The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman Page A

like, aspic?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIt is?”
    â€œM-hm,” Pardus said. “As a matter of fact, a lot of the Garde Manger classes will be coming up here, asking us to save our consommé so they can make their aspic for the Grand Buffet.”
    There was quite a bit of standing around at this point, since we were all staring at the pot as Pardus stirred, waiting for it to come up to heat and form this so-called raft.
    â€œSo why is consommé important to know how to do?” I asked.
    â€œWhy is a consommé important to know how to do?” he repeated. He continued to stir with his wooden spoon, thoughtfully, pushing it into the edges of the marmite, making sure he didn’t feel any sticking egg white. “It’s a technique that requires some finesse,” he began. “It’s a soup that is popular, that is used quite frequently in good restaurants. And it’s something that takes some patience and training to know how to do. You can’t just tell somebody to go make a consommé, this is how you do it. It takes some practice.”
    He stopped stirring, abandoning, for the moment, the party line for his personal thoughts as a cook who had moved through the ranks of several high-end French restaurants. “I would think that it brings together all the aspects of making a good stock and bringing that to the ultimate state of perfection. It’s a perfect stock.” That p in perfect really popped. “It teaches you to focus, teaches you to pay attention, to take care of ingredients. There’s some chemistry involved and coagulation; there are so many things going on in making it that the beginning cook is made aware of, instead of just making a bowl of soup.” He raised his eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, one of my friends had trouble with her consommé in this morning’s chef’s practical—and consequently probably won’t be teaching here.”
    Chef Pardus’s stock came up to heat, and sure enough, there was the raft, gray and scummy and solid, with just a little bit of stock foaming up at the side of the pan. Pardus had stirred almost continuously, even as the meat milk shake congealed. When the raft began to rotate with the spoon he stopped and let the consommé take care of itself. He would slip an onion brûlé down the side of the pot into the stock for more color and flavor, and later a sachet. When it was done we would all evaluate it.
    â€œO.K.,” he said, “demo’s over. Go to town.”
    We did, and it worked. The opaque stock became crystal-clear soup,
though Eun-Jung created a bit of kitchen drama when she let hers come to a boil, obliterating her raft. She wrote everything down, or appeared to, but certain things she did not understand. It would be very easy for her to miss the modifier “low simmer.” Unless she could actually see it, she was never quite sure of herself. Pardus dashed to the rescue. I think he was glad someone’s raft had broken. He loved to fix things on the fly, no time to spare. He made a new clarification by dumping the ruined consommé into a steel bowl, adding more ground beef and egg white, and dumping some tomato juice left over from someone’s concassé for the acid. (Next time this happened, he spotted half a lemon and squeezed that into the new clarification—he really didn’t care what kind of acid it was.) He put it back on the fire and brought it quickly up to a simmer with a beautiful brand-new raft.
    Eun-Jung now knew how to ruin a consommé, how to fix a consommé, and how to finish a consommé. When the consommé had simmered properly, she ladled it out of the pot into a second pot through a coffee-filter-lined chinois, a fine mesh strainer. The stock was perfectly clear. She tasted for seasoning, reheated it, poured it into a hot bowl, degreased it by dragging brown paper toweling across its surface, all of which Chef