The elusive tourné

But before I get into that very tricky method of cutting potatoes…

Sanitation class was again focused on personal hygiene — proper handwashing, hand care, use of gloves, attire, etc. — so it was mostly review from the first day. Somehow, the conversation devolved into all sorts of tangents, which made class a lot more interesting. They included:

• In a discussion about the danger of touching food after touching money, the 55-year-old guy with a beard piped up that 65 percent of one-dollar bills have cocaine residue on them. No one really knew what to make of that.
• Chef prompted a heated debate by making the generalization that everyone made and ate mudpies when they were little (and still lived to tell about it). Teresa, one of the kindest people I’ve ever met (I think she’s a grandmother, too, which makes sense), shared that she would always refine her mud by taking out all the rocks and sticks. Another woman, however, was horrified and kept repeating how disgusting it was that anyone would ever think of eating a mudpie .  She couldn’t seem to get over it.
• Someone else asked about why the chefs on Food Network are rarely seen washing their hands or wearing gloves, and that sent Chef on a rampage. He did a hilarious, dead-on impression of Ina Garten (the Barefoot Contessa), and admitted his love of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, but completely dismissed most of the Food Network personalities as normal people who have no business being referring to as chefs (with the exception of Bobby Flay, who he thinks is only still on the air because a certain sector of the market find him attractive). I  now know that there are fellow Food Network addicts in my class, as well as many others who couldn’t care less.
• A middle-aged man who works at a restaurant raised his hand and said that he once saw a coworker drop 8 pounds of roast beef on the floor, then pick it up and put it back in the bin. He refused to say which restaurant it was, which prompted Chef to assure us that ALL of us, at one point or another, had unknowingly eaten dirty food off the floor when dining out.

Now to the potatoes. Chef has been hyping this technique as one of his favorites and has promised to make us do a lot of it (and judging by an internet search, it looks to be a culinary school rite of passage). We had the privilege of learning how to tourné a potato, which means to cut it into a little football-ish barrel with six even sides (the French do seven, but Chef is fine with six).  As he demonstrated on red potatoes, he spent more time touching them up than he did cutting the sides to begin with!  He also seemed to be quite intimate with his tournés, telling us to love, hug and stroke them.  He made it look easy, but I was wary.

In the demo, we also learned how to clarify butter (melt it over heat long enough so that the water evaporates and the milk solids can be skimmed off the top, leaving pure butter fat), and how to make a simple red wine vinaigrette with shallots, garlic, red wine vinegar and oil. Chef then fried his tournés in the clarified butter and they looked really yummy, but unfortunately we didn’t have time to do the same with ours.  I’m looking forward to cooking dishes that will be a little more substantial to snack on!

When it came time to cut our own tournés — we were told to do 15 — I got out my special tourné knife and tried as best as I could to follow the curve of the potato and do it as he explained.  It didn’t work.  One side was flat, another was too narrow, another cut too far into the potato.  And the more I tried to correct it, the smaller my football got until it was definitely too small to be considered a decent tourné.  After three or four, I started to get them a more uniform size, but still have a ways to go in cutting smooth curves.  Again, a lot harder than it looks!

Here is the best picture I found of the shape (these are obviously carrots, not potatoes):

Tourné of carrot (but you get the idea)