Day one hundred two

Our sampling plates for today

Making a puree soup right consistency

Second day of the same menu. We have two more menues till the end of the week, two days we will be cooking menu as per course guide and on Friday it will be our menu project, four teams will cook each own menu. Very excited to see cooking on  Friday.

Today I made a corn veloute. This is basically a thick soup or sauce, depends on the use. We used it as sauce for a wild rice quinoa cakes.

To make a veloute you sweat vegetables (onion, leak, celery - no dark vegetables, as you want light color). Then you introduce blond roux (flour cooked in fat). When roux is hot, add stock in small increments, whisking constantly so there will be no lamps. Add sachet for a flavor and simmer for approximately 20 minutes to develop flavor and cook off the raw taste of flour. Then you add corn
(fresh or frozen and thawed) off the cobs. Simmer for another 10 minutes or so. Now you want to puree the soup and here is the trick. Take off a good part of your cooking liquid and reserve it. Puree vegetables in a blender and strain through fine mesh strainer. If you have very thick consistency and you need to thin it, add some cooking liquid, but usually you do not need it or do not need to use all the liquid. The balance of the liquid you may use for a separate sauce as it is quite aromatic.

Note for the dish. If you are avoiding gluten, do not use roux, instead use slurry to thicken your soup or sauce. Dissolve some arrowroot starch or cornstarch in a small amount of cold water and add this slurry in small increments to your soup to get desired consistency. It will thicken it very quickly and you do not need to cook it for a long time, so add after simmering with corn.

Today was the first day we plated our food. We did it for an exercise, as this is not required in banquet cooking. We will do it on a constant base in the next course a la cart cooking which will start next week.