Today’s tasting was, you see, sort of like a nutty version of "Iron Chef." We did four courses, and for each course, we would get two mystery ingredients, to which we could add only two components. We went course by course (instead of plating up everything at the end) and had strict time limits for each, ranging from five minutes for a starter to 15 minutes for the entree. Every student had to do every course, whether we were culinary or baking/pastry.
In addition to being limited by time, we were limited to adding things only from what Chef had set up for us in a small "market" with some fresh produce, extremely basic dairy and spices and oil and vinegars. He also included some rice and barley, uncooked, I think to throw us off and get us to make something that would never be finished in time, cheeky bastard.
Maybe because it was my last day, maybe because Chef Olmos had already given me my evaluation yesterday (I got 46 points out of a possible 50, with very positive comments... the only thing he dinged me on was "going too far" and "taking too many risks" on my tastings. That white chocolate and saffron panna cotta is going to haunt me the rest of my days, isn’t it?), but, for whatever reason, I just didn’t give a patoot. I mean that in a good way. I had a ton of fun and wasn’t stressed at all, and really was not emotionally invested one way or another in my dishes. A few of the other students (including Eunice) got themselves all crazy worked up and stressed, but I just thought it was a hoot.
Here, for better or worse, the results (for the record, I finished all my dishes at least 30 seconds before time, and I never felt rushed, I think because I decided beforehand that I was going to keep things simple and not try to be Julia freakin’ Child or anything):
Starter: we were given only one ingredient for this one, in this case, two heirloom tomatoes, a red and a yellow. We had five minutes from the time we saw our mystery ingredient to the time we were expected to have the finished plate in front of Chef.
I added baby greens for color and texture and some goat cheese seasoned with salt and pepper. The cheese was a lot softer than I thought it would be when I grabbed it, so visually it wasn’t quite as attractive as planned, to put it lightly, but it was tasty. Then again, I like white chocolate and saffron panna cotta, so what do I know?
Soup/Second Starter: we had a choice of what we did for the second course, either another appetizer or a soup. Our components this time were baby eggplant and white turnips, with eight minutes from start (seeing the ingredients for the first time) to finish (putting the finished dish in front of Chef).
I did a brunoise of the veggies, sauteed them with garlic and then added chicken stock (one of the pre-made components available to us) and, at the very end, tossed in a chiffonade of the turnip leaves, which were actually quite tasty. I thought it came out ok, especially since I hate eggplant and therefore never work with it. I really liked the turnip that way, though, and would do it again in the future with some other root veggies like carrots.
Entree: our two components for this were a piece o’ dead cow (the culinary student working next to me identified it as a skirt steak) and fingerling potatoes, with 15 minutes start to finish.
I sliced the fingerlings super-thin and sauteed them with garlic, onion, rosemary, salt and olive oil, figuring that was the fastest and least fussiest way to cook them. Even though the plating is pretty lame, I think the potatoes turned out well, if a bit oily. If you're thinking hey, that's adding more than one component, we could cheat by adding a component of "seasoning" which is how I classified the garlic, onion and rosemary.
The skirt steak was a joke, because I have only ever made one steak in my life, and that was in my culinary class for bakers that I took last year. I rarely, rarely eat red meat (though when I do rarely eat it, I eat it rare!) and I never make it myself. That’s what chefs are for, no? Princess doesn’t like getting her hands bloody.
Of course, I was not the only one who felt this way. Eunice was there and raised quite the stink about being a vegetarian and refusing to touch the meat, blah blah blah. Lord, but she did go on about it.
Anyway, I threw the steak on the grill after seasoning it with salt and pepper, but it took a hella lot longer to cook than I thought, and when I took it off with three minutes to go to do a super-quick "rest," it was still blue-red in the middle. So I sliced off a few pieces and threw them back on the grill. Not my finest moment, but then I am the Pastry Pirate after all, not the Cow Pirate.
Dessert: we had 12 minutes (Chef wanted to give us five, but the four culinary students whined about it, so he relented just to shut them up). Our two components were an Asian pear (my favorite fruit!) and baby kiwis, which I never had before working here and now love, love, love. They are awesome.
I tried the Asian pear and the kiwilettes and found they were both nice and sweet and ripe with good texture, so I made a fruit salad. The two components I added were raspberries for color and a little more flavor diversity, and a sauce that I personally loved (and ate the leftovers of). It was super simple: plain yogurt, pinch of sugar, vanilla beans scraped from a pod and the juice of a couple tablespoonfuls of minced ginger. I thought the mild kick of the ginger and the tangyness of the yogurt, tamed a bit by the vanilla and sugar, went really well with the fruit. It's kind of hard to tell in the photo, but I used a tipless pastry bag to sauce the fruit in a flower shape instead of just splatting it on.
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