mango on an apple

Big Rant

on Sunday 27 November 2011

in paris

Milk chocolates

I’m having a Big Rant Day today. I’ll try to catch up on all the things that have happened this past week, and how I am feeling about pastries.

We began work on chocolates this past week – tempering and understanding milk and dark chocolate. Before that, though, there was the Opéra cake.

This cake was easy to make in terms of layers – all the layers are familiar recipes for us. Joconde sponge biscuit? Check. Coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache? So Basic Pastry. Making the components didn’t take that much time. I think I glanced at the clock when I was almost done with making the components for the layers and was surprised to see that it was still really early.

However, when it came to assembly, the clocks must’ve sped up on double-time. Since I had put my cake in the freezer to set early, my cake got pushed to the back of the flash freezer and was the last one to be glazed (only one glazing station in the kitchen). So when I was slowly cutting the square, being extra careful with my blasted super-sharp serrated knife, the chef started hurrying us by turning out the lights. I was so annoyed with him. I looked at the clock to see that we were indeed running late, but I had no awareness of this timing constraint until just then. It definitely didn’t help that I was trying to finish in the dark. Ughhh. Thank goodness I didn’t need practice on my writing, having practiced the night before. So I just slapped on the writing on top quickly in the end, with a really crappy border as you can see. By the time I stumbled out of the kitchen, almost 20 minutes late and elbowing past the incoming Superior Pastry students, I was super grumpy about the way class ended. Luckily, we just had one more demonstration class that day before I could go home and forget about it for a little bit.

Trois Bavarois

The next cake was a three-chocolate-mousse cake that is divine, when consumed in small quantities. My streak of being slow continued, and this was probably one of the worst classes ever. To make the three mousses, we had to have three separate bowls of melted chocolate, a big bowl of whipped cream, a bowl of crème anglaise, and empty bowls to mix the mousses in. We were in the smaller kitchen, so it was super crowded with all the ingredients everywhere. I found it really hard to stay organized during this class, which in turn flustered me a lot.

By the end, I was glazing the cake with another girl who had set her cake in the freezer with me – we were basically working at the same pace. However, the glaze set perfectly on her cake, but was too hot on mine and melted my white chocolate mousse. I wanted to scream. With minutes left, the chef scraped off this ugly chocolate glaze tainted with white chocolate, and told me to re-set my cake in the freezer. I put my cake in there, and somehow, the magnets holding down the parchment paper on the baking sheet in the freezer disappeared. The next time I opened the freezer, my cake had been mauled by the flying parchment paper in the blast freezer. I was close to tears; I just wanted to finish this damn cake and get out of there! The chef helped me fix up the glaze, and I scrawled the white chocolate drawing on top before running out of the kitchen. I felt unsettled for the rest of the day, like I was falling really far behind and too flustered to continue with classes.

Pralines and muscadines with icing sugar (not bloom!)

Since I’m doing intensive classes, I couldn’t just go home after a disaster to recollect myself for another day in the kitchen. We had to temper milk chocolate that evening. I had never used my thermometer before, and wasn’t quite familiar with the best way to use it. My thermometer is also not exact, I think. Anyway, so I was already feeling crappy about my day, and we began tempering milk chocolate. We had to make fillings to dip the chocolates, which took a bit of time but wasn’t too bad. Once I got to dipping my chocolates, even though it was just about reading a thermometer for the right temperatures, I was a nervous wreck. We were supposed to try the “tabling method”, which meant pouring the chocolate onto the marble to spread and cool, before scooping up the runny mass back into the bowl. It’s a very messy method, in my opinion, especially with a bunch of newbies who aren’t magical with their pastry scrapers just yet.

The chef overseeing the class was busy doing his own thing and didn’t talk to us much, which was kind of nice, but not that good for us because we sure could’ve used the extra pointers. As you can see in the pictures, my chocolates bloomed in the end due to bad tempering. Packing up the ugly chocolates, I was extremely upset on my way home after that long day.

We had had some really long days by then, and I was really discouraged after such a bad day in the kitchen where nothing worked out. Maybe I’m not meant to be a pastry chef, sure, but all those disasters and feeling out of control in the kitchen made me question my sanity for why I’m even here. I was really bummed out about how slow I had worked, and how poor my results were even though I took a long time. Intermediate pastry is more about the art of patisserie – beautifully crafted desserts with lots of flavours, so there’s always lots to do. Being fast and precise are keys to success. There are some very talented people here, and some people who are definitely serious about this profession. I’m feeling like I’m neither, and I’m sticking out like a sore thumb.

I came home and wallowed to my mom, Alex, and my sister before crashing into bed. Perhaps it was just a bad streak and things would get better, but I was too tired to encourage myself. It was class #8 already and I have just a couple of weeks to see where I’ll end up. Sigh, pastry is getting a lot harder for me! :(

{ 5 comments }

Catching up

on Wednesday 23 November 2011

in paris

Jamaica

Intensive classes are really what they sound like. Today I will be going to Demonstration #9, out of 20, and we’re only a week and a half into the course. I am exhausted, both physically and emotionally. I have always thought I loved baking, but in this rushed schedule it is hard to find my groove. I like to process the information, do the practical classes methodically, and take my time familiarizing myself with new things. There’s no time for that. We’ve had many days when we’ve had the practical class right after the demonstration.

The recipes are also getting more and more time-consuming and complex. While the finished products have all been delicious, they definitely do come with a price. I have gone from working quickly and efficiently in class in the beginning, to recently being close to the last one to finish in class. It’s a little deflating, I must admit. I hate feeling out of sorts and out of control, and these days classes tend to sway that way and leave me feeling completely flustered.

A quick photo recap of a few classes, and I’ll continue later on…

We had the Superior Pastry chef for the Jamaica, and that day I worked fairly quickly. Since his favourite thing to do is to rush people, I could totally get along with him that day. We baked our biscuits, which is basically just a thin ring on the outside and a bottom, and filled the rest of the cake with coconut mousse on the bottom, and mango-passionfruit mousse on top. The recipe itself is really long, but the cake wasn’t too bad to construct. The chef was really helpful that class, stopping by occasionally to give me hints on what I might want to do, or what I could do better, and it was overall a really pleasant experience and I learned a lot. I ended up giving the cake to a classmate whose flatmate was going to a party that evening, so no pictures of the cake inside.

Fraisier

That same night, we made the fraisier with the young chef. It was a super-whisking class, starting from a genoise cake inside the fraisier, to the mousseline cream on the outside. I should’ve gone with my instincts on the mousseline cream, but I put it in the fridge for a bit anyway because that’s how we were taught. By the time I incorporated the extra butter, the mixture was too cold for the mousseline cream to come together smoothly. The chef was really nice and helped me out by showing me how to warm it up on the stove better, and then when I thought my arm was going to fall off from all this whisking, my best puppy-dog expression got him to help me finish whisking.

The strawberries are all supposed to point up, but I made a little mistake early on when I was arranging, and went with it. The chef wasn’t too impressed, telling me that the strawberries are never to be arranged that way (so French). However, I think he was not too annoyed with me because I told him it started out as a mistake and he breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Good, that’s what I was hoping to hear.”

Raspberry-anise macarons, yuck

My last practical last week before we got Sunday off was restaurant desserts – specifically, macarons. I had made them from the Cordon Bleu recipe in Basic Pastry when we saw the demonstration, and knew what I was looking for in the mixture when I was making it. It was fairly straightforward, and a nice and relaxed practical class to end the week. We were supposed to plate a macaron, which I did, but I didn’t bring my camera. The only picture is an Insta.gram one from my phone…

By the time Saturday finished, I was dead on my feet. We finished the week with a demonstration on the Opera cake, and I came home and slept soundly for nine whole straight hours without stirring once. I spent Sunday puttering about, vowing to only speak to the lady at the boulangerie for a baguette and nothing else…and pretty much that was all I did. The rest didn’t feel like enough, though, because on Monday morning as I was walking to school, I felt like I could use another day to sleep. Perhaps this intensive course will actually make me miss the definition of working as sitting in a cubicle all day!

More to come, my week has just begun and so much has happened already.

{ 5 comments }

Best Tart Ever!

on Sunday 20 November 2011

in paris

Tarte Passion-Framboise

For the first time since all the tart-making began in Paris, we made a delicious one that brought a big smile to my face. It was our second class, and the demonstration was again pretty silent. The recipe was straightforward enough – a tart shell recipe that we had already made in Basic Pastry, with fruit fillings set by softened gelatine sheets. We had our practical class right after, and as we lined up at the door speculating who the chef was going to be, the younger chef came up the stairs behind us. I saw him first, and embarrassingly a huge smile crept up on my face when I did. I was just so relieved and happy that it was going to be someone good at teaching, and I was going to learn something! (Stop it, I know I’m a nerd.)

The class went by quickly and silently. The surprise came a few minutes in as the chef turned on the ovens: “The baking, it’s your problem now, not mine.” My friend and I widened our eyes at each other – say what? In Basic Pastry, this chef was famous for saying “I do the baking, not you.” This tart crust had to be blind-baked first, with a lot of steps in between, so we were in for a lot of back-and-forth trips to the ovens in the back of the classroom.

The baking happened pretty smoothly, and I actually didn’t mind it too much. It felt more relaxed to me, as weird as it may sound. Glancing at the clock every few minutes as we tidied up our stations and worked on our fruit fillings made the experience feel more natural, as if I were baking at home in my kitchen. Sure, there were a couple of moments when I was stuck at the stove cooking my fruit syrup, but wanted to check on the tart shells in the oven. However, it wasn’t a big deal if I left the shell in for a minute longer.

The chef was quiet and observing in his unnerving way during the whole class, and I kept on catching his eye, not knowing how to respond. Was he judging the way I was pouring in the fruit? What now? It was like he was back to his really scary self at the beginning of Basic Pastry, before he relaxed and started being nice to me during my pistachio log kerfuffle.

My friend and I worked well side-by-side and finished pretty quickly. Since we started on our fruit fillings early, her passionfruit cream actually set quite a bit at room temperature before it was time to fill the tart shell. She patched it up with some glaze and fretted about the chef not being happy about the bumpy look, but the chef was actually really nice and supportive when he looked at her tart. He told her everything was great, and her cream was just a little too cold, but that’s normal given how early she finished the cream.

When I brought my tart to the chef for marks, he looked at it quickly and said, “Great,” before busying himself with the palm pilot (people still use these?) on which he records our marks. Even though he had been really stern all evening, I pushed my luck a little bit and said, “That’s it? That’s all you have to say to me?” He looked up at me with raised eyebrows and said, “Well it is great. The filling, uh, it’s nice.”

Concluding that I wasn’t going to get much more out of him, I began to pick up my tart to make room for the next student. He suddenly said, “Leave it.” I stopped what I was doing and looked at him quizzically. Leave what? “Leave your tart here.”

At the end of the class when he made his usual closing remarks, the chef showed the class my tart as the example of what he wants to see on the final exam. He was not critical about it at all, and in fact said it was “almost perfect”. Since this is the first time (and probably last time) that I received such a wonderful compliment on my work at school, please let me have a moment to relish in the delight those words brought me.

Okay, I’m done. So far in Intermediate Pastry, so good!

The little tart pieces I saved for myself.

{ 2 comments }

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