Vichyssoise and lots of Fond

I might as well be taking French here with all of the French we're required to know. Dicing is now known as brunoise, macedoine or parmentier depending on the size of the cubes being cut. Stocks are now Fond. Vegetables are mirepoix. It's a little overwhelming but also exciting at the same time. When I hear someone shout, "Bring me some fond brun d'agneau!" I know instantly that brown lamb stock is needed.

Our soup lab moves much more quickly than baking and pastry did. Since baking is all about precision, most of our lab time was spent scaling out ingredients to the nearest tenth of a gram. In this class, the chef simply says, "Grab some more cream and add it in." Well, how much is "some"? The time that was spent scaling out ingredients in baking is now spent learning to add ingredients by taste rather than by measurement. In the middle of production, it's typical for the classoom to look something like this:

Once the soups are finished, they are sent up to the dining rooms in 2-4 gallon containers, portioned out, and garnished so that they're served to us like this:

We've already covered a wide variety of soup-making techniques to produce dishes like cream of carrot soup, butternut squash bisque, clam chowder, and vichyssoise. It has been interesting to see how all of the culinary labs work together throughout the day. For example, our soup lab is responsible for providing all of the soups for dining room service, and all of the other culinary labs rely on us for stock production.

It's common for famous chefs to perform demos on campus for the culinary students. Thursday, I was lucky enough to be invited to attend one of the first ones of the year. Chef Graham Brown from Pure New Zealand Cuisine came Thursday morning to showcase the secrets of some signature New Zealand dishes. I felt like I was on Emeril Live. This picture is terrible, but it gives you an idea of what the room looked like.

He prepared a variety of dishes in front of us using the New Zealand gold kiwi and my favorite, lamb. As soon as he finished preparing one dish, chefs appeared from the back kitchens carrying trays of individual portions of tempura mussles, steamed mussels with kiwi salsa, roasted venison atop grilled pita with a cauliflower tabouleh, and rack of lamb with kiwi tzatziki for each of us to try. One word - delicious! Not a bad trade off either. I'd sit through that again any day instead of attending my menu planning and cost controls class for 2 hours. Who wouldn't want to have this for brunch?