I remember paying a visit at the French Culinary Institute one year and speaking to Chef Alain Sailhac, he mentioned that the school was working on the project of putting together  the school’s textbook and in his heavy french accent told me that I should contribute a recipe to the book and so he narrowed it down to a soup, a vegetable soup and to think of a recipe that would exemplify a precise technique. So I left NY thinking – vegetable soup and technique – hmmm. I was contacted by the school’s office and was sent all the paperwork, releases and such and the ball was on my court, I just needed to make the recipe and send it to them. Time went by, months passed and the gentle reminders from the school office about the deadline approaching turned into a last call of desperation on a Friday  - Chef Hughes if you do not provide us with the recipe by Monday we will not be able to include it in the textbook -

I can work under pressure and I actually love it because I probably work the best, but in Miami we were just hit by Hurricane Wilma I believe and my catering kitchen had no power; in fact I was without power for quite a few days already. I had emptied the fridges and discarded what was in it but the few remaining things that were still fresh I had placed them in the freezer and kept the freezer without opening it so I wouldn’t loose temperature. My choice of ingredient was narrowed by force to what was available and fresh in the freezer – Fennel- and so I took a few Fennel bulbs and started playing with them. Cut them in half and began slicing them thin with my knife and immediately came to my mind                - Caramelization – Such a simple technique, yet very valuable and overlooked and many times not done properly.

So there I was with my flashlight sauteeing fennel in the dark and acheiving what actually the recipe illustrates very well: How to take a vegetable, sautee it in butter and allow the caramelization process to take place, cooks often stop early in the process, they seem to be afraid to continue sauteeing, but if you are caramelizing onions, or fennel in this case and observe well you can actually see that it takes quite a while. The vegetable sort of begins being limp and whitish but eventually it becomes brown after a while. The transformation of flavor from the raw to the briefly sauteed to the actual caramelized one is immense, its like a different vegetable in taste.

This recipe is a great example of that, the soup its almost a light brown color and the complement of the toasted bread with aged goat cheese works wonderful.

The  book which is used at The French Culinary Institute as a textbook features a handful of contributors such as Bobby Flay, Dan Barber and Wylie Dufresne to name a few has been awarded Best Cookbook of The Year from a Professional Point of View by The James Beard Foundation 2008.