Silhouette plates super frico style

So I am really starting to enjoy plating all our standard dishes on these Bauscher plates.  It allows me to stay creative and look at our instructional dishes from another perspective.

Wednesday we made seafood risotto and I made a few side plates with the ingredients on hand.  The café staff has started to decorate for Christmas so you will notice a few extra props in the background.

Risotto al frutti di mare

I have been wanting to plate something on this dish for awhile and I have been waiting for a nice bright colored soup (actually the acqua cotta soup we make on the same day would have been marvelous).  I should have pulled back and focused on the whole plate though.  I also worked on a presentation on another silhouette dish.

I wish I had pulled back on this shot as well.  I have to learn that I can always crop the shots once I get home.

Here is a shot of the acqua cotta soup that Chef Dale put together.  This would be great dish for the bowl presented in the first picture.

Acqua Cotta

On Monday we start a new group of students and I am excited as I will see if my theory about placing the wine portion of the program first will give us more enlightened students when they arrive in the kitchen.  We will also be giving them a few product and tasting lectures to tune in their senses and highten their anticipation of their time in the kitchen.

Embrace the change.  Hope all of you had a great and fulfilling Thanksgiving.

Presentation assignment

Inspired by an email from Bauscher china company, I decided today to see what my students would do given a presentation assignment.  I gave them the same 4 plates I composed on the other day and told them to come up with their own composition (no help from my end). They each had the same components to play with.  Rice pilaf with a Basque piperade, semolina crusted and seared trout and Beurre noisette with toasted walnuts and reduced sherry wine vinegar. This is what they came up with: (understand they have only been in our program for 7 weeks and with me two and a half).

Student 1

Student 2

Student 3

Student 4

More on Bauscher plates

I have been working on perfecting this fish dish which is wrapped in Brik dough.  Brik dough is commonly used in Morrocan cooking for making brik à l’oeuf or as the wrapping for bisteeya, the famous pigeon dish that is wrapped in brik, baked till super crispy and topped with cinnamon and confectioners sugar.  It is very similar to Filo dough except more resillient and has more shatter when it is fried crisp.

I have been in recent communication with Jeff Heaney Director for Bauscher USA.  He has a desire to start a blog featuring plate presentations created by different chefs featuring different Bauscher plates.  The idea instantly inspired me to the use the same components and plate them on 4 different Bauscher plates.

Striped bass wrapped in Brik with shellfish emulsion and jerusalem artichoke puree on silhouette plate

Same conponents on a different Bauscher plate

On a Compliments plate

On a silhouette plate

I was kind of in a rush when I took these so I could not really think the presentations through all the way.  Believe it or not I am not using a tripod to take these shots.  It is remarkable what the shape of a plate can do for a presentation. Each plate design provides its own shade definition.

The following day we made Lobster à l’americaine and I just had to plate it on my new favorite Bauscher plate from the Compliments line.  The lobster was cooked just until I could easily remove it from its shell and then finished to perfection in a beurre fondue.