What a Farce

I got to class with about 10 minutes to spare. My partner got there about 5 minutes after me. 10 minutes is about enough time to lay out your cutting board, take out your knives and begin to get your ingredients. We have gotten into the groove of laying out 2 cutting boards if your partner isn’t there. It’s an additional 20 seconds compared to an extra minute of having to do it yourself.

Anyways, I look around and EVERYONE has been in class long enough to not only gather all of their ingredients, but also to wash and peel their vegetables, start to boil water if necessary, start chopping their ingredients, etc. With that said, it was inevitable that my partner and I were going to be on the slower side (Not to mention, they were out of mushrooms, which we needed, and had to wait for).

However, we rushed our asses off, and we were not the last team to present our dish, which was quite impressive.

The main recipes we made were escalopes of beef, stuffed with a ground sausage and mushroom duxelles farce, and stuffed vegetables (mushrooms, zucchini, and tomatoes). None of them were really difficult, but stuffings add another element to a dish, which requires careful seasoning and consideration.

Oh, by the way, a farce is simply a stuffing. And a forcemeat (or force-anything, I think) is a ground up meat.

The beef was a top round, cut into thin slices, pounded to thin escalopes (not very thin). I think we could have pounded it a bit more and tenderized it with the jagged end of the hammer a bit more (my partner prepared all of that while I was furiously chopping away at the mushrooms we finally got, and making brunoise out of the carrots). Then we put some stuffing inside, rolled it up and secured it with some string. After a light seasoning, and a light dusting in flour, we seared all the sides (well, as much as we could sear while Chef Tom was rushing us and calling us up to look at something or another), removed the meat, sweated some carrots and onions, replaced the beef “roll-ups”, and filled halfway with stock. We loosely covered it with some parchment paper (perhaps we should have used a proper lid, but Chef Tom said to do it this way), and stuck it in the oven.

So, the beef wasn’t very tender, and the sausage inside wasn’t great either, though it was seasoned well. It was all just “okay” (though the sauce we reduced from it was outstanding). We have to keep in mind that the cut of beef we used is naturally a leaner, tougher cut. And as we learned, the leanness of the meat keeps it from getting too tender. So I partially blame the meat for its toughness.

The stuffed vegetables, however, were delicious. Unfortunately, we were rushing and I was unable to fully appreciate what we were doing, even though I did a lot of it. The stuffing consisted of little pieces of lardon (little chunks of bacon), shallots (I believe), more chopped mushrooms with chopped zucchini guts, one chopped garlic clove, and parmesan cheese. Awesome.

Despite all the rushing, we not only finished this meal with plenty of time to spare, we also made a chicken liver pate. Chef was only supposed to demo this, but instead we all made a dish. I didn’t feel bad throwing it out, because, after all, it was only chicken livers. It didn’t taste bad, but it wasn’t what the doctor ordered.

By the end of class (like 10:00) we clearly had plenty of time to spare, and we found ourselves listening to Chef talk, which turned into a discussion about the mafia, and how we should not get involved with them. HOW did we get to this? And WHY were we rushing just to have 45 minutes to kill, and a conversation on mafia run businesses in the Bronx?
I can appreciate rushing for the sake of expedience and working under time constraints, but when we have extra time, and we are learning something new, why rush us? Of course it didn’t help that everyone had all their ingredients set up from the beginning except for us, but that doesn’t explain 45 minutes of relatively useless conversation.

We also had time to prepare sweet breads for the next class. If you’re reading this and don’t know what it is… well time for some independent study.