Poisson (not the skull and crossbones kind)

After royally screwing up the potato class, I found it to be in my best interest to ROCK the fish class. The word of the day was to be "Perfection." We rocked it. (My partner was in agreement, we needed to step up our game today)

We also had a quiz. I studied hard (he gives us the study material, pretty much exactly as it appears on the test), and I was very confident that I was going to let the word of the day prevail over the test. Rocked it. It was basically memorizing a few sizes of tourner (bouquetiere -3cm, cocotte - 5cm, vapeur - 6cm), remembering a couple of derivative sauces of mayonnaise and hollandaise sauces (I listed sauce verte and sauce aioli for mayo, and sauce bernaise and sauce choron for hollandaise), lets see, a few methods of cutting and cooking potatoes, and a few things about salads. Piece of cake, especially when he tells you beforehand.

Most of us will pick up a piece of chicken breast (or a piece of beef) and hack away, cutting it down to the lengths and shapes we want. You'll trim the fat, season and cook, without a thought. However, put a whole fish on your cutting board and you may be a little more hesitant. At first glance, it is indeed intimidating. An entire might-as-well-be-live animal for you to cut up, cook and eat.

Well after the filleting demo it was less intimidating. My stomach was feeling a lot better and I was focused (and determined to uphold the word of the day). Normally, you will have to scale and gut the fish. We were using bass and trout, both of which were gutted, only the bass was scaled. Apparently, we can eat the trout WITH the scales, since they are pretty tender. But thankfully he made us scale them. There were scales EVERYWHERE. I was picking scales off myself and the table for the rest of the night. But I'm glad we did it. We then had to cut off the fins (we cut up the bass entirely before touching the trout) and cut out the gills. It was weird touching the lungs of the fish. But I guess its no weirder than touching its ribs... and eyes, and head in general. We used our kitchen shears (not scissors, "scissors are for arts & crafts"), and some of those bass fins were pretty thick.

Behind the gills, there is a bony plate, you start your cut right beyond that to get as much meat as you can, and work your way up along the gills and toward the head. It results in a curved cut that outlines the gills. Then you make long, shallow cuts, trying to keep your blade flush against the backbone and the ribs. You can't do it in one cut, it takes a number of strides. Hopefully, when you're done, you'll have a meaty, not mangled ("it looks like your fillet was attacked by a beaver") fillet. You then trim off any fatty parts and pull out any bones.

I had 4 beautiful fillets. I was very proud of my cuts. I felt very confident, and I was upholding the word of the day.

The first method of cooking was very intricate, and required a lot of steps. Primarily, we had to cook a number of ingredients (veggies) in varying methods. We needed to make our fondue de tomates again (which we burned a few classes ago and wanted to perfect this time, and DID), we needed to julienne celery, carrots and leeks, and cook a l'etuvee, and then finely dice mushrooms and cook down until the moisture was gone.

After you had everything laid out, you took a heart shaped piece of parchment paper and spooned on some tomatoes and mushrooms, followed by the fillet, and topped with the celery, carrots and leeks. Splash some white wine, S&P, and a sprig of thyme, and then fold and seal the parchment paper with egg white. You bake that sack for 7-8 minutes and it poofs up nicely, cooking in its own steam, trapping the aromas for you to open in front of the customer.

It was beautiful, and passed the taste test. Perfect.

The trout was fried. We seasoned the fillet, and lightly floured the fish. We cooked it in clarified butter until barely golden, and nice and crispy, and topped it with a deeeelicious sauce.

We cooked a bunch of butter until it reached noisette stage (hazelnut - lightly browned), then threw in lemon supremes, parsley and capers, and at the last second, tossed some homemade croutons in this mixture and topped the fish. It was delicious! And, again, perfect. Could have maybe used a touch more lemon juice for the acidity, but it was, nonetheless, delicious.

So yeah, the fish was delicious, and we picked up our game. Real interesting right? I bet it is.

I went out for a couple of drinks with a couple of classmates after we were done. We discussed our new partners. At the end of class, Chef Tom said ok.. you, come here, you go there, you, here. He reorganized the class so that we mixed up our partners. It was a tricky move. We did, somewhat, settle into a groove with our partners, and I feel like we paired up with equal skill levels, and the better skilled people were together (I put myself in that category). All that was about to change.

As we discussed this over Bud Light's, I tried not to judge my new partner, as I have not worked with her. She comes off as a little lethargic at times (i.e. during chef demos she leans on the chefs station with her head on her hands, and she speaks very very quietly, not putting any oomph into her statements). Sure its a late class, and we probably all work during the day, but you should show some enthusiasm. One of my beermates mentioned that she looks high all the time. Another good description. My ex-partner was paired with one of the guys who I mentioned previously that I found to be immature, and the other beermate was paired with someone who was about to dump in about 30 grams of black peppercorns in his sauce tonight, rather than capers. That would have been interesting had I not helped him out. They were both worried about working with their new partners, which, I guess deep down, I am too, but they were a little more vocal about it. I'm sure their fears are definitely warranted, but I'm hoping that my new partner has a lot more to her than meets the eye.

We'll find out. Should be interesting. Flat fish on Saturday.