A FIVE-COURSE FRENCH MEAL WITH FRIENDS



We have friends over regularly for meals that we cook.  Some are very casual and usually center around one main dish with an appetizer and dessert.  But those that are typically the most enjoyable to us are the five-course French dinners.  The feeling that comes from seeing the days of preparation culminate in a group of adults quietly slouching in their chairs emitting quiet groans is hard to describe.

Here is our menu for this January evening.  We produce menus for these meals in order to keep track of what we have served specific guests (so as not to repeat a dish unless requested).  In addition, some of our guests seem to like to take the menus home.

DINNER AT RU AND LOU’S

SUNDAY, JANUARY 16, 2011

Tuna Tartar

Chilean Sea Bass en Papillote

with Beurre Blanc

Blueberry Sorbet

Blanquette de Veau à L’Ancienne

Salad with Three Cheeses

Morbier (cow’s milk)

Bucheron (goat’s milk)

P’Tit Basque (sheep’s milk)

Warm Valrhona Chocolate Cake

with Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

A five-course French meal typically starts with an appetizer or soup, a fish course, sorbet, a meat course, a salad/cheese course, and dessert.

The Appetizer – Tuna Tartar

For this dish, sashimi grade tuna is sprinkled with a mixture of sugar and salt and cured overnight on racks in the refrigerator.  The tuna is then diced and mixed with green onion, capers, pickled ginger, mayonnaise, sesame oil, and Asian hot sauce.  

When plated, the tartar is topped with seaweed salad and served.

The Fish Course – Fish en Papillote with Beurre Blanc

Fish cooked in paper is very traditional and there are many forms of this dish.  For this dish one must do a lot of preparation prior to assembly.  First is the making of “snail butter.”  No, this is not butter made from the milking of snails.  Rather it is a compound butter made with parsley, shallots and garlic, and traditionally used to make escargot.

Next comes the julienne of peppers, carrot, leek, and celery, which are sautéed until soft.

Prominent in this picture is a mandoline.  This kitchen implement is basically a large razor blade used to cut items thinly and uniformly.  The one shown is a not very expensive one from Japan, but I also own an all stainless steal mandoline from France.  A word of caution here, if you do not pay very close attention when using a mandoline you will quickly find that it is one of the most dangerous kitchen tools in your cooking arsenal.

Everything is gathered for the construction of this dish.

Parchment paper forms are made, the fish and vegetable are placed inside along with some snail butter, and the package is folded and sealed.  

Once baked, they are cut open at the table and some beurre blanc is added. 

Beurre blanc is a French butter sauce made by the reduction of white wine and vinegar with the addition of shallots and bay leaf.  Once reduced, one-half pound of butter is slowly whisked in forming a thick emulsion.  When poured over the baked fish (remember, you can’t have too much butter), the combination is wonderful.

Sorbet –

Many people think of sorbet as a dessert.  In this application it is a pallet cleanser.  Here, a small portion of blueberry sorbet is served with Stoli Blueberi Vodka from Russia. 

Now a word about the making of the sorbet.  I am fortunate to own a Pacojet.  This is a device made in Switzerland that takes frozen products and turns them into the creamiest and smoothest sorbets and ice creams.  Prior to dinner, blueberries from the summer that were flash frozen are placed in a Pacojet container, simple syrup is added and the mixture is frozen. 

When “Pacotized” the result truly tastes like fresh blueberries.

The Meat Course – Blanquette de Veau à L’Ancienne

To me, this veal stew in a white sauce typifies everything that makes French cooking wonderful.  What seems to be a simple dish to the diner, the chef knows has taken some time for everything to come together perfectly.  In this dish, cubes of veal are slowly cooked until very tender.  Added are garnishes of sautéed mushrooms, pearl onions, and carrots.  The dish is served over rice and covered with a creamy ethereal sauce. 

This sauce is technically a velouté.  People are typically more familiar with a béchemel sauce, which is created by adding milk to a roux.  Béchemel is the basis of many creamy dishes ranging from mac and cheese to soufflés.  When a reduced and flavorful stock, such as chicken, beef, or in this case veal is added to the roux you have a velouté.  For this dish, the veal velouté is enriched with the addition of cream and egg yolks, and brightened with some freshly squeezed lemon juice.

Like so many wonderful French dishes this one fulfills the Murphy’s Law that states “That which takes the longest to prepare, takes the shortest to eat.”

The Salad and Cheese Course

For this dish an array of organic greens are dressed with a vinaigrette made with shallots, French mustard, vinegar, and oil.  The salad also has a julienne of red pepper, thinly sliced radishes that are also julienned, and little tomatoes that are halved.

We like to expose some of our guests to foods that they may not have had before.  Here we selected three French cheeses: Morbier, a cow’s milk cheese, Bucheron a goat cheese, and P’Tit Basque a cheese made of sheep’s milk.

Dessert -Warm Valrhona Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

There are many recipes for “molten chocolate cake.”  However, for me they break into two distinct categories, real and not so real.  The “real deal” is a cake that is baked to the point of the outside solidifying just enough to hold together when plated, yet when pierced the uncooked batter flows out.  The not so real cake is what most people experience in most restaurants throughout the United States.  This form of the desert is made by freezing and inserting a ball of ganache into the middle of the batter and baking it.  When cut, the melted ganache flows out onto the plate.  The reason that the real cake is hard to come by is two-fold.  First, the timing must be precise within seconds, a few too many and you have a solid cake, a few too little and you have a pool of chocolate soup.  Secondly, the real cake flows with undercooked batter, thus potentially undercooked eggs.  I always like to live a little dangerously when I cook for friends.

This dessert is served with a French custard vanilla ice cream that is made with Tahitian vanilla beans.  Once again the Pacojet is called into service to take the frozen custard, sans ice cream maker, and produce an incredibly smooth vanilla ice cream.

This dinner, like many that we do, typically leaves our guests either totally quiet or emitting soft pleasant groans of satisfaction.  However, this meal attained the highest possible compliment, Paul sobbing at the table.

Bûche de Noël For 50

Bûche de Noël for 50

Like many historical folk tales, the history of the Bûche de Noël is quite varied depending upon where you look.  What seems to be most consistent in the stories is that French families had the tradiditon of burning a yule log at the time of the winter solstice.  This tradition became part of the Christamas holiday where families gathered together to celebrate, aided by the warmth of the fire.  As the story goes, Napoleon Bonaparte became convinced that the cold damp winter air (sound familiar to those of us in the Northwest?) caused a host of medical maladies.  To address this concern he issued a proclamation banning French families from using their fireplaces during the winter months.  Knowing how cranky folks get when they are prohibited from doing anything that is traditionally celebratory, French pastry chefs created a cake to represent the holiday yule log, and as French pastry chefs are known to do, they made this creation far tasitier.  So the Bûche de Noël was created and the tradition not only lives on today in France, but has spread to many other countries.  Below is my example of this traditional holiday treat.

I already discussed, but can not emphasise enough, the idea of “mies en place,” or gathering together all that you need before you start.  Once done, the process can proceed.

First, one must construct a Chocolate Génoise or chocolate sponge cake.  This cake is light as a feather, comprised in part of whipped egg whites and egg yolks.

Because of the lightness of this batter you have to work quickly and deliclately as you do not want to undue to all the work of getting all that air into the batter.

Given that the sponge is made in half sheet pans (two are cooling here), one can multiply the number of pans to match the number of guests.  In this example, the Bûche de Noël is for a significant milestone birthday party and should easily provide 50 servings.

To keep the sponge moist and to aid rolling, it is infused with a soaking syrup.  The are many variations of soaking syrups based upon the flavors you want to achieve.  For this creation I use a “simple syrup” mixed with the Italian hazelnut liqueur Frangelico (yes, I said it can from Italy).  Simple syrup is created by heating equal parts by volume of water and sugar, just until the sugar desolves.  I always keep some this syrup in the refridgerator just for emergencies.

The running of a kitchen, whether home or professional, is much like the running of any organization: surround yourself with the best people and ingredients and the outcome will always be far superior.  In the case of the Crème Légère, I use Pâte de Noisettes (hazelnut paste) from the French company Cacao Barry.

The next step requires making Crème Légère.  This is composed of first making pastry cream or Crème Pâtissière.  As an aside, many of us have experienced the heartbreak that occures when you heat an egg-based custard to a too high temperature…scrambled eggs!  However, when you add a starch to the mixture, the eggs do not scramble but rather make that wonderful filling that is used in so many pastries, such as éclairs.

The pastry cream is then lightened with wipped cream and some more hazelnut liqueur is added for even more flavor.  Also, some gelatin is added to the wipped cream to help give strength to the Crème Légère to hold up to being rolling into this cake without oozing out the sides.

Now the Crème Légère is spread over the Frangelico-soaked sponge and rolled into what the French call a Biscuit Roulé or rolled cake.  The rolls are then chilled to firm them up while we go onto the next step: the chocolate bark.

Ganache is basically an emulsion made of melted chocolate and cream.  Sounds simple but technology has had an impact on something as simple as this.  Mostly the issues come from the cream that is readliy available.  Namely, that most dairy products whether organic or not are “ultra pasterized.”  This process of applying high heat to kill microscopic nasties and thus extend shelf life also does a lot of other things.  Research indicates that ultra pasterization also impacts the nutritional value and structure of the product itself.  When making pastry such as this, nutrition is typically not at the forefront of someone’s thinking.  However, these manipulations also effect taste.  In my opinion, and based upon my distant memories, dairy products are now relatively tasteless and flat. 

This little bit of commentary brings me to my very important point: to make up for this unforunite shortfall, use the best chocolate you can get/afford.  For 99.9 percent of the desserts that I make there is only one chocolate, Valrhona from France.  I try to keep an ample supply of many of the Valrhona products on hand in case I am marooned in the house due to the earthquakes or volcano erruptions that the Northwest is prone to have.

There is a technique for every aspect of a dessert such as this, so I included a snip of video of my creating the liaison between cream and chocolate.

This relatively thick ganache is created to hold its shape to simulate the bark of a log.  Just to add that je ne sais quoi, butter is added to the ganache.

The next step is to decorate the log with vines, leaves, and mushrooms.  The vines and leaves are created with buttercream that is colored and piped onto the Bûche de Noël.  This is the creative side and takes a little practice, but most people can learn to do it.  There are several approaches to making buttercream.  For this dessert, I make what is called “French buttercream,” which employs sugar that is cooked to the “soft ball” stage (i.e., between 242 and 248 degrees F).  This type of buttercream is very stable and holds up fairly well to being at room temperature.  One word of caution: although I like dangerous cooking utensils and foods, getting burned by hot sugar is something altogether different.  Hot sugar sticks to your skin and just burns away, not unlike the green blood of the Alien.  So, until you get some experence with cooked sugar I suggest having a bowl of ice water nearby to plunge your hand into if you get some hot sugar on it.  A second word of caution: do not do this nude, otherwise you would need a bathtube full of ice water and that could have other physiologic ramifications.

Finally, there is the making of the mushrooms.  Once again we have to contend with the deadly hot sugar needed to make a meringue.  Here hot sugar is added to beaten egg whites to create a very stable meringue that can be piped and keeps its shape.  The meringues are dried out in a low oven and assembled using the ganache.

Using two different pastry tips, I pipe the mushroom caps and stems.

The individual rolled and chilled cakes are cut and assembled to look like  a tree.

The cake is covered with ganache which is spread in a way to resemble bark.

The green tinted buttercream is piped to look like vines and leaves, and little dots of red and orange gel add to the effect.

The cake was placed in two separate boxes to be assembled on site.  The ganache is also good spackling to connect the separate cakes into one seamless creation.

The caps and stems are attached together using ganache.

he mushrooms are dusted with cocoa powder to finish the effect.

Cindy Cameron, a Pastry Chef friend of ours who worked at the famous Le Français restaruant in Chicagoland, told me that you always travel with all that you need to fix and finish your cake upon reaching its final destination.

Below is the finished product, a Bûche de Noël for 50 people.

The birthday girl (on the left) and some of her guests pose with the cake.

Finally, this design is very adaptable.  When I was into my Lord of the Rings phase, the addition of two little figurines allowed me to create Treebeard, the Ent de Noël.