Puff pastry with leek and poached egg with albuferra sauce

Today’s lesson at the cooking school was a continuation from our last class. After watching cooking demo from the chef, we had our puff pastry ready to bake. We rolled the pastry dough with rolling pin until it became very thin and broad. We knew that our pastry won’t expand perfectly but still we wanted to know the result.

While we wait our pastry in the oven, we prepared the poach egg along with the albuferra sauce. There are several method to make poached egg (I googled while I’m writing this post) but I think the way we taught by our chef is one of the simplest. We only need to boil water in a sauce pan, add 2 tbs of vinegar and break the egg near the water edge and like magic, the egg white automatically swirl and approaching the egg yolk. We just wait around 3-5 minutes depending on how hard we want our egg, and then we need to soak the poached egg into water with some salt on it to remove the vinegar flavor. It’s done.

The baked puff pastry result was not that bad, they expanded higher than my expectation. After all the food were ready we prepared our plating (put our food and arrange them on a plate to make it looks good to eat) and present it to the chef for evaluation. I picture I post here was taken at home, I only made very simple decoration with carrots lettering and a pair of cherry tomatoes basket with parsley and the sauce inside.

While I have my share of experience making and arranging bento, I found that the art of plating is quite different, although the purpose is somewhat the same, making the food looked great. While there’s no set of rules for bento (other than food safety and other simple stuff) there are already lots of strict rules for plating. And while most of bento makers are easy to please and amuse, those professional chefs are very serious with their stuff. I will stick with my bento though but while I’m learning at the school I think I’ll learn and do more the art of plating and share some of them with everyone.