This past weekend, I had the honor of hosting a cooking class with Chef Justin Ward, a professional French chef who is based in Paris. He also happens to be from Texas and is a missionary with the UPCI to Romania, Hungary, and France.
Our time with Justin began at 2 p.m. on Saturday, in a flurry of activity of unloading equipment and groceries, organizing workstations, and prepping for the cooking class that would begin in two hours. Twelve students, including me, eagerly awaited his instructions shortly after 4 p.m.
Justin spent a few minutes introducing himself and outlining his long history of education and cooking experience, which is a fascinating story in and of itself for another blog post!
Then the fun began! Our menu included a starter of pancetta & gruyere soufflé, a cheese board, salad with mustard vinaigrette, and rustic bread. The main course was pork tenderloin with a red wine reduction sauce, as well as a caramelized fig sauce. The main course included roasted squash, carrots and tomatoes along with whipped purple yams, flavored with vanilla bean paste. Our dessert was profiteroles.
We began with making our choux pastry since it needed to bake a while. While the puffs and swan necks baked, we mixed up our souffles. The choux came out of the oven and in went the soufflés, our boiled-and-whipped yams, and our veggies. While they baked and roasted, we made our sauces for the main course and then put the seared pork tenderloin in the oven.
As soon as the souffles were ready, we took a break to dine on our first course. Such happy faces!
Then we returned to the kitchen to be schooled in the art of presentation. The sauce is painted on the plate first, the whipped yams are gently forced into a thick biscuit cutter and deposited in a tower form on the dish, circled with roasted squash, capped with two different colored cherry tomatoes, and leaned upon by a perfectly angled thin carrot. Then the pork loin medallions are added next to the vegetable arrangement and covered in the second sauce. Oooo, la la! Or shall I say, “Voila”?
When we finished our main dish, we gathered again in the kitchen to assemble our dessert swans. Chef Ward instructed us on the way to cut the puffs to have a body and wings, fill them with luscious cream, and stack them with a ball of vanilla bean ice cream to create a masterpiece covered in chocolate ganache and decorated with fresh raspberries.
According to Justin, special dinners in France begin in the early evening and typically last until 3 or 4 a.m. As a result, Justin was bright eyed and bushy tailed when he took his leave of us at 11:15 p.m. He stayed up chatting with his overnight hosts, my sister and brother-in-law, until 1:30 a.m. A few hours later, the chef was off to Bossier City, LA, for another cooking class on his tour of the deep South, where he planned to earn his budget to return to the foreign mission field!
