Culinary School: Roasting in a Wood Fired Oven, Stuffing Peppers and Baking Bread Pudding
Truly epic week in Culinary school cooking traditional french dishes like Nicoise salad, Brandade peppers and Sorbets. We also went on a farm trip to Hillary Austen’s place and I got to pet pigs, pick fresh produce and cook with a wood fired brick oven!
This Scallops salad with Almond Vinaigrette gets an honourable mention because I love scallops.
The Almond Vinaigrette was interesting since we first made a sherry-thyme vinaigrette and then mixed in chopped roasted almonds right before spooning it over the salad.
This Egg and Ham filled Spinach Raviollo tossed in butter sauce was outrageously good. A “Raviollo” is the singular of the plural “Raviolli”. It’s so big you just need one.
Why is that dough green? We wilted spinach, squeezed it out, pureed it and mixed 2tbsp of pureed spinach with the egg yolks that went into the dough.
These Brandade Stuffed Peppers were so freaking good. “Brandade” is a mix of salt cod, olive oil and we added potatoes to ours. Yeah, it’s basically a fishy mashed potatoes in peppers. YUM.
Making the Brandade: wash salt cod, change water and keep in water overnight to draw out salt. Dry the salt cod and break up with a wooden spoon. Add riced waxy potatoes, olive oil, S&P and mix until delicious. Put in a piping bag and fill peppers.
This Nicoise salad was a great example of an assembled (or tossed) salad. Our salad had baby cherry tomatoes, sliced red onion, hard boiled egg, cooked potatoes and beans, poached tuna and topped with anchovies and olives.
Poaching tuna: We cleaned out a fillet of tuna, cut into 2" pieces and simmered in 180°F oil for 8–10m until tuna is tender. To season the oil before adding the tuna we first simmered whole garlic cloves, thyme, parsley and peppercorns for 10m.
We made a bunch of Sorbets and Granitas. All of these were great. The difference between a Sorbet and Granita are that Sorberts have 25–30% sugar content and Granitas have 15–17% sugar content; and Sorbets are spun in an ice-cream machine while granitas a frozen and scraped with a fork.
Making Sorbets: Make a fruit puree (cooked or not), add enough sugar (corn syrup or 2:1 sugar:water syrup) to bring up sugar to 25%-30%, spin and freeze.
This Maple Bread Pudding with Maple Creme Anglaise was outrageous. We started off by infusing cream and milk for for an hour with candy cap mushrooms and then used the milk and cream for the pudding and creme anglaise. That made everything taste “mapley”.
Assembling bread pudding: one layer of cubed brioche bread, sprinkle dried currants & raisins, another layer of cubed brioche bread, another layer of dried fruit and finally drown it in custard. Bake covered in a water bath for 1h at 350°F until passes knife test. Serve sliced with 20z maple creme anglaise.
FARM VISIT
We all traveled north to Hillary Austen’s farm up in Sebastopol. It was a packed day including milking goats, feeding baby goats, petting pigs, seeing homemade cheese, and picking fruit and vegetables growing on the property. It was super informative and fun. We also made a bunch of food. Ajinder posted great photos from the goats, the house and the farm.
I’ll focus on my first experience with a Wood Fired Brick Oven. I roasted merguez sausages, baby squash and peppers in that oven. Regulating the heat correctly is challenging since wood fired ovens have four heat sources: the deck, the fire on the side, the fire on top and ambient baking heat.
Protips for wood fired oven:
- Heat plate up in the oven before putting food in it.
- Add high smoke point oil to the pan so food doesn’t stick.
- Rotate plate 180° after 2–3m once the side next to the fire browns. Once the other side browns after 2–3m, pull and mix whatever’s on the plate and return to oven.
- More fat. More salt.
- Everything is 600–700°F hot. Don’t get burned.
Read more about my experiences in culinary school by reading about last week’s classes:
