Basic sauces

What does the sauce mean? Is it the compliment to the dish or a compliment from the Chef, or, maybe, it is just masking an undesirable taste? I heard a statement that a good sauce can make you eat anything, even your plate. Definitely, the plate is not delicious. Even though I love to cook meals at home from scratch, I've never cooked real sauces, so L'Ecole's Chefs opened for me a new page in realizing tastes with learning sauces. I was taught that sauces have their own "genealogy" and five families with the main "mather sauce" in the beginning. The basic white sauce is Bechamel, and sauces like Mornay, Cream, etc are made by adding different ingredients to its milk-roux mix. Espagnole's "children" are Bordelaise, Robert, Duxelle, and many more. Bolognese and Spanish sauces are produced from Tomato. The sauce that is a "mother" of emulsified butter and yolk sauces is Hollandaise. Finally, the basic blond sauce is Veloute, and its delicious "descendants" are Supreme and Allemande, for example. All of those basic sauces and some of the small ones we produced in our school kitchen, and I was excited to try their classic tastes. Everybody is different, so we like some tastes more than others, and I found that my favorite sauce from those we cooked is Hungarian. This is a small Supreme Sauce from the Veloute family. Also, I was happy to learn how to make emulsified sauces even though my arm is not strong enough to produce it easily. One of my "beaten" sauces was Herb Mayonnaise:

Cheese

Nutty and crunchy. Creamy and soft. Rubbery and bouncy. Herby and salty. Delicate. Pungent. Sweet and fruity. I can continue forever because I'm talking about the most delicious food I know. It is cheese. We have this name for such a huge number of tastes and forms, so if you ask one hundred people to imagine cheese, you, probably, would not find any two same images. Especially, if those people are from different cultures. However, all cheeses have the same beginning - a mammal's milk. Off course, it is about natural cheeses. Then, the type of the mammal, features of processing, and the environment, including even air movements, make the cheese's flavor distinct and special. Many of natural cheeses are impossible to reproduce in any region but only in the region in which they originate. Even though, I really love this delicious food, I found that I know almost nothing about it. Endless fields of "cheesy" information I have to browse and learn in case to be aware of cheese on a professional level.

Breakfast

People have the great advice about daytime meals "Eat your breakfast by yourself, share your lunch with a friend, and give your dinner to your enemy". During the centuries, people have observed importance of the time of eating, and those observations show that the most important meal of the day is the breakfast. Unfortunately, I'm allowed to cook a proper breakfast only couple times per week when my husband and I can have the morning together.

 I wasn't surprised that we are going to learn breakfast in the first phase of our studying as one of the kitchen basics. Our Chefs taught us to identify and cook the most common breakfast dishes from eggs such as Eggs Benedict, Frittata, etc. We learned the proper way to fry eggs  in different styles and boil them to certain conditions. For example, I didn't know before that boiled eggs should never be boiled. Yes, they should be simmered. In this way we can avoid blue-green-grey color covering yolk after boiling. Also, my classmate taught me to flip "over" eggs. I did it! It is an amazing feeling when you learn the skill which you've seen only in some movie before. Thank you for this. 

Below I put pictures of breakfast dishes made by my classmates in egg-lab. 

Frittata

Quiche with spinach 

Cheese Quiche

 Eggs Benedict

Ravioli

The stuffed dough is the incredibly popular dish around the world. You can find different names for it in different cuisines: Chinese wontons, Russian pelmeni, Central Asian manti, Ukrainian vareniki, Polish pierogi, and etcetera, etcetera. In school, we learned how to cook Italian ravioli which is basically stuffed pasta. My first experience in cooking ravioli was full of mistakes and therefore useful. My dough was okay, but I made the stuffing with fresh cheese which became hard during the cooking process and no juice was found inside when we tried them. Also, I exaggerated the size of my ravioli and made them giants.

Finally, I plated them in the wrong way, too. Instead of putting the tomato sauce in a separate ramekin, I poured it on a top of my fried ravioli, and, in this way, just wasted their crunchy texture. 

The good thing is my knowledge about what I should not do making ravioli. Also, I was interested to know that frying Italian Ravioli was invented by accident in Charlie Gitto's, St Louis restaurant. This is not official information, so do not judge me if I'm wrong.

Pasta

Pasta has always been a wonder for me.  What makes flour and water so nutty and distinctive? In L'Ecole we made fresh pasta, and I was happy to learn how to do it. It turns out that semolina flour makes pasta hard and nutty, so we added semolina to our pasta in school.

Chef has shown us the proper way to make dough and we learned that it's needed to add eggs and water to flour but not vise versa.

The light-yellow semolina gave our dough warm color and needed hardness. Then I used a pasta machine the first time in my life and I was excited and successful. That day we were taught to cook Fresh Pasta Alfredo and our  group did great. Our pasta was al dente, firm and tender, and the sauce was rich and cheesy, so it was real Pasta Alfredo. 

Macaroni and Cheese

When I visited an America grocery store for the first time, a couple of things surprised me.  One of them was a whole aisle of a wide variety of macaroni and cheese boxes.  I felt like macaroni and cheese is the only popular food in the USA.   I figured out that it is a really popular dish, even though American cuisine is diverse and full of many other delicious dishes.  Macaroni and cheese is easy to prepare, rich in nutrition, free of most allergens, and finally just delicious.

Then we had a chance to use our and cheese and plate it with chicken, which we cooked in our own way.  I decided to make my chicken  in the easiest way I know, so I used wine, soy sauce, and honey, and then cooked it in the oven.  Diluting the soy sauce with wine made my chicken less salty and added a little bit different flavor.  Not to sweet, and in my opinion rich in flavor and a great compliment macaroni and cheese.  Chef said that it was good so I did well that time.

The potato week

I love and respect potatoes. Even though this rich of nutritious starchy tuber originally came from the New World, in Ukraine, where I'm from, the potato is the main vegetable on the table. Once I had a book named 1000 and 1 potato recipes, and I tried many of those recipes. Of course, the most popular ways to cook potatoes are baking and making mash potato, and these dishes are popular around all the world. Expecting the potato week, I was excited to learn something new about a really familiar vegetable, and school gave me new information. It's interesting to know, that starchy potatoes like Russet or Purple are good for baking and frying, while waxy Red or Yukon Gold are perfect for boiling and steaming. Yes, I knew that potatoes are different in use, but I never knew why. The high starch content and low sugar make potatoes starchy, and low starch with high moister content define the waxy potato.
In the potato week we had a lot of practice in cooking different potatoes in different way. I was learn recipes of Russet baked potatoes, Twice baked potatoes, Scalloped potatoes, etc.

Also we tried different styles of deep fries and played with plating mash potato.