T-24 hours until a taste of Asia hits the FCI

I’ve mentioned this already, but this level is 10 times more interesting than the last one. It’s also less stressful. Not entirely stress free, but you get to step back and enjoy what you’re doing. We’ve tasted all of our food and tweaked it to become what we want it to be, not what its expected of us to be.

Since we’re still working o our buffet for Saturday, let me give you an update. We order chicken wings to prepare for the buffet. In addition to ordering 10 lbs, we wanted whole fresh wings. What we got was a bag of precut buffalo wings, frozen. What we originally wanted to do was manchonner the wings and lollipop them. When the wings are whole it’s a lot easier to manchonner. When they’re pre cut you need to do a lot more digging and scraping. So, I spent about 45 minutes cleaning up the wings. Not to mention the chicken quality was, in my opinion, sub par and just a little gross. If I were making buffalo wings at a bar, these would be perfect, but for our purposes, I felt they were downright gross. I have opinions on things…

Further, there just weren’t that many wings!! Definitely not 10 lbs. There were 5 lbs at best. That came out to 40 pieces, which is not as much as we would have liked. However, they’re marinating in a spicy Thai marinade that we made. We made all of our marinades and sauces from scratch, which is great.

We also brushed a basic ginger, scallion, soy, oyster sauce/hoisen sauce marinade on the fillet mignon and chicken skewers. It’s actually really good, and hopefully the meats absorb it all up.

We did a test run on the dumplings and spring rolls to see if they’ll fry properly or blow up in our faces. We heated up a small pan of oil. I was cooking them, so I kept a watchful eye on them. I was considering a couple of things. First and foremost, the dumplings and spring rolls were frozen solid prior to being cooked. So I wanted to make sure the fillings were cooked through. The dumplings were smaller and the meat was raw and frozen. I didn’t want to burn the outside and leave the inside undercooked. Either way they came out just right. After I was almost finished with the spring rolls, I remember that we filled it a) with just vegetables, and b) we cooked the vegetables, so we only needed to defrost and the inside and heat it up. So we could afford to go a little lighter in color that I initially cooked the spring rolls to. That’s why we did it… to get these questionables out of the way. Again, the spring rolls were slammin’.

Prior to coming to class, Chef Rob spent 30 minutes standing outside a Chinese restaurant watching them hack up a duck. He also purchased a duck so we could get some practice in, and admire and taste the flavor, the amount of fat left under the skin, the color, the texture, everything. What was really cool was the fact that as we were hacking the duck, we saw a piece of star anise in the cavity! What’s so amazing about that? We had it in a brine of star anise (amongst other things), which means we’re practically Chinese. No, it means we were doing everything right (so far). Chef wants to smoke it with star anise and then blast it in the oven to get the color and crispness of the skin. Not to mention the fact that the duck is currently hang drying in the fridge right now. (Which chef repeatedly mentioned “hey fellas, did I mention that we have 3 dugs hanging upstairs right now?”) He’s a riot.

He also wants me and Steve to watch the movie “Good fellas” so we can bust out quotes as he and Carlos have been doing. It’s pretty funny.

I also want to mention… We had a few duck breasts that we wrapped in sous vide plastic with a bit of duck stock and spice (the ones that were already chilling in the fridge in a spice mixture). We cooked them for 2 hours in the sous vide method (wrapped submerged in hot, but not boiling, water for 2 hours. We then took one breast, sautéed it skin side down to render some fat and crisp the skin and then we’re serving it thinly sliced for the picking. It was FABULOUS! We’re really going all out…

Also in this class we saw our HUGE chunk of tuna, which we’re serving rare, sliced thin. We tried some of that with a taboulleh salsa that we made for it, and it was phenomenal.

Lastly, the production group was working on the pig for the buffet. Chef Janet’s intention was to take fat back, compress it, then slice it thin and wrap pigmented pork in the fat back, and arrange it decoratively in the cavity, so when its cooked and cut, we would see a beautiful design. There were some issues with cutting the fat back because it was so thin in the first place. I have a feeling, however, that they will do a good job. I saw the sewed up pig, and it looked awesome.

I am going to class tonight (on an off day) to make the duck confit buns. I think it will be great. I realized today that the original recipe we used we put in what we thought was one cake of yeast. We were under the impression that one cake of yeast was about 40 grams. After a little research, it appears that a cake of yeast is more like 18 grams of yeast. That means we quadrupled the amount of yeast for a single batch. This explains its yeasty flavor which was pretty gross. Hopefully when I cut back on the yeast, it works out perfectly.

We’ll see.