With that said, let me tell you about Class #8, which was all about eggs. For this class we learned we would have to cook eggs in 4 ways: over easy, over hard, sunny side up and poached. With our poached egg we would make eggs benedict making hollandaise sauce by scratch. We would also need to create a side dish to go with it of our own choosing.
It all sounds so easy, right? Make 4 eggs, a sauce, a side....BUT let me tell you, eggs is where I cracked (pun intended). It ended up being my least successful class and left me doubting this whole cooking thing. It started with the Chef giving us a presentation of how the 4 eggs should look and be prepared. This gave us an idea of what consistency we were looking for in the final presentation. After that we were on our own. I thought I'd start with a sunny side up egg and if I screwed it up I could make it my over hard egg. Well, I did screw it up and that's where I started to lose confidence. I turned it into my over hard egg but wasn't pleased. I moved on to the over easy egg which basically means you have to flip the egg over (without breaking it) and end up with a very jiggly egg indicating over easy. I cooked it a little too long and ended up with over medium. The Chef confirmed this as he was walking by - so my first do-over. My 2nd attempt worked out fine - phew! Then I moved on to sunny side up. I didn't cook it long enough on my first attempt as the Chef checked it out it still had slimy white parts - my second do-over. My next attempt failed as I broke the yolk when flipping. Grrrr! This was not going well. FINALLY, I completed all my eggs. I had my sunny side up egg showing it's pretty golden egg on top - perfectly cooked. Then my over hard which is the yolk broken and all the egg cooked through (not scrambled). My over easy was flipped and jiggly and my poached egg was pretty too. A poached egg gets dropped in simmering water that has vinegar in it (this keeps the whites all together) and the yolk is not cooked through. So I let my eggs sit to the side for the teacher to view them.
Here's where I really went wrong. I decided to make fried potatoes for my side. To start this side dish I sauteed some leeks in butter. I then added my thinly sliced potatoes which actually made my leeks turn into, as the Chef would later call them, "Burnt Bits". I actually like the crispy onions that carmelize on potatoes and thought that's what I had done, but not so. The Chef let me know what I called "Carmelized" was indeed "Burnt". So, if that wasn't enough as I served my egg and poured the hollandaise sauce on top it occured to me that my egg was now cold as I left it to the side with the other eggs. I should've put it in the warming oven so the Chef would be served a nice warm egg. To sum it up, I ended up with a 20 out of 25 on this dish - a B! I was devastated - so disappointed in myself. I let myself down more than the Chef, knowing I could've done better. Luckily my disappointment only lasted a week and by next Monday's Lab I was out of my funk and ready to learn more - no more burnt bits from me!
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