Culinary School Diary: Week Three
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By OWEN MORRIS
“So I hear there’s this bug going around the school.”
Those are the first words I hear upon entering the classroom/kitchen for this week’s class on soups and sure enough, several people do not turn up. Normally the news would worry me but I have something else on my mind I’m much more afraid of — a French broth soup called consomme.
It’s not supposed to be a difficult class, either — at least not as difficult as last week’s nine-sauces-in-three-hours marathon. Besides consomme, our teams of two have to make three other soups: shrimp bisque, spicy black bean soup and corn and crab chowder. These soups are easier to make than sauces — or at least they’re more familiar. The meat and potatoes and carrots and celery add loads of body and are virtually fool-proof to add. Even the French bisque is reassuringly simple. But consomme is the exception, and one reason why this week’s class is the hardest one yet. For the first time, I feel a tinge of actual pressure and worry.
To an untrained eye, consomme looks a lot like brown water. It has no vegetables (save for a garnish), no meat, no cream or puree. It’s the simplest-looking thing that you can set in front of someone — but the taste, oh the taste! A consomme made from beef stock will brim with beef flavors that a piece of meat itself often lacks — a little fatty beef taste, that red meat taste appearing and then just as quickly disappearing on the tongue. It’s delicious but extremely tough to make.
I’ve tried making it before and have failed. The problem is the raft — a mixture of meat, vegetables, acids and egg whites that coagulates on top of the consomme when the consomme starts to boil simmer. A hard boil will cause the raft to break. So will stirring the consomme once it starts to form. Even moving the consomme can be a nail-biting experience. If the raft breaks, it causes all of those proteins and fat to mix with the liquid, making the consomme murky and ruining it. The murkier a consomme, the worse it is. That’s why the garnish is put at the bottom of the bowl, to show that the consomme is clear enough that you can see all the way to the bottom.
I’ve had the raft break on me nearly every other time I’ve tried to make consomme. But I had an idea on how to prevent that from happening again.
