The Famous Chartreuse Shit Show

“In the weeds”, or as my instructor from Basic Cuisine, Chef Benoit, used to say, “in the shit”.  It’s the moment you realize that the clock is ticking, you are completely bogged down, there is no time to actually cook your dish, and then your brain freezes.  Like a character in a horror movie you ask yourself “What else could possibly go wrong?”

Lots can go wrong, especially with Chartreuse de Riz de Veau (Veal Sweetbreads Chartreuse).  It’s the first difficult dish in Intermediate Cuisine, and it’s almost designed to send the entire class directly into the shit.

Essentially, the dish is veal sweetbreads encased in a chicken farce fine (fine textured “stuffing”), in a mold of carrot and zucchini batonnets (strips) with a truffle slice on top.  It looks kind of neat, the taste is “meh”, and the technique and process keep you running steady for two and a half hours.  The photo below is one of the ones made by the Chef in the demo – by the time I had a moment to take a snap of my dish today it was a little hacked up.

This is a dish where a cool head and some strategy come in. I had a little advantage today as well – it was my first shift as the class “sous chef”, the person responsible for organizing the ingredients for the class, making sure the kitchen is ready, and leading the clean up afterwards.  Knowing exactly where to find all the tools and ingredients is a BIG advantage on a recipe like this.

But what can go wrong?  Well, when I went to the production kitchen before class I discovered that the sweetbreads were still frozen - not good at all.  The staff in the kitchen hurriedly tried to defrost them while I, assisted by a few other students, got the rest of the ingredients and equipment together.  The sweetbreads were ready in the nick of time.

Once my sweetbreads were poaching, I took a rather different strategy than the Chef did in the demo.  Rather than focus on my vegetables right away, I made my farce fine before everyone in the class was clamoring over each other to use the few food processors and tamis (a fine mesh screen for making farce).  I cooked a piece to taste the seasoning, and then tossed it in the fridge.  I did a few other change-ups to the order of the recipe, and added one probably unorthodox MacGyver-ish maneuver at the end to ensure that my dish was completely cooked through.   

More than a few people rushed the final cooking in their bain marie, and turned in collapsing, lop-sided, undercooked dishes.  I could tell that some had forgotten ingredients (notably the mushrooms in the sauce), or hadn’t tasted anything along the way.  You could tell who had waited too long to make their farce - I even saw one poor person trying to make it just 25 minutes before plating.  Given that the dish has to be assembled, cook for at least 20 minutes and then rest for about five minutes, this was a person very deeply in the shit.

Was I the fastest to the finish?  Nope.  But did I turn in a dish that was edible, looked okay, and had a decent sauce?  Yep.  I’d much rather take the extra couple of minutes to get it right than rush and screw it up.  People can forgive a slightly slower service, but they won’t forget undercooked chicken.

On a side note, I lingered a little after class, taking the time to give my knives and tools a good scrub, put away the leftover pots and bowls, and to chat briefly with the very pleasant young lady who was the dishwasher for our class.  Unlike at many culinary schools, we don’t wash our own pots and pans.  We’re responsible for our knives and tools, but most other things are washed by a staff person.  Most students are polite (and if they aren’t they should be given a severe beating with a meat mallet), but I still get the sense that the dishwashers sometimes feel like a piece of the sink mechanism – everyone is usually too busy to talk.  I’m going to be at the school for at least a few months, so it really is worth getting to know someone’s name

I’m tired and my forehead is covered in a thin film of flour and god-knows-what, but I’m feeling pretty good about my dish today.  If this the beginning of the tough stuff, bring it on.