soup station

My introduction to main kitchen work was with soup station. Even though my task was to make 120 portions of soup a day, I thought the work was easier than in the PCR setting, because having everything you're doing going into one big item is just so much less involved than assembling a dozen little small plates. In big cooking you don't have to sweat the small stuff.



But like with anything you gotta mise stuff en place (French for "putting stuff in place"). That was the mise en place for minestrone soup, practically took up the entire work bench.



So you don't have to sweat the small stuff, but we sweated (heated/softened) 15-20 lbs of hand-diced mirepoix (the standard being 50% onions, 25% carrots, 25% celery, all diced). Besides bones and meat, this is the stuff that gives stock and soups flavor.



Then we added chicken stock. Like 10 gallons of it. And two ham hocks, crucial for depth of flavor - that was the lip-smacking part about drinking this soup.



After simmering for over half an hour we added cabbage and zucchini, and canned tomato + tomato paste. The tomato products give the soup more body and savoriness (or umami).



And right before the soup was done we added spinach, a super soft vegetable that would've wilted and lost color if we had put it in any earlier.



And there you have it, a gigantic steam kettle full of minestrone soup!

(The other soups we made were chowders and black bean soup, not half as photogenic as minestrone soup so I won't even bother showing them.)



Oh but we did make vegetable stock, something easy for everyone at home - just simmer mirepoix scraps (onion skin, carrot peels, celery ends) in water for half an hour and then strain the scraps out. The liquid you can pour into containers (or ice cube trays) and freeze. Then the next time you need some veggie stock or want to add some flavor to rice or pasta, just pop one out and throw it in.

salad station

Before I dive into all the mass production type main kitchen work that I did, I just wanted to finish up with the only other station I worked in PCR - salad station. It's the station I wanted because it was the most relaxed, and at that point in the semester I really just needed to relax.

Every day at salad station involved coming in to check the mise en place (ingredients prepped and ready to assemble for the final product). A lot of times the herbs and lettuces would wilt overnight, so I would have to replenish those. And every couple of days I would need to do a batch of something or another, whether it was vinaigrette or glazed nuts or poached pears - and by the time I rotated out of the station I had prepped every single item that went into the salads, which was nice.

The station was so relaxed that I actually had the time to run a special salad of my own design if I wanted to. But I didn't. I stuck to making the three salads on the menu: heirloom tomato, fall greens, and the shrimp louie (seen below in the brief second it sat on the pick-up line before it was whisked away to a diner). What I realized about fine dining salads in relation to regular salads is that there's just a couple of elements that seem hard to replicate at home. In the shrimp louie, that element would be the poached mushroom cap. The pleats etched into the mushroom required a special tool (a super mini bottle-opener of sorts), and poaching required some brief submerged simmering in a white wine/water mix (which is simple but just unobvious enough).



What was fun in salad station was that I had my own printer for ticket orders, so my ears became attuned to the noise of printing - as soon as it started I would spring into action, a sort of muted adrenaline rush (in comparison to the hot line for grill/entree-firing). I would regret not being on the hot line (and maybe I kind of do), but I've discovered that I don't crave that spike of adrenaline. Being on the hot line is the kitchen version of being on the front line, and I really don't need to get shot.



So instead I was in my little corner, doing things like slicing up the heirloom tomatoes and arranging them nicely.



There were small challenges though, like the parmesan crisp that was the mystifying adornment atop the heirloom tomato salad. It's embarrassingly simple - you lay out grated parmesan cheese in circles and bake them until they get crispy. I couldn't get the crisp part down right - either I put them in the oven and they didn't get crisp fast enough, or I stuck them in the broiler and they got burned. On my last day in salad station I got it right. They broke in half nicely for me to use them on my heirloom tomato salads, finally.



It's always the small things that get you.

amuse #4: southwestern pork puff pastry cups

After the third amuse I rotated into the main kitchen to produce mass quantities of soup (for both PCR and the cafeteria). But for my birthday my family was going to come eat in the PCR so I wanted to be there. So I switched with someone for the day and got to do amuse again!

This time my inspiration was simply what I felt like eating - and I thought of ground pork with grilled corn and roasted red bell peppers. And I wanted to put it in puff pastry, because I love puff pastry - one of my favorite creations was a Thanksgiving puff pastry dumpling I did years ago, where I basically wrapped leftover turkey, sweet potato and cranberry sauce in puff pastry and baked it.



So anyway, this was supposed to be an easy amuse - I would stir-fry the ground pork, and lay the corn and red bell peppers on the grill until they charred. Which is what I did, but first I made the sauce.



Since I pictured the pork puff pastry as a dumpling/samosa like thing, for the sauce I thought about the green sauce that accompanies samosas. But I didn't want all the Indian flavors so I just kept it simple, cilantro and yogurt and garlic, seasoned with lemon juice and cayenne. I put in too much garlic, so I tried to adjust by putting in more cilantro and yogurt, but that only made it slightly better.



While I was busy adjusting the sauce, Tishara stepped in and cut my corn kernels for me. Maybe she just wanted her grill back, but I was really glad to have some help.

The red bell peppers I put into a tin and covered with foil after they got all charred up - the trapped residual heat softens the peppers even more and allow for the charred skin to be easily peeled off (which I did, in some cold water).

The bell peppers and the grilled corn were added to the pork - which I stir-fried with red onion, ginger, vinegar and paprika (the seasonings were a product of googling "pork corn red bell pepper", finding a recipe for pork chop with bell pepper and corn relish, and stealing the idea).



Once the filling was done I got to wrapping the dumplings, and somehow I had gotten only a dozen in the oven when it came service time. And guests were being seated in the PCR and I had nothing ready. So I started freaking out and pulled the dumplings from the oven and deep-fried them instead. And they looked ugly and not what I wanted them to look like (hence no pictures of those).

Meanwhile I was also freaking out because my family didn't show up and I didn't have my phone and I had to get my phone and I had all these messages about meetup mishaps, and it really was too much stress.



In the end I bought myself some time with the deep-fried puffs, and decided to make my life easier by not making any more dumplings. Instead I just laid down puff pastry squares in muffin tins and spooned filling over that and baked - and what came out were more like pork puff pastry cups. And they actually looked much better. And I regained my ability to breathe.

amuse #3: chicken peanut satay & green papaya salad

My favorite cuisine is Thai, so I had to do a Thai-style amuse. This one was especially ambitious because besides trying new things without a recipe, I was also doing two things at once: chicken satay AND papaya salad. Thankfully each involved a marinade/sauce that I was able to make the day before so that cut down on prep time.



I love green papaya salad but have never worked with it before, so it was interesting to shred and taste it plain. It actually tastes like... not very much.



To the shredded papaya I added halved cherry tomatoes and chopped green beans (you can also substitute Chinese long beans). The salad dressing involved olive oil, shrimp paste, fish sauce, lime and honey. Although it tasted okay, I thought it could be better but wasn't sure how to make it better - it just didn't taste authentic. Maybe I need my grandma's nuoc mam (cooked fish sauce)...

For the chicken satay I used the leftover diced chicken cubes from the Chinese chicken lettuce cups and marinated them in peanut sauce (peanut butter + soy sauce + lemon juice + brown sugar + garlic + curry powder). But honestly this peanut dressing is far superior and I wish I would've used it instead. I sauteed the chicken cubes and browned them in the broiler to get a little char since the cubes were way too small for me to grill.



This amuse bite had no chance of being held together by a skewer, so I used Asian soup spoons for the presentation. The skewers for the chicken were unnecessary but I just liked how they looked, especially since the soup spoons were plain.



As you can see I made a lot! But they all got eaten, and that made me happy.

amuse #2: grilled peach salad bite

For my next amuse I wanted to do something Asian-inspired again, but I thought it would be better to take a break and do something fresh. Again I thought about things I had eaten recently and this grilled peach salad with goat cheese and arugula came to mind.



Because there's only two hours to prepare, getting all ingredients in one go was very important.



I cut the peaches in half and basted them with melted butter + brown sugar + cinnamon. They grilled until they got soft, and then I put them in a pan and covered them with foil to retain heat.



The goat cheese log was crumbled by hand, and the arugula was tossed in a simple vinaigrette (olive oil + balsamic vinegar + salt + pepper). Again I wanted a crunch element to offset the softness of everything, so I opted for toasted almond slivers.

To assemble, I scraped off the charred bits on the grilled peaches, cut them into cubes, sprinkled some brown sugar on, then topped with a pinch of arugula, some bits of goat cheese, then adhered some almond slivers to the cheese, and skewered the bite with a mini-skewer.



Excuse the poor lighting, but this is how it turned out. As my PCR teammate Dustin deadpan-ed: "It was like an orgasm in my mouth." I didn't believe him at first, but he really did mean it. It was that delicious.