In Phase Two we were much more focused on plating and the presentation of the food. With a steady hand and a lot of patience it's amazing what you can with food. While these aren't things that you will be doing at home on a regular basis or even in a lot of restaurants these days, it was really fun to see how it's done and attempt each technique. You never know when scoring stripes on a potato or making a flower out of a carrot might come in handy.
This is the fanciest little twice baked potato you might ever see. We cored out the potatoes, scored the stripes on the side with a scoring tool (name? I have no clue), deep fried the hollow potato and cooked the inside like a mashed potato. Once the potatoes were soft, we piped them into the fried hollow potato and finished them in the oven.
This garnish was made with a dough that is very similar, but not as much of a pain in the butt, as phyllo dough. We shaped it into the fan, secured it with aluminum foil, egg-washed and then popped in the oven for a few minutes. Not only were they really cute, but they weren't that bad tasting. We had them with tuna tartar and it was a nice added crunch to the dish.
And finally, the infamous garnish -aspic. Do you guys know what aspic is? Simply put, it's beef broth jello. Sounds revolting right? It kind of is, but people really love it. It's fun, but really tricky, to work with. We used it as a side element to a salad. Basically we have steel pipes that we used to start building the layers of aspic. The first layer went down and the we carefully placed that cute little flower you see there. The flower is made of a carrot and dill. We let that layer sit and harden. Once it's ready, we placed a poached quail egg in the center, poured some more aspic and let it sit. The process continued until we had a jello-like flan thing.
As cooks, we are taught to pay attention to detail but still try to work in a timely fashion. Our guests won't wait all day just so the carrot petal looks perfect. It's a trade that we probably will never master but will spend most of our culinary careers working towards.
Lastly, I have to give credit to the pastry students. They kick ass when it comes to detail.
How on earth do they do that?
