Week Four - Garde Manger

This week was actually a pretty boring week. The week started with meat grinding and making sausage. The meat grinding was pretty gross. It makes a weird squishy crackly sound as it goes through the machine. One girl had to leave the classroom because she was going to throw up. The worst part for me is that as it come out of the medium dial it looks like big maggots, slowly oozing out. Through the big grinder it was just small chunks of meat, except when you turn the grinder on high, then it will actually shoot across the classroom. A guy in my class found that out. But we stuffed pig intestines with the sausage meat the first day. We also made a Brioche dough. the pig intestines weren't that bad, just really long. I was the one that put the intestines on the stuffing horn, and it took forever because of how long the intestines were. We also made a very yummy apple gastrique, the mustard sauce again, and a cream sauce. All the leftover meat was saved so we could make Crempenette's or sausage patties. We also made Spatzel.

Day two we finished up the stuffing, and we made the Crempenette's. This is when you take Caul Fat, Cow's stomach lining, and wrap it around a sausage patty in the shape of a football. the caul fat felt leathery and was like a spiderweb of fat. We placed these in a saute pan and browned them on both sides, then finished them in a 350 degree oven for 3 minutes. We took the Hot Italian Sausage and boiled them until they reached 168 degrees, then shocked them in an ice bath. We used 1/2 the sausage to make the Hoggies, which were amazing and i ate too fast to get a picture of, and the other half we wrapped in the Brioche dough and made individual loafs. This was supposed to go on the plate with our salads, but they didn't come out of the oven in time. At the end of class we placed all the sausage in the smoker, and we will be getting them next week.

Sliced Crempenette with Spatzel and cream sauce.

Another view of the crempenette, you can barely see the caul fat hanging down on the first slice.

This was my first attempt at a salad. I think its beautiful. That is a marinated zucchini ribbon, in garlic infused olive oil and reduced balsamic, with a apple salad. The apple salad has the reduced apple gastrique on it, and the gastrique is also brushed across the plate. Garnished with apple slices.

This is a close up picture of the first attempt at the salad.

My chef wanted some green on the plate so she took apart mine and made a new one. Well i thought that one was ugly, so i made another one, and this is how it came out. This is a mixed salad with spinach, celery tops, and other greens. The marinated zucchini ribbon, and apple salad. Once again i did the brush of apple gastrique, but this time i added a mixture of the apple gastrique and reduced balsamic and did a spoon push on the plate.

This is a picture of the full plate.