Free The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman Page B

about the method. A standard sachet . For get about cloves, and for get about allspice. Don’t do it. You want to try it some other place, some other time, fine. I’d rather concentrate on the flavors of the consommé rather than building a fruitcake.
Kosher salt and white pepper. Careful with the pepper, taste your soup, you may not need it.
    â€œWhat we’re gonna do is make what’s called a clarification. A clarification is the mixture of the ground beef, the egg whites, mirepoix, and the acid of the tomato product. You could add white wine, you could add lemon juice. You could add hydrochloric acid if you wanted, probably wouldn’t be very tasty. It needs acid in there. So we mix the beef, the egg whites, the mirepoix, and the tomato together, that’s a clarification. It’s a noun. It’s a thing. It’s different from the process of clarification. It’s gonna look like a too-wet meatloaf.” He smiled. “It looks pretty gnarly.”
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    C onsommé was clearly going to be the most interesting thing we’d done so far. The idea of making goop that looked like a ground-beef milk shake and dumping it into perfectly good stock offered childish pleasure—like making mud pies or dropping very large melons from very high places or seeing how far apart you and a friend could play catch with a raw egg before it smashed in one of your hands. And yet, despite these crude pleasures—indeed, because of them—the end result was one of ultimate refinement.
    Over the weekend I read about the method in The Pro Chef , our textbook. This had helpful illustrations of what happened to your meat milk shake when you boiled it. It coagulated into a gray, scummy mass, or raft, and floated to the top of your stock, bringing everything that made stock murky with it. The raft was like an organic water filter—and the stock simmered up over it and back down through it. Consommé was not difficult to do, apparently, but it took some care. Sometimes a consommé would get the best of you.
    Earlier in the winter, after several months of consommé heaven, K-8 ran into problems. Chef Pardus, who had been teaching since July, suddenly couldn’t get a clear soup. The first time he shrugged, said this happened, and apologized to his class; no one else in the class could get a clear one either. And the definition of clear here is perfectly clear. Rule of thumb: you can read the date on a dime at the bottom of a gallon.
    Pardus went to the books.
    Proteins, both in egg whites and in the meat, are actual things, molecules; if you took a twenty-foot metal tape measure and crinkled it up into the shape of a cantaloupe, you would have a replica of a protein. Imagine,
further, that at each inch of this crinkled tape measure was a little round magnet. These magnets are sticking to all the other magnets, keeping the protein all balled up. When these bonds are broken, lose their magnetic juice, the tape measure relaxes, loosens up, spreads out. Instead of looking like a tight tape-measure cantaloupe, it looked more like a lazy tapeworm. When you’ve got millions of these things relaxing all at once in the same pot, they form a net, create the filter that, as the raft rises to the surface, lifts all the muck out of the stock, clarifying it. What breaks those bonds is acid.
    When Pardus asked himself what was different between the ingredients he was using in July and the ones he was using in December, it dawned on him that the hard pale tomatoes he was using simply did not have enough acid to break the bonds and unfold the proteins into their salutary net. When he next made consommé, he used canned tomatoes, and voilà: the date on a dime at the bottom of a gallon.
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    I n addition to the consommé demo we would also be learning about roux, flour cooked in clarified butter, and slurries, pure starches such as cornstarch, arrowroot, or potato starch mixed in water