Steak n' Mousse

No theme today, just the next week hanging over us -- next week is the last class, and we will be serving dinner to the friends and families of the students and a number of the staff, perhaps 25-30 mouths all together. So today was all about making some fancy labor-intensive desserts for next week, and a few simple dishes to get us fed today.

Pastry chefs run in a slightly different world than the rest of the kitchen, due to the fact dessert is usually NOT a la minute -- it can be prepared hours, if not days in advanced, and will not lose quality. These workers can come in early and take over the kitchen and make complex recipes like the following, before the main staff come in to prep the rest of the menu....

TRIPLE-CHOCOLATE MOUSSE CAKE

Yield: 2 cakes, 24 to 36 servings

BOTTOM LAYER
Butter, cut into 12 pieces 6 oz
Bittersweet chocolate, fine chop 14 oz
Instant Espresso powder 1 ½ tsp
Vanilla extract 1 tbsp
Eggs, separated 8 each
Salt 2 pinches
Light brown sugar, crumbled 2/3 cup packed

MIDDLE LAYER
Cocoa powder, dutch process 4tbsp
Hot water 5 oz
Bittersweet chocolate, fine chop 14 oz
Heavy cream, cold 3 cup
Sugar 2 tbsp
Salt ¼ tsp

TOP LAYER
Powdered gelatin 1 ½ tsp
Water 2 tbsp
White chocolate, fine chop 12 oz
Heavy cream, cold 3 cup

Shaved chocolate or cocoa powder for serving

1. BOTTOM LAYER:
   Preheat oven to 325˚. Grease bottom and sides of 2 10”spring form pans. Slowly melt butter, chocolate and espresso powder in double boiler, stirring until smooth. Remove from heat. Wait 5 minutes. Whisk in vanilla and egg yolks. Set aside.
2. In stand mixer with whisk attachment, beat egg whites and salt until frothy. Add half sugar and beat until combined. Add rest of sugar and beat until soft peaks, scraping down sides half way through.
3. Fold egg mixture into chocolate mixture one third at a time, until no white streaks remain. Pour into two prepared spring form pans.
4. Bake 13-18 minutes, just set but soft in middle. Cool for 1 hour, leave in pan.
   
   
5. MIDDLE LAYER.
   Combine cocoa powder and hot water, set aside. Melt chocolate in double boiler until just smooth, take off heat and let cool 2 minutes.
6. In stand mixer, whip cream, sugar and salt together to soft peaks.
7. Whisk cocoa powder mixture into melted chocolate until smooth. Fold whipped cream into chocolate 1/3 at a time until no streaks remain. Spoon into spring form pans on top of bottom layer. Smooth with spatula and clean off any drips from the inside sides. Refrigerate for a minimum of 15 minutes.
   
   
8. TOP LAYER.
   In a small bowl, sprinkle gelatin over water. Let stand for at least 5 minutes.
9. Bring 1 cup cream to a simmer in a sauce pan. Remove from heat and add gelatin mixture, stir until dissolved.
10. Pour cream mixture over white chocolate in a bowl, whisk until smooth. Let stand 3 to 5 minutes
11. In a stand mixer, whisk remaining 2 cups of cream to soft peaks. Fold into white chocolate mixture, one third at a time. Spoon over middle layer.
12. Set in fridge for at least 2.5 hours. Serve with garnish of cocoa or shaved chocolate.

This recipe was adapted from Cook's Illustrated, which was much more wordy and full of explanation of why. Which is great for someone like me, but a bad distraction from students just trying to get the thing done in the time given.

We cooked off a few flank steaks in the oven -- ideally it would be on a grill, but we had no access to one, so into the convection oven we went. The marinade was blended to smooth, the steak poked fill of shallow cuts with the tip of a chef's knife.

CHIMICHURRI FLANK STEAK

Yield: 12 servings

Flank steak, trimmed & scored 1 each
Vegetable oil 2 floz
EVOO 2 floz
Cider vinegar 2 floz
Garlic cloves, minced 2 each
Cumin 1 tsp
Oregano, fresh 1/3 cup
Cilantro, fresh ½ cup
Parsley, fresh 1 cup

1. Combine all ingredients except steak. Puree in blender. Marinate steak in ½ of marinade for 1 hour.
2. Cook in oven at 300˚ until internal temp reaches 135˚. Rest 10 minutes, slice against grain, serve with remaining marinade.

135 is medium rare, and as I found out, feeding medium-rare meat to this population of students is about as likely as serving a vending-machine hamburger at Nobu. So I cooked off each of the three steaks differently -- medium rare (135), medium (142) and well-done (150), but even the well done was not well-done enough for them. There was no pink, but it was still juicy. After it was sliced, one student put it in a sautee pan and cooked it until it had browned edges, and the consistency was closer to tough leather than unctuous steak. Blech! Over-cooked meat is part of a culture of fear of illness from undercooked meat, particularly established in lower economic rungs, where access to good meat is more rare.

A student last week suggested collards, and we did a pretty standard version.

COLLARD GREENS

Yield: 12 servings

Smoked ham hocks 2 lbs
Water 1 g
Salt to taste
Collard greens 4 bunch
Cider vinegar 1 cups
Sugar 3 tbsp

1. Place the pork, water and salt in a pot. BTB, skim off any fat that rises to the top. Reduce temperature to low and let simmer for 30 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, prepare greens. Discard damaged or yellow parts of leaves. Cut away the tough ends from each leaf. Place greens in a colander, wash thoroughly. Fold each leaf in half at its center vein, fold over once or twice more, then cut in half.
3. Stir prepared greens into the simmering liquid. Let simmer all together for approximately 1 hour over low heat. Add half of sugar and vinegar, taste and adjust. Serve.

One student decided to "spice" it up at the end, throwing in a bunch of dried spices and a bit too much hot red pepper flakes. Regardless, the long boiling in the smokey stock eliminated any bitterness, and the vinegar gave a nice kick.

One student has been bragging about his skill making banana pudding since the day I met him, but unfortunately he did not show up today. When everything was well underway, I decided to fit this in at the last minute.

BANANA PUDDING

Yield: Two 9 x 13 pans

White sugar 10 oz
AP flour 2/3 cup
Salt ½ tsp
Egg yolks, beaten 6 each
Heavy cream 1 qt
Vanilla bean, scraped 2 beans
Rum 1 oz
Butter, softened ¼ cup
Bananas, peeled & sliced 4 each
Nilla wafers 12 oz

1. In medium saucepan combine sugar, flour and salt. Add eggs and stir well. Stir in cream, and cook over low heat, stirring constantly. When mixture begins to thicken, remove from heat and continue to stir, cooling slightly. Stir in vanilla, rum and butter until smooth.
2. In two 9x13-inch dish, layer pudding with bananas and vanilla wafers. Chill at least one hour in refrigerator before serving.

We went off the reservation with this recipe a bit. First, we ran out of cream so substituted coconut milk for about 1/3 of the cream. Second, in deference to next week, we decided to make mini banana pudding cups in cupcake papers. Third, we were given horrible "reduced fat" Nilla wafers, so we ground them in a blender and added a few sticks of butter to unreduce it. In the cups we pressed in some of the Nilla mix, a layer of the rum-vanilla pudding, a few slices of bananas, then a layer of simple whipped cream. When we serve it, we'll sprinkle some cinnamon sugar.

Next week, the wrap-up!

Meat, it's what's for the Lesson

Once again, we had 3 hours to teach the students about the entire world of red meat. I started with asking why people are vegetarians -- answers were "don't like the taste" and "they like animals." I broke it down into two categories -- ethical and health, and would not address the 1st, as this is a cooking class, not a philosophy class. If your going to work in a restaurant 98% of the time you're going to have to deal with meat.

Health is another story. Today we were working with chopped meat, one of the most dangerous meat products out there. I explained the process of unhealthy, overcrowded cow pens in industrial farms, how they are forced to eat grains instead of hay, the use of antibiotics to keep them well, and the act of slaughtering is so fast that when the carcasses are cleaned, some poo remains. If you have a solid piece of muscle (like the pork chops we would be cooking), it's a relatively simple task to clean the meat at some point in production -- all the bad stuff is at the surface.

But if you send the meat to the grinder, all the bad stuff is mixed up all the way through. There are limited ways to make the meat clean now -- you can treat it with ammonia, but that stinks and destroys the meat's flavor. You can cook it thoroughly to kill all bacteria, but the fat runs out and you have tough, crumbly cooked meat with little flavor.

So you can do what McDonald's does -- take this crappy, cheap ground meat and add fillers to soften and give flavor to the meat, typically soy product and bean gums. And to a certain extent, that's what we'd be doing today with our meatballs (recipes here) -- adding things to the chopped meat so that it would still be delicious after being cooked at a fiery 550 degrees.

We set to work on making the meatball mix, a traditional spaghetti sauce and a sheet of polenta. Like last semester, the polenta failed -- we didn't have to to saute it, and it just looked and tasted unappealing. This time we used a big enough pot, and the pasta cooked correctly, but we let it go for the minutes on the package and was a tad too soft -- should of cut back by 2 minutes. The sauce was great, but not enough of it. The meatballs, well, Louis from the restaurant where I got the recipe recommended doubling the bread, but the meatballs came out TOO soft and mushy, despite being well done.

Lastly, I had the students saute pork loin chops in a pan, getting a nice brown fond on the meat and the pan before resting the meat on a rack, then making a simple pan sauce in the pan with wine, shallots, stock, salt and finishing with butter. The chops and the sauce went down surprisingly well.

Next week, a new lesson -- pastry.

Meaty Meat

How does one teach about the entire world of meat in one three hour session, when an hour of it is dedicated to lecture and clean up? One can not. On top of that, half the class was absent, probably due to a combination of being burned out of the two intense days it took to get Thanksgiving lunch out to 150 mouths and the pressures of the holiday season. One thing for certain -- they didn't flake because of the menu: they all love their meat.

Meat is edible animal product, typically muscle, fat and bone. Other animal products, such as skin and offal (organs), are edible but not "meat", and then there are certain animal products, like hair, leather and waste, which are neither meat nor edible.

The USDA recommends all meat be cooked to an internal temperature of 165˚. That would guarantee all meat to be at best well-done, at worst barely edible shoe leather. Meat loses flavor, texture, and color at these temperatures. If meat is sourced from a reliable (read: not dirt cheap), known vendor, is treated correctly, and cooked correctly, illness from meat (in this country) is very overhyped.

The exception to that is ground meat: Because the outside of the meat is where all the filth is -- and where it can be cooked away at temps well above 165 without destroying the meat, is broken up and mixed in, right to the middle and the sides. But won't ground meat be inedible if cooked well above 165˚? Well, not necessarily, because we can mix stuff in to help it retain what we like about it. Take this meatball recipe, for instance....

ESTELLE’S MEATBALLS

Yield: About 85 balls

Chopped Meat 10 lbs
Italian bread, chopped, soaked 2 loaves
Onions, finely minced 4 each
Romano, grated 3 cups
Parsley, with stems, chopped 1 bunch
Breadcrumbs ½ cup
Salt 4 tablespoons
Pepper 2 tablespoons
Eggs, beaten 4 each

1. Oil two hotel pans. Preheat oven to 550˚. Press chopped, soaked bread through colander to remove as much moisture as possible.
2. Loosen chopped meat in a large bowl by hand. Mix in soaked bread, onion, Romano and parsley. Mix by hand until just combined.
3. Add breadcrumbs, if needed, if mixture is too moist.
4. Add salt, pepper and eggs until just combined.
5. Roll lightly into 3 oz. balls – DO NOT OVERROLL.
6. Bake in oven until done, 10-15 minutes.

This recipe comes from the mother of the chef for whom I worked before my baby was born. While meat becomes gray, chewy, and dry if cooked at a high temperature in an oven, the feel of the ball is retained by the mushed bread and the mushed moist onion. Cheese and eggs also serve as binders and replace some of the fat that runs out of the meat during cooking. When these came out of the oven, they were very mushy to the bite; once they came close to room temperature, they firmed up to just the right consistency.

It's important in this recipe not to overroll and not to overmix, or your balls will turn into lead pellets when they cool.

And what's a meat ball without some nice tomato sauce...

BASIC TOMATO SAUCE

Yield: 4 cups

EVOO ¼ cup
Onion, small dice 1 large onion
Garlic, minced 4 cloves
Thyme, chopped 3 tbsp
Oregano, chopped 2 tbsp
Carrot, grated 1 each
Basil, chiffonade 3 tbsp
Whole peeled tomatoes, milled 2 28oz cans
Salt to taste

1. Heat olive oil in saucepan. Soften onion, then add garlic for 1 additional minute.
2. Add thyme, oregano and carrot and cook until carrot is soft, about five minutes
3. Add tomatoes and basil. Simmer until thickened, about 30 minutes.

I adapted this recipe from Batali, a nice simple sauce. He just adds thyme, which I find a bit one-dimensional, and I mill my tomatoes while he hand-smushes them, which I find makes for a very watery/chunky sauce.

Sauteed meat is an a la minute preparation -- once it's out of the pan and rested for half the time it took to cook, it needs to be served. So we made a simple polenta before we got our steaks on...

POLENTA

Yield: 8 servings

Water 4 cups
Yellow corn meal 1 cup
Salt 1 tbsp
Parmesan, grated ½ cup
Olive oil 2 tbsp

1. Grease a 9 x 12 pan. In saucepan, bring 2 cups of water to a boil.
2. In a bowl, combine 2 cups of cool tap water with cup of corn meal.
3. Slowly whisk water/corn meal mixture into boiling water. Add salt. Continue whisking until it comes to a boil.
4. Reduce to simmer. Cook polenta, stirring occasionally 35-40 minutes, until thick, creamy and no longer gritty.
5. Stir in Parmesan until incorporated. Pour into pan. Chill 30 minutes or until firm.
6. Cut into triangles. Reheat in oiled sauté pan, brown on each side.

Unfortunately, we were rushed and didn't have time to try to cook each steak to different degrees of doneness, which is more of an eye/feel/experience thing that can only be learned by doing. Basically, if you salt correctly, if your flame is at the right hotness, a nice brown layer will form on the surface of the meat, indicating deliciousness.

SHELL STEAK WITH SIMPLE PAN SAUCE

Yield: 1 serving

Steak 1 each
Salt to taste
Shallots, minced 2 tbsp
Red wine ¼ cup
Beef stock ½ cup
Butter 1 tbsp
Salt to taste

1. Heat sauté pan, add oil, medium high heat.
2. Rub down steak on both sides with salt right before cooking. Place steak in center of pan. Cook 3-5 minutes on each side, depending on size of steak. Cook to medium rare.
3. Set steak on resting rack.
4. Add shallots to pan, soften in pan while scraping up fond.
5. Add wine. Cook until au sec.
6. Add beef stock. Cook away half of liquid, or until thick.
7. Add butter. Add salt.
8. Serve steak with pan sauce pour over top.

Next week, we spend the day dedicated to my personal hero, Pizza...

Beef (Chicken Poo, Corn n' Drugs)

The morning started off well. The 8am start-time attracts two kinds of students: those who are psyched to be there and those whose commutes force them in then. Today, I stopped by Kossar's Bagels and Bialys on the way to class and bought a dozen bagels. When Chef M came in just after 7:30, he took out the gravlox we set to cure on Friday and ordered up some cream cheese and tomatoes. In case you forgot, the large side of raw salmon was buried in a slurry of kosher salt, sugar, black peppercorns, cilantro and tequila. Chef showed me how to slice the fish, which was a bit of a trip -- I've watched the mongers at Russ & Daughters slice fish for me countless times, and they do it so artfully and efficiently. Dragging the santoku knife along the fish was surprisingly difficult to control to get the nice long, thin fillets. The fish itself was delicious, though the tequila gave it a weird margarita overtone that would probably appeal more to an alcoholic out for brunch than a NYC-raised Jew like myself. Regardless, the flavor of the salty fish was great against the fresh bagel. And a great way to start the day.

The lecture portion of the day was a bit of a horror story. Chef M is more than aware of the questionable state of the American food supply, particularly when it comes to animal product. The majority of beef in the US comes from factory farms, where the animals are pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, fed an unnatural diet of corn and chicken poop (the chicken themselves having been fed a lot of otherwise unusable cow trim), and are slaughtered by a minimally-regulated industry with the highest accident rate in the world. The USDA supposedly inspects cows before and after slaughter, but they are underfunded and politically hobbled.

Chef mentioned sanitation in the slaughtering of beef. On the kill floor, the animal will be herded into a pen and a bolt will be shot into its head. This is supposed to kill it instantly. Seconds later, a caliper will pick it up and cut it in half and remove the head and guts. If the animal moves its head and the bolt does NOT kill it instantly, it'll wiggle when picked up and cut in half, almost guaranteeing the cut goes through its digestive tract and spreading e-coli through out the meat.

Speaking of meat, a steer (castrated male cow, the ones we eat) takes 3 years to come to kill weight when fed a natural diet, but only 18 months when fed drugs and corn. At 1500 pounds, after removing the head, skin, guts and bones, literally two thirds of the animal is trim. This used to be fed to the cows, but cannibal cows developed mad cow disease. Now it's fed to chickens, whose poo is....denatured and fed to cows! All this so we can eat $1 burgers at McDonald's three meals a day.

After thoroughly discouraging me on the idea of ever eating meat again, we discussed dry aging (controlled rotting in a dry room to tenderize the meat) and the different cuts from the different parts of the animal. Many distributors pack meat in vacuum sealed bags, and allow it to age in the meat's juices ("wet aging"), but Chef M is of the opinion that this does nothing to tenderize or add flavor to the meat.

We chopped up some mirepoix (onion, celery, carrots) for duck stock using the roasted bones from yesterday, then the fatty slabs of beef came at us. We each got a third of a short loin and first practiced trussing it, then trimming the copious thick fat which coats this cut. The fat was solid, white, and almost looked like processed turkey meat as we carved it off.

Once we got enough fat off, we sliced it into individual portions then we went to work on a different side of beef, tenderloins. Again slicing off a whole lot of fat, removing excess muscles that didn't go with the portions we were aiming to cut (filet mignon, chateau briand and tenderloin tip.) One piece we butterflied, put in plastic, and hammered it flat.

After clean-up, Chef M grilled enough meat over charcoal for everyone, and the grim lecture of the morning dissipated -- we were hungry, and those steaks smelled good. He also brought out the duck comfit we set up yesterday, and it tasted extremely....ducky. And juicy. I took some of the whole garlic cloves out of it and spread it on a bit of french bread....fatty ducky roasted garlic is easily one of the most delicious bread spreads ever.

It has occurred to me that we're not really cooking yet -- we're still in the fundamentals of cutting down meat and vegetables to prepare them for cooking. I guess one must crawl before he walks, and I'm aiming for an extended sprint by the time school is over.

ADDENDA:
Mother's Day is Sunday, and B's mom wants to go to.... a steak house. Oy.

Got a flyer to try out for "Top Chef." I've only watched the show once and it was over-the-top ridiculous with a bunch of repulsive egoists. Maybe I should try to watch it before I spend a morning on line at a cattle call. Hmmm, cattle call. Think they'll feed me some chicken poo?

BREAKFAST #1: 6:30am, banana, hunger 3/5

BREAKFAST #2: 2 halves of a bagel with class-made gravlox and tomato slice, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Skipped the cream cheese

LUNCH: 11:30, 1 piece grilled tenderloin steak, 1 piece grilled sirloin steak, bite of duck comfit, piece of french bread with roasted garlic in duck fat, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5

PM SNACK: 4pm, small handful of nuts, 1.5 packages of peanut butter cracker sandwiches, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
Bicycle snack, overlooking the Hudson River and Tapanzee Bridge from Tallman Mountain State Park

DINNER: 6pm, mushroom tofu soup, white rice, kimchee, assorted pickles, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Dined at the Soft Tofu Restaurant in Fort Lee again, avoided the meat as I had enough of that in the morning!

EVENING SNACK: 9:15pm, organic chex with good milk, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Kinda craving sweets...huh, can't remember last time I ate a sweet....too tired to review blog....