Oops, I did it again!

'Cause to lose all my senses. That is just so typically me.
(Britney Spears, Oops I did it again)

Intermediate Lesson 24- Perigord

Our dish today is a delicious pan-fried steak, celery flan served with Madeira sauce with diced truffles and potatoes in goose fat.

Pew Pew Pew! Chef Caals' dish.

The dish today is fairly straightforward. Prep celery stock like you would with mash potatos and then make flan with it, make jus for the steak, turn potatoes, and then fry the steak. Sadly we didn't have fresh truffles to work with, just canned truffles. Then again, it's probably too much to ask LCB to provide us with expensive in-season fresh truffles.

For some reason, I couldn't get this dish right. My celery flan wouldn't cook 10 minutes after the necessary time needed to cook. Moreover, my steak that was supposed to be rare came out slightly better than blue. My jus wasn't syrupy enough. And Chef Caals says that both my steak and potatoes weren't seasoned enough.

Here we go again. My food is always not seasoned enough, even though I personally think it's just right (okay the potatoes could be a tad bit saltier, but the steak was definitely good in my mind). I really don't know what I should do other than just cover my food with salt. Oh well.

I later learned that most of my classmates had undercooked steak, despite our following the timing the chef provided in the demo. We suspect it was due to the fact that most of us took our steaks out of the fridge just because searing, because we all left to fry the steak to the end, as we should. We should have left our steak on low low heat longer. Truth is I should have felt the suppleness of the meat before taking it out of the pan.

The only thing I can't quite figure out is why my flan didn't cook at all. The suggested amount of time of cooking for the flan was 15 minutes, and I've left mine for at least half an hour, and I turned up the heat after 20 minutes. I'll need to go back to my notes to see if I missed something.

I did learn something interesting though, and that is a celery purée. If you're too sick of mash potatoes, you can boil a celery root in a equal parts water/milk liquid (seasoned) until you can pierce the celery root with no resistance. Then put it into a blender with butter and cream and blend blend blend. Serve it with chervil and appropriate seasoning and you'll have a refreshing purée that is different than your usual mash potato.

Quotes of the class:

Student: Chef, what can you do if you overcook your meat?
Demo Chef Caals: What do you do if your meat becomes too cooked? You can cry. And then run to your chef and say "Chef, I think it's overcooked," and your chef will probably say, "It happens."


"The ingredient list says that you should decorate your flan with carrots, celery and leeks. If you want to, you can decorate your flans. If you want know what I think, then I would say don't do it. It doesn't add to the flavor. It is a waste of time and frankly it looks horrible. It's so 70s. If Chef Terrier (A very senior chef at Cordon Bleu) asks, you can tell him Chef Caals refused to decorate his demonstration plate, and he can come talk to me."

- Demo Chef Caals,

On raw vegetable decorations on a flan