It’s been a long time since a post, so here goes.
Intro Baking and Pastry wrapped up and my overall experience is that I won’t be turning into a baker, but I would like to learn more. After baking was 3 weeks of contemporary cuisine where we learned how to modify recipes so that they worked for special diets like DASH or vegan. I really liked that class, largely because there was so much room for experimenting. Once we finished whatever we were supposed to make for the day (which were very easy generally), we could do whatever we wanted using the ingredients in the kitchen. One day I made a yellow bell pepper drink which tasted weird, but good. Now I am in the Computer Applications clas, which is really easy and boring. I am coming from a computer science background though, so it should be easy. It is basically how to use Word and Excel. Simple stuff. After this is kitchen math, and then purchasing, and finally wine studies. That means 6 weeks of no cooking, which sucks. I am making myself cook more at home to make up for it.
This week in baking & pastry, we made cookies and cakes. I must admit, it has been a lot more interesting than bread week. I got to choose the kind of cookie I made (caramel pecan bar), we were allowed some flexibility when we made eclairs and cream puffs. I put rosewater in my pastry cream and it turned out really good, I am really happy with how it tasted. Yesterday we baked cakes, today we decorated them, and tomorrow we get to take them home. We had a lot of freedom in the flavors we used. The only constraint was that it be a chiffon cake and have buttercream frosting (made with swiss meringue). So the inspiration for my cake is vietnamese coffee. Anyone who has gotten me started talking about Vietnam will know that I loved it there and will go on and on about how great that country is. One thing I really loved were vietnamese coffee (or ca phe sua nong). It is basically 50% espresso and %50 sweetened condensed milk. So for my cake, I made the chiffon cake with espresso powder so it tastes like coffee (though not strong enough). For the filling, I made buttercream and added a caramel syrup to it so that it had a little of the caramel flavor that sweetened condensed milk has. That was between the first two layers. Between the 2nd and 3rd layers, I made a whipped cream with sweetend condensed milk and cream, and added espresso powder to it for more coffee flavor. For the icing, I made coffee buttercream (espresso powder in the buttercream). The individual parts taste great, and I look forward to tasting it all tomorrow. Chef Judy said she was looking forward to tasting it too. For decoration I used a comb around the sides and put chocolate flakes about 1/3 up the sides. On the top, I made a circle stencil and put a disc of chocolate flakes right in the middle. Around the edge I piped rosettes out of buttercream and made chocolate filigrees and stood them up againt the rosettes. I put a single chocolate coffee bean on top of each slice. A fellow student whose opinion matters said it looked “professional” and he would pay for it. That felt really good to hear. I will take a picture tomorrow and post it.
Garde Manger is done, and I’m in Intro to Baking and Pastry now. So far we’ve made foccacia, challah, danishes, baguettes, epis, morning buns, and something with puff dough. I don’t really like the class very much. All we do is follow the recipes exactly and then the dough comes out. If you don’t follow the recipe, then your bread doesn’t come out. There just isn’t anything differentiating the students, all our bread pretty much tastes the same. We aren’t even making the danish fillings ourselves, just using what is already in the kitchen. Next week I think we will do more pastry items, and the third week we do restaurant platings, so that sounds interesting, or at least more interesting than making bread. Don’t get me wrong, the bread I’ve made is damn good bread (maybe the best foccacia and challah I’ve ever had), it just isn’t very interesting. The Chef Instructor is great, I really like Chef Judy, she is a good instructor.
The photos below are some of the food that I either made, or helped make in class last week. I am in Garde Manger now, which means ‘protector of the food’ or something like that. Tradtitionally it was the garde manger chef’s job to take the food that was going to go bad soon and stretch it out. Nowadays, garde manger cooks use fresh ingredients and quality matters. My station at work is the garde manger station, but all we do is make salads. So far I have learned how to make terrines, fruit mirrors, cheese mirrors, watermelon carvings, several cool garnishes, mousse, mousselines, quenelles, and other stuff. The chef instructor is fun. He is british and has a very dry sense of humor. He is very sarcastic, and I can see how that would make people dislike him, but I think he’s great. He has a mischevious twinkle in his eye all the time, which is fun. In this class, the food isn’t graded on whether it tastes good, it is judged on whether it looks good. We are primarily learning presentation. It is up to the students to make sure it tastes good, because we send our food to the other classes (and in exchange, they send us food). So out of pride, we make sure food tastes good.
In class today the students were discussing Butchery grades, and it looks like I might be the only person who got an A. That really surprises me because some other students were definitely getting their cuts right. I think it was because of the written test that they might not have done so well on, but I am really good at test taking.
