North American Regional Cuisine - New England

Introduction

While our focus in North American Regional Cuisine is going to be on specific regions and their culinary ingredients and dishes, Chef will also be relating the work to ingredients local to the Vancouver area. While understanding the regional cuisines will give us a broader picture of the variety in culinary, the reality is that we work in a specific market with an abundance of certain ingredients. These fresh ingredients bought locally are generally preferred when preparing dishes due to enhanced visual appeal, flavour, and texture of fresh product over those which have been frozen and transported over great distances.

Practical

We started our first day in North American Regional Cuisine with a review of knife skills, emphasizing proper cutting technique and safety. We then began our work on New England cuisine by preparing a clam chowder. During preparation, the cream in ours broke due to the temperature getting too high and Chef demonstrated a method of saving the key ingredients by discarding the liquid, briefly rinsing the solid ingredients to remove any remaining curdles, and starting again with prepared clam nectar instead of using our own nectar from steaming clams. Our end result was quite flavourful although not holding quite enough depth to the clam flavour as we would have liked. We then prepared a New England boiled dinner, a piece of meat boiled with vegetables, sliced, and served. This dish is designed to take an inexpensive, likely tough, piece of meat and tenderize it; the end result, however, is a meat that is very low in flavour. This dish is accompanied by fresh creamed horseradish sauces to make up for lack of flavour in the meat itself. We then prepared a peach and blueberry cobbler, which was fairly standard fare. Our group mixed up a fresh blueberry frozen cream as a garnish for this dish which worked out quite well. We prepared baked beans, which were flavourful but the liquid had not reduced to a thick enough consistency by the time we needed to serve them. Along with the baked beans we prepared a Boston brown bread, a bread which is very similar in texture to a bran muffin. We served this with an apple-cinnamon butter which was very tasty. Lastly, we served red snapper with steamed clams which ended up being a very tasty dish, although we served a little too much liquid with the dish.

Blog Notes

Our Chef for this class is not huge on written assignments and has asked that we keep these journals short and to the point, so there will not be as much information here as I usually post. If anyone has any questions, feel free to let me know and I'll be happy to expand on anything for you.