First up, caramel & walnut tart, so simple & so good.

Next up, apricot tart which was ok(I am not an apricot fan!)

Then he made a strawberry tart, it looked beautiful & tasted great. What I liked was that he used strawberry glaze to finish the tart, that means even before you take a bite of the tart, the aroma of strawberry is upon you.

After the strawberry tart, a raspberry tart. Very nice….

Last for the demo was a fruit tart, Chef did two versions. The elaborate one above, then the more rustic one that we had to make for our practical.

Above is the fruit tart I made during the practical session packed away in my school lunchbox. It didn’t last long when I got home, I polished it off quite quickly. The trinity of fruit, pastry cream & sweet pastry was too hard to resist…..

Later on during the week, we looked at puff pastry. Making puff pastry by hand is “fun”, ok not really. After we made the puff, we made palmiers.

After palmiers we made paille, which are like puff pastry sandwich with jam filling. Very nice, the raspberry seed jam the school buys is amazing.

Chef showed us how to make vol au vent’s, pretty old school.

He also showed us how to make apple tart tartin the long way, in this method, the apples are pre-cooked in the caramel before baking.

We also made some apple turnovers (chausson aux pommes), they were lovely too good to share with anyone… lol!

At the same time during cuisine we also started looking at doughs.

We started with short pastry(pate brisee), chef demonstrated quiche lorraine & wild mushroom quiche both made with pate brisee. For practicals we did the quiche lorraine(bacon & gruyere cheese), though I wish we did the wild mushroom one instead.

Next up was puff pastry, during practical we made puff pastry. We used the puff pastry to make the dish above(chef’s plate), the dish is poached egg with cream leeks, sauteed bell peppers & albufera sauce. Chef showed us a really foolproof way of making soft poached eggs, all that is required is lightly simmering water & some vinegar.

We also learnt how to make omelets, the one one above is filled with candied onions.

To end the week, we did a roast chicken & vegetables jardinieres(french for veg cut like a stick).

That was week 3, 7 more to go…

The next few posts are in retrospect, they are all about my journey through basic cuisine & basic pastry at Le Cordon Bleu Dusit from October 12 – December 24 2009.

Week 1 Basic Cuisine & Basic Pastry

We started of with orientation, it was a pretty short 2hr session with information about the school, rules etc. We were then given our uniforms, recipe folders, knife kit & a large food container. All this items were pretty bulky, carrying everything back on the BTS back to my place was pretty arduous.

The knife kit if I remember correctly has about 40 items in it. Most heavily used for cuisine are the chef knife, paring knife & spoon. For pastry the little plastic scraper is handy for doing a lot of things and also really essential is my thermometer.

The general format of the classes was that the chef demonstrated about 3 recipes in every demonstration session, then we would cooked one of the recipes in our practical kitchen session. The recipe folders we were given at orientation only contained the recipe ingredients, that meant during the demonstration session we had to take notes on the recipe methods. Initially I thought keeping up with the chef would be a problem, but since everything the chef said in english had to be translated into thai, this bought me time to write my notes.

On day one of cuisine the Chef demonstrated how to cook a rustic vegetable soup. The soup was almost bland vegetable soup, but it had some bacon when rescued it from blandness. Bacon makes anything taste good, I swear by that…

Also on day one, the chef talked to us about our knives, how to peel & wash vegetables, then how to cut them the French way. It amazing the French have a name for every possible style of cutting vegetables.

This was my effort for the rustic vegetable soup.

Next cuisine demonstration we looked at three more soups. Dubarry cream which is a cauliflower soup thickened with cream, watercress soup & a crab bisque. We cooked the crab bisque during the practical session, yummo. To make the bisque we had to cut the crab to little bits using a cleaver, then sweat it with aromatics, flambe with cognac, add more flavouring & seasoning, to finish we had to blend the whole thing together(yes, the crabs shells too) then sieve. It was worth the effort.

During the demonstration sessions we also learnt alot of cooking french, pretty handy I think. With just a few words you can describe a whole recipe.

To end the first week, we looked at the ubiquitous French onion soup, Marseille style fish soup & a consomme with vegetable brunoise. We cooked the consomme during the practical. Cutting the 2mm brunoise was fun(not), never cut vegetables that small. They all had to look uniform. I did mine slowly to ensure even sizing.

Day one of pastry we looked at and then baked sable biscuits. They tasted amazing. The trinity of butter, sugar & flour is good for you, yet bad for you. Figure that one out….

Second day for pastry we baked a fruit cake & madeleines. Madeleines, I am in love with them.

Last for pastry on week one, we looked at financiers & gateau basque(butter cake with pastry cream filling). We baked the gateau basque during the practical. Chef thought I put too much icing sugar on my cake….. oh well. Sugar is good for you sometimes.

That was my first week at Le Cordon Bleu Dusit…..