Cooking Lessons: Day 1: Chocolate cakes and lamb

Today for fun I began helping in the kitchen of Restaurant Eychenne. 

The first lessons in a kitchen are always the least exciting: how to wear your apron (with strings tucked under so as to prevent catching fire or on machinery), and to thoroughly wash one's hands. 

Hotel Eychenne's food is rather complicated, but at its root all dishes share one main factor: the most quality, fresh ingredients. The restaurant's owner, now in his seventies, has spent years establishing relationships with only the most quality ingredients. Without the American designations of "organic" or "local", the French have been eating this way forever, because, simply, what's local is often the tastiest. In my opinion this is not just because it is fresh, but somehow when eating food in its origin the foods are tasted with the atmosphere: the moisture of the air, the scents, the scenery. 

Today we prepared a simple dish: grilled lamb ribs. The meat had been rubbed with thyme, and placed on a hot grill. Not too complicated. But the taste of this lamb! To the tongue there were hazelnuts, and herbs. There was a distinct sweetness. Were it not that I had watched the preparation I would have sworn there must be more to this lamb, but the flavors were within the meat. 

Secondly, we prepared the ganache which would top an extremely tasty cake. To make the ganache, the cook prepared a simple syrup of sugar and water, and heated this over a flame until dissolved. He added a spoon of this syrup to a beautifully yellow cream, and heated until boiling. In a bain-marie (which is essentially a small pot placed within a large pot of boiling water, we melted dark chocolate. Both the melted chocolate and the cream were poured over large chunks of dark, baker's chocolate, and swirled until it was a silky liquid.

The ganache was then used to dip frozen cakes, which the chef had prepared earlier that morning. The cakes were composed of a nougat of chocolate that when served is cool, but creamy, like a glorified fudgsicle. The fudgsicle is prepared on top of a crispy cookie, which is a mixture of butter, flower, a dash of salt, and a sort of thicker grain which is ground into a finer powder. Please note, all lessons are in french, so some of these words I didn't always understand! 

Delicately, holding the crunchy bit, we dipped the nougat top into the ganache. These shiny-surfaced, chocolate cakes were then topped with toasted almond. 

Because I'm not a big fan of really sweet deserts, this cake is fantastic: the crunchy bottom is a tad bit salty, and the ganache is nicely bitter. 

Voila!