Culinary School: Cooking Thai Food, Assembling Spring Salads, Roasting Duck a L’Orange
Epic week in culinary school assembling the prettiest best-of-spring salads, cooking classic decadent french dishes and cooking thai food.
We started off this week with a beautiful Sweetbreads Spring Salad. The salad has pea tendril leafs, blanched peas, halved carrots, quartered radishes, halved morel mushrooms, lemon vinaigrette and fried sweetbreads. All super springy ingredients.
How to prep Sweetbreads: We blanched the sweetbreads in court bouillon, peeled them and got them to 1.5" sized pieces. We then dredged them in S&P Wondra flour and shallow fried them to deep brown .
We also made this beautiful Arctic Char Salad. The salad had marinaded quartered turnips, quartered radishes, diced cucumbers, diced raw arctic char, topped with beans, coined radishes, coined cucumber and dill. It was super delicious.
What vegetables to blanche? We blanched large chunks of radishes, turnips and carrots for 1–2m. Blanching for 1–2m still retains the “raw” feeling while taking away the unpleasantness of raw hard vegetables.
What was in the Marinade for this salad? The marinade ended up being pretty modern. 1/4cup EVOO, 2tbsp dashi, 1tsp mirin, 1tsp light soy sauce, 1tsp rice vinegar, 2tbsp minced cucumber and S&P. We marinaded the bigger chunks and plated that as the base for the salad.
This delicious and beautiful dish has a lot going on: fried potatoes, roundified salmon and cucumbers tossed in creme-fraiche.
Potato Pave: Its a slab of reconstituted fried potato. A dish so labour intensive it was clearly done in the age where french orphans were abundant free labour. Start by mandolining rectangular potatoes into S&P cream. Line a bread pan with buttered parchment and stack a dozen layers of creamed thin rectangular potato pieces into a perfect potato brick. Bake weighted at 350°F for 2h. Let chill overnight, cut a slice and fry basted for 10m each side.
Salmon Roulade w/ Horseradish Crust: Cut 3/4" long strips of salmon, roll onto itself and tie with butcher’s twine. Top with 1tbsp of 0.5cup grated horseradish and 0.5tsp salt. Fry crust side side down until dark brown.
Cucumbers: Toss cucumbers w/ 2tsp salt and let sit 15m. Squeeze out. Toss with 2tbsp creme-fraiche, 1tbsp fine cut chives, 1tbsp dill and lemon juice.
This classic Duck a L’Orange was such a great combo. The fattiness of the duck was tempered by the acidity of the orange.
Roasting Duck a L’Orange: Start by shoving two halves of an orange inside a duck. Fo’ realz. Tress up duck and bake at 425°F rotating back down ->left side down -> right -> front ->back again every 15m for a total of 1.5h. Curve up.
Duck L’Orange Sauce: chop duck wings and neck to 1cm pieces and sautee until brown. Add 3cups duck stock and reduce to 1.5cups. Use this “Essence” to deglaze roasting pan until napa. Add orange juice reduced to a third, blanched fine julienned orange peel and 1tbsp white wine vinegar gastrique.
To finish our french extravaganza we made Crepe-Soufflé w/ Cherry Sauce. It’s literally a crepe with a souflee inside it. You like crepes? you like souffles? Let’s synergize!
Assembly instructions for Crepe-Souffle: Make crepes. Make souflee base. Dollop souflee base into bottom half of crepe and fold over. Bake for 15-20m on 375°F.
Thai Cuisine Seasoning
We spent a day cooking thai food and it was so interesting. The key flavour ingredients in thai cuisine are lime juice for acidity, fish sauce instead of salt, and palm sugar instead of raw sugar.
We started out our thai workshop by making Som Tom (Green Papaya Salad).
How to make Som Tom: In a mortar & pestle pound thai chilies, garlic, rehydrated dried shrimp, fish sauce and lime juice. Lightly pound and then remove halved cherry tomatoes. In batches pound julienned green papaya and peanuts.
This Eggplant and Pepper Salad used a lot of Thai flavour components: Peanut oil, Thai Herbs (thai basil, cilantro, mint) and thai seasoning (lime juice, palm sugar, fish suace).
How to make this dish: Sautee sliced shallots, minced garlic, sliced jalapneos, sliced bell peppers, and salted & drained eggplant slices. Season with Thai herbs and thai seasonings.
This Gang GareeGai (Yellow Curry w/ Potatoes & Chicken) was delicious. We even made our own Yellow Curry Paste.
What’s in Yellow Curry Paste? Blend together sliced sauteed ginger slices, whole roasted shallots, whole roasted garlic, dried chiles, salt, lemongrass, kaffir lime leafs, galangal, curry powder, ground cumin and coriander.
How to make this dish? Sautee yellow curry paste in coconut oil for 2–3m and then coat chicken. Add onions, coconut milk and potatoes. Simmer with water for 1h until chicken is cooked. Season with thai seasonings.
This Yum Neur (Thai Beef Salad) was delicious and such a great example of Thai seasonings.
How to make this dish? Marinade Skirt Steak in thai seasonings, peanut oil, grated ginger and minced lemongrass. Grill meat until medium rare. Put a lot of cilantro on a sheet pan, place hot steak on cilantro, cover steak with even more Cilantro, another sheet pan on top and wrap completely. After 10m thinly sliced meat and toss with cucumber, sliced shallots, herbs and chiles.
Read more about my experiences in culinary school by reading about last week’s classes:
