En Votre Facon (In your Own Way)

Things just got interesting… This class was the first one where we got to show a little creativity (aside from decorating a plate or a cake). Before I go on, since I have some time at work (lots of time), I write these post on a template of my job’s letter head so it looks like I’m working. Just thought I’d share that with you. I find it pretty funny. Anyways, we were given a list of ingredients, and from this fairly strict list, we had to make a dish.

I’ll try to recount the ingredients as best I could:
-1 flounder (to be shared by 2 people - 2 fillets each)
-1 potato or rice
-250ml chicken Stock
-125mL wine
-125mL cream
-2 carrots
-1 medium sized onion or 2 large shallots
-a serving or so of haricot vert
-4 plum tomatoes
-1 bay leaf
-1 sprig thyme
-parsley
-butter
-salt and pepper

And there were lemons for us to use which wasn’t listed, but thank goodness they gave it to us, because it’s tough to make fish without lemons.

So I wrote these ingredients down and I thought a lot about them for the past day. I concluded that I wanted to keep everything light and true to the fish. I didn’t want to fry anything because I knew most of the other people would do that, and I wanted to keep things delicate. I personally hate the rice that we use. It’s very plain, and just reminds me of cafeteria rice from high school, rather than delicious Spanish style rice, or Italian risotto, or a delicious pilaf. So I decided on a potato dish for the starch. Most people fried their potato. Either as a pommes darphin, or sliced and fried or something. This was just too heavy for my liking. One other guy had the same idea as me. I peeled the potato, boiled them ‘til tender and then riced it to make a delicious pommes puree. That included like 4 tablespoons of butter and a bit of cream. (we’re supposed to use milk, according to the recipe, but milk wasn’t in our list of ingredients.) Before service I mixed in some chopped up parsley. However, my downfall was that I made the potatoes first and I tried to keep them warm on the flat top, but to no avail.

After I scaled and my partner filleted one flounder, I was planning on making a fish fumet with the bones. However, my partner did a shoddy job on the fillet, and chef wanted me to do my own. So I needed to scale an entire other fish and fillet it. It was quite a waste of time, and my fillets were perfect and beautiful. But it still set me back almost 30 minutes! Scaling the fish is a pain in the ass! And scales get all over the place. So between scaling, cleaning, filleting the fish, and then cleaning my station TWICE, I had wasted a lot of time. I would have presented with the rest of the early birds, but they only had to scale one fish.

I also wanted to make 2 pieces of carrot cocotte to add some color to the dish, and I boiled some haricot vert (I did that first, so that really didn’t take much time). BUT, since I needed to prepare two fish, it meant my fumet would take longer too, since I was making a fumet with someone else. I think he and I were the only ones to use the fumet, which was great because I wanted to keep the fish tasting like fish, and it was a classy move by us to use the bones and some of the other ingredients for our sauce. So after the fumet was done (30 minutes of simmering), I needed to make the sauce, which was minced shallots, a bay leaf and wine reduced down to a syrup, then I added the fumet, reduced that by half, and then the cream, and reduced that by about half. I turned the carrots to cocotte (3 nice sized pieces) and cooked them a l’etuvee (half way covered with water, some butter and salt, boiled under a parchment lid).

So let’s see, I have the pommes puree, I made the carrots, green beans, and sauce. I just needed to cook my fish. I wanted to do this last to keep it moist and warm. (Too bad I wasn’t able to do that with my potatoes). Again, I wanted to keep it tender, moist and true to the flounder. So I decided I was going to steam it, or as chef called it, part-braised (I think). But I really think it was just steamed. I cut a few sliced of lemon and sliced some mushrooms. I laid those in a sauté pan and covered them ¾ of the way with wine. Then I laid 2 halves of a fillet over them (seasoned with salt and white pepper), and covered with a parchment paper lid. I kept a close eye on it and let it cook until it was still a little rare. Not only is this acceptable, but the carry over cooking would finish it so that it was juuuuust cooked. I was really pleased with this preparation. However, the remaining sauce in the pan was gross. It was too lemony and just way too acidic. I thought it would have been better, but I didn’t intend on using it anyways.

So now I had to plate. I put some of the lukewarm potatoes on the side of the plate. Well the plate was pretty small, and round. Then I crossed the fish over it, but hanging off the side, toward the middle of the plate. I topped it with a nice serving of sauce, and placed a pile of string beans and the 3 carrots cocotte in front of them. If I had a bigger plate, I would have done it a little differently. I wanted the carrots and string beans across from each other but separated by the fish and potatoes. But there just wasn’t enough space.

Judgment: Everything was GREAT! EXCEPT, as I suspected, the potatoes were not hot. I didn’t let it get me down, because the flavor was perfect. I knew that was the flaw. The sauce was great, the green beans and carrots looked great and were cooked perfectly. Everything was on point, except the potatoes were cold. I knew it. BUT, that’s cool! I did a good job and I knew my error. Had I thought of the bain-marie for the potatoes, I would have done superb. But I just didn’t get it done. But I will never forget… a bain-marie is a great way to keep things warm!

This class was great. Aside from the temperature of the potatoes, I think mine was up there with the better guys in the class. I will work on this.

Otherwise, everyone else did alright, a few people got special mention, and one guy had to redo his rice about 6 times. Maybe just 3, but the chef was on him. You would think he’d realize that he wasn’t cut out for this… but he’s still ticking, which is good.

This was a great class, and we got to show our own unique voice. Do I like fried fish, of course, but I put a lot of thought into my dish and I feel I took a classy approach.