Stocks and Fonds

Yowza. I remember when I first started taking film classes at Texas. It was the first time that I ever recall being excited to go to school. After today, that seems miserable. I woke up at 4:53am - before my alarm went off - to get to class early. We get bonus points for showing up early to help set up prep. We get to claim our stations. We get extra face time with the chefs. And we get the first coffee. I've never been a huge coffee guy, but I have a feeling it will be what gets me through this class. Well, that, and the sheer joy of creating gourmet foods from scratch.

The base for most delicious soups and sauces is stock. Bones, water, mirepoix (carrots, onion, celery), and bouquet garni or sachet simmered for hours to create delicious meat-flavored liquid. Today we made chicken stocks in class. The mise en place:













Chicken carcasses, celery, onion, carrot, and sachet ingredients (cloves, peppercorns, bay leaf, thyme, parsley). There's also a few extraneous items on the tray that we got to play with whilst our stock simmered.

Once the bones have been blanched and rinsed, fresh water, mirepoix and your sachet has been added, there's about 3 hours to kill. Here's what we did to pass the time:













Those are fluted mushrooms, tournéd potatoes, medium diced carrots, julienned celery and carrots, very fine diced tomato, a tomato fillet, fine chopped parsley, and paysenned carrots. I can't wait until I'm really good at this stuff. Fluting mushrooms is a lot of fun and I'm pretty decent at it. I even had other people in class asking me how to do it.

We also roasted some veal knuckles until they were GBD - golden brown and delicious. Those went into the steam jacketed kettle. Then we deglazed the pan with red wine and a little water to get all the suc (brown bits of FLAVOR) off the bottom and that went into the kettle. Then we used some of the veal fat to caramelize the mirepoix to which we added tomato paste and that went into the kettle. By the end of class, this had begun to simmer and (presumably) continued to simmer until the PM class strained it. When we get there in the morning, we'll strain the brown veal stock that the PM class started. We will use this brown veal stock for a great deal of very yummy (and very fancy) sauces. Stay tuned for that.

Oh yea, that "exciting meeting" that I had last week was excellent. There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out, but hopefully I'll be making a really exciting announcement in the coming weeks. NO SPOILERS PLEASE from those of you who have heard things. Tomorrow is béchamel day - white cream sauces. Yum.