Kitchen 5 - Chicken and red pepper pie and Eggs Benedict

Today was somewhat of a day of truth. Did we roll and fold the flaky pastry well enough? Were the temperatures of detrempe (the basic dough) and the fat (lard and butter) right? Well, only the baking of our Chicken and red pepper pie could tell us.

So quickly assemble the ingredients for the fulling and cook it. Then into the pie dish and roll out and cover the pie. And in it goes into the oven. From then on: wait and see! - And then after all it didn't look too bad:

Meanwhile the other dish on the schedule had to be tended to: Eggs Benedict. A lovely, but somewhat fiddly and tricky dish because you cannot hold the sauce for that long but everything has to be warm and the eggs want to be poached perfectly.

So, first slowly incorporating the first knob of butter into the egg yolk that is in a bowl over a bain-marie. You have to be careful with the temperature. It shouldn't be TOO hot, but it has to be hot enough so the egg actually cooks. Plus you should look out for the yolk-butter-mixture not to look too greasy because then it could split.

Those instructions I find really hard to follow or rather to judge. So I find myself constantly asking: "Does this still look alright?!" Afterwards I always think I should have just done it the way I thought it should be and see what happens because you learn better from mistakes.

Anyhow, I incorporated the butter without the mixture splitting. Then on to poaching eggs which I find exciting, watching the egg in the vortex from almost the wished-for tear-drop shape. Toast the muffin and arrange the ham. Then eggs on top and naper over the sauce. Voilà!

I thought it tasted quite nice alltogether. But seasoning just the sauce I thought was quite difficult because of the vinegar reduction. To me it felt like it was already quite salty, but when the teacher tasted it, he thought it could have had a bit more. Well, it's a long way to perfect seasoning!