Committing...
There it is - the "C" word...once we turn in our Patisserie portfolios, we are locked in with our desserts, decorations and plating. I'm going to have to take in a photo of mine so that I can remember what I committed to on paper.
I spent Sunday afternoon experimenting with tuiles, puree and plating. If there was ever a time that drove home how unartistic I am, today was it. There was also the scientific curiosity which made me see if I could marble blackberry puree with white chocolate for a tempered decoration. I know that a small amount of water (or other liquid) can make chocolate seize. I just wasn't sure what the quantities were. So the unscientific part of me didn't measure, but it doesn't matter. The puree on chocolate was an unmitigated disaster - if the chocolate stayed tempered, you couldn't see the purple. If you could see the coulis, it took the chocolate out of temper in a spectacularly disastrous fashion that I would be ashamed to present to the chefs at the Patisserie finals. What to do, what to do? I was still dithering as I fell asleep last night...plate design depends on so many factors (like, what if I accidentally overcook my coulis? It turns out blackberries do have pectin so cooking it too long or cooling it too much will make it lumpy because it does something or other to the water. I'd tell you more but that would require going into permutations and I'm still finishing the portfolio which just makes me want to curl up and eat Snickers bars.) You'd think with all the chocolate, sugar, butter, milk and cream around, I'd have no problems making myself something sweet in the absence of any Snickers bars, but no - you'd be wrong. Making any sweets would require cooking and I am pretty much through except for the exams. As for the Snickers bar...well, I already ate it so another one would be massively naughty. And I only had one so actually...
Anyway - the tuiles. A slightly more successful attempt at the lattice but I am beginning to give up on it. Part of it is that the equipment at home is a little bit different - like I don't have a blast chiller or a fridge large enough to accommodate the baking tray once I've spread the diamonds on the silmat, before I pipe the connecting batter. The rest of it was that I was experimenting with the piping but since I didn't use a proper piping bag, the batter melted and I ended up with a closed lattice instead of an open one.
Praticing the plating took a lot of plates. I think for some of them I tried a couple of designs on the plate. All I have to say is thank goodness for dishwashers! This is what the sink looked like after I had cleaned up any and all mess from the preparation and cooking part. It's a good thing no one needed the kitchen because I had things everywhere (plating area, photography area, rubbish area, etc. etc.) I got really lucky with accomodation in that the kitchen is actually usable for most of the practice things.
It's all starting to feel real
I have been sorting out my knife kit and Patisserie tools bag only to discover the acetate that I use to line my moulds for the dessert is not thick or strong enough to use for my chocolate twirls (I want a larger circumference on the twirl so I need a less flexible acetate strip). Ah, the dilemmas of being in culinary school. They're real in the sense that some people will do this for a living. On the other hand, they (most likely) won't change the world or bring about world peace or do anything useful to better someone's life or the world so it's not as real as some other jobs I could name where every day you make a difference to someone's life.
There has been substantial panic in the kitchen as tuile paste refuses to cooperate and I keep forgetting which way I bent the tuiles. Hopefully if it goes on backwards on the day, they won't deduct marks for getting it backwards.
The portfolio has been submitted (with literally just a few minutes, if that, to spare. Formatting took way longer than I had wanted to spend on it but this is Patisserie - how pretty it is counts. How pretty everything is counts. In Cuisine, sometimes you can wing it. As long as your techniques are good, you can always try to save it by saying it's "rustic" - unless of course, that's not what they're looking for, in which case you're just in trouble.
Must go and start mental review now of my game plan. And do laundry. And pack my kit for school. And organize Patisserie tools. And pack my bags. So much to do, so little time.
There won't be much cooking between now and the finals but still a lot of thinking to do. So until next time, may you have as fun a week as mine will be.
Recipes/photos/etc.
I don't think I can put them up here. The school has copyright over recipes and photos and I have to ask their permission first - so it is safer for me not to do anything that might cause problems. I will share any tips I pick up though...
Fruit Salad
I hear you wondering, fruit salad? That was my first reaction too, when a more advanced student saw us scrambling into the remainder of our uniform to get to our practical class today.
I thought, geez - all this way and I'm doing fruit salad. Which sounds so easy until you get the chef's feedback: your orange segments are uneven, that melon ball has a flat spot, this strawberry is not happy...I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the idea.
It all looked so easy in the demonstration. They even had time to lecture us about all of the items in our equipment kit (yes, it actually comes with a lock, which I eventually figured out) and the different types of cuts, different temperatures for sugar work and what they are commonly used for as well as the fancy cuts for special fruit platters and the sugar caramel netting baskets and spirals for decorations.
And then we got upstairs. Chef's first remark to me when I walked in: You're not even dressed! I hadn't put on my apron because I couldn't tie it and still walk (FYI, it reached from the bustline down to my ankles - it was like wearing a long pencil skirt over clown pants). Then when I asked him how to tie the neckerchief, I got the withering answer: You don't wear a neckerchief in Patisserie. You only wear it in cuisine. The result: "Zero." Another zero for not having my safety shoes yet (we have until Monday to get them). Another zero for not having my scale (we have until Monday to get it). Another zero for whoever was supposed to sous-chef for today's practical - on our induction packet class list, going in alphabetical order (so luckily not me!). The word zero has actually ceased to have any meaning, at least for the next 24 hours. Evidently none of us met his sartorial standard because there was a lesson in apron tying.
I also got in a little trouble when Chef caught me taking my grapes to wash at the sink. "What, you think we would give you dirty fruit?" Um, well...the fruit still had stickers on them so even though I didn't think so, I wasn't sure. Plus it seems awfully spoiled not to have to wash our own fruit. And how do I know they washed the lemons and oranges?
On the other hand, I did note that the production kitchen which makes sure the ingredients for classes are ready seems to have done a lot of the work for us (i.e. stocks, etc.). Also, Chef F told us yesterday that usually kitchens don't have windows or as much space as we have in the various kitchens. And we don't necessarily have to beat all the cream and eggs by hand first (thank goodness for the Kitchen Aids)! So really, we are beyond spoiled...
Basic knife skills
What I learned today: most accidents occur when you are cleaning/taking out/putting away your knives. We heard this in the demonstration, in the beginning of our practical and right after someone cut her finger taking out her knives for our class.
I admit that I had a tiny run-in with my peeler, but as Chef put it, my fruit salad was still vegan.
Also, when your orange segments are uneven because some segments are naturally smaller than others, you leave out the small ones. I wish I had known that before I put in all the segments into the salad. I was also glad that I didn't like some of the fruits so I didn't get marked for them. Chef checked our cutting by going through our bowls and showing us what was good and what wasn't (pith on orange segments- not good; pieces being uniform size - good; flat spots on the melon balls - not good).
According to Chef, when you remove only the green part of the strawberry stem (instead of cutting of the stem end) - you are either being punished or you are really bored and lonely. If they tell you to do this, evidently you tell them to do it themselves. If I weren't so tired, I might know whether or not this was a joke, but since I can't keep my eyes open...which is also my excuse for any grammatical and spelling lapses in this post.
By the by, I will put up photos of my knives because they are so pretty. Unfortunately the school gave out the card for only one engraver, with the result that he has 32 pieces (or so) for each student. He claimed today to have missed only one item in the time that he has been doing this, but to bring back any items he missed - so I will take him my spoon sometime soon. At least 20 people got their sets yesterday and we all have to have our knives for class, so he has been very busy.
The patisserie students get to lighten the load by taking some of the knives out of the kit (for example, the meat cleaver is not required in patisserie).
Sugar work and hand testing
We did an infused syrup and a caramelly syrup (whose technical name I can't remember at the moment because I am brain dead and my notes are in my locker).
We left the cardamom out of our infused syrup but used the vanilla, cloves, orange and lemon peels, cinnamon and whatever else my teammates put in it. It tastes amazing - and I have some of it in the fridge along with my fruit salad in which there is no banana or mango because I don't like them. Ah the advantage of making your own - you only put in what you like.
You may wonder what hand testing is. It was really freaky the first time I did it and I got scolded for lifting my hand out of the melted sugar solution too fast and for not getting enough of it in my hand. So - you put your hand in a bowl of ice water, then smoothly and in motion, quickly dip your hand into the melted sugar syrup (3 parts sugar, 1 part water and boiling by now) and grab a bit, then back into the ice water. Yes, sugar has a very high boiling point. Yes, it is creepy. Yes, it is also really cool to have the sugar in your hand turn into a little ball (soft or hard, depending on the temperature of the sugar in the pot) and then to play with it. Also cool to be able to do this and not have to use our thermometer, although you can if you want to.
We didn't really turn it into caramel, much less turn it into pretty nets/baskets/spirals because we were running out of time, but at least now we know the theory.
Dinner!
So that was our first day. We finished just after 8pm. There was a group of us (six) who were starving and none of us had anyone anxiously waiting for us to get home, so we went out for dinner at a Morrocan Place on James Street, near St Christopher Place. I think the general misconception is that we are cooking all day so we wouldn't need to eat at home because we would eat what we cooked. Well, not quite. There's just enough time to set up, prep, cook, clean and get feedback. Depending on the day, there might be another class (!) - and you're not supposed to eat in a demo. You don't have time to eat in a prac unless it's to taste. So we took home our fruit salads.
Note to self: pack (large?) clear tupperware to take to class and a plastic bag to carry our food in.
So until next time, happy eating. Hmmm, I've already brushed my teeth but now I am thinking about that fruit salad - especially the sauce. Who knew that a syrup could make fruit taste so good? Ugh, never mind. I'd have to get out of bed and it is so comfortable here...
Oh - and last tip re tomatoes. Chef F told us that tomato skins are acidic, which is why he likes to peel tomatoes before putting them in salads. I'm sure there are people who already knew this, but it was news to me.
I spent Sunday afternoon experimenting with tuiles, puree and plating. If there was ever a time that drove home how unartistic I am, today was it. There was also the scientific curiosity which made me see if I could marble blackberry puree with white chocolate for a tempered decoration. I know that a small amount of water (or other liquid) can make chocolate seize. I just wasn't sure what the quantities were. So the unscientific part of me didn't measure, but it doesn't matter. The puree on chocolate was an unmitigated disaster - if the chocolate stayed tempered, you couldn't see the purple. If you could see the coulis, it took the chocolate out of temper in a spectacularly disastrous fashion that I would be ashamed to present to the chefs at the Patisserie finals. What to do, what to do? I was still dithering as I fell asleep last night...plate design depends on so many factors (like, what if I accidentally overcook my coulis? It turns out blackberries do have pectin so cooking it too long or cooling it too much will make it lumpy because it does something or other to the water. I'd tell you more but that would require going into permutations and I'm still finishing the portfolio which just makes me want to curl up and eat Snickers bars.) You'd think with all the chocolate, sugar, butter, milk and cream around, I'd have no problems making myself something sweet in the absence of any Snickers bars, but no - you'd be wrong. Making any sweets would require cooking and I am pretty much through except for the exams. As for the Snickers bar...well, I already ate it so another one would be massively naughty. And I only had one so actually...
Anyway - the tuiles. A slightly more successful attempt at the lattice but I am beginning to give up on it. Part of it is that the equipment at home is a little bit different - like I don't have a blast chiller or a fridge large enough to accommodate the baking tray once I've spread the diamonds on the silmat, before I pipe the connecting batter. The rest of it was that I was experimenting with the piping but since I didn't use a proper piping bag, the batter melted and I ended up with a closed lattice instead of an open one.
Praticing the plating took a lot of plates. I think for some of them I tried a couple of designs on the plate. All I have to say is thank goodness for dishwashers! This is what the sink looked like after I had cleaned up any and all mess from the preparation and cooking part. It's a good thing no one needed the kitchen because I had things everywhere (plating area, photography area, rubbish area, etc. etc.) I got really lucky with accomodation in that the kitchen is actually usable for most of the practice things.
