Les Cussions (continued)

Earlier, I talked about French cooking techniques called Les Cussions. First up was Roasting or Le Rotier if you're taking notes. Roasting can be done dry or Poeler, with moisture. We roasted a truss chicken Poeler. The poeler was Mira Poix. Another term we learned was the term WOG , (without giblets). Salt, pepper and quite a bit of butter inside and on top of our WOG chicken. It was delicious. Very French!

Next up was braising or Le Brasier. This was a cut chicken, browned or 'a brun' and we did one 'a blanc' white or not browned so much. See, you guys are getting all this cool stuff for free. Braising requires browning either slightly (a blanc) or darker (a brun) depending on how you want your sauce and the color of the item you're going to braise. Adding aromatics, de glazing, adding liquid and then cooking at low temp on the stove or in the oven are all steps in braising. Braising liquid is used as the sauce at the end. Just so you know, there are nine steps in braising. The sauce making is step 9. Also very delicious. Step 10 is eating!

Today was grilling, le griller and frying, le frire. Again chicken, which is what we'll be cooking most of the time, cuz it's cheap. One thing to remember when grilling are the numbers 10 and 2. That's how you get those diamond shaped grill marks on your meat by placing in at 10 o'clock for a minute or so and then turning it to 2 o'clock. You do this on the side you're going to present. There you are, more cool free stuff.

Frying was deep frying using a three or two step coating method. You know, milk, flour, eggs and breading. It's called three step even when there are four ingrediants. If you watch the cooking shows, you know always to keep one hand dry when going from dry to wet back to dry. One last cool thing. Le Cordon Bleu has their own method of breading. To find out what that is, sign up for classes!