The funny Chef Phil was not in class, and instead of his sous chef sitting in, we were confronted with a mean French man who was almost disgusted by how little we knew, and who was not kind enough to treat us like adults. Being that it was just our fifth day, you would think he'd cut us some slack. No.
We were to make four soups: Beef Consomme, French Onion, Split Pea, and Potato Leek.
Beef Consomme with spring vegetables
For anyone who has never made a Consomme, it is the most bizarre thing. You start off with a ball of ground beef, mix in some vegetables and egg whites, then throw it into some beef stock and slowly simmer it. As the mass floats to the top, it creates a "raft" which filters the stock. You dig a hole in the center of the raft with your ladle, and slowly ladle stock through the hole to moisten the raft until the stock runs clear. The whole thing looks like a pool of vomit. I think Escoffier came up with this brilliant idea. What strange people those early French chefs were.
After the consomme we made French Onion Soup, which according to our instructor, is very popular in restaurants because it's extremely cheap and delicious.
"You need to work fasteh! Ozerwise you vill not be able to have zis soup for deener! And eef not, well, too bad," said the Chef to our class.
He walks over to my station and peers over me.
"Vut is zis?"
"Onion soup?"
"No! Zis mess! Ow can you work like zis?!"
He took my towel, laid it on a shelf beneath my station, grabbed all my knives and put them on the towel along with my bowl of vegetables.
"And your note cards! You cannot ave them touching ze food! If you are not using somesing, you put it away, yes?"
"Yes, Chef. Thank you."
He looks into my pot.
"Ohhh... your onions could use a beet more color, no? And your garlic is raw! If I bite into ze garlic, then I cannot taste ze soup because all I taste is ze garlic!"
He tastes the soup.
"Ohhhh... I deed not expect such a good flavor. Did you taste eet? Eet's very good."
To the chefs, good seasoning means A LOT of salt. I learned this our first day when Chef Phil told us to rethink our concepts of salt and butter, because we use a ton of it.
My partner and I didn't finish our onion soup in time for dinner, so we alternated between eating our family meal(provided by Level 4 students) and cooking.
The Chef was right- it was pretty good.
After dinner it started to get hot in the kitchen, and I could barely concentrate. My partner took over the more complicated Split Pea soup while I struggled with the simple Potato Leek soup.
The Chef was again impressed by our seasoning, but he did yell at me for not cutting the vegetables smaller. Ah well. So I make ugly, tasty soup. There's still time to improve.
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