Class #4: Potato Soup

With deboning a chicken and making Coq au Vin and a very crazy busy week I have found myself about to take class #5 tomorrow and have yet to tell you about class #4!  Soooo let me do that now.

To start off we learned about the 5 mother sauces, which are:

1. Veloute' - Sauce with light stock & roux (fat & flour)
2. Bechamel - Sauce with milk & roux
3. Tomato - Sauce with tomatoes
4. Hollandaise - Sauce with eggs, lemon juice and oil
5. Espagnole - Sauce with tomatoes, stock & roux

So after our CI expressed his disappointment that no one read the book this week (I hate disappointing the CI but I did debone a chicken - doesn't that count?) he did an overview of the chapter on Stocks & Sauces.  We watched a video on each of the 5 mother sauces being made and learned all about the types of stocks and the difference between that and broth. Broth is clarified stock.  Stock is where you get all the flavoring from either vegetables, chicken and/or beef.  We learned about mirepoix which is 50% onions, 25% celery and 25% carrots.  We then learned about deglazing (using liquid to take bits off bottom of pan), carmelizing (cooking natural sugars out of food) and what goes in a sachet (peppercorns, bay leaf, parsley, garlic & thyme). 

I actually found myself a bit intimidated as the chef gave us our class assignment: make Potato Soup and a bread of our choice.  No instructions, no recipe, no CI does it first and we copy - just make vegetable stock and make potato soup from it. I know, I know - it's just soup but it's a soup I've never made before and have to present to my CI who will taste it and tell me his opinion on it.  After getting new partners to work with you could tell most of the class was a bit inimidated so he promised he would help us in the kitchen and he did.  We made our vegetable stock using our leftover pieces of veggies that we practiced our 8 cuts on.  Then we covered that with water and added our sachet to make the stock.  We then strained that to have our veggie broth as our base for our potato soup.  My partner diced up potatoes as I fried up some bacon for our garnish.  We were doing fine with the CI's help to guide us along.  What's funny is the first time he came over he said we were going to starve him to death on how little we were making so we chopped up a bunch more potatoes and I guess we got carried away because we ended up at the end with soooo many veggies that we had to throw out. That wasn't good, but our potato soup actually turned out okay after we added buttermilk and half & half and then got to use an emulsifier to puree our soup.  With some dashes of salt & pepper it was actually started to taste pretty decent.  We served it in cute ramekins and garnished with bacon bits, cheddar cheese & green onions and some toasted bread to go along with it.  We got lucky on the bread as the baking class before us had plenty of extra loaves laying around for us to use. Overall we got a good review with some small tweaks for improvement but our CI was pleased with our product being our first potato soup we both ever made.

Next week (I guess that would be tomorrow) we draw out of hat a type of soup that we have to make from scratch.  There are 7 different ones to choose from.  I just hope I don't end up getting split pea soup...blech.  My husband will get all those leftovers FOR SURE.