an ice bath.

All I had left to do was cook the salmon in my poaching liquid, make my hollandaise, and saute the beans. No problem! So I decided to work on my salad.

“For the first time I know what it is to eat. I have gained four pounds. I get frantically hungry, and the food I eat gives me a lingering pleasure. I never ate before in this deep carnal way… I want to bite into life and to be torn by it.”
~ Anaïs Nin

I didn’t have a recipe so I thought about it for a bit, then I walked over to where the produce was to see what looked exciting. Hmmm, I had been thinking about a spinach salad with strawberries and … wait … no strawberries. Okay. But, look, beautiful apples. How about an apple salad with a honey yogurt dressing?

I looked everywhere, but couldn’t find any yogurt.

But I did find some raspberry vinegar. And, hey, are those sliced almonds?

The almonds went into the oven to toast. Apples were sliced and stored in a lemon water (to keep them from browning) while I sliced celery (for crunch), anise (for the sharp taste and to coordinate with the salmon poaching liquid), and arranged the greens. Then I made the vinaigrette with the raspberry vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, and a healthy pinch of sugar.

Took the apples out of the water and dried them. Took the almonds out of the oven. And I tossed everything with the vinaigrette, leaving a few apples and almonds to one side.

I plated the salad on two plates, sprinkling the extra apples and almonds on top to make it look pretty.

Then the Chef graded it.

“All sorrows are less with bread.”
~ Miguel de Cervantes, “Don Quixote”

Next, I popped the salmon into the poaching liquid, then made the dessert. First, I made two crepes. Second, I made a fruit sauce. This was another one of those recipes I had never made before, so I winged it. I put blueberries in a pot, threw in some water and a ton of sugar, and let them boil. Then I popped them into the blender, strained them, and put them into a squeeze bottle. The plan was to make a pretty plate design with the sauce. But, alas, this school has crappy squeeze bottles, all with terrible tops with gaping openings and none with the small, delicate opening I needed to do the type of design work I had in mind.

C’est la vie.

Finally, I made my whipped cream.

I rolled the crepes, one per plate, did the best sauce design I could (not the delicate swirls I imagined, but thick dots of sauce randomly applied over the plate). Then I got a piping bag and topped the crepe with the cream.

Again, the Chef graded it.

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy, and to make plans.”
~ Ernest Hemingway

Finally, it was time to do the entree. So I got started on the hollandaise.

Keeping with my lemon theme, I made a lemon hollandaise. Then, I sauteed my green beans (first time I ever cooked green beans) in some clarified butter.

I totally forgot to put any salt on my beans!

Then I plated; two plates, again.

A scoop of rice pilaf, trying to get the good stuff from the center. On top of that, at an angle, the salmon fillet. And, on top of that, the paper-thin slices of lemon from the poaching liquid.

Next, to one side, the sauteed green beans. And, on top of the salmon, went the julienne carrots, delicately crossed. Finally, a drizzle of hollandaise.

And, once again, the Chef graded everything.

“This recipe is certainly silly. It says to separate two eggs, but it doesn’t say how far to separate them.”
~ Gracie Allen

Not only did I get everything done in the time allotted (2 1/5 hours), but I got done early. Not a lot early, mind you, but early enough to check out how everyone else was doing.

There were some pretty dishes. And some real disasters (Other Guy and Mr. Big both burnt the hell out of their entrees and totally ruined their vegetables, but Asian guy did the most beautiful crepes, using a pasty brush to paint a thick stripe of fruit sauce down the side of his plate).

Now, I was so delighted to just serve decent food, that I barely remember my grades (I saw the grading sheet, but it was handed in at the end of the class). But I can tell you what I remember.

Food was graded on a bunch of different criteria, from appearance to cuts to taste. With one exception, I got either perfect or near perfect. My best dishes were my salad and my dessert — they both got perfect scores for all the criteria.

The one exception was my salmon. I cooked it for 20 – 30 minutes (mercifully, at a very low temperature). I only got a 3.5 out of 5 for that, my lowest score. Later, when I asked the Chef how long I was supposed to poach it for, he said about 6 minutes. Shit! (Interestingly, Mama also got poached salmon. When I asked her how long she poached it for she said an hour!).

So my panic turned into elation; all this was just too much fun.

When I get my grades back, I’ll let you know exactly how I did.

And now I’m thinking, when do I get to do it again?

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