More Fun with Knives and Boeuf Bourguignon

For all of you sick and twisted folks who came here hoping that I accidentally cut myself again and wanted to see the bloody mess, unfortunately today is not your day. As promised during an earlier post, I wanted to take you on a quick tour of the famous Le Cordon Bleu knife set and show you some of my favorite and least favorite tools!

Our Knife Case

For our first knife, we have the undisputed most important knife in the kitchen called a "chef's knife", but most people probably know it as a regular knife.

Chef's Knife

This knife has a variety of different purposes and can be used on vegetables and meat in a variety of ways, making it the most useful and versatile knife in the kitchen.

Next, we have my most favorite knife to use...that would have to be the cleaver. When using the cleaver not only do you get to take your aggression out by chopping up some bones, but you get to look awesome while doing it. 

6" Cleaver

Now, this is probably my favorite tool in the whole kit, mainly because it fixes a major problem I've had in the kitchen. Let's see if you can guess what it is before reading the next paragraph?

Any Ideas?

This is actually a zester and I like it so much better than a regular microplane zester that I'm used to using because it's so much easier to use and clean, and it has other purposes like making strips of zest or  grating fresh nutmeg. 

Finally, we are out the one knife in the kit that I can say I do not enjoy using and that is our "Tournee" knife or peeling knife, in other words it's the knife that we use to turn vegetables. (For more info on turned vegetables see Vegetables, Rabbits, and Crabs, Oh My!)

Peeling Knife

I could be biased because using this knife means we're turning vegetables and I don't particularly like turning vegetables, but this knife is really not that easy to use. Some chefs from the school won't even use it because "they simply don't know how" and will use their paring knife for turning vegetables. Believe it or not, the blade is actually on the inside of the curve and I'm not really sure how that helps anyone do anything at all. 

Now, moving on to the cooking aspect of the school, we finally had our demonstration for what I would call Julia Child's most famous dish, boeuf bourguignon. For those of you who don't know what boeuf bourguignon is, it's beef shoulder marinated in wine and other vegetables for around 24 hours and then cooked until tender and succulent. Unfortunately for me, I started by slightly over-searing my meat, making it a bit tougher than desired and unfortunately for me again, the chef in our practical told us to take our beef out of the oven around 50 minutes earlier than we were told to do so in demonstration!!! This resulted in getting an end product that was dry and not very succulent at all but the chef understood that we simply didn't have enough time to finish the recipe properly. However, Sarah and I had the boeuf bourguignon for dinner and Sarah seemed to enjoy it (even though I think she was just being nice).

Well, now I'm off to study for our exams (more info to come) and go to bed before my 12 hour day tomorrow (our final full day!).