Can't I just put butter on it? Butter makes everything better.

 Not gonna lie, I'm kind of tired of being in the kitchen. Thank God it's not the 50's. 

It's been a full day dry run of my midterm today. I know that it doesn't sound like a very successful dry run. 'Bri', you say, 'don't you only have four hours for your midterm? And today took you ten?' 

*In my head you sound like a Precious Moment when you talk.

But yes you would be absolutely right. I only have four hours to do everything that I took all day to do today. And there are even things that I will have to do on Wednesday that I didn't even DO today. Self-sabotage? Perhaps. My life resembled a bit of a science experiment today. I had my projections of what my midterm should look like, my HYPOTHESIS if you will -(guaranteed I just lost a couple of readers)- and compared it to what I felt I was capable of against what I was able to actually pull off. 

To my surprise -probably an hour added up throughout the day was made up of me congratulating myself on being realistic about my abilities and that I was 'going to be just fine at the midterm'- everything went fairly smoothly.  

Now being in pastry school has been an exercise in managed expectations. Anything you do at school -ANYTHING- that you choose to try and replicate at home, you will likely be disappointed. Professional kitchens are laid out with a certain modicum of premeditation. Ergonomics. "Flow". And you have a $1000 knife kit at your disposal. Your tuition has paid to enable anything you could want to put your hand to to be at your fingertips. Your apartment kitchen was made with the premeditation of "We were just going to put in a hot plate and a plug-in for a microwave but the building next door just put in new faucets and privacy film on the bathroom windows. So we have to at least make room for a full-size refrigerator." So any moments of Sound of Music-style spinning that was possible at school is only possible OUTSIDE your apartment. I don't remember my kitchen being inadequate before I went to pastry school. This is why you don't sleep around with other kitchens. Hindsight and all that.

So you get home. And you realize that you have a cloth piping bag that smells like morning breath (It DOESN'T dry well OKAY!?), you have a dough scraper that was obviously designed by someone who had never made bread before and purchased by someone (me) who hadn't a clue either, and your spatula has chunks missing along the side due to it being left on hot surfaces unattended. And then you feel sad. 

But then. You look back at your recipe. You remember the glory of school days recently passed. You conjure up your best show stopping dish. Commence dancing and inspired chanting at the glory of your semolina bread and how it's going to bring all the boys to the yard. 

Fast forward fifteen minutes: "Bah! This thing doesn't work AT ALL!"

Inspired chanting is replaced by swearing under one's breath. You make concessions for your recipe not shaping up like you had hoped. You pass the buck to the (now) broken spatula. You say that "It's just not for the home baker". And then you feel ashamed because you promised yourself that you would be better than that. Whatever you were making comes to a relative state of completion and you eat it with your eyes closed trying to resuscitate the previous beacon of talent and unchallenged winning. 

I have done this before if you couldn't tell. 

But today went well. I tried my best to preempt any tool-related shortages and use what I had at my disposal for it's intended purpose. I know you say, "Just take your knife kit home." But I would probably just say -and probably not very nicely- that it is simply not that simple. I don't know if you have ever been in the charge of a toddler or related small human before but there is this inevitable moment where you realized that they blew a shoe, or their pacifier or their blanket at all Hell breaks loose when they are without it. You search and retrace your steps. "You just had it. I don't understand." This life is my life. Everything I have is on an idiot -ahem, tether- when we go to the airport.  So two days before my midterm I am not going to lose my shoe THANK YOU VERY MUCH. 

I documented my truffle making process today because... I am a product of my generation and I have this insatiable desire to take pictures of my life on my phone using unnecessary photo sharing apps. Mae culpa, mea culpa. I worked with milk chocolate today whereas I've only worked with dark chocolate before. This made for a learning experience I probably could have saved for AFTER my midterm. Because dark chocolate has more cocoa solids in it, its sets up faster and requires less work to create the proper crystallization. The milk chocolate ganache is quite soft but it has bourbon in it so it can't be THAT bad right?

Including the Saran wrap and Archimedes the napkin holder seemed necessary. Or I just didn't realize I hadn't moved them until after. Our glass table isn't a marble and therefore will never be as great as marble but it definitely served its purpose well today. 

I also practiced my pate a choux paste today. I made eclairs, with drive me crazy but are on my exam, and then some profiteroles, which are much easier to work with and therefore more gratifying. I practiced some lemon curd today as well so instead of pastry cream I crammed the profiteroles full of lemon curd and left the finicky eclairs without any filling. That'll teach them right? Lie to me. 

 Tomorrow I have time to further finesse my agenda because I am the queen of over planning. A third of my class has already done their midterm. I want to ask them, ya know, pick their brain and TOTALLY obsess. But I know it is a short distance for me right now to go from there to rocking back and forth whispering, "I'll never teeeeeell." Best if I just keep to myself until Wednesday morning. 

Moozh did his this morning. The culinary students weren't told ahead of time what would be on their exam so Moozh went in blind. His chef told him that all of his stuff was cooked perfectly and that he did very well. And after six years of education and a master's program, Moozh still considered this midterm the most stressful exam he's ever written. I concur. Already. 

One more day to overprepare. 

Find a cookie. No, two. Find some ice cream. Make a sandwich. CUZ WHO DOESN'T LIKE AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH? Repeat. 

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Beta 5

The Oven Wall went on a field trip! And by field trip I mean, I got cabin fever and decided in the Vancouver drizzle to venture out of Yogapant-land (aka Kitsilano) and out into the land of some of the best coffee you will EVER HAVE, the art of finding beauty in concrete and a chocolate shop holy grail (aka EastVan). Next time I'll bring a good camera. 

When we were learning about chocolate in Foundations, Chef mentioned a chocolate shop that had started up in Vancouver by a buddy of his. Then he mentioned that they had a tobacco-flavored truffle. I think at that moment my brain kind of shorted out. Definitely didn't hear anything he said after that. I don't think he realized how dangerous it was to throw out such a mind blowing concept in such an off-handed way. The whole idea -nay- the INTENTION of combining those two glorious things into a TRUFFLE?! Mind blown. I knew that I had to have one. And I had to buy AT LEAST one for my scotch-lovin', Johnny Cash-quotin', corn cob pipe smokin' man aka The Moozh.

The moral of this story, preemptively of course because no one ever likes to wait for the moral, is when you feel these compulsions, act on them. Tobacco being the flavor of the month, and me having discovered it's existence on the 28th of February -even with a leap year on my side- I missed the February flavors.

The shop is called Beta 5. The name is very clever because the stablest formation of crystals in chocolate making and tempering is called Form V or Beta 5. That is the crystallization that is responsible for shiny chocolate, chocolate that isn't grainy and a bar of chocolate that has that great 'snap' when you break it. Nestled just off of Main St on Industrial Ave in a building a color somewhere between Pepto Bismol and flesh tone, Beta 5 Chocolates specializes in chocolate, marmalade, and other confections like caramels and marshmallows. 

*Why I felt compelled to take pictures with the awful camera on my phone, I don't know. It was all I had. Apologies. 

Despite having only the window on their door to work with, the shop has an open, brightness to it. The decor is industrial in a very cool way with exposed lightbulbs, metal shelving, wooden boards and cool cardboard packaging. 

 

 The people there are freaking awesome, even though all Vit D deprivation considered, we should all be feral and snarling at each other.

Beta 5's Chocolate Union is the version of chocolate of the month if Jesus had come up with it. Utter perfection. (Or Christopher Nolan. That guy's got a great track record.) It will redeem any negative connotations you have with the word 'union'. You can purchase a three-, six- or twelve-month membership. On the first Saturday of every month, you pick up your union package. Inside you will find an assortment of treats associated with a monthly theme. March's theme, because they're awesome and they GET IT, is Legends, Leprechauns and Libations. Within this theme you will find treats like Guinness truffles, green apple shamrock fruit jellies, chocolate covered potato chips among other things. *They have a 'crunch' category every month. Can't wait. 

Understandably this month's memberships are all old out.

 I picked up a six-piece Monthly chocolate, even though I was POSITIVE it wouldn't live up to the mythical tobacco truffles that I had hoped for. Wrong again. Sometimes our instincts, when clouded by our emotions, just aren't that reliable. The monthly flavors this month were Spanish olive oil, lime, pistachio, wasabi and genmai cha. The olive oil chocolate was smoooooooth.  Like Marvin Gaye smooth. The wasabi was good if not as pungent as I was expecting. I need to try another one in order to feel truly informed. You know, in order to give constructive feedback. My favorite out of the six, by far, was the lime. All of a sudden I felt like Mexico was in my mouth. (In the good way not in the hep-B, bad beef kind of way.) I associate Mexican cooking with that really intense, clear lime flavor. This truffle had that. I didn't share that one. My wifely dedication only extends so far. Mea culpa, Mea culpa.

I also went intending to buy a jar of their Bergamot Orange marmalade. *I feel marmalade is misunderstood and I appreciate that Beta 5 is working at a kind of renaissance. Beta 5 placed Second and third at the World Marmalde Awards (because there IS such a thing) for their Seville Orange marmalade and their Rangpur Lime marmalade respectively. They were out of the Bergamot orange (I'm seeing a pattern here) so I came home with the Blood Orange marmalade instead. The Blood Orange isn't as tangy as I assume the Seville Orange would be but its got this subtle deep pink to it. So preee-tay. I'll be hassling them until they get some more Bergamot in but I will also take what I can get in the meantime. By any account, their tactics to get me to come back are totally working. 

 So the moral of this story, yes there are two, is that if you are ever in Vancouver, you must make a stop at Beta 5. Tell 'em Chef sent you. You might get a deal. Don't tell them I sent you. They be like 'huh?'

Eat chocolate. Be happy. Repeat. 

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

"What do you want me to do? Dress in drag and do the hula?"

If I were a racer, and providing I could any longer see my toes, I would be stretching right now. I would be decked out in something unflattering, that wicks away sweat and pinches at your armpits (and your groin). I would likely be sizing up my competition, praying my shoelaces hold, and injecting myself with some kind of steroids (secretly). But I'm not a runner. I'm a baker. I still wear unflattering clothes. I still sweat a lot. Nothing pinches because everything is too big. (Which is a good sign.) I'm not sizing up my competition, I'm clinging to them for emotional support. I'm not on steroids but when you eat nougat for breakfast, you might as well be.

I ROYALLY messed up my marshmallows. I had coffee extract all ready for it. Coffee marshmallows + HoCho* = what you want your life to be all about. Or a mocha. This is a "both/and" kind of situation.
Anyways, I then realized we had a scaling situation on our hands as we were pouring the BOILING SUGAR SYRUP into our egg whites. Hot sloshy mess = not what marshmallows look like. And then I nearly poured that mess down the drain which would have resulted in, what we call in the culinary world, 'call the plumber cuz shit just went down'….and it's not moving. I guess. (This is stream of consciousness blogging.) But I've picked up some gelatine so I'm going to give it a try this weekend on my own when I should be studying for my midterm.

*HoCho is the gangst terminology for Hot Chocolate for those of you unaware. Now you know. And you sound cooler or as Moozh likes to call it, "Trying to be black, you white girl". You're welcome.

So marshmallows were not to be for us but we did make nougat. Did you know that nougat (and marshmallows and hard candies, I kid you not) started out as medicine? They were a way for pharmacists and apothecaries to cover up the gnarly taste of their medicine.
I was telling my friend Zoe that marshmallows used to be made from the mallow plant, that grew in marshes. And then I told her that they also used to be medicine. She will henceforth never believe anything credible I have to say. Certifiably.

But look at our nougat. Yum city, right?

Candied orange, toasted almonds and pistachio nougat. I don't know about you but I was NOT excited for nougat. Whenever I think nougat, I think of that irritating crud that gets stuck in your teeth when you eat a Toblerone. So I also associate nougat with Swiss Chalet. Not a good association. But this nougat is NOTHING like that crud. Like anything made by hand. My mind was completely changed about marshmallows, marzipan, and fondant for this same reason. When it's not churned out in a factory where the air smells like Frito Lay chips, it actually turns out pretty good. This nougat is chewy in the best way while still being pillowy. And it's not the 'clingy-chewy', where you think you're gonna rip out your fillings if you eat another piece. I have totally made things like that. Good nougat.

We also made Pate de Fruit (Pat-due-Free) yesterday and it is the candy equivalent of bacon. You will eat EXCESSIVE amounts of it and it 'cures' underneath a centimetre of granulated sugar for at least a day. K, maybe it's not JUST like bacon but it is so good. Again, it's the artisan equivalent of a fuzzy peach (or whatever fruit puree you choose to make it out of). I'm sure if Epic Meal Time found out about Pate de Fruit there would be a shirt that read "Pate de Fruit Pate de Fruit Pate de Fruit Pate de Fruit".

This week has been more of midterm prep.
We made more chocolate truffles:

More buns (accompanied by Chef's continuous jokes about 'handling our buns'. Hardy har. My sense of humour is the first to go under stress.)

We may take another stab at eclairs tomorrow but that is somewhat unlikely I think. We are learning plating tomorrow. Pretty desserts. I am forbidden to put a mint sprig on ANYTHING. EVER. Chef ranted about that for probably five straight minutes today. Which I get. Mint is boring. And unless you have halitosis, I would wager, no one eats the mint sprig. You either leave it on the side of your plate or flick it at your eating partner. (Moozh and I never go for dinner anymore. So strange.)
We made sauces today: caramel, chocolate, anglaise, fruit coulis, gelee, to use to plate things tomorrow. Eight hours will be spent on learning the art of the 'smear'. You know the one I'm talking about. The sauce that you always wish there was more of.

My practical is a week from today. Week. From. Today. What is scarier to me is that a week from tomorrow, I will BE in advanced, preparing food for the general public! But what if…what if something totally irrational and unlikely happens! What will I do?! How will I recover from the embarrassment?! Like what if I stab someone (by accident, for real)? What if I give someone food poisoning?! What if my mousse doesn't set?
(I'm trying to poke fun at myself now. I will laugh later. WHEN IT HAPPENS.)

P.S ~ Three points for me: I used the "Hula Dance" from The Lion King in conversation at school the other day. Someone mentioned something about doing the hula (Because this is what you talk about in your down time at pastry school) and of all the songs and quips that could have come to mind, I managed to pull this out, complete with dance moves, I can guarantee you. It's stuck there, in my head. That is core space I am never going to get back, never be able to use for any other useful purpose.

Find some Toblerone. DON'T EAT THE NOUGAT CRAP. Sing a Disney song. Repeat.

Friday, February 24, 2012

"How do strippers do it? They really must have so much cardio."

Oh chocolate. You've gotta be more like cilantro. Or Dub Step. A love or hate kind of thing. Because this ambiguous middle ground that I am feelin' for you right now is very confusing.
Chocolate demo: kind of frustrating. Not that inspiring.
Chocolate day: Kind of frustrating. Not as gratifying as I was expecting. Wanted to throw my chocolate writing AT somebody.
My chocolate-related imagination: Totally Wicked.

Chef put some bugs in my brain by the mere mention that things could be done with chocolate beyond what I've seen at Purdy's (which I would venture to say is one of the least imaginative chocolate shops ever. Which is not to say that it's not good.). Like instead of a ganache with cream and dark chocolate, you do it with passionfruit puree and milk chocolate?! Amazeballs. No kidding. Even tempering, which I was beyond unexcited for, was really pretty relaxing. And almost instantaneous. If you ever decide to try tempering at home (which I would probably just tell you to buy tempered chocolate), it will likely not take you long -unless your house is like Dante's Inferno. I dumped my chocolate on the marble, fooled around with my offset spatulas for like two minutes and the chocolate was already hardening. Back in the bowl and onto the ganache.

But flavours! Boundless. Which I knew but at the same time, there is so much I haven't even considered. Adding flavouring to a ganache is typically alcohol even though you could use nut pastes, and syrups if you so desired. The alcohol we used was pretty much cleaning solution. You took the lid off and instantly the kitchen smelled like a casino: just alcohol and sweat. But think about using a spiced rum, or a bourbon. Chef told me you could get tobacco truffles. Which I WANT. As in, not optional. You could do an Irish Car Bomb truffle. You WOULD fall down but man would that be tasty. And worth it. The things I love about what foodie culture has contributed to the culinary world is a creativity and a playfulness to flavour and texture combinations. Not that that aspect wasn't present before but now you have this demographic desperately seeking it out.

Like rosemary chocolate truffles. Or lemon rind cacao nib chocolates. Why am I dreaming about this? I pretty much everything about chocolate including it's mother on Thursday. Whatever.

My dark chocolate truffles and Lex's white chocolate truffles. Chef complimented our properly tempered coating but my ganache had a chunk of solid chocolate at the base from when my ganache set unevenly on the marble. That's what is known in the culinary world as 'not paying attention'.

Today we made Dobos Strips, prepped petit fours and made rolled fondant for our cake decorating days next week. I know that I will feel as if I have been transported back to elementary school when I was trying desperately to do one of those stupid grid pictures. Art + Math = no thanks. People will walk past my station, squint, clear their throats and then ask, "What is that?" at which point I will probably growl, insult them in my internal monologue and reply, "I'm not done yet." But of course we all know, I will never be done. Because it was supposed to be a  teapot, why does it look like a cactus?! That's it! I'm being a librarian!

…

I'm really aiming for something realistically achievable next week. Employing a lot of cut outs. Stencils. Bands of fondant. Like scrapbooking but with cakes. And not like Michael's scrapbooking where you pay $3 for a sheet of patterned paper. But like, Drunken Craft night scrapbooking where you cut out your friend's face and put a Powerpuff Girl sticker on them. That kind. Just trying to keep it interesting.

This is my Dobos Strip, which is a kind of petit four. My friend Danielle accurately described it as my cake having 'toast on the top'. Which I think is mortifyingly accurate and totally hilarious. This is what a Dobos is supposed to look like (once again put to shame by Smitten Kitchen. This woman has a two year old!)

And then we hand made rolled fondant. Or I made three batches of fondant. We had a couple people absent and so Chef asked me to make a second batch after I finished my first one. "Yours is good", he said to which I wanted to reply, "Totes a fluke Chef". But I don't think 'totes' is in Chef's vocabulary. So I did a second. And then he was going to do a double batch in the Hobart. So I did that one too. Hopefully, in my future I will look back on this day and I will say, "I am glad I got so much practice on fondant because otherwise I would be in a real pickle right now." Because in my future, I will STILL be lending from profanity and so I will STILL be talking like a Precious Moments doll and my life will be hard.

I also made caramel sauce last night that is so bitter that I need to throw it out but I want to save it so it's in my fridge. I talked to Chef about it and he's going to demo caramel sauce three different ways for me on Monday! I will be a caramel genius and Moozh will love me for it! And then I may just inch above Indian Food for first place rank in Moozh's heart. It'll be temporary but it will be a success!

Guess who's hilarious? Daily Grace! I want to be her. Especially in the kitchen.

Find some fries. Melt chocolate over them. Eat it standing in the kitchen, preferably in the dark. Exclaim over the redemption. Repeat.