Knife Cuts and Buerre Noir

I apologize for being behind. That's what happens when so much stress crushes down on you, but not to worry, culinary school always brightens my day!

The second Day of class and Chef Loving was intimidating. He asked questions about the last class to poor students who were put on straight blast. After his initial frustration, he composed himself and issued a good morning.

There is no way I can stay awake sometimes without coffee... it's mostly cream though...

He let us know that we needed to train our brains not to just file these terms to memory, but to think of them as knowledge that we happen to have as chefs. Make it something things that all chefs know. A few students recently entered the class and he spoke to them while Chef Musto talked to us. We were going to learn knife cuts that day. I met a new woman when she walked back in after being told she should make 'other plans' since the class was already soooo far behind. (I didn't think so and told her my opinion. I don't think we learned so much that she couldn't pick it up quickly, and I was right).

Now, it's learning time. Last time we spoke of oignon brülée. This day, we went over the oignon piqué. It's an onion cut and studded with cloves and a bay leaf is either attached to it with a clove or place into a layer of the onion. This adds aromatics.

While he embarrassed more students, we also learned about beurre noir. It sound beautiful really, but it's black butter. Butter that is cooked until it turns a dark brown, adding a nutty flavor to dishes. This was made in parallel to 'clarified butter', which we learned about AFTER the knife cuts.

Here are the important cuts we learned:

• Small dice, medium dice, batonnet, and julienne of carrot, celery, and onion.  

• These would start off our standard mirepoix, and the julienned pieces would apparently make a 'great soup'. The trick is to make the size conducive to eating with a fork or spoon, so the julienned piece should fit on a fork.

• Small dice, medium dice, batonnet of potatoes. When you're peeling anything, peel over a piece of plastic wrap for easy clean up. Make sure you clean the hell out of that potato first.

• How to mince garlic. The trick is to add salt or water to a tiny diced garlic and then just start chopping it up.
•  Apparently, the crystals of the salt help make even pieces to create a perfect mince. The water keeps it all together I guess? I don't know, but it works.

• Chop parsley. Wash, remove the stems, chop, wrap in a towel, rinse in the towel, and squeeze until dry. Always chop parsley last because it will stain your cut board.

• Tomato Concassé. Wash the tomato, core it, mark an X on the top, blanch it for about 45 seconds, shock it in ice water, peel it, quarter it, seed it and remove and extra meat that is preventing the 'tomato petal' from being flat. Dice.

• Roast a red pepper. Wash, char the outside skin of the pepper on a gas stove burner on all sides. Wrap in plastic wrap and let sit. Peel of the skin and get as much black stuff as you can off of it but DO NOT WASH IT. THIS REMOVES THE ROASTED FLAVOR! Cut in half lengthwise and slice that in half lengthwise. Remove the seeds and the core and dice as you want.

Chef Loving diced the roasted red pepper, drizzled extra virgin olive oil over it, seasoned with a little salt and pepper and garlic, and added the fresh parsley. We got to taste it and it was damn delicious.

After lunch, it was our turn. My dicing of carrot and celery was laughable. The trick for the carrot is to square it of, cut into planks, julienne or batonnet those, and dice from there. As you can imagine, squaring off a carrot is freaking difficult.  The celery is even worse since it's a natural half-moon thing! You have to slice the peaks off to make it into a sort of plank before you julienne and dice. In  the end, this is what I had… it looks much better in the picture.

From left to right starting in the top left corner: Julienne onion, diced onion, small dice carrots, julienne celery, minced garlic, medium diced carrot, small diced potato, batonnet potato (but really planks), and medium diced potato.

After this, we were pretty tired, but the excitement still hadn't left our eyes. I am a pretty good cutter of veggies, I can get them to you in seconds as long as they don't have to look perfect… the problem with this is that he wanted us to practice on that. We were told to practice and that is exactly what I plan on doing. Come time for practicals, I'll be a dicing machine!

I told you there was always that 'one' person. Turns out there's more than 'one' in our class. The one kid is kind of rude (the guy that never pays attention) but Chef Loving shut him down quick. The other kid is foreign, so he gets a pass, but honestly sometimes I'm hoping he can pass the course. Some things he doesn't get as quickly as the rest of us, but I'm glad the teachers can understand him. Chef Loving invited him to his office hours to help him because the test would be the next week. He adamantly declined and Chef Loving proceeded to ask who would like to go to his office hours. Almost every female raised their hand. Including me. What I wouldn't give….

Next week, the first quiz!