Food For Thought: Birds on Toast

Another throwback post

Hi subscribers: It’s still summer, it’s still hot, and I’m on the road a bit this week.

I hope I can entertain you with another throwback post from my cooking school days at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa. If you missed my first installment of this occasional feature you can check it out here.

This post is was written about a month into my Intermediate Term: enough time to get comfortable, but still very much a newbie. Re-reading this today made me smile - I remember it like it was yesterday and not nearly a decade ago.

Enjoy and I’ll be back with new stuff on Friday! - SF

Tweety Bird on Toast

Can you imagine trying to debone a budgie?  From the inside?  If you can, it’s probably because you’ve deboned a quail.  I’ve always liked quail, but I’ve found them a bit of a pain to eat – too many little bones and next to no meat for your effort.  But debone it and stuff it – problem solved!

Well, not really.  The catch is that you have to debone it.  And that’s a wee bit of work.

Chef 3 did the demo for the quails, with Chef 1 supervising from the back of the room.  Even though he’s only been here a few weeks, I can tell that he’s smart, talented, and has just the right amount of edginess that makes a good Chef.  He’s tough on organization (more on that below) and tough on clean and pressed uniforms – and doesn’t hesitate to point it out.  I’ve heard a few rumblings from other students that he’s too tough, but I completely disagree!  If I wanted a hug and an affirmation that I’m a special snowflake, I’m sure I could have found a cooking holiday or a community college night school class somewhere.

There are two ways to debone a quail – from the front or the back.  Chef 3 said that he preferred deboning from the back – something about the size of his fingers, apparently.

My mind was already in the gutter that day, and I could feel a dirty joke coming on.

Chef 3:  I prefer to do it from the back.  Someone with smaller fingers can show you how to do it from the front.

Chef 1:  I prefer from the front…… for deboning.

And without missing a beat, a student piped up:  “Front? Back? It’s all boning!”

I think Chef 3 said something else, but I couldn’t hear it because we were all laughing too hard.

Once the quails have been boned (ha!), they take a little rest in the fridge while we prepare a farce à gratin stuffing.  Sear some chicken livers and déglacer with cognac (it makes a jolly flame!) and pass them though a tamis to give them a fine texture, sweat some shallots and a fine brunoise of mushrooms, combine the whole thing with some breadcrumbs and an egg, and then into a piping bag.  Fill the little birdies up with the farce, pin them closed with skewers, sear, and into the oven.

And of course, we had to make a sauce!  Sear the quail bones, add some mirepoix and a bouquet garni, mouiller with water, and let ‘er simmer.  Suer some shallots, add some paprika, strain in the quail stock, reduce, add some cream, season, etc.

And oh yeah – make some croutons (toast) and turn and glaçer some carrots and turnips.  Easy, right?

Somewhere along the way, most of the class got into the weeds.  Most people (myself included) took longer to debone our four birds that we should have, and even a few minutes delay on the front end sets you up for tumbling into the shit on the back end.  And that’s exactly what happened.

The last few minutes I was struggling to get anything on the plate.  Chef 3 was adamant that we have our dish plated by 10:45, and since we’d be working since about 8:20, that didn’t sound all that bad.  But when you’re in the shit, bad things start to happen and problems expand not just arithmetically, but geometrically.

I burned my hand on the handle of the pan of quails I had just pulled from the oven.  Excruciating, right from the tip of my left thumb to the joint with my hand, and right up to the knuckle of my index finger.  No time to deal with it even though it hurt like hell, so I just kept going.  Having to work with my right hand, even for just a few minutes, set me back quite a bit.

I didn’t have enough time to spend turning my carrots and turnips.  It’s one of my weaker skills and I know it.  I did them at great speed.  I cooked them at great speed, and the turnips were undercooked.  When the Chef was tasting my dish (and I was rubbing some kind of burn cream into my hand), he stuck a spoon under my nose with half a turned turnip and asked me to taste it.  He didn’t need to do that, because I already knew:  it was undercooked.  I ate it anyway, and it was much as I expected.  Point taken – this is what happens when you rush.

Sauce was a little runny.  A few more minutes of attention would have fixed that.  Taste was pretty good though. Stuffing was decent, but quails a bit overcooked.  More time = more attention. Looking back on it, 10 minutes saved at the beginning of the class would have given me 15 or more at the end.

At the demo later in the afternoon, Chef 3 admonished both sections of the class for our poor organization.  Given that both sections struggled a bit, it reinforces to me that there’s a strategy behind the order of the dishes we prepare.  We get a few dishes in a row that aren’t too difficult which lets a little complacency set in, then a harder one that reinforces a few lessons.  As I said about the last workshop, it wasn’t about the salads, and this one wasn’t about the damned quails.  It was about having our shit together.  And at this point in the course that’s the lesson we need to learn.

Tweety bird was quite tasty, by the way.