What A Day...
Well today turned out to be quite a long day, but well worth it. After working 12 hours on saturday, I got four hours of sleep and then was up and moving. Had to go into work to get my papers with all the prep stuff and dish ideas that I forgot. Brought them back home and typed them up. Then back into work to meet chef and work on our souffles. We ended up doing two different batches of chocolate souffle and one passion fruit souffle. So 3 1/2 hours at work and then up to school for the competition. Spent an hour or little more getting set up with all our pots, pans, bowl, etc, as well as all our ingredients, for the possible dishes we could get. They gave us 3 possible secret ingredients for each course and we had to plan accordingly. The choices ended up being scallops for 1st course, venison for 2nd course and passion fruit for the 3rd course. We had one culinary student there to assist us which was great, she helped with a lot of different tasks, including making the pastry cream for our souffle which was critical. So I was of course working 100mph, but working next to Chef I felt like I was standing still. He was doing so many things at once, he was the fuckin man! It was worth the experience alone to get to work under those conditions with such a talented person. So on to the food, for the first course we did bacon wrapped scallops with potato puree, carmelized onions and a curried apple cider glaze. Second course we did a venison meatloaf topped with tomato concasse (onion/garlic/tomato/white wine), roasted venison leg, fennel puree, creamed napa cabbage (with applewood bacon and shallot) and a tomato-red wine vinegar-veal stock sauce enriched with veal brains! That was the first time I've ever had anything with veal brains in it and let me tell you, the sauce was off the hook. For our third course we did a passion fruit souffle with strawberry sauce. This actually gave us the title. Apparently four out of the five judges thought it was the best souffle they had ever had. It was also the fastest souffle I've ever been apart of. We put out our entree and then had 20 minutes to plate the dessert, with the baking time being at least 10 minutes, probably closer to 15. So we had to seperate eggs, whip the whites with sugar and fold it into our pastry cream and passion fruit puree and bake them in 20 minutes! I told chef before and after the competition that it takes guys with big balls or no brains to make a souffle in a competition like this with the time constraints and no room for failure. But we did it and we won. I still feel very honored that he choose me as his assistant, out of all the people he could have picked, he picked me. No wonder my stomach was all in knots the entire day and up until we got started cooking. It was a great experience to say the least and if he decides to defend his title, I will come back to assist him no matter where I am or what I'm doing. We brought the Golden Whisk home to 2941!