Le Cordon Bleu – We Bid You “a Dieux”

We had our third and final class yesterday – it was sad to think that the hands-on cooking experience is over, but as they say, all good things must come to an end.

As a recap, in our first class we made a sea bass and shrimp dish, in the second class we mastered the art of crème brûlée and poaching fruits.  In our final class we are putting together an entire meal – with some help from Chef Franck.

The menu includes:

Appetizers:  Red & Green Gazpacho
Entrée:  Sauté of Veal with Sausage and Black Olives
Dessert: Orange Tian with Chiboust Cream and Tangy Citrus Sauce (or in layman’s terms…coconut sponge cake with orange sections and a custard/cream and meringue filling – translation:  YUM!)

Gazpacho

We began the class making the Gazpacho – some of us made red, others made green.  The primary difference is the red gazpacho has mostly red ingredients…and the green…you guessed it – has mostly green ingredients!

I worked on the red version chopping up 2 tomatoes (no need to de-seed), ½ a red pepper (seeded), ¼ cucumber (peeled and seeded), ½ garlic clove, ½ cup of olive oil, ¼ cup of sherry vinegar (you can use more vinegar if you want a stronger taste) and a handful of basil leaves (not the stems…just the leaves).

We then covered it and refrigerated.  After refrigerating for a while to make sure everything is good and cold, we blended the mixture (using a submergible hand mixer like the one pictured below) and added some breadcrumbs to thicken (1/4 cup or so…depending on your taste you can use more or less).  You can also add more olive oil, sherry vinegar and salt and pepper to taste.

Now I’ve never been a big fan of “cold” soups…but this one was incredible!  Maybe it’s just that I never personally made gazpacho before so I didn’t really know what was in it!  It is a very healthy and light (depending on how much olive oil you add…) recipe and was delicious!

For the green version, use 1 green pepper (seeded), 1/2 cucumber (do not peel skin – but do de-seed), ½ garlic clove, ¼ onion, ½ cup of olive oil, ¼ cup of sherry vinegar (you can use more vinegar if you want a stronger taste) and a handful of basil leaves (not the stems…just the leaves).   Remember you can also add more olive oil, sherry vinegar and salt and pepper to taste.  Follow the rest of the recipe as described above.

You can also do a yellow gazpacho – replace red tomatoes with yellow ones and make sure you peel the cucumber.  Everything else is the same!

For the presentation, Chef poured some of each color gazpacho into shot glasses and garnished the serving dish with some more basil.

Sauté of Veal with Sausage and Black Olives

Moving onto the veal, we used veal cubes (these were already cubed for us…but you can use a lower priced cut of veal for this dish because we will simmer it for a while — and cube it up into bite size pieces).   We sautéed the veal over med/high heat to sear and color all sides.  It is important not to over crowd the meat or it won’t brown properly.  Also, make sure you don’t “stir” the meat – let it brown for a while on each side before turning over (use thongs for this).  As the meat is browned move it to a platter or bowl.  In the same pan, add 1 finely chopped onion – let this cook for a few minutes stirring often and then add 1 finely chopped garlic clove and let that cook along with the onion for another few minutes.  Remove from pan (you can put on top of the veal cubes as they will be combined anyway in a few minutes).

Deglaze the pan by adding some port wine (1/2 cup) to the hot pan and scrape all the brown bits off the bottom.  Once that is complete, put the veal, onions and garlic back into the pan and add 2 oz of tomato paste and stir to combine.  Reduce the heat to med/low and add enough veal stock (can also use beef stock) to cover the meat as well as 6 sprigs of thyme, 8 ounces of black olives (no pits) and the sliced chorizo (you can use any time of sausage here…we used smoked sausage instead of the chorizo).  Slices should be bite sized.

You can simmer this either on the stovetop on med/low (remember to stir every 5 minutes or so) or you can cover it and put it into the oven (350 degrees).  After 30 minutes add 8 cubed potatoes into the pot and continue to simmer for another 30 minutes or so.

Once the meat and potatoes are tender, taste and add salt and pepper as appropriate (make sure you don’t “season” with salt and pepper until this point…otherwise as the broth reduces it will concentrate the salt and it can become too salty by the time you are finished).  The potatoes should thicken the sauce – if it isn’t think enough you can pour the majority of the liquid through a cap sieve (strainer) and put in a separate pan on med/high heat to reduce the sauce further (or, as I would do at home, you can boil the sauce and add Wondra!).

To serve, spoon the meat and olives into the center of the plate and surround with the potato cubes.  Pour the sauce over (not too much – this isn’t a stew) and decorate with parsley.

I am not going to post the dessert menu – it is complicated and you can probably Google it – needless to say French dessert cooking is a LOT of work…lots of whisking and you have to be mindful of the temperature of what you are mixing together so you don’t get dry bits hanging out with your wet bits…never a good thing!

So in the end, we had a heck of a morning cooking – when we finished, we had a great meal (and it was just about lunch time so we had a pretty good feast!) and we learned a lot.

Last night we had a gallery tour of the Mariner and a dinner with Chef Franck, Florian (our F&B Manager) as well as the ship’s Staff Captain.  We had a great time – next event is our graduation celebration coming on March 9!  Stay tuned.

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