"May your crust be crisp and your bread always rise."

Oh Y'all. 

Operation Avoidance is a go. Yesterday, I pulled out my RUSSIAN NOTES. What was going through my head was a combination of 'I really wish my Russian vocabulary was better. I was really getting quite good. Shame shame,'  and 'WHAT A BUZZ KILL. Only sheer panic will get me to work on this stupid project.' Sounds like me yeah? 

I am being excessively melodramatic (which is so unlike me). I have a simple project that I have to do on Peter Reinhart. They may as well have said, 'Take a look at the books on your shelf. Do a presentation. You may have to bake.' I have had a crush on Peter Reinhart for a while now, ever since I found his bagel recipe on Smitten Kitchen.  He is such a sweet man with such a genuine and unobscured passion for bread. Go to YouTube and type in Peter Reinhart. You will see countless demos of his showing folding techniques, shaping techniques, how to prepare a home oven to bake bread in. He is currently an instructor at Johnson and Wales in Charlotte, North Carolina. I do not go to that school. And thank goodness. Because taking a bread class from Peter Reinhart would be akin to me taking a creative writing class from Margaret Atwood. I think I would die on sight. Which is really so embarrassing, especially when you have questions you wan to ask them and you were trying to make a good impression. My favourite clip of Peter Reinhart, however, is his TedTalk. He found out that he liked to bake bread when he was in Seminary. He was just kicking in Boston with some friars, making their meals for them. And then we thought, "I. Am. The bomb dot com. Let's open a bakery." And so he did. He and his wife, Susan (who I imagine being similarly lovely), started up Brother Juniper's Bakery -Brother Juniper was a friar alongside St. Francis of Assisi. IMAGINE the name dropping. And Brother Juniper's became a BIG DEAL. It was in San Francisco and soon it was supplying the entire Bay Area with his line of breads. 

All of this informed Reinhart's opinion of bread and bread baking. He has this beautiful spirituality about and it comes through in his TedTalk where he parallels the process of bread baking with the spiritual walk and with the internal process. 

After you watch his profoundly spiritual pontifications on bread, you have to watch his Pizza Quest videos. They are hysterical. It is Peter Reinhart, wearing a little red kerchief around his neck, talking to hipster pizza makers in the Castro district in San Francisco about what makes their pizza so good. And some of them are super hipster and too cool about it but some of them have a really genuine passion about making good food for people. And all the while, Peter Reinhart sits there with a huge smile on his face, totally engaged, unfazed by any mention of 'coolness' or performance. 

But now I have to do a presentation and it's got me thinking that I don't have a clue and that everything is going to be awful. I can't just make one of his breads. I have to interpret one of his bread recipes. I have to plate it. WTF. This is not a pastry project. There is no PLATING of bread. You stick it in a basket with maybe some oil to dip it in. And I know which recipe my Chef wants me to make because Peter REinhart is KNOWN for that bread. And my Chef straight up told me that's what she wants me to make. And the girl in the other class already did her Peter Reinhart presentation and hit it out of the park. And now I have to step up to that. Crap. 

Reinhart is known for his bread called, Struan. It is a whole grain bread, out of his book called Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. He came up with a new method of fermentation that breaks down the harsh fibres in whole grains and produces a lighter, better tasting full grain loaf. I have yet to really give it a shot because like I said, I'm AVOIDING him. I don't want to make a loaf of bread like I am known for making here. One that is dense, rubbery and doesn't taste like anything. I find home bread baking so very deflating and I don't want to be deflated right now. I also don't want to go into my presentation blind. And so here I sit. With my Russian notes on my lap. Totally forgot about 'Kookla'. Gonna slip that into conversation tomorrow. 

If you are interested in baking bread at home at all, I highly recommend Peter Reinhart's books. The Bread Baker's Apprentice is easily his best. It is an accessible method and it produces gorgeous artisanal bread. And try his bagels. They are damn fine bagels. And you will feel like a damn fine baker. 

Find a cookbook. One with pretty pictures. Pick one. Make it. Eat it. Like it. Repeat. 

"Quick! Look like you're having fun."

Oh hello Good Friday. And hello Easter Sunday and Monday. Get the flip off my porch Tuesday.

So fast. It was over so fast. It was Thursday and I was gearing up to sleep in and have my husband all to myself. And then it was Tuesday and I was asking myself what I was doing in my uniform already.

Having four days with my husband where we could sleep in, eat a meal together and have conversations that consisted of more than just one of us rolling over saying, 'Bye Babe' or 'Hi Babe' or "You must be tired" was just long enough for me to get really used to it. Tuesday became extremely offensive to my newly acquired sensibilities quite quickly.

The week following was really fun. I was on dessert service again. After my experimental (and non-lucrative) jaunt with the strawberry soup, I figured I would stick to something really reliable. Lent was also newly over. What do most people give up for lent? Booze and dessert. Let's do it up.

So I made a Red Wine Chocolate Cake with a Blackberry Sherry Ice Cream and a Cassis Sabayon. Yep, there was alcohol in all three parts. With the candied hazelnuts from the dessert before. This should have been a hit out of the park but then like ten people came into the restaurant to eat that day. Girl just can't catch a break.

Then I moved on to Bake Shop aka Pate a Choux-land. My Chef wants us to be super confident when it comes to making pate a choux (which is what eclairs, cream puffs, profiteroles, etc are made of) and thus at any spare opportunity she has us making some. It's likely going to be on our final so it's REALLY good practice. Hordes of eclairs, cream puffs, big and small, St. Honore cake bases.

Friday was my first day in the chocolate room and I spent eight hours trying to temper chocolate. I have never had a hard time tempering chocolate but, for some reason, I chose Friday to use up eight hours.

Saturday. Now Saturday was fun. We got to volunteer, through the school, for an event in the city called "Growing Chefs." GRowing Chefs is an organization in Vancouver that looks to educate school age children about food, agriculture and sustainability. They engage kids in farming and cooking exercises, teaching them where their food comes from and how it gets to them. Very cool. On Saturday, Growing Chefs did a fundraising event called "Guess who's coming to Dinner?" Highly recognized chefs from all over the city volunteered their time to cook for a group of people who bought tickets to a dinner. Matt and I got to assisted one of said chefs in preparing one of the dinners around the city. Our chef, Andrea Carlson, has such an amazing ethic about cooking and she was also one of the founding members of Growing Chefs. She has worked at amazing restaurants in her career. What's even better was our menu for the night. The theme was "Wild Botanicals" which was a purely vegetarian meal using unfamiliar and locally grown produce to create the dinner. Basically, I have never been so full in my life. She made a farro risotto (which I could probably eat for the rest of my life) which burdock root and salsify (do YOU know what that is? I didn't.) There was wild sorrel and miner's lettuce that Andrea foraged herself. Green almonds (look them up!), morel cream sauce, black garlic compote. For dessert she made nougat with toasted walnuts and blue cheese and she served it with a walnut port. She even made, as an amuse bouche, a cherry blossom spritzer made from cherry blossoms she picked from the tree in her yard and cured in salt!?!?! Seriously.
I hope to work with Andrea again. At the end of the night, I basically told her that I was at her feet and her service whenever she needed it. Which made me seem crazed or really keen, one of the two.

Monday, I got tempering under my belt and with the necessary reflection, figured out that I make things too hard for myself. So strange. Instead of getting frustrated I made coconut lime white chocolate truffles and ginger pear milk chocolate truffles.

Today. Banquet plating. On Monday we had a party of fifty come in and today we had a party of twenty-five. The timing of banquets is fascinating to me. It's kind of a 'hurry up and wait' kind of situation. But when you have everything you need and you're all working together. It's really cool to see it all come together at the same time and go out seamlessly.

I can't remember if I mentioned it when I was in basic but this cake is called a "Pasuwa". It's a speciality that the school does. They actually invented it. It is chocolate cake on the bottom, a layer of chocolate mousse, chunks of cheesecake and chocolate chips, another layer of chocolate cake, another layer of chocolate mousse and one more layer of cheesecake to top it off, glazed with a chocolate glaze. It's made in both individual sized dome cakes, like above, or in lager 6" and 8" layer cakes. The banquet party ordered Pasuwa as their dessert so then it was just a matter of figuring out how to make it pretty. I got to be lead hand, and come up with the plating, which was pretty fun. I posted a pic of it on Facebook and a friend of mine who's an architecture student posted that it was 'under strain and thus had to be eaten'. I guess I put too much faith in tempered chocolate to hold cookies up. Fulcrum and all that.

Tomorrow is a new day. We got new candy thermometers today and so I brought my old one home so now I have one here as well. I've got my eye on a sponge toffee recipe. Memories of my dad and I trying to make sponge toffee come to my mind. It was always either too hard, more like snap toffee, or too crumbly. If I can master it, I will consider it a top achievement of my pastry education. And then I can brag.

Make a cake. Your choice. Buy a candy bar. Use it as a 'garnish'. That's what we pastry people do. Eat. Feel spiffy. Repeat..

Sistine Chapel with a caramel crust

Methinks I need a proviso.

I don't hate creme brûlée. I don't think any less of people who like creme brûlée. In fact, most of the people I hold intensely dear get creme brûlée every time they are in a restaurant. My Moozh, love of my life and the ministry to my silly walks, ordered creme brûlée just last night. And I DIDN'T EVEN SAY ANYTHING! Creme brûlée is a beautiful combination. There is something mega satisfying about cracking through the sugar crust and finding silky smooth custard, with everything from chocolate to fresh berries to earl grey tea flavouring it up. But let me put it this way: If you were capable of painting the Sistine Chapel but you were all, "Ya know, I think I'm just gonna skip class and tape pictures from magazines onto the front of my binder…" WHAT. There is nothing wrong with taping pictures to your binder. I do it too. But why the flip aren't you painting the Sistine Chapel!? Not that I'm saying that burnt orange ice cream is the Sistine Chapel.

Juuuuuuuust kidding. All this is to say, when you are on a paintball course, you run, you scream, you shoot the crap out of things. Have fun. Go crazy. I will have ample opportunity to make creme brûlée when I get a job out of school. Because EVERY RESTAURANT I've ever been  to has it on their menu.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm on dessert tomorrow and it needs to be chocolate and I'm out of ideas. Or maybe I can only remember putting flipping curry in it. Oy.

Touché, toffee pudding

 I was beaten by a sticky toffee pudding. Powerless against a sticky toffee pudding. 

I feel like I have been on a marathon of dessert service lately. Broken up only by two days of production where I glazed two consecutive cakes that fell apart due to assembly-related errors. I also made some of the most hideous happy birthday signs and one "congratulations on thirty years with Shelfspace Mark." In my opinion, if you have text that you want on a cake, it's like twitter. You have only so much you are allowed to say. 

So then today. I was not totally excited to serve but I was excited to try out something different. To do something fresh and springy, something maybe a bit more palatable than a chocolate are with curry spices. I don't know if I isn't don't have the skill but today was not an exercise in mainstream dessert experimentation. 

 

I stumbled upon (and yet I did so without StumbleUpon) a video on CHOW by Mindy Segal. CHOW does these cool video segments called "Go-To dish". For some people, like Molly Ringwald, it's a roasted chicken recipe that they always use. It could be a cocktail, a soup, bread, anything really. CHOW introduced me to Mindy Segal and I fell in LOVE with her. She's a James Beard nominated chef, which means she's talented 'fer realz', and she owns a restaurant put of Chicago called Hot Chocolate. *Check it. They have marshmallows on their menu*. I am absolutely prepared to monologue  and dictate the entire video but you should just go watch it because it's awesome. But what I found so fascinating in the video was the sense of creativity and potential. Flavors that are exciting. Textures. So she makes a fruit consommé. When I showed Matt the first thing out of his mouth was "that's not a real consommé' and it's not but we pastry chefs...sometimes we just don't understand. We play with concepts and sometimes we play with concepts A LOT. *Notice how I said 'we pastry chefs' as if I am one. Self-talk. Self-talk.* 

 A fruit consommé, or more prosaically, a fruit soup had been on my mind since I saw the video. Every time it has come around to coming up with a dessert, I have thought 'should I do it today'? Every time I have ended up with a 'no' based on the fact that no one would order it. Making a dessert that doesn't sell can be deflating, even if you really like it. But today I bit the bullet and I indulged my soup-lust.

I started with a strawberry purée, which has such a phenomenal strawberry flavor and then I simmered it with some dried lavender, some sweet ginger (that pink stuff you put on sushi), some black pepper, and a squeeze of lemon. I thinned it out a bit with some water so it didn't taste just like purée. I spent so much time in the culinary dry storage picking out spices for the components of my dish. I felt like Baba Yaga, eye of newt and that kind of stuff. each time I walked past the culinary pastry station where sticky toffee pudding was being prepped. Take my 'Creme brûlée rant' and sub in 'sticky toffee puding' and you've got my inner monologue. "Ooooh sticky toffee pudding. Be still my beating heart." With gusto, of course, 

I was reading through Michel Roux's dessert book the other day and he had a recipe for apple gelees. They were these gorgeous champagne-colored cubes, clear and flawless and he said he often uses them either as a component to his dish or as a garnish. I was going to do an angel food cake, because of its light texture and great crust, but I knew that it was going to get hella soggy in the soup without a bottom. With this in my mind, I grabbed some apple juice and infused it with some fresh tarragon. Tarragon, you say? I have the greatest chef for me. Blessed in basic training and blessed in advanced. My Chef in advanced seems to understand how to motivate me. She also understands my palate and how, therefore, to intrigue me. I love strawberries and balsamic vinegar. It is a slam dunk in my book. Macerate some strawberries in some balsamic vinegar and some sugar over night, you have the best topper for ice cream ever. Ever. Chef suggested the quality of tarragon, being anise-y, citrusy and slightly herbaceous, as another great foil for strawberries. My palate was going crazy today. Total sensory overload but it was wonderful. I even took a core out of the angel food and filled it with some vanilla chantilly cream with sme minced tarragon in it to tie things all together.

So I have all of my components together and for the very first time I have having a very relaxed time of dessert service. I realize, in retrospect, that I COMPLETELY forgot about the customers. I was just having fun playing in the kitchen. Then I had to go get changed into my serving jacket. I come back and I have this moment. No one is going to want this. Everyone in my class was clamorous to try it. The strawberry soup was so fragrant. The angel food had great lift (and consequently a great collapse). The gelee providing one hell of a great snack. I candied some slivered hazelnuts for a bit of crunch on top. It was going to be a thing of beauty.

I sold four. Count 'em. Not a huge hit. The sticky toffee pudding sold out. My pride was wounded, I will admit. Wounded in the best way possible but still a crushing blow to the ego.

After dessert service closed, however, the masses descended and my classmates got their taste. All comments tasted together, gelee, soup and angel food with the chantilly. It was just a mouthful of flavor. So despite my loss in the dessert service race, I still think I made one hell of a dessert, one I would love to make again. My plating was not thought through. The gelee screwed up the soup decor every time. The plate didn't have enough color in my opinion. The cake needed some TLC in the worst way. All good things to think on. 

And it's still better than sticky toffee pudding, I swear to God!

It is Easter. Go find a sunset. Drink some wine, eat some cheese, watch it set. Repeat. Easter Peeps optional. 

"You can't leave the table until you eat that."

 Well y'all. Today was another trip to the dessert service circus. There are those that are made for the showmanship of fine dining. The deadline, the service, plating, customer gratification in real time. And then there are those, and I include myself in this category, that thrive in the equivalent of baking in a closet. With the lights off. Having but a few hours to put something together, balance my expectation, execute and present turns me into Molly Shannon in Superstar. I get weird. And very aggressive. And every time, without fail, I ask myself the question, "Why do I have the make things so hard for me? Why can't I ever choose something easy?" 

My first sewing project was a lined, fitted denim jacket. No boxer shorts for me. I didn't want to buy my wedding dress, I wanted to make it. (plus my engagement was like three seconds long it felt like.) I didn't want to start out doing character sketches or short stories. I wanted to do NOVELS. With a main character that's mute. 

Given this tendency in me, pastry school has been no different. My first dessert service, I did a frozen souffle, which was an exercise in, "What the eff AM I DOING!?" I was covered collar to fingertip in passion fruit souffle. I could smell my caramel sauce caramelizing its way to its death on the stove behind me. And my chocolate cake bloated like a preteen to three times the size I thought it would be. And yet, it was a hit. The diners liked it. I got good feedback from my chef and classmates. And I went home and slept. Satisfaction. 

And so, with that experience behind me, I could have applied some marked sense of wisdom or temperance to my day today. 

But I didn't. 

Behold, "Madras chocolate cake with burnt orange ice cream."

 

Now y'all I have a but of a confession. I have a weird palate. My mouth just wants weird things. A girl in my class wants to do a blue cheese-kimchi croissants. I WANT THAT. I love acid, I love bitter, herbaceous and vegetal. I am still training to be a pastry chef. I'm okay with acknowledging my hubris that but I'm finding that it is alienating me from producing the "hit it out of the park" stuff, if you will. I do have girls in my class who are amazing and honest and know when to reel me in when I need it. "Umm no offense but the general populace would NOT buy that." Good to know. But my Chef has been brilliant in coaching me that it's all how you sell it. 

When you read 'madras' what comes to mind is probably correct. Madras is curry. My chocolate cake had cinnamon, cardamom, ginger; gorgeous chai spices. It also had cumin in it. Which was "subtle...delicious...perfect...I think I crossed the line". The ice cream was so good. It was an orange caramel ice cream and so there absolutely nothing creamsicle about it. It tasted like Grand Marnier. This deep, beautiful, dark orange flavor. The recipe is originally from the Gourmet Cookbook (which is a MASSIVE compendium and well worth the investment if you're looking for a huge book on desserts) but I found the recipe on Lottie + Doof. He had me at 'burnt orange ice cream' but then what truly sold me was when he said ,'this ice cream is not for everyone'. Why I chose to do it for a dessert that kind of has to be for everyone? These are the questions of my life. There is an aspect to fine dining where some people come with an adventurous spirit and foodie culture has absolutely nurtured that demographic. *This is one side to my love-hate relationship with foodies.* But I think the majority of people go to fine dining restaurants because they want prime rib done really well. Do they come prepared for sweetbreads? They come for vanilla creme brûlée. Do they come prepared for curry cake? 

*As an aside, I can't bring myself to make creme brûlée. At school, at me, anywhere foe any reason. To me it is a 'culinary dessert' and that is my snobbery coming through. I know that there is nothing wrong with it. There is a pastry chef based out of Portland, OR named Jeff McCarthy and he summed up my feelings about creme brûlée: "ordering a creme brûlée is like buying a golden retriever. Have some fucking imagination." I feel like such a douchebag, and a hipster which is worse, but that is EXACTLY how I feel. There are MOUNDS of amazing, mind-blowing desserts out there that would create such a memory for your guests and enlist your creativity as a pastry chef and you want to make creme brûlée. It has been DONE. (I also like Jeff McCarthy  because he shares my affection for bread pudding. Which is an equivalent to what I just expressed about creme brûlée for some people. One of the advanced chefs thinks that bread pudding should never be on a menu. I have been put in my place.)

Someone restrain me because I'm on the conveyor belt heading towards molecular gastronomy and I do not have the finesse yet to do anything accessible or palatable with that just yet. I wanna make fruit foam!

This has been 'rant-y' but unfortunately this is one of my outlets for that. I am on dessert service again on Friday and next Monday as well. I will document the carnage which likely me something along the lines of "And then we have a port sabayon on some soggy cardboard. It lends tis really fabulous 'earthy' quality." Sure.

Find some strawberries. Plus sour cream, plus brown sugar. Maybe some balsamic reduction. MAYBE. Thank the gods of simplicity and dairy. Repeat.