Looking Forward

Ballymaloe Week 8

    

These photos were taken two days and about one mile apart. It is beautiful here in (this part of) Ireland, but I do wish it would make up it's mind a bit.

As week eight draws to a close, final exams are slowly but surely becoming a topic of conversation. We have a bunch of written exams on things like herb and leaf recognition, HACCP, and wine. The real fun, though, is our practical exam. We'll each have three hours to make a three course balanced meal based on recipes we've made over the course. The menu is up to us, but it has to have some kind of theme, using ingredients we'll be able to get in season (so, early spring in this case). Our menus need to be submitted by the end of week ten to give the school time to gather all our ingredients, and presumably for us to get some practice in. That still leaves two weeks of recipes to come, but with 80% of our cooking done and dusted, it's probably time to start planning. I have two themes and three potential menus that I've been thinking about. The first theme is Green, White, and Orange. This is a play on the Irish flag, with starter main and dessert spanning it's colors:

• Asparagus tart // chicken with tarragon, roasted parsnips // carrot cake. 

I like the range of techniques this menu covers - I'd get to make shortcrust pastry for the tart, do some chicken butchery, poaching, and sauce making for the main, and get all artsy with my cake decoration. I like all the dishes on this menu, too, but I think it would make for a very heavy early spring time meal.

The second theme, and the one I'm more into at the moment, is flavors from the Silk Road. This is really the food I'm most passionate about, but I think it might be slightly less technical to put together. I have two potential menus for this theme, depending on if I want to focus more on fish prep and cookery, or vegetables and meat:

• Crab cakes with saffron mayonnaise // fish curry, rice, Moroccan carrot salad // cinnamon meringues with poached plums.
• Crudites with pita bread, hummus, beetroot puree, and pesto // spiced chicken with almonds, rice pilaf, Moroccan carrot salad // cinnamon meringues with poached plums.

I think right now I'm leaning toward the latter option. I love making pita bread, and I also love the idea of serving a starter of raw vegetables - they go through all the trouble of growing such great produce on the farms here, why fuss with it any more than you have to? I'm also really, really bad with fish, so cutting up a chicken for the main would save me lots of time and stress on the day of.

The Mrs. Walsh's Cottage crew, and friends.

I think I've mentioned Ballymaloe House in the past; it's the hotel and (formerly Michelin starred) restaurant that Myrtle Allen started in the 1960's which led to the founding of the cookery school. One of the possible extra-curricular things we can do as students is to go to the kitchen of Ballymaloe House to watch a service and maybe help out with some prep or whatever needs to be done (without getting too much in the way). I went last Wednesday night, and in between peeling a bag of potatoes and straining some beef stock for consomme, I was basically just a fly on the wall watching the chefs handle orders and do their work. I wish I had gotten to do more actual work when I was there, but it was fun just to go watch service, and a little re-affirming that I didn't feel at all out of my depth trying to keep up. Anyway, this weekend Kate from our cottage made reservations for all of us to have dinner at the restaraunt. Ballymaloe House cuisine is described as "modern Irish", but this is not a place to come looking for Parmesan foams or beetroot jellies. To call anything they do modern any more is a bit of a stretch. Black-and-white uniformed waitresses served us our five course meal from a menu that, on it's cover, informed us that cell phones were not allowed at any table in the restaurant. I had a (familiar sounding) beef consomme starter, followed by an apple, goat's cheese, and hazelnut salad. For a main I had local cod with Jerusalem artichoke puree, chard, and shrimps. The fourth course is an (oh so modern) cheese trolley featuring local cow and goat's milk cheeses, followed by a dessert trolley which, that night, featured carrageen moss pudding, chocolate hazelnut tart, butterscotch and banana meringue roulade, lemon posset, saffron poached pears, and coffee ice cream with Irish coffee sauce. Petit fours of fudge, dates, and honeycomb were served with tea and coffee to round out the meal.

I guess I'd be a little put off if I came to the Ballymaloe Cookery School and didn't get any recipes from the Ballymaloe restaurant, but to be honest initially I was kind of underwhelmed by the menu just from how much of it we've made these past 8 weeks. Some of our selections were straight-from-week-seven sirloin steak with bearnaise sauce, tofu coconut curry that ended up being a much blander version of something we had this Wednesday in an all-vegetarian demo, tangerine sorbet starter we made week five or six, and salads which could have been from one of our lunches and day of the week. I particularly remember the dessert trolley and petit fours because the carrageen pudding, chocolate tart, poached pears, fudge, and candied peel stuffed dates have all previously come out of our student kitchens. On reflection, though, I'm really encouraged by how much I recognized and even have made from our dinner. There we were, in one of Ireland's most prominent and respected restaurants, and at any given time any one of us could have or already has made (in some cases superior, in my opinion) versions of half of what was on the table.

Really, at the end of the night, it's great company that makes a great meal. And after eight weeks under the same roof, I think it's pretty cool that we can all go out together and enjoy ourselves.

Highs, Lows

Ballymaloe Weeks 7-8

Week 7 was a heavy week. Irish stew, Italian beef stew, steak and oyster pie (worth neither the ingredient costs nor the labor costs - I don't know why this is a thing). The sun has started coming out here in the afternoons and it's much too nice to be eating stews and meat pies all week long.

As the course goes on, I've been struggling with consistency. There are days where an hour in I feel like throwing all my mise into the hen bucket and crawling back into bed, but then there are days where everything just kind of works and I don't ever want to leave the kitchen. Last Friday featured over-cooked and badly prepped monk fish in red pepper vinaigrette, served with under-cooked soggy pommes allumettes (aka french fries), under-baked granary brown bread, burned palmiers, not-worth-the-trouble caramel glazed fruits, and a split and slightly scrambled creme angliase (I actually had a lot of fun on Friday, but every single thing I did was hilariously wrong). Monday was pretty shit too. Bread unevenly plaited, steak under seasoned, bakewell tart pastry too wet, and messy plating of a smoked fish starter (the whole point of which was to be nicely plated).

But then today after plating and tasting, my instructor said to me, "you really like to cook, don't you?" And I really do. The good days reaffirm that there's nothing I'd rather be doing right now, I just need to work on making more of the days good ones. This morning was roast rack of lamb which I had a lot of fun trimming and frenching, red currant sauce, and buttered cabbage. Bread was ciabatta - it's the first time I've made the Ballymaloe ciabatta recipe. Their method is really strange, but the results are tasty enough that I'll definitely play around with the recipe some more. The most fun I had today, though, was making millionaire's shortbread, which was an extra thing I've wanted to make ever since it was demoed to us four or five weeks ago. Millionaire's shortbread are little squares with a shortbread biscuit base topped with a layer of sticky caramel, with melted dark chocolate spread over the top. They're incredibly rich, decedent, and delicious. Since these were just an extra thing that I had the time and inclination to make, I was allowed to do basically whatever I wanted. Since I can't leave well enough alone, I had a little fun and infused the caramel sauce with rosemary and topped the chocolate with flaked sea salt. Then I ate lots and lots of buttery sugary and deliciously herb-y shortbread. My teacher had me save a few squares for Darina & co. to try - I'm curious if they'll be as much of a fan of the rosemary/chocolate combination as I am. All credit for this idea and the rosemary and chocolate pairing really goes to Kim Boyce and her incredible olive oil cake recipe from Good to the Grain. Actually, I think I'll make that cake on Thursday if I can find the recipe online - it's so so good.

The granary bread I mentioned earlier is something I've not heard of before coming here. It uses a local flour blend called Malthouse bread flour - a blend of malted wheat, rye, and barley that has a beautiful malt flavor and blue-grey color of dark rye. I picked up a bag of it over the weekend because I really want to play around with it in my sourdoughs. This loaf is 20% malthouse flour with dried figs mixed in. It's also a good example of an over-proved loaf of bread. After shaping, I kept this loaf in the fridge for about 24 hours, instead of my usual 10-12. Compared to my standard loaf, what I've got here is much denser and heavier, and the shape is much flatter. The bottom crust is also a bit thicker than normal. 24 hours in the fridge really dried out the exposed surface of the loaf and let a skin form that baked up extra thick. You can also see around the score on the top of the loaf that there was little to no oven spring - the score of a well-sprung loaf should peel well away from the rest of the bread as steam escapes in the oven, forming a sharp ear. The taste is nice though, with bites of jammy fig and a sweet, malty finish from the granary flour.

Mid Term

Ballymaloe Weeks 5-6

I was supposed to run a race last weekend. Instead I decided to be sick and sleep for about 16 hours that Sunday. I think the recent traveling and even more unpredictable than the Pacific Northwest Irish winter caught up with me a bit. Week five wasn't may favorite week, considering. I  don't remember much of what was made that week to be honest, we do so much that things get lost pretty quickly. No standout recipes from the week, but I did make bread every day, as is my wont. We had chicken liver pate on one of the menus, but I think mine is better (shout out to the Boat Street Cafe for their recipe). We made a full Irish breakfast one day, too. First time I've had black pudding - it's not bad, but it wouldn't be my choice for breakfast every day. White pudding was surprisingly delicious though, I'm going to have to experiment with oatmeal in my sausage forcemeat when I get home.

Week six in the kitchens was a lot more fun. My teacher that week used to run a bakery, so we talked about bread a lot as I was making it every morning. Made focaccia on Monday and Tuesday and will probably make it again later this week, it's quickly becoming one of my favorites. My favorite recipe from last week, though, reads as the most unexciting - tomato soup. This seems particularly surprising considering it's the middle of February and we're far from anything resembling fresh tomatoes. What we do have, and I now think is brilliant, is freezers full of tomatoes from last summer, when they were fresh off the vines right outside our kitchens. I didn't realize how well (and how easily) tomatoes freeze. No need to skin or deseed or prep them in any way - just throw a bunch of tomatoes at peek ripeness into your freezer. They're actually much easier to peel from frozen anyway (as long as you don't mind cold hands), just dunk in cold water and the skins will flake right off. This is a handy trick I'm definitely taking home with me - when it's high tomato season in the Seattle farmers markets, my freezer is going to get stocked. Last week's soup impressed upon me something I seem to rediscover every few months: some (most?) times the best things aren't the fanciest. Great ingredients need little embellishment, they just need to taste of themselves.

Week six was a short one in the kitchen, but a landmark one in the course. We're half way through the course already, and Friday last was a reminder that this is a cooking school. Midterm exams, both theory and practical, were held in the afternoon. Theory entailed table setting, wine pouring, and herb and lettuce recognition. Each student was presented ten lettuce leaves that we had to name, and ten herbs that we had to name as well as list recipes they would be used in. I'm sure I misnamed one or two of the lettuces, and I set the table with an erroneous fork (the starter for my theoretical menu was soup, but I laid a fork for both a starter and a main - the horror!), but as tests go this wasn't exactly the hardest.

For the practical exam, each student had to make a piping bag out of parchment paper, chop and sweat an onion, and do two random techniques from things we've done over the past 6 weeks. I was the very last student to go for my techniques, and probably had the easiest time because of it. I was supposed to make shortcrust pastry and line a tart tine, and chop a cucumber. Since it was the end of the day and we were running understandably behind schedule, my instructor said to skip making pastry and instead had me make an omelette. When it was all said and done, I was out of the kitchen in probably 15 minutes, most of which was spent cleaning up my section from the students who were there before me, and making sure my onions weren't burning. Not my hardest day in the kitchen by any stretch.

Crumb Shot

The weekend's sourdough is, I think, particularly interesting this time. When I first started making bread at home it all seemed like black magic, and I had a really hard time matching my technique to my results. Bread debugging is something I wish more people would talk about - working, proofing, shaping and baking are all variables in bread making, but since none can be done in isolation with any sort of tangible results, it's hard to know why your bread is the way it is. This loaf is, I think, a good case study on how something easily overlooked can really impact your end result. You might notice the the crumb on this loaf is very uneven - the top right of the loaf is much closer textured and denser, while the left side is much more open with much bigger air pockets. Notice, too, that on the top right of the loaf there's an indentation - this is the mark from where I scored the loaf before baking. At home I do my scoring with a razor blade - something nice and sharp that I can make quick, neat incisions with. When I put this loaf in the oven, I wasn't thinking at all about the score before hand. Instead, I grabbed the nearest knife, a particularly dull one at that, and instead of a precise, clean cut, ended up having to saw a dull knife blade through the dough pretty ham-fistedly. At the time I knew it wasn't optimal, but didn't thing much of it. Upon inspection, though, you can see the direct results of a sloppy score. All the gas around the ear was knocked out of the dough when the cut was made, and instead of getting a nice spring with big, even air cavities, the de-gassed section of the loaf is closed and dense, almost collapsed (but still tasty!).