Lesson 2 - Tournage & Glacage

The one thing to remember about this course is that it is French.  Many of the terms used are French.  I took a little bit of French in high school, but we never covered words like Glacage and Tournage...

Tournage is a type of shape made with vegetables - faceted oval shapes, usually with 7 sides.  I honestly think tournage is French for pain in the butt.  These shapes are so difficult to make!  Chef Bruno said that he once worked in a restaurant where that was the only thing one guy did for his job - cut these shapes all day...  Can you say nightmare???

Glacage is the technique of glazing vegetables.  The vegetables are placed in water, salt, butter and a pinch of sugar and cooked with a parchment paper lid until the water has evaporated.  This creates a shiny glaze on the vegetables, known  as Glacer a blanc.  If you continue to cook until the syrup caramelizes, it is called Glacer a brun.

The dish we made was called a Garniture Bouquetiere.  This is the stove we use:

For the first few classes, the space was daunting because it was so large and industrial, but before long, we were all walking around like we had been cooking in this kitchen for years!

Below is my finished product (it includes an artichoke heart, turnips, potatoes, peas, onions, and carrots).  It was surprisingly good! 

Here is all of our plates together:

One of the interesting things I learned in this class is that when preparing a whole artichoke, if you attach a lemon slice to the bottom of it with some twine before boiling, the artichoke will not turn brown.

That does it for Lesson 2!

Okay, what I left out was the fact that we had all of our vegetables cooking in skillets separately with a cartouche (paper cover with a hole in the middle) & 4 skillets going, and I had my fire on too low, so the Chef turned up the heat for me.  Then he walked away.  And so did I.  And with the parchment cover, you cannot see what is going on...  So finally, I look below the parchment paper, and everything looks fine, until I turn them over.  They are BLACK on the other side!!!  And I look behind me and I know the Chef has seen this as well...  So when I plate the food, I turn it nice side up, of course.  But the Chef has seen that it was black on one side, so he turns it over in front of everyone and says 'oh, looks like the dark side of the moon'.  We all cracked up!  But then I said to my classmates 'if he hadn't turned the heat up for me, they wouldn't be burned!!!'  I realized then that we all had great chemistry and this class was going to be so much fun.  :)