Things are sort of gearing up for our big production on Thursday. Remember, free breakfast (Free Food at Kitchen Academy - Feb 1st, 2nd, 3rd).

Much of the class was unable to finish their plates today. We had to produce Crepes Suzette, Eggs Benedict and Eggs Florentine. Of course, this required the infamous Hollandaise Sauce, one of the five mother sauces, and a notoriously difficult sauce to make properly. Without proper organization and teamwork, it was very difficult to produce everything on time. However, my station was able to get a bit ahead of the game and produced some Bechamel for future Crepes Mornay. All thanks to excellent teamwork from myself, Brent, Danny and Arturo.

I always thought that crepes would be pretty difficult to produce. However, I found that I was able to crank them out (in a non-stick skillet) easily enough. Of the dozen or so I made, I had only two imperfect crepes. One I tore (a small tear) turning it over (clumsy fingers) and the other had a small hole due to lack of batter.

Today was the first day that we worked with hot sugar making the sauce for the Crepes Suzette. First of all, this can be dangerous stuff. Hot sugar burns are among the worst and hot sugar is sometimes called "kitchen napalm". It can also burn easily (even Chef Perez burned his butter a bit during the demo). I'm not sure who was responsible, but at one point the not entirely unpleasant aroma of burning sugar could be smelled throughout the lab.

Making the Crepes Suzette sauce was also quite interesting because it would be the first time we would flambe a dish. And who doesn't like flambes?

And, damn, did they taste good. That's a dish that is definitely going to be part of my repertoire.

The Hollandaisae was a bit of effort. I imagine if I had to make it by hand everyday, I wouldn't need any upper body workouts. Nevertheless mine came out quite well. Learned a lesson, however. If you heat hollandaise too much, it will "break" where the butter fats come out of the yolk emulsion, and you're left with an ugly, greasy and pretty unattractive mess. Everything was fine with mine until I plated.

We keep our plates warm for hot dishes for service. You want the plates warm so the food doesn't cool as quickly. You'll get docked points on grading if your plate is cold. Unfortunately, my plate was too warm, so when I brought it up for grading my hollandaise had a bit of a sheen to it (an early sign of breakage). However, it wasn't too bad and everything else went well.

Of course, for the Eggs Benedict and Eggs Florentine, we had to poach eggs in simmering water. Not an easy thing to do, actually. My first egg "feathered", that is, the egg white spread out when it entered the simmering water. I was able to salvage it a bit in plating (hollandaise makes an excellent cover). Chef Guevara also showed me a trick to getting well formed eggs by lowering it into the boiling water in a spoon, which will hold it together for that initial cooking. Both of my eggs were nicely done from a slighly runny yolk point of view, but I'll need more practice to nail it everytime. As I noted yesterday, egg cookery is really about experience (Kitchen Academy - Course I - Day 16).

On Thursday, we'll have to be cranking out Eggs Benedict. So perhaps I will get practice - in a trial by fire.