Day Fourteen

The Head of Everything has a favorite meal: La Blanquette De Veau A L’Ancienne Aux Champignons. It is white veal stew, topped off with an old school garnish (A L'Ancienne means "in the old") of glazed pearl onions, potatoes and mushrooms. We added carrots to the garnish for color.

Can you imagine the pressure of preparing such a thing - The Head of Everything's ALL TIME FAVORITE?!

La Blanquette De Veau A L'Ancienne Aux Champignons

Ingredients
For the Stew:
2 1/2 c. Veal, cleaned and cubed
1/2 Whole onion
1 T. Cloves
4 c. Stock
1 c. Leeks, chopped
1/2 c. Carrots, chopped
1 Bouquet Garni (Thyme, Bay Leaf and Parsley)
Roux (equal parts of butter and flour - about 3 T of each is good)
3/4 c. Cream

For the Garnish:
1 c. Potatoes, tourner cut (good luck with this)
1 c. Carrots, tourner cut (carrots are harder to tourner than potatoes)
1 c. Mushrooms, quartered
2 c. Water
2 T. Flour
Juice from 1/2 lemon
1 c. Pearl Onions, skin removed
2 t. Sugar
1 T. Butter
1 t. Salt
3 T. Stock or water

Methods
Prepare the Stew:
-Put stock in a large sauce pan
-Clove 1/2 onion (called an "onion pique") and add to stock
-Add bouquet garni, leeks, carrots and veal to cold stock
-Season with salt and pepper
-Bring to simmer and cook until veal is cooked through and tender
-Strain and reserve stock and veal in a large sautoir pan (a large pan, similar to a saute pan, but with straight, vertical, 2"+ sides)

Prepare the Garnish:
-Boil mushrooms in water with flour and lemon (to retain their white color)
-When mushrooms are cooked, strain from flour and lemon water (called a "Blanc") and reserve
-Tourner carrots and potatoes and boil in salted water until just cooked (a tourner cut resembles a football with exactly seven sides)
-Strain carrots and potatoes from cooking water and reserve
-Put peeled pearl onions, sugar, salt and stock or water into a small saucepan.
-Bring to a boil and cover - simmer on a very low heat
-When most of the liquid is gone, begin slowly stirring until a thick glaze forms
-Remove glazed onions and reserve

Finish the Blanquette de Veau:
-Begin heating the reserved stock and let it reduce
-Make a roux by melting butter into a pan
-When melted, add an equal share of flour and stir quickly until a paste forms
-Cool the roux
-Once cooled, whisk roux into heated stock reduction
-After sauce thickens, add cream and whisk
-Season well and add 1 to 2 T. of lemon juice if desired
-Add veal and garnishes to to gravy
-Serve over rice or fresh pasta

Stews require the use of numerous important, basic techniques, therefore our lessons will be thick with stew for the next couple of months. We were thrilled at the prospect of creating and eating things like Beef Bourguignon and Coq Au Vin, until we served the Blanquette de Veau; although delicious, piping hot stew is not a choice meal in a piping hot kitchen.

My assigned partner this week is the Numero Uno Dummy. Nice, motivated and likable for sure, but clueless when it comes to anything common sense. Mine and the Dummy's Blanquette De Veau turned out way too salty.

"I figured out why our sauce was too salty!" the Dummy exclaimed.
"Oh yeah?" I replied.

This is what happened to our sauce: We each made our own sauces and combined them at the end to make life easier. We let the combined sauces reduce for over an hour, which was way too long, and therefore the ratio of salt to stock was way too high.

"Do you know why it was salty?" the Dummy inquired.
"Yes, I do. Its because we reduced it too much," I kindly replied.
"No!" the Dummy exclaimed with a smile. "Here is what I figure - since we combined our sauces, which both had salt in them, some sort of reaction happened and we ended up with double the salt. So, from now on, you should never combine two separate things otherwise your final product will have double the seasoning!"

It took all my energy to hold in a chuckle.

"Um, no. That's not correct. Think about it, if you take a can of coke and mix it with another can of coke, you don't end up with super sweet coke," I explained.
"I dunno," the Dummy doubtfully said. "I think the coke may be sweeter. I 'll have to try it when I get home tonight."

Oh boy.