Chaud froid: For your eyes only...

The design is limited only by the cook's imagination................

Chaud froid is a showcase for patience and ingenuity. Designed to visually enhance an elaborately-laid buffet table, it is more eye-candy than appetizer.

The process involves cooking a piece of meat (our students use chicken), then chilling and covering it with a smooth coat of bechamel sauce.

...........eyesight, and manual dexterity.

The kitchen grows unusually quiet when students focus all
of their attention on developing their micro palates. 

The sauce-coated meat is cooled again to set the bechamel, and to hold the chicken at a safe temperature while the intricate surface design work is prepared.

The French term chaud-froid refers to heating and cooling the food as each step of the process is undertaken.







When the bits of vegetable mosaic are ready, the meat is once again pulled from the cooler, and the design laid on to the white background.

A clear aspic glaze is prepared and cooled to just the right temperature: warm enough that it flow easily over the whole piece of chicken, covering it with a smooth and transparent coat, but cool enough that it does not melt the bechamel undercoat.

Once these creations have been cooled again, they are ready for the buffet table. If they have been handled carefully, and with food safety in mind, they are edible works of art. With emphasis on their visual aesthetics, though, their ornamental value far outweighs their gustatory appeal.

 The white bechamel that coats the chicken is
like  gesso on a painter's canvas. 

Paper-thin slices are shaved from sweet pepper and other veggies for
the chaud froid design.

A clear aspic glaze (foreground) is applied
over the  design to finish these  buffet showpieces. 

Hitting the sauce

The transition is seamless as students enrolled in the Chef de Cuisine diploma complete their Cook Basic training and move on to Advanced Level 2. First on the agenda for the current Advanced class, along with some Basic students and alumni, was three days of prepping, cooking and serving a Christmas lunch to almost 400 children at Hess Street School.

Jessica works up a bechamel sauce.

Kevin starts his veloute with a roux.

The glow of team work and camaraderie that made the Christmas lunch lively, fun and efficiently executed will follow everyone that pitched in to make it work. With such a concentrated curriculum to work through in the next 15 weeks though, our students have little time to digest the experience before returning to the kitchen.

Essential groceries for sauce week-
the reason those sauces taste so good!

After a quick review of mother sauces (béchamel, velouté, Hollandaise, brown and tomato sauces), Chef Dan demonstrated an array of small sauces that are borne from these five. Students cooked up a few of them; the rest were relegated to quick jottings in their kitchen bibles. Chef delivered a homework-in-the-making heads-up: they will be making sauces from their own notes in a few days, and will need to remember much more than turkey gravy and cranberry sauce. 

A lot of sauces start with quality stock,
so this spigotted stock pot is often on the
back burner. 

Students' kitchen bibles are their best friends
when a demonstration includes twenty sauces. 

Food as Art

Chaud-froid takes the creative process beyond the mouth-watering, well-balanced, multi-hued meal, creatively plated with eat-with-your-eyes appeal. Count yourself among the fortunate few when you discover a dining establishment that adds show-stopping works of art to a cold buffet, created with this time-intensive technique.

With emphasis on eye candy, the Advanced students in June cut wafer-thin slices of veggies to arrange on a béchamel background, and put their sculptural talents to work before finishing with a glossy aspic glaze. The cold creation had to ultimately be edible. With this in mind, they prepared their food in steps, paying particular attention to keeping the underlying cooked, stuffed chicken breasts at a food-safe temperature.