Pâte feuilletée, or puff pastry, is often considered one of the most challenging yet rewarding doughs to master in the culinary world. Known for its delicate layers that puff up beautifully in the oven, this dough relies on a precise technique to create the "leaves" or layers without the use of yeast. Though made with just three basic ingredients—flour, water, and butter—it demands patience and skill to perfect.

The magic behind puff pastry lies in the layers of butter trapped within the dough. As the dough bakes, the water in the butter turns to steam, causing the layers to separate and rise, creating the signature light, flaky texture. While mastering puff pastry can be tricky, with the right technique and a bit of practice, you can create this stunning dough for all kinds of delicious treats.

Puff pastry's number one enemy is heat. Working quickly, and never doing more than two turns at a time, you must keep the butter cool enough so that it doesn't leak out during rolling.

Recipe: Cheese Sticks

400 g flour
200 g water
6 g salt
300 g butter
100 g Gruyère cheese

You can find the recipe for Allumettes au fromage (Puff pastry strips with cheese) here along with more background information. It was part of Week 2 at Le Cordon Bleu in Basic Cuisine.


Links
Video (in French but shows the technique) 
Eggbeater's Puff Pastry 
50 Flaky, Crunchy, Delicious Appetizers, Entrées (affiliate link)

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• Index of Recipes
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Squab, a euphemism for a 4-week old, tender nestling pigeon is on the menu this week. I've only fed pigeons, never eaten one so it was a new adventure for me! Along with the squab, I prepared a partridge and a regular chicken for comparison.

The birds were sprinkled with salt, shallots and tarragon, then rubbed all over with butter. Finally strips of bacon (that had been simmered in water for 10 minutes to remove some of its smokiness) were placed on top to add flavor. The poultry were roasted in a 400°F oven until the juices ran clear (about 30-40 minutes).

The mushrooms, canapé and sauce make this roast poultry so much more delectable! The mushrooms are easily sautéed in butter and oil and then set aside. For the canapé, I chopped up some fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes and made a bruschetta using the recipe's ingredients instead of the requested chicken-liver version. Frying the bread slices in clarified butter added extra richness. To deglaze the roasting pan, I used the pan juices, homemade chicken stock, a dash of leftover veal stock and a splash of port and let this mixture simmer until reduced by half. Finished with butter, this sauce was perfect ladled over the meat.

Recipe: Coquelets sur Canapés (Roast Squab Chickens with Chicken Liver Canapés and Mushrooms)

Serves: 6 (I halved the recipe.)

Ingredients:

There's a buzz in the food world around Julie and Julia, the movie coming to theatres Friday, August 7. I can't wait to see it. And thanks to Leanne Cusack from CTV News at Noon, I'll get to see a sneak preview.

I met Leanne today to talk about my link to this movie as a featured blog on Sony Picture's official trailer website and to demonstrate a French recipe from the Le Cordon Bleu curriculum that I'm working through. Here is a link to my segment on CTV News at Noon.

I was also on "A Morning Ottawa" with Angie Poirier this morning where I demonstrated both Leek and Potato soup (which will be another post another day) and Crème Caramel.

Live TV is a bit of an adrenaline rush. All of a sudden, the lights are on, the camera is pointed towards you, a host is asking questions about you and your work, you're working through the key points of a recipe, and in no time at all the four to six minutes are up. I'm just thankful for the professionalism of all the hosts who make being on air so much easier.

You can read all about Crème Caramel from this post that I did last year.

Recipe: Crème Caramel

from a New York Times article by Julia Child called "Eat, Memory: Sacré Cordon Bleu!"

Serves: 6

For the next few classes, we're learning about different types of poultry. Cornish hen is on the menu this week (since I couldn't find guinea hen at the butcher). According to Wise Geek, the term "Guinea hen was used to refer to these small poultry servings but Cornish game hen has become more popular."

The Cornish hen is a plump all-white meat bird. Its original breeder was Alphonsine "Therese" Makowsky. Here is a video explaining the history of the Cornish hen. There is another theory that chicken mogul Donald John Tyson created the Rock Cornish game hen by cross-breeding White Rock hens and Cornish hens in 1965.

Cabbage and Other Vegetables
Again, this recipe calls for many pots. In Saucepan #1, the cabbage is blanched. Mon petit chou. I love boiled cabbage that's then drizzled with butter. Its subtle flavor is very comforting. In this dish, it's blanched and served along with the carrots and onions and plays its supporting role very well.

In Large Casserole #2, the onions are cooked until tender, and then the carrots are added. The cabbage joins the milieu along with a Bouquet Garni and 2½ cups of water and this mixture simmers for about 1 hour.

Poultry
I rinsed and dried the Cornish hens with paper towels and then threw a garlic clove, a thyme sprig, and a bay leaf in each cavity and seasoned them with salt and pepper. After trussing, they were ready for Roasting Pan #3 and a 425˚F oven for about 30 minutes.

Bacon
While the hens were roasting, I prepared the bacon. Although the recipe called for lardons, I used bacon strips. Using Twitter, I asked how people like to cook their bacon and got these answers: Since my oven was taken up with the roasting hens, I used the stove to cook the bacon this time. For this recipe, I cut the slices into 1-inch strips, blanched them in Saucepan #4 (but probably could have reused Saucepan #1 to save on one dish) in boiling water for 1 minute to take away the extra saltiness and drained them in cold water. Then, in Frying Pan #5 I fried them in some butter and oil until they were golden and almost crispy. [I'm not sure I really needed to use the butter and oil since bacon has enough fat on its own.]

Polish Sausage
Polish sausage from Butcher Boy Meats in Regina, Saskatchewan with some dill cream cheese and table water crackers was a staple when I was in university. I haven't been able to find Polish sausage that tastes as good as theirs yet. This sausage was tucked into Sauté Pan #2 along with the vegetables, bacon and hens, and cooked along with everything else for awhile. Once everything had finished cooking (about 20 minutes later), I sliced up the Polish sausage and dinner was ready.

Recipe: Pintadeaux au Chou (Guinea Hen with Cabbage)

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

¾ pound Polish sausage

Éstouffade (Es-too-fahd) de Boeuf Provençale or Pot Roast. Which sounds better? The French have a flair for making food sound fancy and delicious. And this dish doesn't just sound delicious, it is delicious.

Éstouffade is a beef stew simmered slowly in a covered casserole dish. The technique is braising, where your goal as "Chef" is to take a cheap, tough cut of meat and make it tender and tasty. Unlike stewing which uses small chunks of meat, braising usually uses a large cut of meat. Turning a hunk of meat into a tender morsel is a bit of magic and science.

A Demo
A few years ago, I attended a demo at Le Cordon Bleu in Basic Cuisine, and it was this class #16 " Les Braisages (Braising)". I casually walked into the classroom before it began, as I have often done for other classes. I and another visitor both found a spot to sit and watched the Chef prepare for the class. I was wondering why the students milling about in the hallway outside weren't coming in, but I realized that at precisely 8:15 a.m., they were allowed to enter and find their seats. Of course, they all addressed the Chef as "Chef" with a capital "C". "Yes, Chef" and "Excuse me, Chef" were heard throughout the morning. I thoroughly enjoyed being a fly on the wall during this demo class. I've enjoyed looking over my notes from that class {after finding them buried under a huge pile of recipes yet to try].

The recipes covered that day were

• Boeuf à la mode (Pot-roast)
• Carré de porc braisé nivernaise (Braised pork rack with carrots, onions, potatoes and lettuce)
• Navarin d'agneau printanier (Braised lamb shoulder stew)

As the Chef prepared the dishes, he talked easily about how lamb is fed, how long it takes to grow a chicken, the use of steroids and antibiotics in poultry, the benefits of organic meat, and occasionally quizzed the students about terminology.

As he was explaining how to butcher meat and the benefits of doing it by hand in your own kitchen, one student bravely asked why he couldn't go to the butcher and buy it already cut. The steely eyes and frustrated tone of the Chef answered him quickly, saying that a chef must be able to do all the food preparation. Choose the Meat
The meat you select for braising should be one of the leaner, tougher cuts, such as shoulder, shank or chuck. {Save your tenderloin for the grill!} Also, the shank adds more gelatin to the mix so the sauce is thicker at the end of the cooking process.


Fatten the Cow
Pork fatback is NOT bacon. I learned this the hard way. I used bacon. It's what I had in the refrigerator. I didn't have pork fatback. I should have gone to a butcher, I know. The bacon added too much flavor to this dish. Go get yourself some fatback, ya hear?

According to Chef, bacon has lots of water in it, shrinks more, and leaves more fat in the pan. {And an over-powering bacon flavor!}

Ok, so if you can't get any fatback, the next best thing is salt pork. It's not bacon either. Even if you get this salt pork, you must blanch it for 10 minutes, rinse, dry {repeat?} to remove all the extra salt they use to cure it.

Before using fatback in the beef, the Chef at the demo class said to marinate the fatback in cognac for 10 minutes. {I wish I'd found my notes before making this!}

Then, you cut the fatback into strips so that you can insert this fat into the lean cut of meat you're about to braise. {Sounds like cheating to me. Or, a better cheat might be to buy a well-marbled piece of meat.} The fat helps to keep the meat from drying out.

Peter Hertzmann has a great article about Boeuf à la mode where he also demonstrates his larding technique and in the end discusses whether or not larding was worthwhile.

Marinate
After adding fat to the lean cut of meat, it gets marinated {for up to 24 hours, if you can, for best flavor}.

The marinade has the usual suspects: onions, carrots and a Bouquet Garni. Tomatoes, garlic, red wine, olive oil and cognac round it out. {You're supposed to turn the meat after 12 hours. Oops. Forgot to do that.}

Braise
Now, it's time to braise. This is a brown braise, where food is browned first (seared) and then dark ingredients, such as red wine, are added.

After straining the marinade in a bowl and setting it aside for later, pat the beef dry so that it can sear. When you sauté the beef, you can add a bit of butter with the oil for extra flavor. Searing caramelizes the outside of the beef and adds more flavor. After it's seared {not burnt!}, drain the fat and set the meat aside to rest. Fry up some bacon. {This time you can use bacon as we all know and love it.} Add the vegetables from the marinade and cook them off until golden. Sprinkle some flour on this mixture and cook for a bit to remove the flour taste. The flour will help thicken the sauce at the end. Then add the strained juice from the marinade — -it's purple! This helps deglaze the pan and pick up all those {burned} bits from the bottom of the pan, called fond. Add the meat back into the pan, the tomatoes, the Bouquet Garni, and a bit of salt. The liquid should cover 1/3 of the meat. Add more water if it doesn't meet this stringent braising requirement. Add the vegetables from the marinade back to the pot. Bring to a simmer and then put it in the oven, covered, to finish, slowly. Don't let it boil. The liquid and steam cook the meat slowly until it's very tender. If it's cooked too fast, it will be dry and tough.

I found this great article about braising.

Thicken {or Reduce} the Sauce After taking the meat out and putting it aside to rest a spell, reduce the sauce. As you reduce, you should skim away any fat that comes to the surface. Reducing sounds easy, but I always have trouble with this step — not the skimming but the thickening part. I have to resist the urge to quickly make a roux to thicken the juices. I thought I reduced it enough, but my sauce was runny. Back to the stove to reduce it further, I went {the next day}. After reading these tips, I was prepared to dig out my potato flour to thicken it slightly.

The recipe says to add olives to the sauce {but I didn't}.

Recipe: Éstouffade de Boeuf Provençale (Braised Beef Casserole, Provence Style)

You can find the recipe for Éstouffade de Boeuf Provençale (Braised Beef Casserole, Provence Style) in the book Le Cordon Bleu at Home (affiliate link). To see how the rest of the Whisk Wednesdays group fared with this week's recipe, click here (or check out the sidebar) and then click on each blogger!

The marinade is PURPLE!
Tasting Notes
I made some {well, many} mistakes on this seemingly, easy pot roast. Too bacon-y. Too over-cooked. Sauce was runny. But, everyone enjoyed it, even so, and it was even better the next day. {No anchovies this week! Yay} Next time, I'll try Harold McGee's tip to use a cooler oven (200˚F for the first two hours and then 250˚F for the last hour). I'll also check my butcher for fatback. And, I'll spend more time reducing the sauce. And maybe I'll ask for a Moroccon Tagine for Christmas! That should definitely help!

Next Week (September 24)
• Blanquette de Veau à l’Ancienne (White Veal Stew with Onions and Mushrooms) page 55-56

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Running total: $752.74 + $21.00 (beef) + $6.46 (marinade) + $4.48 (finishing) = $784.68

Butter used so far: 7 pounds, 27 tablespoons

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I love the smell of onions cooking; it's one of my favorite smells. And French Onion Soup is one of my favorite foods. Although I made it earlier this year, this time I followed the recipe in Le Cordon Bleu at Home which calls for water as the base instead of stock. I found this intriguing since I thought the best onion soup was made with veal or beef stock. In the first taste test, we preferred the French Onion Soup made with beef stock, so I was curious to see if I liked this version.

"Only the pure of heart can make good soup." - Beethoven

"No More Tears" Onions
Getting the onions prepped without tears is hard for some. With my contacts protecting me, I was fine, but my daughter who was my sous chef was crying from the sulfuric compounds in the onion hitting the liquid in her eyes causing sulfuric acid. A tearless onion may be in our future!

After caramelizing the onions in butter for 20 minutes, I added a bit of flour to help thicken the soup a touch. Then, I added the wine, brought it to a boil and simmered for a bit. Finally, I added the water, the Bouquet Garni, and seasoned it with salt and pepper. Then, I left it alone to simmer for awhile.

The Onion Bowl
I had also been wondering if I could make the soup bowl out of an onion, and wouldn't you know it a fellow food blogger did it just this past weekend and blogged about it! I went to the store looking for the largest onions they had, and found big ones, but not huge ones. After scooping out the inside with a grapefruit spoon, I ladled a small amount of warm soup in each onion bowl. I topped each with some toasted bread and cheese. Next, I needed to find out if this onion bowl would hold up under a broiler! And it did!

Links
I found these links helpful:
• a bit of history about French Onion Soup
• a video showing how to make French Onion Soup

Recipe: Soupe à l'oignon gratinée (Onion soup)

You can find the recipe for Soupe à l'oignon gratinée (Onion soup) in the book Le Cordon Bleu at Home. To see how the rest of the Whisk Wednesdays group fared with this week's recipe, click here (or check out the sidebar) and then click on each blogger!

Tasting Notes
Using an onion as a bowl boosted the flavor of the soup. Although it was more work than using a traditional crock, it was novel, fun, and the perfect size for a small appetizer. It's worth the trouble to impress your guests!

This soup was very flavorful and my favorite of all the French Onion Soup variations I've tried so far. And no stock is required!

Next Week (August 20)
• Potage Ambassadeur (Split Pea Soup with Bacon, Sorrel, and Lettuce) page 462

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Running total: $633.48 + $5.91 = $639.39

Butter used so far: 6 pounds, 29 tablespoons

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More to Explore:

• Index of Recipes
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Tasting Notes
This is a simple, but satisfying salad. It’s a fun salad to play around with, but since the ingredients are all so beautiful, it’s hard to go wrong.

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Running total: $261.55 + $19.87 = $281.42 (That tuna was expensive, but it was worth it!)

Butter used so far: 4 pounds, 19.5 tablespoons