Day Eleven - Starch Time

We’ve moved onto starches. Last night we cooked up four potato dishes –

Pommes Dauphinoise
Pommes Anna
Pommes Roesti
Mashed Potatoes

For those of you who don’t like carbs don’t read on. You might get some on you. We made a LOT of potatoes.

My 2 favorites were the Dauphinoise and Roesti. The Dauphinoise is a French dish in which the potato is peeled and sliced into disks about 1/8 of an inch thick. They are then layered in a 6” non-stick skillet, starting with the middle disk in the middle, then layering them around and slightly overlapping so it looks like a flower. As you create your layers you sprinkle 1 garlic clove over the potatoes. You end up with 2 layers. You then pour 4 ounces of heavy cream over the whole thing and top it off with 2 ounces of Gruyere cheese. Throw this into an oven at 375 for about 40 minutes and you have YUM! The Roesti is basically hashbrowns with onions.

The Pommes Anna is the same as the Dauphinoise but there is no garlic, cream or cheese. Just arranged the same way, browned in butter and put into the oven to finish cooking. (These were very boring to me)

Fun things to note – When trying to flip your Roesti in the pan the way fancy chefs do, be sure you know ‘how’ to flip. There is nothing worse than going up to the chef to present your dish and not have it, and then having to ask the Chef “Can you come over to my station for just a second..my dish looks great! But it’s on the floor.” (No this didn’t happen to me.)

Another fun thing…when, over the course of a long weekend you decide to dye your hair (red in my case) be sure to do it on the first day of the long weekend so that you have ample time to wash your hair several times before class. Because let me tell you, when you put on that nice white hat and your head gets hot….you’ll be wearing a pink hat. (Yes this did happen to me).

We got our grades back from last week (not including the test we took last night) and I did very well I’m happy to say. I increased my score 4.4 points which is huge.

Next week we’re doing this big breakfast buffet. I find it hard to want to cook a big breakfast, let alone eat one, at 8:30pm. It is anticipated we will be serving about 120 people. I really hope they stop off at McDonalds on the way to the academy first and aren’t too hungry.

All in all a short night. We were done and cleaned up by 10pm…that was a beautiful thing!

Next starch dishes will be rice! Bring on the Risotto!