OOF!! Or… Oeuf!!

We were forewarned in the beginning of this class. Chef told us a story something along these lines: “This was the first class I ever taught at the FCI, and the co-Instructor/Chef watched as I ate egg after egg, trying the students’ dishes. Let’s just say it was a rough night.”

Well it sure was.

The egg is extremely versatile, and does some amazing things. For instance, and egg yolk is used to make a cake moister and a richer, but a boiled egg yolk is drier than the boiled egg white. (How does that happen? I don’t have an answer)

It also enhances and enables emulsifications. A yolk can literally bind oil to vinegar, defying science!

Well, it’s really versatile, but let me tell you, it can mess up your stomach. None of us ate SO many eggs, but all of the guys got stomach aches. The girls seemed ok.

Anyways, soft, medium and hard boiled eggs. 3 minutes -> 5 minutes -> 12 minutes. You’ll get a perfectly boiled egg in 12 minutes (after boiling/simmering starts). The soft and medium boiled eggs are a little more difficult to achieve. The timing is much more important. We tried making a soft boiled egg, but the white sets a lot quicker than we were told. 3 minutes after boiling is WAY to long. Apparently, it should still be very runny. Ours was almost cooked through, minus the yolk. How embarrassing.

My favorite was the poached egg. Go ahead, try throwing an egg into boiling salt water. NO DON’T! Salt is a no-no for poached eggs. Instead you need approximately 30mL of Vinegar for every liter of water. (Just use regular garbage white vinegar, the one you use to make volcanoes). Keep a simmering pot of salt water nearby to rinse the vinegar taste off of the eggs.

Anyways, the water should be at a super soft simmer, and you carefully drop the eggs into the water. The Vinegar will help coagulate the eggs immediately, keeping them together, not flying all over the place (is it a density thing?). Well after a few minutes, and the egg remains very soft, and the yolk runny, you take it out, dip it in the simmering salt water to wash off the vinegar, and SERVE!!! Usually you put some hollandaise sauce on there, but we didn’t have any. It was cool to see it actually work though. Pretty simple, too.

We made stuffed eggs, stuffed with mushroom duxelles and topped with a Gruyere cheese mornay sauce (a creamy cheese sauce). I think these are what did me in.

Lastly, we made some perfect omelettes. (We also made Spanish omelettes, but those aren’t as impressive.) The regular French omelettes have about a tablespoon of cream per egg, you put it in a medium to hot pan with butter (the butter has to be FRESHLY added so it doesn’t have a chance to brown and color the omelette). Then you drop the eggs in, pull in North, South, East and West, and scramble them!! This is all a very quick process. Little time to think. The point that you STOP scrambling is pretty much the consistency that your eggs will be. Quickly shift the pan to get the omelette hanging off a little bit, and then roll it up and off into a plate. There should be ZERO color, and very little wrinkle. It really doesn’t take very long either. But it’s not easy. The temperature is the killer part that is hard to monitor and maintain. But if you’re making them every day, 50 in an hour, I bet you’ll get pretty good at it.

So right after my last omelette, I felt like I was going to explode. I told the chef I had to run to the bathroom, he said ok. I RAN!!! When I got back, I RAN AGAIN!! It was scary. I was afraid this moment would come. Turns out a couple of other guys experienced the same problem I did. Let that be a lesson to… me?

Sweet Sweet Breads

Ok, this class was straight out of fear factor. It was a little ridiculous to be honest with you. The menu… Sweetbreads, calf kidneys, calf liver and lamb tongue. I don’t know which one was the nastiest. I’ve had breaded sweetbreads at a nice restaurant, and they were really delicious. The sweetbreads we made were braised. Needless to say, they weren’t the most appetizing dishes we ever made, but I suppose they’re somewhat of a delicacy.

The lamb tongues were by far the most fun to make. After they were boiling for like 2 hours, we had to peel the skin off of them, which we did as a class, huddled around one table, and that was pretty fun.

Oh, it was POURING that day, so only about 7 of us made it to class. It happened to be the 7 of us who probably belong in the class. A number of the other students who were not as… I’m at a loss for words, but it was a good time, and Chef had a really good time, so it seemed.

SO after we peeled the lamb tongues, all we had to do was make the sauce, which was a little spicy. Chef said ours was perfect. And, quite frankly, the sauce was delicious. I took a piece of the tip of tongue, and it just felt weird.

I guess I should get a little more detailed, rather than just telling you how weird it was. The organ meats are divided up into 2 categories, white and red. As you can probably imagine, the reds include the liver, kidneys, heart and tongue. Not the most appetizing of food items, but probably better than the whites. The whites are generally the sweetbreads, brains, tripe, feet (chicken feet), and don’t laugh, testicles! The liver (lightly dredged in flour and sautéed) was alright, and kidneys (browned and gently braised) weren’t bad, but all in all, I feel like it was a class on how to serve the garbage parts of the animal, but I know that’s not true.