Pâté. It's not just for breakfast anymore.
As long-time readers know, I've taken a fair number of classes at the California Culinary Academy 5? 6? I've lost count. But I also have the absolute worst luck at picking classes. All but two of the classes I've signed up for have been cancelled. Not permanently; it just seems that the classes I choose, and the dates I choose to take them, are horrible combinations.
For the most part, this has all worked out; the class is offered a couple weeks or a month later, and I'm all set. But this time I didn't get so lucky. I had signed up for Pâté and more class in mid-February. Shock of shocks, it got cancelled. They offered me a swap for another class that day, but the only other class I was interested in was also cancelled. See, I really do have bad luck with this. So I opted to go for the March 22 class.
As Wednesday ended, I was psyched. Normally they knew by now if the class was going to be cancelled.
I got the call Thursday morning. I was the only person signed up for the class.
But this time, I was out of luck. The class isn't being offered in the next quarter, and who knows when it will turn up again. So the coordinator proposed a compromise (again, I wasn't interested in any of the other classes being offered that day). She would move me to the "Wonders of Brunch" class, and the chef (who was incidentally the same chef I had for my home butchery class, though I didn't know that at the time) would incorporate some ad hoc pâté work.
I will give Chef Toby credit: he did his best to incorporate an advanced home cook into a class full of people who were interested in a different kind of class. Many seemed to think that cooking class meant the chef cooked for them. But you can only do so much with such diverse interests.
So he had me salt-cure some salmon for gravlax first. Not really pâté, but he wanted to give me exposure to some charcuterie in general (I'm all for this, by the way). Okay, I've done gravlax lots of times before (I have some curing in the fridge right now, in fact), but the nice thing about Chef Toby's teaching style is that he's eager to teach the basics in a very casual style and then give you the room to do your own thing. His philosophy on gravlax is simple: take equal parts salt and sugar, in abundance, and drench the fish in them. Wrap. Weight. Sure you can add other flavorings (dill is traditional), but that's the process reduced to its bare minimum. I will probably never again need to re-look up the technique for doing gravlax.
The pâté portion was similarly structured. Since this was a last minute addition, he did his best to find me ingredients, but was only able to scare up two quarts of chicken livers. Then I got my five-minute demonstration on how to do your basic offal pâté (that's good offal, not bad awful). Process livers (or whatever) in a blender, pulsing to prevent things from getting too warm. Add in an egg white. Keep processing slowly. Turn the blender on, and then pour in some cold cream and another egg white. Salt. Adjust until it looks like a liver milkshake. Strain and pour. Top with spices. Bake in a bain-mairie at 375 until the pâté jiggles slightly in its container (mine were done after 20 minutes). Chill. Serve. That was it. He left me with two quarts of livers, a hand wave at the shelves of spices, and a blender, and I was on my own.
You can imagine the rather dubious expressions of my classmates, walking by and seeing me pouring big gobs of chicken livers into a blender. Several of them (argh!) said they had almost signed up for that class. I'm not sure I provided the best advertisement (the coordinator thinks she might slip it into appetizers and canapés next time around which was a class I was marginally interested in just because it might give me ideas for amuse-bouches).
I hunted down Chef Toby and asked him more questions. The best way to do a terrine. Flavor combinations. That sort of thing. And while I had downtime, I helped some of my classmates how to poach eggs and gave them a small demo on cutting gravlax.
For the most part, I had fun. It's not as much as I would have gotten out of a full-blown class on the subject, and it's really hard to imagine I'd have spent the same amount of money on this class, but there's something fairly useful about getting a couple hours to just try blending pâté a whole bunch. You get a feel for it, a sense of what's going to happen as you do new things. It's the kind of cooking I try to move towards all the time, one based on intuition and not recipes.
And, incidentally, the pâté was fantastic. I brought a bowl of the paprika and curry version I made to the table with me and shared it with my tablemates at the midday lunch. Everyone liked it. I may even serve it at our next brunch.
A note on the pictures: my camera ran out of batteries right as I was starting to go around, so here are just a few.
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| Caviar and gravlax eggs benedict. |
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| You can see the creme fraiche on the french toast. But you can't see the Brie stuffed inside. |
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| My contribution to brunch. I made a lot of pâté. |
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