Turning Japanese I Think I'm Turning Japanese I Really Think So...

I often kiss you when there's no one else around
(The Vapors- Turning Japanese)

Lesson 26- Fish Terrine

Today's dish is rather strange: Hot Fish Terrine with Beurre Blanc. A Beurre Blanc is a butter-based sauce cooked with shallots, reduced white wine and vinegar, and cream:

 Fish Terrine as Prepared by Chef Bogen

The final dish feels like a cross between a Japanese maki roll and the Japanese kamaboko that I ate as a child. Even the chef described the dish as a maki. However, instead of rolling the dish in nori, we rolled it in layers of poached spinach. The white part of the roll is the fish terrine, which taste shockingly like kamaboko, which is a kind of Japanese fish cake or fish paste. Point is the whole dish felt very Japanese-y. We should have served it with soy sauce.

However, the dish was surprisingly hard to cook. Out of 10 students in our practical, only 3 successfully had a good fish terrein. The rest of the students (myself included), had undercooked fish terrine that resulted in the white terrine appear more like toothpaste than solid fish cakes.

My Disaster as Layed Out on
My Cutting Board

My dish was already not the worst, as I was nearly there. 2 of my classmates had their fish cake collapsed when they took their products out of the molds. Their texture looked more like Greek Yogurt than cooked terrine.

I have two hypothesis in why my dish came out wrong, despite my leaving it in the oven for 12 minutes more than in the demonstration:

1. My oven is simply not hot enough- Our practical kitchen ovens is not as effective as the professional oven that they have in the demonstration classroom. And so maybe the amount of time needed in our practical chefs is much longer than what was shown in demonstration But this doesn't explain why 3 classmates were successful while 7 of us failed.

2. My spinach was too moist- We poached our spinach, lay out the leaves, and then put them together as a skin. After poaching my spinach, I kind of lazily let them sit on a tray soaking in water (sorry chef). I remember seeing a few of my classmates being just as sloppy as I was, and perhaps this explains why only 3 of us had successful products while most of us failed: perhaps the successful cases were by people who were more diligent of their items.

Point is, the dish was still good, and the ends justify the means.... right? Everything goes into your digestive system and comes out as shit anyways.

Lesson of the day: To thicken your sauce with butter, you have to prepare small cubes of very cold butter and have the sauce boil. We usually soak the butter in ice water just before we add them into the sauce. The reason is oil and water do not mix , and if you just melt butter into a water-based sauce, the fats will float onto the top of the liquid. By adding bits of ice cold butter into a boiling liquid (and whisking vigorously), you achieve a type of thermal shock to the butter and emulsify the fat. The end result is the butter mixes homogeneously in the sauce and gives the sauce a thick, buttery and heavenly texture.

Quote from this class:

"It doesn't matter whether you are in a 3 star Michelin restaurant, or a cheap bistrot ordering a 10 Euro dish. If your plate has stains, your client will send his food back to the kitchen. SO CLEAN YOUR PLATE BEFORE SERVING!"

- Chef-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named Yelling at A Hapless Student in Practical