Class 5: Throwing food a life Preserver

The mantra "Waste not, want not" is one that I believe should be embraced by everyone in this world. So, I was glad to see that one of our classes at culinary school was all about how to preserve food and how to cook with foods that have been preserved. The class was very light on the cooking and heavy on the lecture and demonstration front. I was very exhausted from last week's classes, so I was pretty thankful for this brief reprieve.

My partner and I have become excellent at prepping our station and getting mise en place at the beginning of class. We had all our ingredients for the split pea soup and the Nicoise Salad we were going to make before the chef even began his first demo...Not that we're teacher's pets or anything, but its just easier to get all the stuff we need before people start lining up.

Chef began his first demo with an explanation of salads and the three different types (simple, mixed, and composed). In this class, we made a homemade vinaigrette and a Nicoise Salad, which has tuna, potatoes, hard boiled eggs, tomatoes, green beans, and peppers. All the components are mixed in with a little bit of the vinaigrette before its plated. Its an extremely beautiful salad when plated with all the different colors. We then moved on to Pea Soup using dried split peas.

The Pea Soup started with browning bacon lardons then adding mirepoix, broth, and dried split peas that had been rinsed and picked through. We also made homemade croutons, which were the best croutons I had ever had. You take bread that you chilled in the freezer for a while and then cut into small croutons. Instead of baking the croutons, you saute them in a good deal of butter. Yum! We used the vitaprep to puree our soup. This machine is amazing not to mention about $500! You can puree anything with this anywhere from a very slow rate to extremely fast. It took about 15 seconds for my soup to be completely pureed without any lumps. In comparison, my blender at home takes about 2 minutes.

The rest of the class was demonstration. The chef pulled out a beautiful piece of salmon and showed us how to cure it, which is always done with the skin on. You mix salt, sugar, a little bit of alcohol becuase of the antibacterial properties, and some herbs and spread it all over the top of the fish and use something to weigh it down. The salmon was left in the fridge until our next class, when the chef pulled it out from the fridge, rinsed it, and showed us how to slice it very thin for an appetizer at a party. This was an excellent bite of fish that just melted in your mouth. The next demo we had was a salt cod dip that turned out wonderfully. You rinse off the salt cod, poach the fish, then fry the fish in olive oil, add mashed potatoes, garlic, and cream. When it was finished, we all tasted it on bits of bread. This is definitely going to be an appetizer over the christmas holiday. It was a simple, delicious dip.

The chefs also showed us some other things that classes had preserved or made to not waste food - a 2 month old kimchi, scrapple, and a terrine made of pork face. The chef cut up the pork terrine for us to try and it tasted like a salami but richer. They fried up the scrapple, which is made of pork scraps/trimmings and buckwheat.

Next up, eggs!