Week 2: Soups, sauces, sauerkraut and soil

I’m finished with week two! And actually just wrapped week 3, but I’m a little behind on my writing…bear with me as it has been pretty crazy! At this point, week one feels like forever ago. I’ve stayed busy with class, of course, and also lots of homework. Culinary school is no joke. I honestly think it is harder than Yale. In the evenings, between reading about many new techniques and terms in our textbook, familiarizing myself with the next day’s recipes and writing them out on index cards, practicing my knife skills, and studying for our exams, I’m pretty much working from the moment I get home until I go to sleep. I knew I was going back to school, but it’s definitely more work than I anticipated.

My disaster of a study area

My preferred studying accoutrements

The highlight of week 2 for me was our Saturday morning trip to the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, where the two Michelin star restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns is located, about an hour north of NYC. On the farm, we learned about sustainable agriculture and how it plays an instrumental role in creating extreme deliciousness in food. Cooking wise, we made some wonderful things, focusing on liquids: stocks, sauces, soups, and methods of food preservation such as pickling, where you put something in a brine (a salt + water mixture) to extend its shelf life and change its flavor, as well as fermentation, a process that encourages the growth of microorganisms like yeast and bacteria that boost flavor and nutrients while preserving food. It’s a magical process.

The idyllic setting at Stone Barns. No filter needed!

Before I talk about what we cooked and our farm visit, I’ll shed some light on my emotional state. The ups and downs of school are crazy, even over the course of one day. My cocktail of emotions during class includes focus, stress, exhilaration, relief, exhaustion, joy and fear…mostly of maiming myself in some capacity, but also of screwing something up horribly. When a recipe turns out really well, I feel like I am on top of the world — this feeling like I’m so happy I could cry. But more often than not, something goes wrong. Throughout the day, we receive lots of comments from our instructors on how we can improve our dishes, our knife skills, the organization of our work stations…the list goes on. We get endless information thrown at us, and we need to multitask so that we don’t drop the ball on prepping three ingredients while we cook four others. It’s often overwhelming. But at least things are never boring! And I know that I’m slowly but surely learning how to better stay calm under pressure and to take the time I need to figure out how I’m going to accomplish everything on my plate.

I guess this is very typical millennial of me, but it’s hard to not be amazing at something on the first, second or even third try. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m here to learn, not to perform, and to soak everything up that I can and gain something from every failure. Feedback is a gift. Practice makes perfect, and we need a LOT of practice, way more than we will even get in these six months of school. The other day my instructor said, “there are two words I don’t allow in this room: perfect and impossible. Nothing is impossible, and we can always strive for perfect, but it’s not something that can ever be achieved.” So that resonated with me. And when I have moments of feeling discouraged, I think about how fantastic it is that I get to play with food and be taught about it all day. It’s truly a dream come true.

Practically, one thing I’ve struggled with especially in week 2 is getting my seasoning right, which is instrumental. By seasoning, I mean the levels of salt, spices and acid (vinegar, citrus juice, etc) in a dish. The finishing touches that make or break a dining experience. I find myself doubting my own palette while trying to achieve what the chef’s demonstration dish tastes like. Personally I am not big on a lot of acid, so one response I have been getting is that my dishes need more of it. And I LOVE salt, so I have conversely been trying to rein it in because I assume that what I like is too salty, so sometimes I end up not having enough salt either! It’s frustrating.

Below, two kind of unattractive dishes that tasted good, but needed some improvement in terms of seasoning and preparation.

Split pea soup in front: needed more salt. The farmer’s soup in the back passed the seasoning test, but we didn’t render our bacon enough so there were still some fatty bits in it. Thanks to my partner Melissa for taking this photo!

Brandade (salt cod mashed with potatoes) in progress. I added too much oil early in the cooking process, so the texture ended up being both dry and oily at the same time, though the seasoning was on point.

There were some big wins in week 2: for example, we made consommé, which is a stock — a long-simmered liquid made from vegetables, herbs and sometimes meat bones — that has been clarified of all its impurities and then typically reduced (boiled down) to intensify its flavors. You put this mushy concoction of ground meat, vegetables and egg whites into the stock, and it creates a floating “raft” that sucks all the cloudy stuff from the bottom of the pot into it, revealing a beautiful clear broth underneath. I have no idea how someone came up with this method, but it works! Anyway, my team's consommé turned out incredibly clear due to our rapt attention during the clarification process — even clearer than our instructor's, and he was impressed. It also tasted great. That felt good. My first theory exam went very well, and I didn’t burn my eyebrows off while flambéing our red wine and mushroom sauce. Success in my book!

This is a picture that I did not take (credit to Saveur) of a “raft” purifying a consommé. I forgot to take a photo, but ours looked pretty similar to this, minus the nice lighting and wood countertop. You gently make a hole in the middle of the meat, egg white and vegetable mixture over the course of 30-ish minutes, spooning out the little impurities that bubble up onto the top of the raft. Ultimately, you use the same hole to ladle out the clear broth into a cheesecloth to strain it. If you break up the raft, you have to start over!

I also loved making emulsified sauces like mayonnaise, hollandaise and béarnaise from scratch, something I have struggled to do at home in the past. Emulsified means that oil/clarified butter and water (typically) are able to incorporate into a stable mixture due to the addition of an emulsifier. Examples of emulsifiers are egg yolks and mustard; both contain lecithin, an emulsifying compound. With these sauces, you end up with a creamy, rich, and thick texture that adds luxurious heft and needed moisture to a dish. They are also delightful eaten alone. Don’t judge me: I was eating my béarnaise sauce directly off a spoon...multiple times. Like the most exciting of love affairs, emulsions are are temperamental and require your undivided attention to cultivate. Look away from your sauce for a brief conversation, or leave it on the heat for ten seconds too long, and it can break, meaning that the fat and water will separate, sometimes irreversibly. We learned some tricks for re-emuslifying sauces when they break, like whisking in a few drops of warm water if the mixture gets too cold and vice versa, but sometime’s it’s not fixable at all. If your sauce is heated too much, your egg yolks can scramble and you need to throw it away and start over from scratch. Disaster.

Behold the amazing béarnaise sauce, a variety of hollandaise that includes tarragon, shallots, white wine vinegar and parsley. I love it served with steak. I had the idea that it would be amazing mixed into mashed potatoes…thoughts?

The aftermath of warm emulsified sauces. I’m working on keeping my station neat…but it’s tough when you’re rushing to finish things on time! Mayhem.

We also learned all about food preservation, covering topics such as:

• Pickling, where we put vegetables in a salt and vinegar solution in a sterile jar to sit for a few weeks

• Fermentation, where we salted and mashed cabbage and put it in a bucket to hang out for weeks while it turns into sauerkraut.

• Canning, where we poached (gently simmered) pears in a mixture of white wine, honey, lemon zest and fresh vanilla bean and then sealed them in mason jars. We then heated them up to an extremely high temperature and pressure to kill off microorganisms.

• Salting / curing, where we covered a side of salmon in a 50/50 mixture of salt and sugar to draw out moisture (bacteria thrive in moisture) but preserve its tender texture, and added dill, pink peppercorns, citrus zest and aquavit for flavor. This cured in the fridge for a few days before we ate it.

• Confit, which also involves covering a protein in salt — in our case, duck — then poaching it in its own fat and letting it cool, and then submerging it in sterile fat where it will will keep for up to 6 months in the fridge. Pretty crazy that you can keep poultry in the fridge for six months, right?

• Enzymatic aging, with black garlic, for which we vacuum sealed a bunch of heads of garlic to remove all oxygen and are still in the process of roasting them at a very low temperature for about 6 weeks. This encourages the garlic’s own enzymes to break it down - basically controlled aging.

We’ll be eating many these things in a few weeks to a few months, so I’ll have to report back with a final verdict at that point. We did get to try the gravlax and duck confit a few days later, and they were fabulous. Gravlax is super easy to make at home. I will post a recipe soon!

Some pickles from class that I am very excited to try in a few weeks!

Pears poaching down with wine, honey, sugar, lemon zest and fresh vanilla bean. These were canned and will be stored for another month, when we’ll open them to make pear tarts during our pastry module.

Sauerkraut step 1: Put a million pounds of cabbage in a bowl. I have never seen so much sliced cabbage in one place. This bowl was at least twice the size of my head.

Our instructor pointing out how the natural liquids come out of the cabbage after salting and mashing it down with our bare hands. This the same amount of cabbage as the previous picture, and it lost even more volume as we mashed it further, fitting into a small bucket at the end. We weighed the cabbage down with some plates and then sealed the bucket to let it ferment.

We ate our gravlax a few days later on a potato cake - Pommes Anna - that we made on potato day. More about that soon. Thank you to Blake Sterling Peyrot for this photo!

Duck confit, which I did not do the best job sautéeing. My pan was not hot enough and I needed a little more oil, so the skin stuck to it and broke when I was flipping it. Still delicious though.

Again, the real highlight of the week was our visit to Stone Barns. Over the course of 2.5 hours, we were exposed to so much. We got a primer on farming without chemicals, which involves being thoughtful and purposeful about when and where you plant specific crops and how that changes year over year. For example, nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants) use up a ton of nitrogen from soil, so if you plant them in the same field every year, you will have to use fertilizer with nitrogen in it to get them to grow again. However, if you plant them in a different field and then plant a nitrogen-fixing plant such as a clover, that plant will put nitrogen back into the soil, essentially bringing it back into equilibrium. Another interesting thing was that some plants can act as insecticides for others, like basil and tomatoes. Basil naturally repels the types of pests that flock to tomatoes, so it makes sense that they appear together in cuisine, because when they are grown together they can flourish!

We also learned that pretty much every vegetable has hundreds of varieties, with beets as an example. Like apples, each type of beet has its own name, and I don’t mean “golden" or “red”. The red ones I’m holding in the photo below are called Cylindras because they are long and cylindrical, which makes them easier to peel and cut than round beets — much more efficient for a kitchen to use, especially in large volumes. The orange ones are called Badger Flames; they are lower in oxalic acid than your average beet, which makes them less dense and more light and crunchy, and therefore great for eating raw. We were slicing and eating them straight out of the ground.

Me with some beautiful beets straight out of the Stone Barns ground.

We also toured a state-of-the-art greenhouse with automatic temperature control mechanisms relying mostly on natural light and atmospheric temperature, and we got to sample some of the delicious food at Blue Hill’s casual cafe for lunch. One really cool thing about Blue Hill is that they mill their own flours from artisanal grain, so the flour in your scone or bread was made by them. It’s more nutritious than your typical flour out of a bag from a store, and much tastier and more interesting to eat.

Rainbow chard in Stone Barns’ state-of-the-art greenhouse. The top of the greenhouse opens and closes automatically to let in outside air, helping to regulate the temperature without a ton of energy.

Turmeric plants are like four feet tall! All for one little root. You can use the leaves like banana leaves, wrapping them around proteins and steaming / roasting them together to keep the protein moist.

Here is a variety of corn indigenous to the northeast called Eight Row Flint. It actually went extinct for hundreds of years, and then a very similar variety was brought to Stone Barns from Italy. Now they grow it to make amazing polenta. Photo credit: Blake Sterling Peyrot

The bakery at Blue Hill. You can see the grain mill in the back on the right, where they mill them fresh to make flour/meal for things like polenta and pastries. The smell coming from this room was divine.

My carb-heavy lunch from the Blue Hill cafe, with provisions from their home-milled grain. A mushroom and goat cheese tartine on the left, a cheddar and chive scone and a chocolate chip cookie on the right, with some butternut squash soup in the back. I found the tartine a little too sour with the goat cheese, so I drizzled some of the soup on it and it was great! A new recipe idea — keep an eye out.

So, I hope you enjoyed my account of week 2. Keep reading for some of my favorite cooking tips that I picked up.

My favorite cooking tidbits from week 2

• If you’re trying to thicken a warm liquid, such as a soup, with something like flour or corn starch, first mix the starch into a little bit of liquid so that it dissolves. This is called a “slurry.” Then, add the slurry to your liquid until it reaches your desired thickness. If you add the starch to your liquid directly, it will clump up and cook into little dry dumplings. No one wants that! I actually used this technique the other day when making my morning oatmeal. I had been mixing protein powder into the cooked oats directly and it was creating a grainy texture, which was gross. So I decided to dissolve my protein powder in a small amount of water to make a slurry and added it, and it was perfect.

• When caramelizing onions, add some salt early in the process. This will help draw out moisture and break them down as they cook over very low heat. When done right it’s a long process, but it’s definitely worth it!

• When whisking something vigorously (like mayonnaise), stabilize your bowl by putting a damp towel in a small pot and placing your bowl on top of that. It will stay in place better than sitting directly on the counter, especially if you can’t hold it because you are adding oil at the same time.

• Béchamel — a mixture of milk, butter and flour — is the perfect base for mac and cheese. The butter and flour are first whisked together over low heat into a “roux” and then the cold milk gets added slowly to that until it’s a thick and creamy sauce. You know your roux is ready for the milk when it has the texture of wet sand but is still very pale. Once the béchamel comes together, add grated cheese into it to your heart’s desire! Or, pour the bechamel over warm pasta and mix the cheese into it directly with your hands while still warm.

• Speaking of long processes, I learned that time is an ingredient. No, I’m not talking about the herb. For example, half sour pickles — my fave, like you find at Jewish delis — are made the same way and in the exact same solution as regular, full-sour pickles. They just aren’t sitting in their brine for as long. But their color and flavor is completely different from full sour! It’s amazing how much time can change the nature of food when it is pickling / fermenting.