1. I Still Can't Define What a Salad is.
Salads are so obvious, yet if someone would ask me now, "What is a salad?," I won't seem to be able to put it in words. I mean I did memorize it for my test. But after I took the test, the definition provided by my textbook has gone out my brain window. Okay, so I'm looking it up now. Quoting verbatim from my textbook: "The definition of a salad is expansive and continues to grow even today: The Prentice Hall Essentials Dictionary of Culinary Arts (Prentice Hall, 2008) defines," and this is the most important point, "a salad as 'a single food or a mix of different foods, accompanied or bound by a dressing.'" Okay, do we now have it in our brains? I hope so.
An important element in a salad is the dressing. The two big components of which are oil and vinegar. Of the oils used for a salad, olive oil is the most commonly used oil. The grade of olive oil depends on the degree of acidity. Extra virgin olive oil has an acidity level of less than 1 percent; virgin olive oil has in between 1 and 3 percent; and pure olive oil has 3~4 percent and up to 10 percent of virgin olive oil. For vinegars, the quality is dependent on the quality of the wine or alcohol used to make it. Vinegars are a result of fermentation of alcohol. The usage of "mother," or bacteria starter, to produce vinegar is important. We can start our own vinegar using a jelly-like layer found in the bottom of vinegar. That, apparently, is the mother.
Lastly, there are three categories of salad: Simple, Mixed, and Composed. An example of simple salads (salades simples), would be something like a lettuce only salad with a simple dressing. So, in a word, it's a salad made with only one ingredient and it's dressed very simply. A mixed salad (salade mixte) is a salad with a mixture of ingredients that have been combined and dressed together. A garden salad, or in our example, a salad of sweet and bitter greens with tomato and herbs, would be good examples of mixed salads. Lastly, in class we made Salade Niçoise, which is a great example of what a composed salad (salade composée) is, a salad with a mixture of several ingredients that have been dressed separately, but put together and presented on a single plate or a platter.
One last thing to note is that a classmate of mine and I had a brief discussion on what category a cooked vegetable salad (macedoine de legumes) belongs to. We finally settled on this: overall it is a composed salad, but the four main components: the cucumbers is a simple salad, the macedoine is a mixed salad, the fondue de tomate is also a mixed salad, and the frisee is a simple salad.
2. Spuds and then more spuds!
Potatoes are so freakin' versatile. Here, we sliced, deep fried, boiled, sautéed, baked, piped, puréed around 15 potatoes per each student to make 9 dishes. They were pommes gaufrette: waffle-like slices of potato that are deep fried in the 1-Step method, the food is fried at one temperate (350ºF~375ºF), or in class at 300ºF but fried a bit longer. Pommes pont-neuf: deep fried potato sticks that are 7cm x 1cm x 1cm. We use the 2-Step method, where the potatoes are partially cooked or poached at 300ºF until somewhat tender but haven't colored, then before service they are finished at 375ªF to brown the outside quickly.
In the next two dishes, pommes purée and pommes duchesse, the potatoes are passed through a food mill after they have been cooked and dried. The potatoes can be cooked by boiling them in salted water, as in the case of pommes purée and pommes duchesse, or by baking them in the oven, as in the case of pommes duchesse. Yes, for duchesse, either way of cooking the potatoes is okay. But make sure to dry the potatoes in the oven before passing them through a food mill! For the purée, we add milk and butter. We season with a bit of nutmeg, and salt and pepper, to taste. And voila, we have a purée, or what we know as mashed potatoes. For the duchesse, we add egg yolk and butter. We then place the puréed mixture in a pastry bag and pipe it out to make fun shapes and then bake in the oven.
The next two dishes, pommes darphin and pommes Anna, we use the sautéing technique. For the darphin, we get julienne sticks of potatoes, then place the sticks on the sauté pan in a lattice-like fashion. We brown and crisp the bottom, then we flip! And we finish it in the oven. For Anna, we get thin oval slices of potatoes, and we layer them in a circle. Using the same technique, we crisp and brown the bottom, we flip it, then we finish the dish in the oven.
In a gratin dauphinois, sliced potatoes are simmered for a few minutes in cream and milk. We pour the potato/milk/cream into a casserole, top it up with grated Gruyère cheese and baked in the oven until potatoes are tender.
Lastly, for pommes croquettes, we start with pommes duchesse. We pipe out long logs and chill in the refrigerator until the mixture hardens somewhat. We cut the log into short cylinders. We then use the technique called paner à l'anglaise, which is we dredge the cylinders in flour, dip them in beaten eggs, and then roll them in bread crumbs. We then deep fry in the 1-Step technique. Voila, we have our croquettes. We can add cut up ham or whatever into the duchesse mixture before we pipe out the logs.
Final note regarding potatoes: there are two types--starchy and waxy. When it comes to deep frying, we need to understand what smoke point, flash point, and fire point are.
