becoming the baker

2010-02-22T13:04:00.003-05:00

ever wonder how to make scones, 'on the fly'? let me know if this helps!

2008-02-26T18:48:00.004-05:00

Day 100: Ends. Middles. Beginnings.

Well, obviously, it's the end of the road here at school: graduation day is here at last (is this the fourth one of these for me? I think it is... who keeps track of these things!?), replete with champagne, portfolios, the rather déclassé tall hats, and pictures with the folks.

My pants are tight. But not as tight as they were on the last day of the cake section, thank God.

Obviously the end of school is not an end in itself, as we all part ways to seek the shores we got in these boats to find in the first place. (As anyone with even elementarily developed math skills should be able to tell, it's been a while since graduation day, and I've been in the field for some months now, but I can still taste the fear on my tongue as I walked out of my office of eight years for the last time, "leaving it all behind" in pursuit of my true calling. Not for nothing, it was hard to do and I miss the old career at times, but as future writings will hopefully communicate, I love what I'm doing, ardently.)

Not that you require disclaimers, but here is one anyway: I hope you don't think that eighteen-day entry I just posted was copping out. I have to tell you, things like cake and chocolate are skills that people spend decades practicing, under immense pressure and with acute focus, just to learn them capably enough to make them suitable as professions. As such, we spent several days just getting a grasp on each project I mentioned in that entry. This isn't to say that it was boring, but my rhetorical skills are limited to the extent that to have elaborated further would have made it seem that way. Hence, I compacted the information into a reasonably succinct account of our final days so you could continue to enjoy my writing in the manner to which the previous forty-two posts had accustomed you.

I am glad this particular blog is at an end. Lately especially, I have had so many thoughts racing through my head, about bread and pastry and food, that only by writing them down will I be able to pin them down long enough for them to materialize fully. Rest assured, if they form into something that I feel it worthwhile to babble about, you'll be the first to know. Both of you.

Thanks for reading.

2008-02-26T15:38:00.009-05:00

Days 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, and 99: Conformation.

The last two projects, special-occasion (read: wedding) cakes, and molded chocolates, were all about the art of conforming. Human intuition tells us when working with things like chocolate and fondant - that great mass of sugar one rolls out and turns into cake upholstery - that we would simply need to find a way to conform it to our needs and to make it work. Allow me to elaborate.

Let's begin with fondant. (Don't be scared by this word. Some people say fahn-dahnt, putting equal emphasis on both syllables, which I find awkward as it rolls across my my absurdly delicate palate. I say FOND'nt - which sounds more melodic to me. Anyway.) Fondant is something like taffy in consistency, only not quite so sticky and perhaps marginally firmer; I suppose that would depend on where you shop for taffy. It takes color remarkably well, and can be smoothed, through no small efforts of legerdemain on the part of the baker, to a finish as fine as the sheets they use at the Four Seasons. It is hence extremely popular for fanciful cakes, particularly at weddings of course. Fondant is somewhat the operatic soprano of the pastry world: it's certainly sweet but the question of substance does come up, it doesn't take direction particularly well, and once it sits somewhere it's pretty much staying there. (That was a little mean but I've earned it.) This terribly aggravating component of our final cake-related project stumped nearly all of us, myself most definitely included. In the end, I was able to choose my decor elements cunningly enough to conceal any areas that brought to mind the skin on and around the less savory parts of an elephant. But only marginally, I must add; I got by on luck.

The one aspect of this process I was able successfully to objectify was the fact that we were instructed in rolling the fondant very thin. I was greatly relieved because, as anyone who has been to a wedding or three knows, the stuff is not really good eating; it's rolled off as frequently as on. When it's three-eighths of an inch thick, it poses a reasonable barrier to enjoyment of the cake it's covering. As the fifty-five-member crowd that eventually eviscerated my cake can tell you, mine was fortunately thin enough to avoid this obstacle. Another fortunate aspect of this educational segment was that it allowed me to realize I wouldn't want to decorate cakes for a living. Occasionally, sure, especially now that I know I can do at least a decent job of it, but there must be easier ways to pay the bills.

Concurrently with our lessons in rolling and draping fondant, we were introduced to another use of it. By adding carboxymethylcellulose, a plant- and acid- derived chemical, we turned the fondant into a substance called gumpaste. Adding CMC dries the fondant so that it can be more easily worked with and rolled more thinly, after which it dries completely for use in lasting, usually floral, decorations. Edible? Technically, yes, but not advisable or practical. In any event, this is where pastry work becomes the most detailed. The fine brushes come out of the case, and powders, dusts, and dyes are applied, using a variety of odd tools unidentifiable in normal society. If proper care is taken, gumpaste and its entourage can be used to create perfectly realistic floral details. I kept returning to azaleas for some reason, and so chose to use them as the primary decor elements of my springtime-wedding-themed cake. I bunched them up with some roses, mimosas, generic "five-petal blossoms," vines complete with vaguely iridescent (and therefore to my mind dewy) "buds," and leaves. Oh, and ladybugs, which I thought were a nice touch, if a little precious. I stood back, admired the cake, and then, as mentioned, shared it with fifty-five or so colleagues in the career I'd soon be leaving.

From fondant, intractable though it seemed at the time, we progressed to taming an even testier shrew: good old chocolate. The term "tempering," which we've all heard, simply refers to cooling and agitating melted chocolate (albeit in very specific ways) so that the cocoa butter's crystal structure develops in a very defined and organized way. This results in chocolate that, once resolidified, has shine and snap. If you want to see what happens when you don't do it properly, just go melt some chocolate in a little bowl in the microwave and wait a few hours. The pasty, crumbly mess that results clearly wouldn't be suitable for use as food. To temper it properly, close attention must be paid to temperature - too high and the cocoa butter separates, "breaking" the chocolate and bringing it out of emulsion (this is bad). Once it's cool enough and you have established the beginnings of a crystal structure (through any of a number of methods more complicated than I feel it necessary or practical to explain fully here), the chocolate is then agitated (usually by stirring), to spread that crystal structure around the rest of the chocolate. When using chocolate as an ingredient, tempering is typically not bothered with, but it's compulsory if the chocolate in question will be standing alone or encasing something.

Our first project with tempered chocolate was the creation of molded chocolates, which we may think of as truffles. They usually wind up as small, shiny, scalloped shapes, shells, hemispheres, pyramids or what have you, filled with caramel, fruit creams, ganache and the like. They're the things in boxes that you pinch and put back if the filling is just too repulsive. Not terribly difficult to produce satisfactorily, if you can get past the fact that the molds you make them in require cleaning with cotton balls. Clearly, the chocolate used in molding required a good temper (in terms both chemical and emotional), but it was crucial to an even greater degree in our final-final project, our chocolate showpieces. Mine, born of a love of the Alien films and perhaps a latent desire to disappoint myself, was to be an offworld flower rising from a turquoise pond (poured sugar), with a blown glass (sugar) bulb as stamen, and broad, reaching leaves (chocolate) sheltering its own (white chocolate) sprout-babies. If it sounds bizarre in concept, perhaps I succeeded. The irony of calling it a showpiece endured, as I would prefer no one had seen it. (But, since they all got to, I've posted a picture here as well.) It was an important exercise, anyway, in learning not only how to construct things with chocolate, but in discovering the importance of restraint when being creative.

In the end, I found pastry to be about the craft of conforming. The things which must conform, however, aren't the butter, sugar, eggs, custard, filling, topping, dough, batter, icing, piping, spice, flower, fruit, jelly, nougat, caramel, paint, powder, nut, sauce, covering, and chocolate that we're working with, but rather our attitude toward and attention to each of those things. When we learn to listen to the crackle of a crust as we pull a loaf of bread from the oven, to feel the spring of a perfect muffin, to see the shine on a layer of caramel, to smell the butter rising in waves from a fresh croissant, to taste the acid of a strawberry as inquisitively and with as much pleasure as its sweetness, we realize that to learn from food we need only observe it with a little care. It teaches us as much about our own desires and choices as it does about the world around us.

And in the end, what does it mean to Become The Baker? Evolving into one's own skin? Creating substance from ash and water? Bringing many diverse elements into one resonant confluence? Perhaps it means these things, but maybe it's something simpler. To my mind, baking simply brings into focus how little is truly needed for man to survive. From such little as flour, water, and a few grains of salt, man has lived through the millennia; twenty thousand years of bread just can't be wrong. Baking of course encompasses a far wider circle of technique and ingredients, not to mention purposes, but the principle is still the same. Through ingenuity, technique, or just plain physics, what comes out is always more than the sum of what went in. It's this alchemical aspect that brings me back again and again to the oven, and which will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

I Am The Baker.

2007-10-07T14:03:00.001-04:00

Days 80 and 81: Flowers. Chocolate.

It sounds like Valentine’s Day, I realize, but this little foray had little in store when it came to romance. We revisited chocolate plastique, which you may recall from Days 68 and 69 (adorning the cake I gave to the stranger on the subway).

The first time we worked with it, all we had to do with chocolate plastique was wrap a cake in it, and then fold little rectangles of it into abstract crinkles. Now, however, as we continue to learn about those greatest of all pastry displays, wedding cakes, the focus is on pretty little things like bows and flowers. We begin to appreciate, difficult though it seemed at the time, how easy it is to make abstract things. The process for bows is pretty straightforward: once you’ve rolled the chocolate plastique nice and thin, cut it and fold it into bow shapes. Not exactly a thrill ride, but don’t worry; the lack of excitement there was made up for once we got to roses. As with marzipan, small petal shapes are cut from thinly rolled chocolate plastique, and placed between two sheets of parchment paper. These small cutouts are then placed between two sheets of parchment or acetate, and the second skill (the first being rolling) is applied. With the back of a spoon, you press gently on each petal, moving in a circular motion. By paying extra attention to the edges in this step, you can give each petal-to-be an irregular ruffle along its edge, as real rose petals often have. This is by far the hardest part to learn. While you work to master the motion, figuring out how to achieve the proper shape as you go, you constantly have to pay attention to thickness. If they’re too thick, they’ll look cartoonish, and if they’re too thin... well, they can’t be too thin. Thin and delicate is really what you’re going for, but obviously this results in special challenges in handling. Once you’ve managed to press out at least fifteen (plus about thirty extra in case two or fourteen of them break), you can begin constructing the rose. This third skill was perhaps the easiest. All that’s really left to do is attach the petals to a small cone of chocolate plastique, first a layer of three, followed by a layer of five, followed by a layer of seven, gluing each on with a little egg white as you go. I would recommend cheating like I did: refrigerating the pressed-out petals enables you to actually use them; a benefit in my mind. Once I’d figured out that extra step, it became a very gratifying exercise, and one which I can see using in the future should I need a bit of elegant décor on one cake or another.

This repose from icing was almost a sort of mini-vacation. After the buttercream, chocolate plastique seems to melt at an incredibly slow pace, so this was a chance for us to spend a little more time in search of perfection.

Which eluded us nonetheless.

2007-09-24T14:23:00.000-04:00

Days 76, 77, 78, and 79: Bloated eels. Molten bouquets. Ransom notes.

If you're excited by the thought of stepping into the stale, shallow water of a neglected, moonlit canal in the middle of nowhere, casting in a short, baited line with a steel lead at the end, and pulling up a shiny, slithering eel to squeeze about hoping that something exciting might happen, then I suggest you consider the art of buttercream piping.

Let's talk about buttercream for a moment. Here in America we tend to prefer a coarser sort of frosting, one that's plentiful enough in powdered sugar for us to feel its not necessarily unpleasant grit on our palates and between our teeth. This supersweet frosting is an American classic; the recipe is even on the box of sugar. When we're exposed to a true buttercream (like the ones we've been making since Day 11) for the first time, it tends to shock us slightly for two reasons: it's not extremely sweet, and it's got that used-car-dealer quality of being almost too smooth to be trusted. Many of us turn tail and flee back to Gritty Sugarville, but if you give its silky cousin a second chance, you may surprise yourself by becoming addicted to it. (Allow me, as if you had a choice, to theorize about this phenomenon for a moment. If you consider our general food aesthetic as a nation, dessert equals sweet. It's a pretty one-dimensional sort of characteristic that has come to be the guiding principle in our hunt for dessert. Obviously there are other things we look for - texture, temperature, color - but from the standpoint of flavor, we look for "sweet" above all others. The somewhat more European (particularly French) tendency is to judge for other flavor components; buttery, for example, and spicy or herbal. This isn't, of course, to the exclusion of sweet, but the sweetness doesn't override the other flavors to the extent that you'd find in, say, a classically American cupcake. Even a palmier, which is simply a thin slice of puff pastry rolled and folded in pure sugar and baked to a deep golden brown, has a deeper and more complex flavor: nuttiness from the wheat, more nuttiness and a slight bitter note from the caramel, and the butter's... well... butteriness. The sugar is on stage, but there's no spotlight. The textures of American foods, too, tend to steer away from buttery, whereas European cookery and baking call for far more of it as a rule, the resultant texture being just a side benefit. Given these tendencies of the American palate, when we taste something that should be pretty familiar, like icing, and it's not only less sugary than we expect, but also has an exotic texture, our neophobia kicks in and we tend to revert to what's old and comfortable - in this case, gritty frosting. There's nothing wrong with the gritty stuff, but don't exclude the buttery stuff. Just make sure that you get a good one - make the Day 11 recipe if you have to. Its constitution should be moderately soft but not melting (until it’s on your tongue); its flavor should be sweet and buttery, with clear but not cloying highlights of whatever essences have been added (rum, vanilla, or the like); and its texture should be beguilingly satiny. You’ll like it once you’ve had a good one twice, you’ll see. I digress.)

Obviously a very common treatment of buttercream is in piping, and so began our lesson, and our segment on Cake Decorating. We started with the commonest of shapes, the shell. Now here’s where the eels come in. You fit a plastic pastry bag with a metal tip that has a star-shaped opening. Then you fill the bag with huge gobs of buttery icing. Buttery icing, by the fault of its own magic, melts at just a few degrees below body temperature. So, in keeping with the theme of pastry in general, you have to do it accurately, and you have to do it quickly. As you attempt to squeeze out practice shell upon practice shell, you realize that you’ve got melted buttercream (in other words, melted butter) all over your hands. Now you’ve got a giant, squishy, slippery mess between your hands, and the goal is to squeeze it in a very precise way in a very controlled rhythm. No problem. This eel even has teeth, in the form of the many-pointed star tip, with which, shocking as it may be, I managed to stab the webbing between my forefinger and thumb.

Hesitant as we were to retire from two full days of piping practice shells, Day 78 brought us to piping buttercream roses. This is clearly going to be a handy skill for those of us who go on to do any cake decorating, but it’s painfully obvious as well how much practice we’ll need before we can consider it a marketable still. If I ever get any good at it, I’ll remember this phase of my artistic life, perhaps, as my Salvador Dali Period. The beauty of a shell is that, even when the icing is melty, it’s still allowed to lay down. Petals, they tell me, are supposed to point up straight. No kidding.

After a day and a half creating these eerie miniatures - perfect set pieces for a Tim Burton film about a forgotten garden - we began working with royal icing. Made using egg whites and sugar, royal icing hardens to the point that it’s unpalatable; it’s the stuff you see all over gingerbread houses not only as a snow effect, but quite literally as glue - more to the point, mortar. Its very effective use as a décor element makes it a common medium for writing as well, which we learned to do using a cornet. Melting is no longer our problem, but speed is still a factor, since this cement is the quick-drying kind. It’s taken a number of decades for my handwriting to improve to its current, terrible level. Hopefully, if I practice forty or fifty quick times a day over the next twenty-something years, my kindergarten-royal-icing-scrawl will also be marginally legible by the time I’m in my mid-fifties. I’ll keep you posted.

The timbre of these first four last-quarter lessons is different. Everything we’ve created up to this point has been something we can learn to do well fairly quickly (with the exception of cornet work, naturally). These new skills are ones that will require hours and weeks and years of practice and honing before we’re even modestly proficient.

Wedding cakes, all of a sudden, seem a whole lot cheaper.

2007-09-12T19:42:00.001-04:00

Days 72, 73, 74, and 75: Batter up…

The final four days of our third quarter (of four, for those of you who are a little slow with the arithmetic), saw us occupied with two activities: plating desserts and our final exam. Contrary to what you might expect, the former task received far more attention than the latter.

It sounds simple, and in a sense, it is. Plating means simply putting what you have created onto a plate in an attractive and sensible fashion for presentation. It must be somewhat trickier to teach plating than other parts of the course, since to do it properly requires good taste, which is not so easily imparted if the student doesn’t already have some. The main time-consuming aspect of the three days we devoted to it wasn’t about geometry or strategy or art, but production. Altogether, we turned out thirteen sauces; five types of cookies (as if we needed more of that!); seven mousses, curds, and confits; ten kinds of cakes and tarts, which, I suppose, were the actual desserts; four types of candied nuts and nut brittles; a giant pile of crêpes; fourteen ice creams and sorbets; and five or six additional décor elements like marshmallows or apple chips or spun sugar. (I was fortunate to have been assigned one of the few fruit components, which, after several pounds of cookie dough, was awfully refreshing.) Getting these things all together was obviously time-consuming, but once accomplished, the possibilities for combining them were limitless. If we were to use just four of all the components at our disposal, we could make something like 424,270 different desserts, according to my math skills (and therefore probably some other number altogether). We were directed to pay attention to texture, color, and flavor of course, keeping an eye open for negative space. In a flurry of activity, we assembled our desserts into fanciful and often hideous displays, from the crimson cast-sugar disc that arced gracefully atop a pear tart, echoing the reduced-wine sauce below it, to the drizzling of caramel sauce over the pinwheel arms of a candy-studded cake, in an excess that made it look quite like a frightening, melted carousel.

Philosophically speaking, it was exhilarating to whip up so many different dessert components so quickly, because it made us realize that we were now capable of doing so without panic attacks or fainting (not counting sugar coma). It was also a milestone because for the first time we addressed the issue which we will obviously encounter as we enter the kitchens of restaurants around the world: making our products look as good as they taste (which has been consistently excellent). My particular extraction of this philosophy resulted in a number of different combinations, among which three were particularly memorable. First, that old lounge act from every joint in town:: Molten Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Ice Cream, which I accompanied with whipped cream and raspberry sauce, along with a little nougatine (which you undoubtedly remember from Day 17) for textural interest. I proceeded then to the slightly nuder pasture that was my raspberry dacquoise. Having decided to go for a more minimalist approach, I accompanied it with only raspberry sauce striped with white chocolate, and a white chocolate curl on top of the dacquoise, echoing the sauce. Just before submission (oh, yes, we had to submit each plate to Chef for review, and, presumably, grading), I had a sudden burst of irrelevance and opted to do a little mint-kumquat-confit-thing. It worked though; I got a thumbs up on that one. My daring spurred to higher levels, I opted to finish with a molded chocolate mousse, enrobed in ganache, atop a bed of chocolate whipped cream. I accompanied this with mounds of regular (that is to say, non-chocolate) whipped cream, between which I had the brilliant judgment to place large placards of mille-feuille (Day 43). A little mound of whipped cream is not designed to keep a dense tablet of mille-feuille erect; it’s not a structurally sound configuration. Having decided (and announced, of course: a real shock) to do it, I carried on and managed to get them to stand up just long enough for a drive-by evaluation and a quick snapshot. The waiter that could carry this to the dining room, though, and keep those things standing, is worth his weight in gold. Easy as it is to assemble desserts when one has sixty or so components to choose from, and putting aside issues of individual taste (or exemplar lack thereof), I think the main lesson here was to realize that we have a long way to go in terms of learning what’s practical.

After the thrill of mock restaurant service, we came back to the refreshing simplicity of yellow cake. We each baked two layers of cake which we filled and frosted on the following day for the practical portion of our final exam (where refreshing simplicity dissolved with great haste into bleak reality.) I received a few points off for inconsistency of icing thickness and off-center adornments (two of my icing rosettes were not equidistant from those surrounding them), but in the end walked away none the worse for wear. The written part of the test covered all these cakes we’ve produced over the last several weeks. We know we’re not quite done with cake, though, as more than half of our last quarter, just around the bend, deals with wedding cakes.

And we round third base.

2007-06-03T16:22:00.001-04:00

Days 70 and 71: “C” is for Cookie…

I never want to see another cookie again. No, really; I might actually mean this. Okay, probably not, but still, I’m a lot closer to saying that truthfully than I’ve ever been before, and I’ve O.D.d on cookies a number of times throughout my history of radically prodigious eating. When our class produced cookies, though, it wasn’t a question of eating a few cookies’ worth of dough from the bowl and then another few ( i.e. several) cookies after baking. Rather, I wandered freely from station to station, tasting each raw dough (a number of times) and then, ultimately, quality-controlling the cookies after baking as well. Allow me to propose a metaphysical excuse for this behavior based on the very nature of why people like cookies to begin with. They’re generally small, and therefore, seeming harmless, it’s conceivable that nearly everyone can enjoy them (if in somewhat more reduced quantities than your host does). Also, since they are so small, you can have a few of them and experience vastly different flavors and textures in the span of one plate; a creamy lemon bar followed by a crunchy almond biscotto (yes, that’s the singular) topped off by a chewy oatmeal... what’s not to love! Not much, I can tell you from my several thorough visits to each station.

Divided into teams of two, we all prepared many dozens of cookies. There are some tricks to making consistently high-quality cookies, but only a few; otherwise making them en masse isn’t very different from making them at home. Here’s a tip for drop cookies (like chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin, say): chill your dough. Seems simple enough, and in some recipes it’s required. For drop cookies, it helps them bake in a much more shapely fashion, since they all go in at the same temperature and consistency and therefore all spread in a similar manner. Given this need to chill, we made our cookies over two days. Some of the cookies were mixed and baked and cooled on day 1, but much of the dough (that which escaped my notice, anyway,) was held over and baked on day 2. After baking the last of them, we took a step back to survey this ocean of cookies we had just created. When over a dozen people have baked several dozen cookies each, what’s required is some serious organizing, the kin to which I have only ever experienced as an observer hovering outside my mother’s kitchen the week(s) before Christmas. Our first step in classifying them was to divide them into two categories: European and American.

The European-style cookies we made included both vanilla and chocolate sablées – sandy straight-ahead cookies which are delightful plain but which are often layered together to make checkerboard cookies; Linzer augen (OW-ghen), which are actually quite good when they haven’t been sitting on a convenience store shelf for several months while their jelly-filling dries out; mamoul, which look like peanut butter cookies but which are in fact filled with a filling of the vastly underappreciated date; Sicilian fig cookies, which are a plain sugary dough wrapped around a rope of fig filling and cut to resemble the letter H or perhaps a pair of chromosomes; macaroons (here the classic French almond-ganache-hamburger style, not the American coconut variety); spritz cookies, like the dry, crumbly cookies with maraschino cherries mashed into the ends of them that every Italian bakery sells by the ton that people pretend to like because they believe them to be fancy; palets aux raisins, amandines, and chocolatines, which are all small, round cookies which are either studded with raisins or made with almond flour or chocolate – tasty, snappy little bites, really; delightfully caky orange- scented madeleines; pignoli (peen-YO-lee), small, Italian shortbread-like cookies studded with pine nuts, tulipes – flat cookies of either vanilla or chocolate which are slightly molded immediately after baking to create a specific shape, such as a small edible dish or a curved cookie; crisp almond biscotti; and Scottish shortbread. All of these cookies were delightful in that they were delicate and refined, many being as rich and satisfying as a much larger dessert.

The American cookies were of a clearly different ilk, including some powerhouse brownies; lemon squares; Tennessee icebox cookies; pecan balls (the dough of which I must confess I ate most unreservedly – if pressed for the truth I would probably admit to perhaps nine cookies’ worth); rugelach, the rolled-up Jewish treat whose sublime flaky dough is made from equal parts flour, butter, and cream cheese (it works, it works well); oatmeal cookies of course, whose chewiness benefited from the inclusion of molasses; pecan sand tarts (like the classic pecan sandy only dressed up to go out); and, of course, that crown jewel of American (and, in your author’s opinion, all) cookies, the chocolate chip. Like their European cohorts, these cookies were all excellent and terribly irresistible, albeit in a less subtle way. The really impressive aspect of the experience, however, wasn’t the taste, but the sheer quantity. The fact that we learned how to execute so very many cookies in a short period of time is significant, as anyone working with me in a bakery sometime in the future will undoubtedly tell you.

To finish the lesson, we divided our thousands of cookies neatly onto trays, as might be served at formal banquets or displayed at fancy bakeries, which we presented for evaluation.

After which I dumped my cookies into a giant box and waddled home.

2007-05-10T00:16:00.001-04:00

Days 68 and 69: A Wrinkle in Time.

It’s been tricky finding words for this next cake. But I suppose that’s true of any cake whose execution requires the use of a pasta roller. The Chocolate Ribbon Cake, as it’s called, is a chocolate lover’s dream… layers of chocolate cake filled and iced with chocolate mousse, wrapped in a layer of chocolate plastique, and decorated on top with curly ribbons in the same medium. Cranking out cakes and mousses these days is pretty simple; literally cranking out paper thin sheets of chocolate is another matter.

Chocolate plastique is made by adding a small amount of corn syrup to melted chocolate. Once this re-hardens, you knead it until it is smooth and pliable; the texture reminds me of the probably toxic modeling clay that I used to play with more years ago than I care to count. Using it to sculpt things like baroque flowers is a treat we’re saving for down the road a bit. For the chocolate ribbon cake, the grandest assignment on the proverbial chalkboard was to make rectangles. Lots and lots of rectangles. The first of these, of course, was a very long rectangle, a band with which we covered the sides of the cake. Obviously you don’t want the people eating this cake to get such big globs of this chocolate material in their mouth that it would leave them singing Everything I See Looks Like a Ribbon Cake To Me, if you catch my drift. It’s a little like… well, modeling clay, as I said. To avoid just this predicament, we rolled the plastique to incredible thinness using the pasta roller. Now, I wasn’t there when the ingredients for our plastique were measured, but it seemed pretty straightforward. I don’t know what went wrong exactly, but my team’s came out dramatically different than everyone else’s. It was extremely melty, if that’s a word, and it had a peculiar interest in wrapping itself around the pasta machine’s rollers rather than gracefully passing through them. When chocolate plastique does this, all there is for it is a light dusting of cocoa powder, but if you can’t imagine how dangerous that is, go dip your finger into some cocoa powder and lick it off. Gingerly dusting our glob with two-molecule-thick layers of cocoa powder, we coaxed it through the rollers, gradually narrowing them, re-dusting at the first signs of trouble, until it was thin enough to be applied to the cake (not to mention palatable). We wrapped our band around the sides of the cake as smoothly as possible, sealing it at the seam.

The balance of rectangles were much smaller, about two inches by three. We made dozens of these after rolling out the remainder of our plastique. Then, as if we hadn’t teased it enough, we pleated up each small piece and laid it on top of the cake, overlapping each with the next. As unhinged as I had become, beset by roller-woes, I was forced to admit to myself after completing half the top that the cake was taking on a very elegant aspect. In quite a contrast to the buttercream and ganache we’ve been covering our cakes with so far, its plastique covering lent this cake a very fabric-like appearance. (Surely this is a hint of what’s to come when we undertake our segment on wedding cakes in the final quarter.) Continuing around the entire circumference in this manner, and then again in smaller circles, we carried on until the entire surface of the cake was safely tucked away. Some simple decorations on the top, including our introduction to gold paint, and the cake was ready for display in any bakery’s window.

I was pleased with the way my cake looked, and, clearly, excited about how it would taste. Later, however, an odd thing happened. As we traveled home, I gave the cake to a random woman who came upon my classmates and me on the subway. There can be only one of two explanations for this. Either I had reached the point where the Voice of Pastry is calling out to me less forcefully, or I had simply had too much sugar during class. I certainly hope that the latter is the case.

The former is too depressing.

2007-05-03T01:01:00.000-04:00

Days 64, 65, 66, and 67: Melody. Rhythm. Harmony.

In a journal of superlatives such as I have created here, it is difficult to present an accurate account of this next confection. Rather than going on an on and saying things like: No, really, this one is my favorite, I will summarize in a word. Paris. It’s the Paris of desserts. It is refined and elegant, mysterious and a little proud, expensive, complicated, torrid and searingly beautiful. I’m sure there are many other desserts with the same name: Symphonie – a simple Google Image search confirms this suspicion. I defy any of them, however, to hold an audience quite as rapt as this one managed to. In a rare career crossover attempt, I shall indulge myself briefly in the obviously begged comparison of this dessert to a symphony. (For you Classical music geeks, think of it as inside-out R. Strauss.)

The basis of any solid symphony is melody (let’s not get into a musicological debate about this; just roll with me). It’s the tune people hum after the show; a mental imprint of the experience. The number this dessert sang was Chocolate and Hazelnut, a club favorite for centuries. The dress it wore was a showstopper too – a rich satin robe by Ganache, with gold accents. Everyone who was there whistled long after the show.

You have to have rhythm if you want any kind of texture. This cake was almost Bartók. From the snap of the chocolate on the bottom to the crunch of the ground hazelnuts caught up in each chocolate cake layer to the praline buttercream, smooth as silk between each one, the full spectrum of texture was available to anyone who had a bite.

Finally, the coalescence of all the elements: the harmony. Here, no dynamic was too loud, no phrasing too blatant. All the elements of this marvelous work converged in Mozartean balance, each note exactly where fate would have it put, each voice exactly where it belonged in the context of those surrounding it. It was so perfect as to seem plucked from the air.

Alright, so what the heck was it? It took us a number of days, with multiple sets of pans, mixers, freezers, and decorating supplies, to create all the elements of the symphonie. We began by painting a rectangular layer of hazelnut sponge (like a génoise) with some chocolate. Once that had set, we turned it over, making the very bottom of the cake a sheen of slightly snappy chocolate. We then moistened the cake layer with kirsch-flavored syrup, and iced it with a layer of whipped ganache. Not ordinary ganache (half-chocolate-half-cream), though. Here, we used ganache riche. (Five points to the person who can guess what riche means in French.) This ganache has a bit more chocolate in it and so imparts a deeper chocolate note. When that layer was down, we iced it again, only this time with praline buttercream, which is essentially buttercream with praline paste whipped in. Think of praline paste as peanut butter, only slightly more liquid, and made from hazelnuts. (I know; it’s pretty awesome.) Usually, in a buttercream, we would whip egg whites with sugar and eventually add (lots of) butter. For this one, though, we whipped egg yolks with sugar, and added (still lots of) butter. It made it quite as rich as you would imagine it might. Atop this second layer of filling, we placed a layer of almond cake called biscuit joconde (bis-KWEE zho-COHND). My sources tell me that “jocund,” as it would be in English, means “characterized by joyful exuberance.” I see their point. This layer was treated the same way as the lower one, with syrup, whipped rich ganache, and praline buttercream. We placed a third layer, this time hazelnut again, on top, and moistened it with syrup. At this point, we did not continue as before with a dual layer of icings, but rather with whipped ganache only, which we spread level and to exacting smoothness. The cake was then allowed to refrigerate and firm up before the final steps. The finishing touches involved pouring a sleek liquid coat of (ordinary) ganache over the top, strategically dropping some gold leaf at the corners, and, in what we were informed was the traditional way, inscribing the name of the dessert across its front, in chocolate ink from our favorite pen, the cornet. So to tally, for those including myself who have lost count, the layers from the bottom up go something like this: chocolate, hazelnut cake, whipped rich ganache, praline buttercream, biscuit joconde, whipped rich ganache, praline buttercream, hazelnut cake, whipped rich ganache, poured ganache. (Not counting syrup and decorations.)

It sounds like too much, I realize this, but once again you must trust me; it’s not. The finished cake is perhaps three inches high, each layer being incredibly thin. All these rich ingredients come together in the right proportions, and form a dessert that is perfectly balanced in weight, sweetness, flavor, and texture. One friend who picked up a piece while in her car called me from her cell phone before having bothered to swallow (I was praying she was at a stoplight), and stated that it was hands down the best cake she’d ever had. I have to say, I was in agreement. This symphonie truly lives up to its name, as so few desserts bearing such a name ever could. And after eating it, not because it was heavy but because it was so immensely satisfying, you remember another integral part of any line of music: the space in which you can luxuriate for a fleet moment, before the effects of what you’ve just experienced can be carried away by something new.

Rest.

2007-04-29T19:04:00.000-04:00

Days 62 and 63: Personal reflection.

It would seem that we’re in the middle of the two-or-more-day-cake phase. These days it’s always make the cake layers, freeze them, come back again, and do something to them. This has its advantages though; imagine this: you’re cutting a cake. Horizontally. Would you rather do this when the cake is nice and soft, hot, tender, and fresh from the oven? Or would you rather do it when the cake is a solid and forgiving block of what is basically frozen butter with a little starch, sugar, and egg thrown in to keep up appearances? Me too. So let’s proceed with the understanding that these creations of ours can be accomplished by actual human beings, right in our own homes. The two-day aspect isn’t continuous, so don’t be daunted. It’s not quite a lot like painting your house.

The particular Two Day Cake we cranked out this week was a miroir (meer-WAHR). The miroir (“mirror”) is a classic French dessert composed of layers of sponge cake which are moistened with syrup, filled and iced with a bavarois, or Bavarian, and topped with a thin layer of nappage. For clarification, allow me to state that the Bavarian I’m talking about here isn’t a person dressed in short pants with suspenders and a jaunty little feathered cap. No, this is a different kind of polka-dancer, where a purée of fruit (or another base of similar texture) is mixed with gelatine, and then folded together with whipped cream. The tricky part is the folding. People are afraid of folding, and understandably so; if you do it too forcefully, whatever it is you’re folding will deflate. Why not simply do it slowly, then? The Bavarian is the perfect answer. The gelatine which is melted into the base must necessarily be slightly warm, while the cream must be at least cool. The trick in folding them together is to do it gently enough so that the whipped cream isn’t completely deflated, but quickly enough that the gelatine doesn’t set when it comes in contact with the cream. Failing to accomplish the latter would result in a creamy sludge with what would seem like Gummy Bear droppings scattered throughout it, and we clearly can’t have that. Nappage (nah-PAZH), from way back in our first week, is essentially jelly with extra pectin. To construct the cake, you place a layer of sponge in a cake ring (think cake pan without sides), moisten it, top it with Bavarian, another layer of cake, and so forth, ending with a perfectly even and smooth layer of Bavarian. You chill this until set, and then pour a pool of warm nappage on the top, creating the mirror effect for which the dessert is named. Using a cake ring is doubly exciting. Not only can you create a cake with tremendously even sides, but when the time to remove the ring has come, you get to blowtorch it until it’s loose enough to simply slip off.

Some people have issues with the Bavarian (which is, by the way, what Bavarian cream really is; that stuff in donuts is a lie). The texture, admittedly, is a little unconventional, being somewhere between mousse and Jell-O, and nothing goes worse with cake than Jell-O. It’s also understandably off-putting to consider a gelatinous dairy product. Once you get past these things, though, it’s a pretty enjoyable dessert. The one I fashioned was strawberry (and before you raise the hypocrite alarm, let me state that both the purée and the nappage were (presumably) made from fruit when it was in season), decorated on top with some more voluntary cornet work.

What’s happening to me!?

2007-04-23T08:46:00.000-04:00

Days 60 and 61: Light! And… not so much.

I’ll admit it: these haven’t been light little wisps of pastry we’ve been creating. You can, therefore, imagine my pleasure at finding that our most recent project was very different than the chocolate-cloaked-or-caramel-topped-or-sugar-enrobed-or-cream-cheese-infused items which we’ve been producing. We were finally introduced to the génoise, a classical French sponge cake which is always soaked with syrup during assembly. This cake is made by a whole lot of folding. Egg whites are whipped with a bit of sugar. Egg yolks are whipped with a bit of sugar. Dry ingredients, like flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt, are sifted together. The yolks are folded into the whites, and then the dry into the wet. That part (no fat other than egg yolks, did you notice?) people follow. It’s the whole syrup thing that sounds disagreeable when people first encounter it, but allow me to explain (as if you had a choice). Too much, yes – nasty, gross, soggy cake; who needs it? Too little, however, and you have an equally unappealing, dry layer which will make even the lactose-intolerant cry out for milk. Just the right amount, though, and you’re biting into a pastry that is the perfect (and I mean perfect) level of “moist,” that ever sought-after characteristic of cake. As with last week, we baked the layers with partners, but for the finishing we were left to our own devices; I chose raspberry. (Now, don’t think me some great hypocrite when it comes to seasonal fruit. We had to use something, and I chose raspberry. I’m not proud of it, but my pride does not extend to getting a failing grade for the day.) For the syrup, we used framboise, which is a raspberry eau-de-vie (a clear, unsweetened, 40% alcohol liquor distilled with the essence of a plant) combined with simple (sugar) syrup. After soaking the first layer, I topped it with pastry cream that had been scented with framboise as well, and dropped a few raspberries around in it. The second layer went on and got soaked. Then, the whole cake was iced with sweetened whipped cream, adorned with a few additional raspberries, and some sugared slivered almonds, just for some textural diversity. I will admit that when conceptualizing it, even I thought it would be overpoweringly raspberryish. It wasn’t though. It was airy and fruity and extremely cheerful. Like me, most of the time.

All balloons pop eventually. We countered this useless lightness with one of the heaviest and certainly best things so far, in the form of a chocolate chestnut cake. We soaked a layer of chocolate génoise with syrup flavored with kirsch, a cherry eau-de-vie (you couldn’t really taste the cherry, it just added depth; let’s move forward with that understanding). We then topped this first layer with alternating stripes of whipped ganache and chestnut buttercream. Other than that Christmas song, chestnuts don’t seem too popular here in good old America; they’re much more beloved in our parent England. In any case, they’re delightful, and one thing that further enhances their resident richness is to incorporate a puree of them into a buttercream. Trust me. The next layer of the cake was added and again soaked, and then, like that fancy cake of a few weeks ago, iced very evenly with whipped ganache. After chilling and firming, we poured liquid ganache over the whole thing, creating a shiny finish that’s only fitting for a cake this good. I decorated mine with some cornet work, and decided to further embellish it with a little gold dust. This was a mistake, because there was moving air in the room. Not only did some random current cause my first attempt to add a dot of it turn into a comet-shape (and therefore all subsequent ones, in an attempt to be consistent), but when someone walked by quickly, a whole random smattering of it landed elsewhere on my cake’s surface. Not to worry, it’s gold dust. It’s innately appealing.

And once they took a bite, I’m sure they all forgot.

2007-04-14T20:36:00.000-04:00

Days 58 and 59: Babies. Mamas.

If you enjoy getting your entire being sticky by covering it in repeated coatings of pasty, semi-liquid sugar which will promptly solidify on your skin and thereafter mercilessly rip out any hair that had the misfortune to have been in the spot where this tacky sludge was originally applied, you might consider making some petits fours glacés (petty four glah-SAY). These little treasures have the dual condition of being adored by the general populace and abhorred by their creators. The assembly isn’t so esoteric: make a couple of frangipane layers, chill them, sandwich them with some strained and therefore seedless raspberry jam, chill them some more, cut them (perfectly), chill them one more time, then glaze and decorate them. That’s ostensibly easy. The common glaze for these is poured fondant (don’t struggle with it, just say FOND-int; you’re American, and that’s okay), which is essentially sugar with a small amount of water (and sometimes corn syrup) added, and mixed into an opaque and pearl-colored sludge. Said sludge pours beautifully as long as it’s somewhere within the generous temperature range of about 110 to 111 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay, it’s a little more generous than that, but truthfully, not much, and the real kicker is that if you heat it over say 120 degrees, it becomes pretty much useless. Oh, and when it hits the low end of its temperature range, as mentioned, it turns into a kind of diabetic plaster. We were to create twelve identical (a word which many of the members of class seemed to define quite subjectively) petits fours, plate them, and present them to Chef for evaluation. While we worked with partners during the assembly phase, our glazing and decorating was our own. For my miniature crescents, I opted for a pale yellow glaze with (slightly too) pale green adornments, finished with a small section of crystallized violet petal (which are gaining their own special place in my heart). Lovely. And to think: one satisfying bite took merely three days to prepare. Nonetheless, petits fours glacés are the darlings of the pastry world; indeed, those acquaintances of mine with whom they were shared gave me genuine kowtows. In my opinion (which you’re getting anyway), fondant looks very pretty, but it tastes like plain sugar (which is probably due to the fact that it’s plain sugar; I can’t say for sure; I’m not a chemist). To have flavored it with some oil-of-something-or-other – lemon, for example – would probably have been prudent. The marriage of the frangipane’s velvety smoothness and the raspberry jam’s enlivening tartness was presided over by the priest of sugar, who, despite his shallowness, truly made the ceremony what it was. Like I said, lovely. Just sort of a pain in the butt. (Then, most worthy weddings are.)

I like to think that every little one, sweet and/or annoying, is followed at some point by a grande dame whose dignity commands naught but the highest respect of everyone who interacts with her. Whether this tenet holds true in the real world or not, it definitely did in our class. Our particular stroller-pusher was Hungarian, and she goes by the name of dobos torte (if you want to keep it simple, say DOH-bohs tort; if you want to sound more well-informed, try DOH-bohsh; it’s closer). If some old-timer came up to me and said “Sonny, this torte is the reason WWI happened in the first place,” I might have believed him (ignoring the fact that an old-timer using the word “torte” could be somewhat off-putting). An impractically thin layer of moist yellow cake is topped with chocolate buttercream. This is then repeated. It is then repeated again. And again. Once more, and again. One final time, and voilà, we’re not quite done. (And unless you’re actually in Hungary, this confection is usually finished as follows.) An eighth thin disc of heaven is placed elsewhere, on a piece of parchment. Once the nearby boiling sugar has completed its time in the pot (or cocoon as I like to think of it), and become the flitting butterfly that is caramel, it is poured over this last layer. Timing this next step is important: this final wayward layer is cut into wedges corresponding to the desired final number of slices. The trick is, you have to get it when the caramel is set enough that it doesn’t stick to your knife, but just before it sets too much and would therefore be inconveniently brittle – an even narrower window than that fondant stuff. Meanwhile, an identical number of rosettes (round shapes, and leave it at that) of buttercream are piped at regular intervals on top of the cake. Each caramel-covered wedge is then placed on a slant against each piped mound of icing. Other than a final rosette at center, the cake is left alone. The sides are left un-iced, to showcase their many many layers, and to give some hint to the eater that the person behind this creation actually put quite a bit of effort into it.

Which was, as usual, totally worth it.

2007-04-01T15:26:00.000-04:00

Days 54, 55, 56, and 57: Taste vs. Taste

Things are really starting to get out of hand. Cakes shouldn’t be this good; it’s just not fair. First, I suppose I should give you a little background. You know those shows on TV where they do the competitions and all these women from various parts of our probably too-large country coalesce for the purpose of seeing which person can make the best cake? When I watch those programs, I always feel encapsulated in a feeling I can only describe as a sort of nonviolent terror, and it’s a feeling that I reserve exclusively for these shows. I think they shouldn’t call them Who Can Make The Best Cake shows, but perhaps something more along the lines of Which Enormous Cake Can Hold The Most Objects competitions. Even as I walked past a darkened bakery window in Manhattan sometime between late last night and early this morning, I saw a large white cake (at least six inches high) topped with a rim of enormous (out-of-season) strawberries. I thought to myself, Do people really like eating whole strawberries at the back of a piece of cake? Well, do you? I don’t understand the appeal of having an entire Oreo sticking out from the top of an otherwise harmless piece of cake. People seem to confuse jabbing with decorating. (I hope I’m not being too snobby here, but is that elegant? Really?) In any event, Chef said that we weren’t going to be making any “diner cakes,” and it was at that moment that two things transpired within my mind. First, I found a name for this phenomenon, which has for so long repulsed me. Perhaps somewhat more significantly, though, I realized that I was not alone in finding these the-higher-the-better confections to be revolting. That promise laid before us, I began to believe that our quest to perfection in cake was on the right track. I suppose every great teacher says one thing that leaves a mark.

It dawns on me also that I should explain how we’re filling these cakes, since I’ve explained the later step of icing. We cut them in half and then spread frosting in between the layers. There.

We began the week with a cake that was positively transporting. We first baked some dense, fudgy chocolate cake (clearly, a good start). Now, you occasionally see recipes that would have you take these cake layers and fill and frost them with a dense chocolate frosting, and then glaze it with chocolate, and then decorate it with chocolate, and then possibly even serve it with a chocolate sauce, and call it something like Chocolate Death. Yes, we get it, people love chocolate; you’re reading from one such person even now. But the truth is that many people, even those who wouldn’t admit it, like me, find desserts of this kind to be too rich. Beyond being too rich, though, they fail also to treat the eater to the ethereally perfect balance of texture that a good cake has. Well, there are reasons we’re learning all this. We did Pretty Icing Lesson No. 2 with the lightest frosting possible: whipped cream. While there’s nothing wrong with clean, fresh, lightly sweetened whipped cream, no one on my team argued when we were assigned caramel whipped cream. In a nutshell, this is made by melting some sugar into caramel, then (very carefully) pouring some cream into it, chilling it, and whipping it up. Really simple, and beyond excellent. The resultant cake, which I suppose would be dense chocolate cake filled and iced with caramel whipped cream, was stupefyingly good. (Stupefyingly might not even be a word but it’s the only one that makes any sense.) When I brought this cake to work the following morning, it was like watching some sort of nature show. Not the kind where they’re all cute and cuddly, either, but more like one where the entire pack has been hunting unsuccessfully all summer, until this one particular day.

Don’t worry, bliss was soon supplanted as the ruling emotion in the class. We moved on to working with marzipan. Marzipan, which is a thick, sweet almond paste, can be sculpted into any shape which it will hold, barring natural disaster, indefinitely. When appropriately tinted, it can be used to create an infinite variety of decorations. We began with the most cliché design (and therefore the one we’ll need to know best): roses. My first try was less than triumphant, but on repeating it the second day I felt I had made enough progress to display a photograph. To do this, you flatten small balls of tinted marzipan on the table, further thinning the edges with the back of an immaculate spoon. You then filet the marzipan discs from the table with a sharp knife, and then roll each into a specific shape – the first of course being the center of the rose, with the petals following. It’s a good start.

We concluded the week with a cake that still cannot trump the aforementioned one in sheer eating pleasure, but whose appearance leapt far to the front of the elegance line. We used one batch of ganache for two different tasks – icing and glazing. We each took about half of our barely cooled, still liquid ganache, and whipped it. We used this whipped ganache to fill our yellow cake layers and to ice the tops and sides of our cakes. After letting the cakes solidify in the freezer, we reheated the now cooled remaining half of our ganache to a liquid consistency, and proceeded to pour it over them, enrobing them entirely in a satiny, mirror-finish layer of sumptuous dark chocolate. Combined with a bit of cornet work, some chocolate shavings, a little gold leaf, and a ribbon, I produced my first cake of showpiece appearance. I brought this one, too, into work the following morning. It was greeted with oohs and aahs and many declarations that it looked “too good to eat.”

How quickly our convictions crumble.

2007-03-31T16:11:00.000-04:00

Days 51, 52, and 53: Pounds. Carrots. Rums.

Cake has begun, much to the danger of all around me. The threat was apparent from the very beginning, when we started with that commonest of all cakes, the pound cake.

There are varying schools of thought with pound cake. In the first method, the flour and sugar are creamed together very thoroughly with the butter. (Don’t even think about gluten; there’s way too much fat sitting between each little starch granule for them ever to become acquainted.) The liquids are then added and away it bakes. I tend to think of this as the Southern Method, since any pound cake I’ve had from the South has been of the texture this produces, which is light, fluffy, crumbly, and perfectly balanced with a clear flavor. The other method, which simply to equalize the matter I consider the Northern Method, is what you might think of as more traditional, if you’re from up this way. The butter and sugar are creamed together, eggs are beaten in, and then milk is added in alternating steps with the remaining dry ingredients. This results in a cake of a denser, less crumbly texture, and a richer buttery flavor (but not the oily quality of the plastic-wrapped slices at every deli in New York). Both cakes having completely disappeared with equal speed leaves me to conclude that neither the North nor the South will win this particular war. Both are good, in their own ways, and I can’t personally choose which I prefer. Unless, that is, we’re talking about the next pound cake, which I must have made with one or the other of the methods… forgive me if I can’t remember. I was probably distracted by the rum and hazelnuts we were adding.

We also created another cake that’s ubiquitous and overridingly popular: carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. A terrifyingly easy cake to make, we filled and then frosted ours with delectable cream cheese buttercream. I’m certain that the icing recipe made nearly double what we needed, to accommodate the huge amount of it we’d eat during the process. (I was reminded of the butter-tasting incident from Day 2, only whilst high on sugar.) We learned the messy way to frost a cake. It wasn’t a primary concern that things weren’t perfect, since we were to freeze the cakes overnight and trim them the next day. This is when a pall was cast over my carrot cake, after having promised a piece of it to no fewer than seven people. I had mistakenly put it in the fridge instead of the freezer. On the day we were to be trimming, mine was too soft to cut properly, so into the freezer it went to be cut up during the next lesson. When I arrived at that lesson, with the mob of people who did not get their carrot cake barely at bay behind me, I was confounded to find that it had disappeared from the freezer, nowhere to be found. (My theory, after noticing that a large amount of ice crystals had accumulated in the freezer, was that my cake too became covered in them, and someone threw it away. I’m not a very suspicious person, I guess.) I suppose I learned an important lesson, even if it had nothing to do with baking or frosting: don’t promise people carrot cake, just surprise them with it.

We finished the week with our first lesson in How to Frost Prettily. I don’t know if it’s an industry secret or not, but here goes. Put your cake layer on a round of cardboard that’s about the size of the cake. Spread big globs of frosting over it, and top it with the next layer. You then want to ensure that the cardboard at the bottom is about one-quarter inch larger than the cake all the way around. If it isn’t, trim the cake with a bread knife, without worrying about trimming it perfectly roundly. Then, with a metal spatula, put great heaps of frosting on the sides, using the cardboard as a guide by scraping against it. Allow the frosting to mount up past the top edge, and do this all the way around. Then, spread more piles of frosting on the top, going past the side edges. Don’t freak out about it, just do your best to make it smooth and level. Then, again using the cardboard as a guide, scrape the extra frosting off the sides, smoothing as you go. It’s pretty foolproof if you have a little patience and keep your spatula clean. If you expect it to look flawless or don’t have at least a little patience, just go buy a cake. We iced our white cake with a lightly rum-flavored buttercream, which I cannot recommend wholeheartedly enough.

Making all these cakes one after another made me come to wonder why in the world anyone with more than 6 minutes would bother using a boxed mix. It’s tremendously easy to do it properly from scratch, the only aspect approaching difficulty being the finishing, which you’d have to do in any case. The flavor of a homemade cake is pure butter and vanilla (and, as the case may be, chocolate or carrot or spice), and the sublime texture will make you question why you would ever even admit the boxed stuff was food. It seems like the lesson of this short first week of cake might simply have been to show us all how simple it really is.

Even easier than pie.

2007-03-29T00:09:00.000-04:00

Day 50: Test. Paper. Halfway.

Mostly logistical at this point, so let’s keep this brief.

We had the usual written exam, which I aced.

We had the usual practical exam, consisting of creating soft rolls to the point of readiness for the oven, but without baking (although one other student and I stayed late to bake ours, since they looked particularly good), and then making puff pastry by hand. Both went very well and I received full credit.

I also did pretty well on the paper (which, for those of you who just can’t get enough verboseness, can be found here). My topic being Middle Eastern baking, a look at the region’s breads was highly informative in terms of human history and political geography, as well as of the breads themselves.

The report card we received the next week showed me at a .07 reduction in my overall GPA due to the day that I was out sick – the fact that I made the project for that day at home, perfectly, using my own equipment and ingredients, apparently notwithstanding. I might push my luck on this one; I’ll keep you posted. If I felt it were fair I wouldn’t mind so much.

Halfway done!

2007-03-25T14:12:00.000-04:00

Days 47, 48, and 49: Coating. Tunneling. Snapping.

We continued in this last week of our second quarter with the process of lamination. Any dough which is rolled thin, spread with fat, folded, and rolled thin again (this process being repeated any number of times) is called a “laminated” dough. A very common one was the puff pastry we had made the week before; a very uncommon one (that I know only through my research on Middle Eastern breads for our second final project) is malooga, a Yemeni flatbread which is prepared in the same way. The one most recognized around the world though, is probably the croissant, which we finally got to this week. Surely right on the croissant’s heels is the Danish, which we also made.

The origin of the croissant goes (something) like this: in Vienna (yes, which is not in France), bakers were working in the very early morning, when they heard alarming noises coming from what seemed to be underneath the city. They alerted the authorities, and lo and behold, the Ottomans were tunneling their way under the city to sack it. The military responded and before you knew it, the invaders were squashed in one fell stroke. The bakers were credited with saving the city, and, in recognition of their heroism, they were graciously permitted to create a new pastry. (Rodney Dangerfield should have been telling this story.) They thus created the croissant, its crescent shape a sort of middle finger to the Ottoman Empire (who symbolized itself with the crescent, as the Turkish flag still does). But I digress.

The major difference between puff pastry and both croissant and Danish doughs is that the latter two contain yeast. Obviously this creates rise, but that fact is fairly significant when you compare it with puff pastry. There, the only way to obtain a perfect rise is through a thorough and perfect rolling and folding technique, allowing the moisture in the butter to push the many layers of dough up and apart with stunning ease and surprising efficacy. With these new two doughs, however, the fact that the yeast aids the rise allows us to create it with fewer turns of dough, and, at the same time, promotes a degree of evenness in the rise of the final product.

We began with Danish. This smooth and cooperative dough (ok, sorry to interrupt, but I have a rather large digression on which to embark: My core philosophy with food is, and long has been, that it should be comprised of natural, whole, real ingredients – ingredients which we can identify. As my food education continues, both leisurely and formally, I have begun to learn that certain things like xanthan-, carageenan-, and guar gums are natural plant derivatives, so my derision of them has concluded. However, thanks to food shortages and industrialization efforts during and after WWII, there are other widespread and odious ingredients in food today, and they’re dually demonic. The only thing they contribute to food, by and large, is stability; not flavor, not texture, not quality, simply shelf-life. Meanwhile, as is coming to light even now, hydrogenated fats are… well, they’re just not good for you. Same goes for high-fructose corn syrups, polysorbates, mono- and di-glycerides, modified food starch… what are all these things? Not to sound prideful but I’ve read a fair amount about food science and I know where they come from and how they’re made, but I still don’t quite know what they are. When something is derived from “pineapple,” I get it. I can imagine it. When something is derived from “polyoxylated sorbitol and oleic acid,” you really start to lose me; I’ve never seen that on any tree and I’ve been in a few forests now. If all this sounds like hippie, tree-hugging nonsense, examine this trend: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and food allergies are at an all-time high for us as a species, and these conditions are especially prevalent in regions whose food supply is tainted with these things. Won’t you please join me in crusading, at least in your own daily eating and cooking, for pure, clean, true food? It’s not your fault or mine that these things have become staples in the American diet, but we can do something about it. That being said, I should mention that Danish dough) is one of the few products that benefits from the use of margarine. It gives the dough an even softer texture, and the butter flavor of the margarine doesn’t come across as chemical or overpowering in the final product. We did, however, use butter in ours, kneading an amount of flour into it, and the final product was truly excellent. We formed ours into a number of fruit envelopes (the shape most closely resembling what most of us think of as “Danish”), and into one long prune-filled braid.

Proceeding, we made croissants. (Here’s an oddity for you: all my snobbery and French lessons aside, I hope you find it enlivening that I say cruh-‘sahnts, not ‘cghrwa-soh. It’s okay, we live in America.) For as many times as I’ve failed in making these at home, it went fairly well. We didn’t have enough time to allow them to rise properly, so they didn’t expand to the light and airy state that anyone enjoying a croissant would generally prefer. However, for some reason not too many of us complained about a product that was a little heavier and in which the butter was more concentrated. In general, not a huge event. Next time, though, watch out.

We followed these slightly off but clearly understood pastries with a different sort of croissant. Pains au chocolat, or “chocolate croissants” as they’re callously called here, share the top of my Great Pyramid of Favorites with crème brûlée and donuts. Since I left France, I’ve been trying to find a good one; this above all other food matters so far has been my grail quest. The defining factor of a good one, for my money, is a certain amount of “snap” to the chocolate; it shouldn’t be soft. This way, rather than eating a goo-filled croissant, you’re eating a real croissant at the same time as real chocolate, and what could possibly be better than that? Finding a proper one of these is a true quandary. Certainly don’t get one from a coffee-shop chain; their chocolate is downright mushy. Corporations aren’t the only ones who missed the boat; it’s hard to find a good one even from a great bakery. When we made them in class, I was a little ho-hum, my longtime discouragement about this nitpicky little detail a foregone conclusion at this point. We were each given a number of small, narrow bars of compound chocolate (that is, chocolate which has had a small amount of vegetable oil mixed in, so it doesn’t break down in the heat of the oven – it’s all-natural, mind you!). We enrobed these bars in small rectangles of croissant dough, sealing them on the bottom. Shortly after pulling them from the oven, the fact that they were really too hot to eat was trumped by the incredible aroma filling the room, and we all set upon them like a pack of hyenas at the end of a thin year. The chocolate, of course, was gooey, but the pain au chocolat was heavenly anyway. The next morning, I packed two of these delightful creations for breakfast. When I bit into the first I was slightly more exuberant at my desk than I may have been in quite some time… for the first time in nine years, my teeth stopped at the chocolate and I had to bite just a tiny bit harder to break through it before it surrendered itself to my startled, happy mouth. Not a minor difference. When that snap is there, the chocolate melts at the same moment that the flavor of the butter comes to full light, and both of them float away together on a raft of gossamer pastry.

Sailing into the ecstatic glory of a perfect sunset.

2007-03-13T23:53:00.000-04:00

Days 43, (44,) 45, and 46: You thought strudel was thin.

It seems I forgot to mention what was probably the most enjoyable aspect of making strudel, so allow me to regress for a moment. The thing which allows the dough to be stretched to such inconceivable dimensions is of course gluten. The fun part is getting that gluten to the appropriate emotional state to accommodate extension to such dramatic proportions. Where kneading is enough for bread dough, which needs the gluten to be strong enough to trap air but not much stronger, strudel's gluten obviously needs to be much more thoroughly developed and forgiving. The way you do this is to mix the dough, and then to bang the dickens out of it. You accomplish this is to grab the dough and then throw it - hard enough to use the word "slam" - against the table. Our recipe specified that this was to be done one hundred times; this number seemed a little arbitrary to me, but it was neither insufficient nor excessive, and it worked well. What this does is shock the gluten into formation by slamming the individual microscopic strands of it into one another so they adhere (basically), as opposed to kneading, which invites them together for a nice afternoon tea. As you might imagine, the room became a bit noisy for a short while, but the free therapy this activity provided lasted days.

During the week following strudel, our gaze narrowed to even thinner dough as we dedicated ourselves to four days with puff pastry, that Ionian column of the confectionery. The first type we prepared was "quick" puff pastry, which is made in very much the same way as flaky pie dough or pâte brisée. After this mealy dough is just brought together, with lumps of butter averaging the size of peas, it is rolled into a rectangle, which is given what is called a "double turn" - the short ends are folded into the center, and then the whole dough is folded along that center line. After adequate rest (no gluten here, thanks) and chilling, this process is repeated three times, resting again between every other fold or so. Quick puff pastry is only quicker than the classic version (hold on, we'll get there) when it comes to mixing... the same rules of rolling, folding, and resting apply to all forms of this dough. This dough doesn't puff up to quite the glory of its much more fussed-over cousin, but it still gives the baker adequate push for things like cinnamon-almond straws (which were unstoppable, truly) and little savory things, like the parmesan-paprika palmiers my team fashioned as well. We were also introduced to the mille-feuille, which translates directly as "thousand leaves." To make this very popular confection, the goal is to bake the sheets of dough, which tend to puff up quite vigorously, while at the same time trying to keep the dough as flat as possible. It basically involves a number of sheet pans stacked on top of one another and a lot of squashing things down in hot ovens. This seems silly I'm sure, but the result is a deeply rich and crispy layer of pastry, which flakes apart when broken. I can't visualize another way of making a preparation like this (and I would imagine that if there were, they might have shown it to us since it would most certainly have been simpler).

The next day was my first and hopefully last absence from class, due to strep throat. Our task for that particular Tuesday was the creation of classic puff pastry dough by hand. Not wanting to fall behind, I made it at home – I don't know how I happened to have on hand the two-and-a-half pounds of butter that this recipe requires, but not many people were too surprised when I mentioned that part, so I guess I shouldn't be either. I found the actual preparation of it rather enjoyable. When I returned to class the following day, my homemade dough in hand, everyone seemed moderately annoyed at having had to make puff pastry; and I didn't understand what the hubbub was. But then, when Chef looked at mine and said "huh," I began to think, Gee, maybe I'm not annoyed by doing it because I was doing it wrong. Any error I might have made in preparation, though, was obscured in the final baking process; everything came out pretty spiff. We used it to create more straws and palmiers (sweet this time), which puffed quite a bit more dramatically than those made from the quick dough, and also the classic pithiviers, which consists of two layers of puff pastry enclosing a mound of frangipane, a nut dough (almost always almond) whose fragrance and divine flavor permeate not only the pastry itself but the entire kitchen. Before baking, the top of the pithiviers is scored in a decorative pattern, and a look at the lines will give any potential employer a very accurate picture of just how advantageously neurotic their potential pastry cook will be. We also created an apple strip, which is a long rectangle of puff pastry bordered by slightly higher walls, lined with frangipane and sliced apples. As you can imagine, the variations here in terms of filling and topping are pretty much endless, and my mind wanders back to that gorgeous pastry cream-cognac-apricot concoction of a few weeks ago. (I'll let you know how that one goes.)

If I may say so, I felt I had reached a new level in my education with the final item I produced with this marvelous dough. I created a mille-feuille having used classic puff pastry, which necessitated quite a bit more pushing down during baking but resulted in a pastry layer that was impeccably even in color, flavor, and texture. These layers I alternated with lightened pastry cream, and then, having iced it with a white glaze and covered the sides in crumbled puff pastry (as is traditional), I actually opted to do some cornet work on top. (I know, I know!) The result, though, is a testimony to why we bothered learning cornet work to begin with. This may have been my favorite thing so far. Trumping all three hundred twelve earlier favorites.

So, the preparation. To make classic puff pastry does require a certain amount of patience, which is why most restaurants buy theirs in frozen sheets of only-slightly-lower quality than homemade. You begin by forming a soft dough, using cold water. This step goes fairly quickly, and while the dough rests somewhere, you proceed by kneading cold butter (which you soften by beating it into submission with a rolling pin) with a small amount of flour until the butter is completely smooth in texture. Ideally, the texture of the butter mixture will match the texture of the dough itself. The butter is formed into a block, the dough spread into a large square. The block of butter is then placed on the dough, which is wrapped around it and sealed tightly at all seams. This package of three layers, dough-butter-dough, is then rolled into a rectangle and given a double turn. This is repeated, with resting and chilling of course, three more times, resulting in a final product of (I think) 768 alternating layers of dough and butter (right?). When placed into an adequately hot oven, the moisture in the butter evaporates and very forcefully puffs the layers of dough apart. This works more evenly and impressively than quick puff pastry because between all those layers of dough, the butter is spread out in one giant, even sheet, not in several thousand large squashed pieces. The rise is quite tremendous, a mere eighth-inch piece of puff pastry rising to an inch or more, each impossibly thin layer visible from the side. When chewed, the resistance these layers provide to the teeth, as they are first pressed together and then shorn through, give puff pastry a unique and positively heavenly texture.

Let’s just say I had plenty of communion, then.

2007-03-01T11:35:00.000-05:00

Days 40, 41, and 42: Getting thinner.

The dough, of course; not me. Actually, before busting out the rolling pins, we began the week with some biscuits. It seems like a non sequitur from last week’s crust lessons, and after those colorful fifty-dollars-each tarts, a little like the shack among mansions. Biscuit dough, however, is made in much the same way as a pâte brisée; the fat is thoroughly rubbed into the dry ingredients until the mixture is mealy and uniform, and then the liquid is added. We used the classic White Lily flour, whose biscuits have graced the Southern table for as long as chitterlings (yes, that’s really how that’s spelled, can you believe it!?) and gravy. We also formed some scones by the same method. My team was lucky to have received the lemon-cornmeal scone recipe as an assignment. Several other teams were to prepare chocolate scones, and just as in the Great Donut Fiasco some weeks ago, they didn’t come out too hot. (Maybe they make the recipes that sound the best come out the worst in order to keep that fabled freshman twenty-seven at a level that wouldn’t beg too many lawsuits.) In any case, the biscuits were light and many-layered and flaky, and the scones had a delightful crispness from the cornmeal along with a refreshing hint of lemon.

Readying our pins and using a bit of dough we had made the week before, each team made a number of tiny tartlets. The whole process with this type of pastry, from weighing the ingredients to weighing yourself the morning after you’ve eaten too many of them, is the perfect training ground for the patience a pastry chef must learn. Each of these little desserts takes a fair bit of time to make: you form the dough, then chill, roll, mold, bake, and cool it; you make the pastry cream (or citrus curd, buttercream, or other filling), and cool it; you prepare miniscule slivers of whatever it is you’re planning to put on top. Then, finally, you’re up to filling and topping, the latter of which is best done with a pair of tweezers. After that, they’re ready for presentation and eating. And you watch the microcosmic fruit of so much labor disappear in one bite, or maybe one and a half if the eater is particularly demure. This teaches you to break the emotional bond with your products very quickly. (The value of which, as anyone who related to my sourdough disaster on Day 32 could tell you, cannot be overestimated.) That said, they were very elegant, and envisioning row upon row of them conjures images of the best-catered party any of us have been to.

We used a bit more of the same dough, rolled thin again, to make a Breton. This pastry, named for the Bretagne region of France, is basically a thinly veiled excuse to enclose candy in pastry and call it a dessert. We made a walnut caramel, placed it in a pastry shell, and then topped it with a second layer. Then, as if to further disguise its nature, we gave it a rustic fork design across the top. (No one in the country eats candy, everyone knows that.) Not that I’m complaining, mind you. It was awfully good.

From there we proceeded to the thinnest dough so far, the fabled Hungarian strudel. This dough is truly a marvel to behold. It begins as somewhat ordinary dough. You take a pound or so of it, and on a table covered with a clean cloth and amply floured, you begin to stretch it. You stretch and stretch, always using the backs of your hands, until the dough is thin enough to read through. (When I had read about strudel, I always thought it was just an expression to “read newsprint through” it, but seeing the clearly defined edges of my burn scar as the back of my hand stretched the dough toward me taught me otherwise.) What you’re left with at the end is a giant sheet (and I mean giant – ours was about six feet by eight feet), stretched so thin that you can see the gluten not only for the transparent membrane that it is, but also for its incredible extensibility if rested properly. After all the oohs and aahs had died down, we brushed the whole sheet with butter, strew breadcrumbs across it, and added our filling. I had chosen apple for our team, being somewhat the classicist but also wishing to avoid things like those mid-winter plums I’m always going on about. Then, the three of us lifting the tablecloth gingerly, gently, and in perfect concert, we began to roll up this monster of a confection. When we had finally rolled the entire thing, we divided it into three pieces, each of which could still be called large. The final product was everything you could hope for in a strudel – thin, flaky layers of crisp pastry enrobing a lightly sweet and mildly spiced fruit filling, the whole of which simply melted into oblivion on the palate. Even given its superlative eating qualities, it’s understandable why making strudel this traditional way is somewhat a dying art. Not only is it labor-intensive, but it requires the undivided attention of at least two, and preferably three people to pull it off properly. There are tales of some people who can make this alone, which I’m sure there are.

Just nobody I know.

2007-02-20T11:39:00.000-05:00

Days 36, 37, 38, and 39: Pâtes and pans.

A flurry of activity took us through the week, the focus of which was crusts. We learned the classic pâte brisée (pot bree-zay), which essentially translates to “broken dough,” the sweetened pâte sucrée (soo-cray), in both the plain and chocolate versions, pasta frolla, a more mildly sweet Italian dough, galette dough, which I’ll explain later, and a gorgeous flaky pie dough made using sour cream.

The first dough, pâte brisée, is made by rubbing pieces of fat (butter, in our case) into flour with a nick of salt in it, and adding water until a dough is formed. The butter remains in those “pea-sized” chunks we’ve all read about in so many cookbooks (let me tell you, it’s an average you’re going for here, folks; don’t waste your life trying to get them all pea sized – it would be beyond annoying and the crust wouldn’t come out as nicely if they were all the same size). The purpose of this is that when they’re incorporated into the dough at that size, the butter’s moisture, which evaporates during baking, steams the layers of dough apart, resulting in a flaky texture. A good brisée, in my humble opinion, should end up exactly halfway between a shortbread cookie and a true American pie crust when it comes to being flaky. This crust is typically used for tarts. There’s no sugar in it, so it’s superb for savory tarts, but filling it with a mildly sweet pastry cream and a glazed fresh fruit topping allows it to bend the other way as well; this is what we did with ours. We were to make one large tart and two small ones. I went behind Chef’s back and made one large and seven small. (What can I say; I really like tarts, especially charming little ones.) We had a wide variety of fresh fruit available to us, which, being that it’s February, mostly tasted like cardboard from a Kool-Aid shipping box (remind me sometime to go on a rant about how Americans really aggravate me sometimes by demanding year-round availability of fruit and then convincing themselves that it tastes good when it’s out of season, or, for a less bitingly sarcastic version, visit my paper), but we carried on anyway. Eating quality of the fruit aside, the displays of color which resulted were about as fantastic as a flock of agitated macaws.

Pâte sucrée differs from brisée in that the fat is rubbed in much more thoroughly, so that the mixture, before adding water, resembles that stuff certain large food corporations sell in green cans and audaciously call “parmesan” “cheese.” Water is then mixed in, and the dough, as you might expect, has a notably smoother texture, which then bakes down to a shorter – more crumbly – texture than its flaky cousin. Pâte sucrée is used for sweet tarts, and our choice was the classic apricot cognac tart. What a marvel this confection is. We were fortunate to have high-quality apricots which were canned ripe. We rolled out a large rectangle of dough and used it to line an entire half-sheet pan (13 by 18 inches). We then filled it with lightly cognac-flavored pastry cream, topped it with apricot halves (face down), baked it, and then glazed it with melted apricot jelly which also had an insinuation of cognac. This is a surreal treat, as long as you use good apricots and good cognac. A very judicious sprinkling of crumbled toasted almonds elevates the taste and texture to a level that I, in my limited vocabulary, can only describe as transporting.

We used our chocolate sucrée to make tartlet shells which we filled with ganache (a mixture of chocolate and cream (basically)) and topped with hazelnuts. I never imagined a time in my life would come when I strongly preferred an apricot pastry to a chocolate one, but, against all odds, it’s happened. I don’t know if it was the recipe, the preparation, or something as simple as a lack of cognac, but our spiffy little chocolate tartlets, which make you melt just thinking about them, were pretty dull. I’ll have to tweak this one and get back to you. They were cute though.

The less edgy pasta frolla was another dough we rolled out into a half-sheet pan, but the filling here was vastly different than the apricot tart, and satisfying on a whole other level. We managed to lay down a solid inch-thick layer of a most decadent mixture: smooth ricotta, mozzarella, and Romano cheeses, shredded prosciutto, and diced sweet sausage. Just for looks (ok, and taste), we covered the whole shebang with a lattice of more pasta frolla. The slight sweetness of the crust perfectly offset the salt of the pigstuffs and the heat of the generously cracked black pepper. (Isn’t that the kind of qualification you look for in a perfect food?) This glorious invention bears the humble name pizza rustica. Oh, to be an Italian peasant.

Now, to the galette. These rustic pastries are made using a dough that is prepared in the same technique as a pâte sucrée, but which isn’t sweetened. The dough is rolled out into circles, filling is placed on top, and the edges are folded over it but not completely into the center, so the filling in the center is left exposed. They’re baked directly on the deck of the oven, which develops a crisp bottom crust, heightening appeal in terms of appearance, texture, and flavor, as well as adding stability. We made two varieties, both using roasted fruits: plum-ginger, and pear-fig. The roasted pear and fig filling was especially terrific – not only did I receive my first badge of honor (a.k.a. large second-degree burn) pulling it from the oven, but its flavor was downright ethereal (this usually happens when you add rum, vanilla, sugar, lemon zest, and a pinch of salt to something and bake it). You should really consider making a galette. They’re easier than pies; you only have to roll one crust, you don’t have to fuss with a pan, and if it looks uneven or boils over or cracks somewhere, it only adds to the inherent rustic appeal – a margin any baker can appreciate.

Finally, we come to the pie. This iconic American pastry, which so many things are as-easy-as, has been the source of a number of frustrating kitchen ventures for me, as I know it has for many others. (Even if they didn’t know it, it’s happened to them; let’s admit it: we’ve all eaten some pretty awful pie at one pot-luck or another.) The recipe we used for the dough, as mentioned, had a contingent of sour cream, which is beneficial in a number of ways. First, the acidity in the sour cream inhibits the development of gluten, so there’s less worry about overmixing, a common issue with pie dough. Second, it gives the dough a rich, smooth flavor, just as you might expect it would. Third… well, who needs a third when you have those two? This dough rolled out very easily and smoothly, which is about seventy-five per cent of the real battle with pie. I decided to continue with the theme “iconic” and filled it with sour cherries and topped it with a lattice crust. It was flawless. (I blame the recipe.)

The common denominator here is mixing. Crusts are sometimes flaky, sometimes short, and sometimes somewhere in between. They shouldn’t ever be chewy or tough, though, which are the results of overmixing. When you consider that some of the greatest pastry doughs in the world are some of the most quickly mixed and least fussed-over, you start to understand why things could ever be called easy as pie. Want to make your pie as easily as… well… pie? Simple: introduce all your ingredients to one another, allow them to become acquainted, and then do what any gracious host or hostess would.

Walk away!

2007-02-13T00:20:00.000-05:00

Days 33, 34, and 35: Doughs. Nuts. Finally, some pork.

[To my reader or readers: I hope it’s okay that I’m compiling posts like this. Tell me.]

Last week’s three sessions went by in a sort of dreamlike haze, and not just because there was far-flung flour covering every surface in the room. (Although, admittedly, that was probably a large part of it.) The correct planets must have come into alignment (I’m still researching this), or some unseen but ill-humored force must have been hard at work in our kitchen. Whatever the cause, fate conspired against us.

Now, let’s level the playing field a bit. I have a lot of favorite foods, we all know it, but let’s ignore that for a moment as we bring our little discussion to the topic of donuts. I get pretty serious about my donuts. There’s little to make me proud of my Dutch heritage when it comes to food; mostly they just boil the dickens out of things, or eat Indonesian. Donuts, however, are my one straw to grasp; that one, perfect food, comfortably unchallengeable in their ivory tower of comestible excellence, that is credited (by people who have the story right) to the Dutchman. Those noble people of Holland, who most of us know so little about, were the first to take globs of sweetened dough and drop them in giant vats of melted pork fat. The momentousness of this discovery is never lost on me. These days, of course, you can only get donuts fried in much healthier fats (especially now that trans-fats are going bye-bye), but my sincere appreciation of them is undiminished. I love donuts. I had been aware that Lesson 33 had been approaching for quite some time, the three-hour segment apportioned to donuts lingering deliciously on the horizon. When finally the day came, my enthusiasm was almost palpable. Lesson 33 began with a demonstration by Chef of his grandmother’s buttermilk donut recipe; not bad, not bad at all. We were then each assigned, in teams, a particular donut recipe. My team was to prepare the sour cream chocolate variety. The first hint of foreshadowing in this novella was when a student who had taken the donut segment in another class before (long story) said how awfully they had come out. My excitement, however, remained. We went on to prepare them precisely according to the recipe supplied in our texts, and every thing seemed in place; the batter tasted right, the oil was hovering steadily at three-seventy-five. When they had been frying happily away for quite some time, it dawned on us that they should be done, although they remained somewhat soft. We removed them; they’re done, Chef said. Fine. We fried the remainder. I noticed next that our first round of three donuts had managed to entirely saturate six paper towels with oil. I have no illusions about how fatty donuts are, but this seemed a bit extreme. Other people’s donuts were shedding a bit of oil, but these were like sponges drying out. Which is what they did. When cool, they were hard and heavy. When pressed hard enough, they would give way and crumble into nothingness, leaving only oil on the finger and a scowl on the brow. The taste? Sort of like nothing, actually, which I can find elsewhere for far fewer calories. Not happy. You know by now that I consider slander to be unseemly, but I can’t help myself tonight. Shame on the person who wrote this recipe; it really sucks.

Picking ourselves up from the dirt, we created our brioche dough, which we retarded overnight. Brioche is a fantastic dough; it’s very rich and buttery, but perfectly neutral at the same time. It bakes up very soft, and lends itself very well to both savory preparations – pigs in a blanket, for example – and sweet ones, like cinnamon rolls. It’s also pretty fun to work with, being firm and elastic and fairly forgiving. The following evening, we removed our dough from its refrigerated environment and shaped it into the classic brioche shape, which is called brioche à tête, the last word meaning “head.” Round little mounds of dough are placed in fluted tins, and a small piece of dough, called a topknot, is placed in the center. We placed our filled molds on a sheet pan and slid the whole getup into the proofbox. Again with the slander, but whoever designed this model should’ve gone to a better school. The racks inside are just one millimeter too wide, so large sheet pans full of probably heavy things can sometimes fall directly downward, onto whatever happens to be beneath them. You already know what got smushed on that fateful night. Some theorize that when Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake!” what she actually said was “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” which means, “Let them eat brioche!” Whether she said it or not, my brioche-with-heads ended up quite like she did: without one.

After that little disaster, we went from a beautiful, soft French dough to a couple very hard and intractable Italian ones. We crafted dough for both cannolis and for sfogliatelle (don’t worry about how to pronounce it; if you ever see one, just point at it, and smile and nod excitedly at the person on the other side of the display case). These doughs are similar in that they’re both extremely dry, and therefore must be kneaded using a pasta machine. A chunk of rough dough is passed through the pasta machine on the widest setting, and the strip of dough that results is then folded up and passed through once more. This is done again and again, while the distance between the rollers is gradually reduced. This dough eventually becomes smooth, perfectly uniform in texture, and ludicrously thin. We had begun with cannoli dough, and when it was fully kneaded, we stored it in the fridge overnight, a procedure we then repeated for our sfogliatelle. Returning to our doughs the next day, we rolled them out again. First, for cannolis, paper-thin rounds are wrapped around metal tubes, and then, with the tube still in the middle, dropped into hot oil. The fun part here is that you have to take these fragile things off the tubes while they’re still hot. Whatever, it helps build chef hands. While they were cooling, we prepared our sfogliatelle. (Alright, it’s sfoal-yuh-`tell-ay.) This is done by rolling all the dough out into one long strip – I think ours ended up at about ten feet – and then painting the whole strip with a softened, fifty-fifty mixture of butter and lard. (Yes, I was excited too.) It’s then rolled up and, once chilled, cut into half-inch slices. These slices – looking somewhat like unbaked cinnamon rolls only with thousands more layers – are then pressed out from the center into cones, using the thumbs. These beautiful pig-laden cones are then filled with a very smooth, sweet ricotta and orange mixture, and baked on their sides. They’re better than they sound, and I think they sound pretty good. We filled our cannolis as well, with the smoothest cannoli cream I have yet experienced, and gorged on them.

For a change.

2007-02-02T16:58:00.000-05:00

Days 30, 31, and 32: Pride. Prejudice. Proofboxes.

I had (and took) the opportunity the other night to display my gluttony more overtly than ever before. Using the dough we had created on Day 30 and retarded overnight, we each created a number of pizzas. Pizza carbonara was the one I ate most fervently, but then anything combining bacon and cream usually would be. Ranking closely behind that sublime, rich combination were large bites of my own and other students’ creations, including but certainly not limited to four cheese; three cheese and pepperoni; prosciutto with garlic, sage and goat cheese; puttanesca (anchovy, caper, and olive); and good old Margherita. This was real pizza, too – thin, crisp-crusted “New York” pizza, which is to say, Italian pizza. The brick pizza ovens used in Italy (and New York, for that matter) reach about eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. We had to settle for a mere five hundred fifty, but our crusts firmed to a state of delightful crunchiness even so. Oven temperatures aside, I’m slightly disturbed at my own lack of shame (nay, pride) in the amount I’m willing to eat while others egg me on. I remember days when I would sneak off for this sort of thing, so the opportunities were rarer. Now, I’m on a low-dignity diet. I’m enjoying it thoroughly but I’m not sure it’s working.

Using a very similar, if slightly wetter dough, we also crafted a bit of focaccia. I used fresh oregano and parmesan cheese on mine, seasoning it with salt and pepper, and a bit of minced anchovy. You’ll see now that I’ve brought up anchovy a couple times. Most people say “ill” because they saw someone say that in a movie at some point. Let’s move past this phobia. Anchovies, good ones, are nothing to say “ill” about. They have a delightful saltiness and a thrilling, slightly meaty texture. The “fishy” flavor you’re so worried about won’t be a problem if you’ve gotten some good ones. Let’s talk about how they make the sausage you’re so happy to throw on your pizza, then we’ll see what’s ill-worthy.

I was surprised, when I pulled my bagels out of the oven last night, that they actually looked like real bagels. (Well, I guess they were real bagels, but still.) Bagels are an interesting case because they’re so often made in shops that only do bagels. This adds an air of mystery to them; they must be so complicated to make properly that an entire store’s worth of employees have to dedicate their lives to them. Not really. Make some fairly dry bread dough, poke a hole through a small piece of it, dip it in some boiling water, put stuff on it, and bake it. You have a bagel. Pretzels, now, are another story. Made from a similar dough, shaping them is an exercise in futility so thorough that frustration never even breaks past the wall of amusement. Depending on whose tray you happened by, you might have wondered if a seagull, a Chihuahua, or a golden retriever had passed by at some point. I guess I like big soft pretzels just enough that one a year from the pretzel cart man on Forty-Second Street does the job quite nicely.

Meanwhile, that fermentation thing I’ve been ranting about all this time actually pays off. I created my sourdough last night using my bubbly little starter, let it sit around for a while in the temperature- and humidity-regulated proofbox, and then shaped it into a loaf. I originally intended to form a classic boule (a round loaf, said “bool”), but as I was rounding it, the dough mysteriously formed a large hole through the entire center. Yes, it looked like a giant bagel, as if somehow keeping with an inadvertently established theme. All was not lost, however. Remember my little exposé on the French, how they have a word for everything? This loaf shape, a giant bagel, is called a couronne, and that’s what I “decided” to settle on for my loaf. (When life gives you lemons…) The bread itself had a beautiful, open “crumb” (the actual flesh of the bread) and a deep, complex flavor that spoke of long development. I was foiled in my other attempt at bread with a pre-fermented component, however. Chef had created, at least a week ago, a mixture of huge amounts of both water and flour (twenty-two pounds of each, specifically), with a comparatively tiny amount of yeast (one tablespoon) thrown in. This combination, called a poolish, bubbles up into an amazing blob-like mass of foaming wonderfulness. I used a great big cascade of it to build an amazing dough by adding simply flour and salt, and formed it into perky little rolls which bespoke the very nature of their creator. Little did they know, though, that their doom was upon them. As soon as they were slid into the oven, which was at five hundred fifty degrees, I watched the temperature plummet, inexplicably, by nearly three hundred degrees. What happens to dough when baked at two-hundred-something I will have to research in order to explain scientifically, but for now suffice it to say that the interior moisture most definitely does not evaporate, the dough does not spring up in the oven, and then you get very emotional, helplessly watching about nine days worth of meticulously monitored preparation amount to lumps of gluey insipidness not worthy of ingestion.

But I ate them anyway.

2007-01-30T16:48:00.000-05:00

Day 29: Ugly loaves. Bubbly sludges. Blank stares.

Yesterday was the oddest class so far, by a substantial margin. We began by making baguettes that only a mother could love. The dough, which we made last week, had been “retarding” in the refrigerator over the weekend. What this means is its literal translation: we slow down, or retard, the action of the yeast in the dough so it doesn’t overdevelop, while the bacteria continue to create lush flavors. This technique is absolutely used in all world-class bread, and it does tremendous things for it. We shaped our baguettes, and placed them on linen couches (pronounced koosh, in singular or plural, pictured at right below), and allowed them to proof. For just a little bit too long. When we started to remove them to peels, for loading into the ovens, the mayhem began – we realized that they had been proofing too long and most of them were very stuck to the linen. The result was a whole pile of terribly ugly loaves, loaves so ugly that if you made them at your bakery all you could do was sell them as “rustic baguettes” and charge people a dollar more. Just like so many mothers have told their children over countless centuries, though, true beauty lies on the inside. The flavor was deep and complex, with buttery overtones that lingered silkily on the palate. (So you see, you wouldn’t really be ripping people off.)

We also made some breadstick dough – which invariably led to a discussion about the very antithesis of good food, The Olive Garden. I hate to be slanderous in a public forum, but honestly, if I hear one more person going on and on about how great their breadsticks are, I’m going to need a padded room and a straightjacket. That’s not bread, people. If you don’t believe me, let’s try a little experiment. First, stop by a bakery – even an average one; I know we don’t all live in downtown Paris – and get a baguette or another long, narrow loaf. Then, that evening, go to The Olive Garden for dinner (or better yet, make someone else do it and ask them for a favor), saving a teeny little bit of room (which should be easy, since you really shouldn’t eat too much of that food). Make sure that your doggie bag includes a breadstick. Now, when you’re safely in the comfort of your own home and both breads are cool, cut each of them in half. What differences do you notice? Which one looks like it includes Elmer’s Paste as an ingredient? Which one crumbles apart from the motion of air or light particles around it? Now, grab a glass of water and get ready for one of those famous tastings I’m always talking about. Take a sip of water to cleanse your palate. Now, taste one of the two breads. Take another sip of water, and when you have no lingering flavor from the first bread, taste the other. Now that it’s cool, the “restaurant” breadstick is a little less convincing, isn’t it!? Which sample do you suppose contained only flour, water, salt, and yeast (and maybe some vitamin C)? And which do you suppose has things like high fructose corn syrup and modified food starch? Do you know what flour, water, salt, yeast, and vitamin C are? Do you know what modified food starch is? Have I made my point?

Fermentation; let’s talk about it. You sort of know what fermentation is, but let’s break it down so we’re all on the same page. Yeast eats sugar, and when it does, it excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide. And that’s it; that’s all fermentation is. When you have fermentation happening, you have bacteria colonizing as well. It happens in some of our favorite foods – cheese, yogurt, beer, wine, sausage, bread, for example – and it’s what gives these foods flavors that transcend the sum total of their simple ingredients. The sourdough starters we’re currently cultivating are just jars of goop made of flour and water. At least, that’s all we put in. Did you ever get a plum and see the white powdery stuff on it, especially in the crevices, that you thought was pesticide so you washed it off? That’s wild yeast. It’s drawn naturally to plants and other living things, and wheat is certainly included. There are also bacteria all over… well, everything… so the yeast and the bacteria present on the wheat start doing their little magic together, and form a symbiotic culture, which we call a sourdough starter. We fed our starters before leaving class, adding flour and water to them. It was particularly exciting when my classmate’s very hungry culture began expanding beyond the limits of its container during our commute, burping and spilling out all over the 125th St. subway station platform. And no one had any napkins.

There were bunnies in all kinds of headlights last night as new segments of culinary math were introduced. We began learning about dough hydration, both in terms of what it means mathematically and what it means aesthetically (we’ll get to that down the road). Chef also talked, at length, about the system of baker’s percentages, which is invaluable in scaling bread recipes up or down. We learned how to find the percentage of any ingredient against the percentage of flour, as well as how to find the quantity of any ingredient based on the percentage of what percentage of flour isn’t a percentage of the main amount of flour for each ingredient’s percentage.

Or something like that.

2007-01-27T15:33:00.000-05:00

Days 27 and 28: The Cat Whisperer.

I realize that I tend to become somewhat impassioned with things, particularly food things, but seriously, bread is and will always be the song I sing most loudly. It’s a never ending source of fascination for me to gaze into a jar of my sourdough starter and watch my billion little pets eat slowly, teeny pockets of gas rising to the top like the primordial ooze of life that it actually is. So I hope you’ll forgive me as I systematically and unabashedly try to convert you into a bread maniac.

Bread is something I’ve researched on an über-hobby level for several years at this point, and I’m continually telling people how simple it is to craft really good bread at home. I stand by that, always. You’d be hard pressed to find better bread that what you can make at home, unless you live near a really hot bakery. And I’m not talking about Plantera or whatever it’s called; not a large chain bakery. Operations like that can make palatable bread, for sure, but I promise, you can do better. And you can certainly outdo the supermarket (yes, even Wegmans, which is my favorite too).

That being said, there’s something of an elusive quality that bread has. Say you mix identical amounts of flour, water, yeast, and salt together on two different days, and treat them in what seems the same way. On the first day, you create a loaf of golden crusty wonderfulness, crying out to you to break it apart and let it warm you down to the roots of your very soul, and on the other day you end up with some horrific steaming mass that might have been found in the corner of a wet sauna somewhere in the unsavory part of town. This is what can happen if you’re not paying attention.

As I learn more about bread, I’m learning that it’s like cats. My major error with bread is that I’ve been trying all along to get it to cooperate with me. Have you ever had a cat that was willing to cooperate with you on any level? I’m zero for eighteen on that score. You have to meet the bread/cat on its own terms. What’s dawning on me now is not to force our bread into the package we need it to be, but to let it show us what it’s capable of. If we follow our dough, we learn from it. We let it take us down its own avenues, and it shows us into unknown and exciting quarters, as it’s been doing for breadmakers for millennia.

Our first bread projects were clearly aimed at lassoing in any nonbelievers. We began with a semolina loaf. Semolina is flour milled from durum wheat, which has an very high gluten content and therefore makes a very strong and forgiving bread dough for first-timers. The taste of it doesn’t imply that it’s so simple, though; it’s got a really deep, buttery, and almost corn-like flavor. The next two breads didn’t exactly turn people away, either. We made a rosemary and olive dough – our team crafted rolls from it, one of which gave me a pretty awesome sandwich the next day – and a Provençal bread called fougasse (foo-`gahss). I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss this one. It’s made like many other breads, only the water you add to the dough for fougasse has herbs soaked in it first. Oh, and then there’s the matter of several ounces of crumbled bacon and a few tablespoons of bacon grease which are kneaded into the dough. Yeah. Pretty much. We also crafted our first baguettes – I didn’t feel like I had inadvertently stepped into a Parisian bakery or anything, but, if you were asked to identify them, you would have said “baguette.” Pretty spiffy for the first time on the water in that particular boat.

There are certainly advantages that appear in the professional kitchen – fifty-thousand-dollar ovens with steam injectors; giant tubs of fresh, high-quality ingredients; electronic scales and rock solid gadgets; eighty-quart stand mixers that have wheeled carts and hydraulic lift systems for the bowls; a knowledgeable chef telling you what to do and how to do it. Yet all these advantages amount to nothing if the doughmaker isn’t listening to his dough, and you can certainly do that at home. Other than ingredients, all you need is one each of wooden spoon, bowl, counter, pan, and oven, and a dash of patience. If there’s anything further I can do to convince you to try this, let me know; even if it’s as simple as shutting up about it.

I fully intend to continue ranting either way.

2007-01-24T01:35:00.001-05:00

Day 26: Fungus. Gas. Bacteria.

The debate I’ve been having with myself daily has just been rearranged. Since starting school, I’ve wondered constantly whether I should continue with my studies after my current program has ended. Baking is wonderful and warm, but cooking has always appealed to me in nearly equal measure – my treasured and rare free weekend, the one that just passed, was filled from 8:00am to 10:00pm with shopping, preparation, and cooking, as was most of Sunday. Not to discredit the art, but I’m beginning to think that I can be as competent a cook as I feel I need to become without formal training – I don’t wish to work as a professional culinary chef. In bread, though, pastry has a new opponent in the ring. It might not be so obvious a competitor for pastry as culinary arts are, but the people who excel at bread, like those who excel at pastry or chocolate or wine, are the ones who dedicate themselves squarely to that particular craft.

My most serious hobby over the last decade, bread is something I have come to love in a way that could only be the result of obsession and infatuation, to which I’ll readily admit. (The seven different lumps, sludges, or blobs of dough in various states of refrigeration around my apartment would give it away anyway.) When you manage to combine four or five common ingredients, let them react with each other for a while, and then heat them a bit, and you end up with fresh, hearty, wholesome, life-sustaining food, your mind spins with romance and pleasure. You’ve created. From your simple bowl has come a food that no country, no region is without in some form, a food that has sustained and fueled life and economy and religion and war for thousands of years. A history of bread is a history of the world around us and its constituent cultures. To make it in your own kitchen evokes this grand place in the scheme of things, and it’s spellbinding. I know I’m not crazy in feeling this way, because I’ve shown people how to make it, and it’s never failed to amaze them how simple it is. Somehow this oldest craft of the home kitchen has become very mysterious; people always say things like “Oh, I could never make bread, it’s too complicated.” Well congratulations, you have a shorter attention span than the gold miners who wore their yeast in little pouches they hung around their necks, or the Israelites who made it even as they fled Egypt with Moses. Alright, it takes a little more time and effort than, say, pulling the slick plastic skin off a Hungry Man prepackaged microwaveable dinner. But to be perfectly frank, there’s really nothing elusive about it, and each time you make it, you have a better understanding of it than you did the time before. For me and my fellow bread-nerds, it is impossible to break free of its grip.

Our introduction to bread began with a simple semolina loaf, which we constructed today but won’t bake until tomorrow. We did, however, go thoroughly over the process. Here it is, in a great big nutshell.

To make something that can be called bread, you really need flour, liquid, and salt. Yeast, too, if you want a leavened bread, which is what we’ll concentrate on since that’s the kind most of us eat regularly. Adding water to wheat flour, and then mixing it around, causes all the protein molecules in the flour to stick together, forming an elastic network that we call gluten. This gluten network is capable of being inflated, much like a balloon, and this is exactly what we want to happen; we want the bread to rise. The way we get air into those little balloon-like pockets is yeast. Yeast is a tiny fungus that eats sugar. Starch, when it breaks down, is sugar, so in a bread dough, yeast has plenty of food. The waste product of the yeast during all this sugar bingeing is gas – carbon dioxide. This gas inflates all the little (and sometimes not-so-little) pockets of gluten, resulting in rising, and, eventually, the network of holes throughout the bread which give it its texture. This whole process is due to fermentation – the other byproduct is indeed alcohol, which doesn’t concern the breadmaker so much since it evaporates from the loaf during baking. Now, add to that the working of different varieties of bacteria, and we have a little flavor factory going on. Yes, bacteria. It’s like an advertisement for rinsing all the soap off your clean dishes. America’s current phobia with bacteria is far too broad in scope; there are some really good ones out there, the kinds that give us not only bread but cheese, yogurt, vinegar, and sausage, and a host of other products. Give that flavor a little time to develop, and you’re making serious bread.

The really cool thing about all this chemistry is that it happens without you interfering. Once you put all these things in touch, as long as you meet their very basic environmental requirements, they just do what they’re supposed to do. And that’s it. You bake it. That’s the simple part: put it in a hot oven. My usual challenge for nonbelievers stands for this as well: if you don’t believe me, go try it. Now, it’s going to take a little effort on your part to throw it together properly, and a little patience to let it do its thing. But what in the world beats making something at home that’s better on your third or fourth attempt than any you could go buy? That’s the really cool thing about bread these days. As restaurant food becomes more and more removed from what we can accomplish in our own kitchens, bakers the world over strive to make bread as rustically as they can. It adheres more to tradition and history as it becomes more popular.

Well, maybe that and origami. But bread tastes better.

2007-01-23T12:38:00.000-05:00

Intermission: Produce.

My regular posting will resume this evening or tomorrow, and you’ll find out all about our new chef, new students (!), and new projects.

Meanwhile, I’ve gone ahead and created a space for my first quarter final paper, right here. It’s all about fruit. It should give you some insight into selecting and storing several fruits that you should be able to find locally. It’ll also give you an introduction to exactly how much I’m into using local, seasonal produce. You can take the boy off the farm…

I hope you enjoy it if you have a moment to take a gander. Otherwise, I’ll see you back here soon!

2007-01-19T15:47:00.000-05:00

Days 23, 24, and 25: Filling. Foiling. Failing?

First and foremost, thanks, readers, for your patience with me this week as I prepared for my first-quarter (“Module I”) final and practical exams, which were yesterday. If you’d forgive the lack of my usual diligence in posting regularly, and continue reading, I’d be ever so grateful. Picture it… Tuesday… New York City…

Those French. The really amusing thing about French pastry isn’t that they’ve thought of every imaginable combination of things; it’s more the fact that they have names for any and all imaginable variations of a product, distinct names, which don’t translate. This only adds to the esoteric nature that’s inherent to things French to begin with. Nowhere does their thinly veiled ploy to maintain the vastest repertoire of desserts and amuses bouches become more apparent than with cream puff pastry, or pâte à choux (pot-ah-shoe – please don’t say pot-AY or I may have to spank you).

Made by boiling water with butter and salt, stirring in flour, and then beating in eggs one by one, choux pastry is one of the more versatile ingredients in the baker’s kitchen. It’s piped onto sheets and when baked, it puffs right up, and the center (ideally) becomes a hollow. A classic accompaniment to baked choux pastry is pastry cream, which is made by boiling milk and sugar, adding some form of starch, and then drizzling a bit of this hot liquid into some eggs while whisking. Several more eggs are then gingerly incorporated, and the whole mess is returned to the boil. (Yes, the boil. You can do that without making scrambled eggs here since the starch molecules insulate the proteins from one another and prevent them from coagulating… but that’s another blog.) Stir in a bit of vanilla for flavor, and butter for general goodness, and you’re ready to go.

What you can make by marrying these two ingredients is limited only to the shapes your mind can devise, but don’t worry: when you’ve found a unique shape or vehicle of presentation, just ask someone in the know and they’ll tell you what it’s called in French. If you fill small puffs with cream, they’re called petit choux. If you fill big ones with it, they’re called choux à la crème. Long ones, éclairs. Round ones, Paris-Brest. If you fill big ones with pastry cream and then a few mixed berries, they’re probably called boîte à bijoux (jewel box) or something (and if they’re not, that name is copyrighted, by me, just now). Dip them in caramel, fill them with cream, and make a giant cone out of them, like they used to do at French weddings, and you have the inimitable croquembouche. And when I say “doesn’t translate,” I’m referring to terms just like this one – the English word for croquembouche is simply croquembouche, since if you tried to translate the word it would boil down to something like “crustymouth.” I can’t imagine a wedding where that would go over well. (Although for all the caramel left on my face after I was done assembling mine, the French seem to have a point.) These confections are all rather simple – a bland shell filled with lightly flavored cream – but they do not disappoint, as the thirty or so of them which are currently floating in my stomach could tell you.

Choux pastry is where texture starts to assert itself as an enormously important aspect of dessert making. Given that the flavors involved can be somewhat plain (which is not to say at all unpleasant), texture steps forward and shares the spotlight for a moment. The coalescence of a light, crisp shell with velvet pastry cream is the truly addicting aspect of choux. When even as simple a textural experience as this can be so deeply satisfying, you begin to realize that you’ve only begun to explore the avenues of texture. And it only adds to the fun that, simply by virtue of physical laws, when you bite into a choux, you get pastry cream all over yourself.

The freezer saga continues. On Wednesday, I noted that the onetime broken freezer in our classroom was, and had been for some time, at around thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The one next door, where we had put our ice creams and sorbets, to “firm up,” was at a balmy seventeen. I promptly moved my containers to the now arctic unit closer at hand, hoping to get their contents to solidify enough to survive my 42- to 62-minute commute. They well may, the only problem being that during their time in warmer climes, the actual brittle in the cashew brittle ice cream dissolved, and is now a puddle of caramel at the bottom (which maybe I can sell as cashew caramel ice cream), and the port wine reduction that so gorgeously marbled my tangerine sorbet is in a similar state (which, if I mix it together, I might be able to market as blood orange sorbet… maybe). All of this may be inconsequential in any case; I have my doubts as to the length of time the freezer in our classroom can maintain its Rochesterian chill.

So, finally, the exam. After days, nay, weeks, of suspense, it is finally over. Go ahead, ask me the necessary temperature of sugar syrup for use in a nougat recipe. Or to identify semolina, define nappage, or recalculate yield on a marshmallow recipe. I’m there. The written part, unsurprisingly, I wasn’t worried about – you’ve watched me write my own Cliffs Notes. No, the real test for me was the practical, which consisted of three parts: slicing an apple in a specific way in a perfectly uniform fashion (as for a French apple tart, etc.); crafting a soufflé that is properly and evenly risen, uniform in texture, and superlative in taste; and, finally, piping just one consistent border in chocolate (the pattern our choice), using that old favorite device of mine, the cornet. In a flashback to my music-major days of yore, a solid case of performance anxiety set in. So badly were my hands shaking after completing my soufflé, in fact, that the only thing I could to do relax sufficiently for the cornet work was three sinks full of dishes. (Please don’t tell anyone I’m actually capable of this; I have reputations to uphold.) Apparently, dishes and practice are the successful recipe for cornet work. Suffice it to say that I did better than I imagined I would.

And with that, our first module has drawn to a close. It’s sad, in a number of ways… our kindergarten time, that taking of the first step onto the mountaintop, which allowed us to get a real view of the world we’re in and see the horizons we hadn’t yet imagined, has drawn to a close. Also, Chef, as you know him so far from my various postings, will be leaving us. This is not uncommon at my school, but sad for all of us nonetheless. His sure guidance of us, and in particular his patience with us and all our bright-eyed questions, are not something we’ll likely encounter again, in school or after. But there are brighter sides, too. Now that we’ve had a survey of the surrounding land, we can take a step off that peak and actually begin our long march toward one of those points on the horizon. There’s a large forest still to cross, and we’ll encounter footpaths yet unimagined. But now we have a compass.

Not to mention, next week, we start BREAD! (And you thought I was writing before…)

2007-01-12T13:48:00.000-05:00

Day 22: Ice. Cream.

This most delicious class began with the preparation of additional frozen desserts. In our texts, these products were referred to rather unromantically as simply “frozen dessert” of various flavors; they’re the things on menus that usually end up with names like Pineapple Paradise or Strawberries and Dream. They’re somewhat mousse-like in texture, being creamy and whipped. We poured our coffee flavored dessert into pyramid-shaped molds, and our banana flavor went into molds shaped like straight-sided eggs. I don’t know if I have my partner’s approval on this one or not, but I think “Espresso at Giza” and “Gorilla Eggs” might have been my choices for more inventive menu-naming. These molds went into the freezer (next door, of course) for the weekend.

We followed this by a lengthy group discussion of material for our Module I final and practical examinations, which are coming up next week, believe it or not. We also practiced slicing apples. It’s a fairly simple concept, but executing it in a very consistent manner is actually rather challenging. In addition to more apple-slicing, this weekend will find me making soufflés and folding, filling, and using cornets – these three activities comprise the practical portion of the exam.

At the end of this practice, with fully two hours of class remaining, we retrieved our ice creams and sorbets from the freezer. We then proceeded to plate them, using our pizzelles and tulipes from earlier in the week as well as our sauces. We were instructed to eat as much of them as we wanted to, which for some of us, such as me, was a lot. (A disturbing trend I'm noticing lately is that it amuses people when I gorge myself.) As we began plating them, we were informed that a pork class was in the mood for ice cream, so we sent a couple dozen plates up their way. Their pork wasn’t finished by the time we were done for the evening, allegedly. I take it as a given that we have advance credit in the pork department for one night next week.

Now, back to the books!

2007-01-11T11:15:00.000-05:00

Day 21: Ribbons. Cups. Liver.

The ire of yesterday’s crème disposal was mitigated as soon as we had finished churning our second ice cream flavor, which we performed at the very beginning of class. We crushed the cashew brittle, our secret weapon, into tiny chunks, and folded it into our vanilla ice cream. The class did not hesitate in showing its appreciation, immediately setting upon it.

We then hastily proceeded to the logical next chapter in frozen desserts: sorbet. Sometimes referred to by the far less attractive name “water ices,” sorbets, it turns out, contain gelatine, a great surprise to me personally, and a problem for our few vegetarian students. A small amount of gelatine does, however, add inimitable smoothness to the texture of a sorbet. So if, like me, you’ve made sorbet successfully at home, and been pleased but not overwhelmed by the texture, try throwing in the tiniest bit of gelatine. It allows the consistency to far more closely mimic that of its dairy-laden cousin. The flavor which jumped out from our texts, to both my partner and to me, was tangerine. At the end of churning, we folded in a port wine syrup. This gave the pale orange sorbet a deep maroon marbling, and the sultry ribbons of deep and gracefully lingering flavor were a perfect complement to the brightness of the citrus. Chef winked when he tasted it, so I took that as a good sign. If you would like to make a port wine syrup at some point, please take the following under advisement. Bring the port gently to a boil, and then reduce it to a mere simmer. After a while, this simmer devolves, and you’ll have nothing more than a static pot of hot wine. Increase the heat only slightly at this point, and stay handy, because the simmer returns shortly and, the moment it seems stable and you walk away, a furious boil ensues. I couldn’t decide to be proud or embarrassed when the smell of our burning wine drew people in from other classrooms, to see what was the matter.

During the previous class, we had made pizzelle, those round, flat, ridged Italian cookies. This seemed like a non sequitur until we shaped them into cones – a fun exercise in burning one’s fingertips. We continued on the theme of manually molding very hot things yesterday, with what are called tulipes. These very thin, moldable cookies will presumably be used at some point as containers for our sorbet. They’re very annoying to make, which you do by spreading the rather thick batter over plastic templates. You then remove the templates, and decorate and bake the cookies. When they’re just out of a hot oven, you remove them from their sheet and shape them. Naturally, when they’re cool enough to handle comfortably, they are too hard to mold without breaking – an experience similar to the one we had making pizzelle. I feel that my fingers have started to build up some resistance, but clearly there’s a long way to go.

There was a graduation ceremony during our class last night, in the wine room next door. The previous evening, we had used our cheesecake as a bartering tool with the culinary classes. This might be the second-best way to use cheesecake, as it led to fish and chips – and humongous fried oysters – for everyone. In stark contrast to that, we were treated last night to pâtés of chicken liver and duck liver, wedges of tortillas laden with fresh chorizo, cold asparagus soup, and slices of foie gras with green tomato sauce. It was naughty, and delightful.

If not so sweet as usual.

2007-01-09T23:55:00.001-05:00

Day 20: Solid cream. Frozen cream. Bad cream.

The wait from the projects we began yesterday was quite worth it, and even all the built-up anticipation couldn’t dampen my spirits when we continued and finished them. The first was cheesecake, which we had baked yesterday and cooled overnight.

The three styles of cheesecake which various teams assembled were mascarpone, sour cream, and basic. Mascarpone cheesecake is rich and exotically smooth, and it is superlatively creamy. If you want a cheesecake that you can put into a tuxedo and take with you to the opera or the floor level seats at the Westminster Dog Show, this is probably the one. The sour cream version is what I’ve experienced most often labeled as a “French cream cheesecake,” or some such nonsense, in many a dinner spot across the country. It’s the kind that’s slightly soft in texture, very creamy and dreamy, and a bit lighter in color. The basic, simple cheesecake is the one I’d refer to as “New York” – marginally sturdier that the others, with a straightforward but immensely pleasing flavor. Most of the New York cheesecake which you have consumed has been horribly overbaked, trust me. It would usually have an almost mealy appearance, and it is creamy in the same way that peanut butter is – thickly creamy and dry, requiring coffee or milk on the side. This is actually a good thing, however, because when you find a good basic cheesecake, which has not had all the moisture baked out of it, it is a real challenge to stop eating it. (Which I exhibited, thoroughly, to the entire class. Someone has to teach them these things.)

My partner and I had been assigned basic cheesecake. We mixed and baked them yesterday, and the first thing that I noticed, after they had been cooling for a good while, was that all four of ours lacked even a single crack. The old classic crack-prevention trick is probably the cool-it-in-the-oven method. Like many other methods which you’ll find hopping around from cookbook to cookbook, misinforming all of us, this is simply wrong. It fails to address the reason that there would be cracks in the first place, and it also does nothing to help prevent them. Avoiding cracks is a remarkably simple task. First, don’t overbake. Your cheesecake should still be slightly wobbly in the very center. If you wait until there is no jiggle anywhere, make sure you have something to dump on top, to hide the small ravines which will develop. Second, run a knife-tip around the top, along the side of the pan, to make sure the batter isn’t stuck to it. Things contract when they cool. (Gentlemen?) Even though it’s the Number One Selling Dessert in the United States of America, cheesecake has still not managed to outdo this cardinal law of physics. So, given that shrinkage will occur, which do you think will give way first? The still wobbly-center of a warm pool of molten cream cheese? Or the rolled-up, aluminized-steel rim of your baking pan? Release your cake. (Don’t worry, if it was meant to be, it will come back to you.) This style of cheesecake, having come out perfectly, gets to be my preferred variety, for its simplicity, its dynamite flavor, and its dense, velvet texture.

The second item we had begun is a frequent guest on my palate, and on all of America’s: Ice cream. Brief lesson: After you make a custard, if you let it rest for a while – say, overnight – the protein molecules gradually attach to some of the water molecules. Then, when you freeze this “aged” custard in an ice cream maker, there aren’t as many free-floating water molecules, so they can’t come together in big globs and form ice chunks as the temperature drops. Pretty neat stuff! This translates to the smoothest, creamiest ice cream you can imagine. Our first of two flavors was Coconut Rum. In the end, we had to change the name to Rum Coconut, because when it first hits your tongue, the alcohol – which was not cooked off – evaporates and carries the rum’s flavor to every corner of your mouth. Immediately afterward, this strong (but far from unpleasant) sensation is gently snuffed by a soft blanket of coconut. We were quite pleased with ourselves, a feeling which seemed to grow the more of it we ate, for whatever reason. The completion of our second flavor, and therefore my description of it, must wait until tomorrow.

After dealing with cheesecake and churning ice cream, we made one more item, a sauce of puréed pineapple, which we made and immediately set in storage (guess what we’re pouring that on tomorrow). We then received the results of our second quiz. I am in no way ashamed to say that I aced it.

That happy conclusion was clouded only by the task of cleaning out thirty-five untouched ramekins of would-be crème brûlée, which, sadly but somehow appropriately, fell to me.

2007-01-09T01:25:00.000-05:00

Days 18 and 19: The Pauper and the Prince, or, A Foul Wind.

On Thursday, our final day of class last week, we took our second quiz, this one involving the anatomies of both an egg and a wheat kernel, as well as some general questions about sugar chemistry and other matters.

We then proceeded directly across the border from serious quiz land into that sunny realm, that great beyond, that Eden which is custard. Most simply put, a custard is egg and sugar in a liquid medium. The liquid, usually milk or cream or a mixture of both, is heated with the sugar to boiling. It is then added very gingerly to beaten egg yolk, while whisking constantly. When fully combined, it is poured into ramekins or other molds, and baked in a soothing water bath. (A lengthy but hopefully enjoyable digression: I was immediately aggravated by this, because of something that happened long before class ever started. In several cookbooks on my shelves – including an encyclopedic, professional-level pastry reference book – all the recipes for custard of any kind begin by boiling the milk alone, and thoroughly beating the egg yolks with the sugar. This reversal of ingredients, adding sugar to the yolks instead of to the milk, seems rather benign, doesn’t it? Allow me to explain why “benign” is not the word you’re looking for. As those who know me would willingly testify, I am not a small person, nor am I a weak one. However, whisking egg yolks and sugar together, “until light and fluffy, with a canary yellow color,” reduces my strength to that of an anemic lamb, and quickly. The arm is fatigued by literally the tenth whisk-stroke, and it takes approximately three thousand five hundred whisk-strokes to bring the mixture to the consistency described. Please, by all means, say I’m exaggerating; say, “No, Julian, it really cannot be that bad.” And then go, please, go, and whisk eight egg yolks together with a cup of sugar, until the texture is as I quoted above, then gradually whisk in a quart of boiling milk. Seriously, do it. The whole project will cost you four bucks, tops. Did you try it? It’s unbelievable, isn’t it!? Now that you’ve experienced this ridiculousness, imagine finding out that it would have made no difference to the product in any way, if you had simply beaten the egg yolks alone, and dissolved the sugar in the milk. Seriously. Cookbook authors: Fix this. It’s ridiculous.

But I digress.) When the custard is done baking, one of several things can happen. For instance: if you prepared the ramekin by adding a small amount of caramel to it before adding the custard and baking, you could easily have made crème caramel. Simply chill it after baking, and then invert it onto a plate. Just run a paring knife around edges and be patient. Voilà, your waiter might say. These are the projects we unmolded and sampled today. They’re remarkably good, and not overly sweet.

Another lodging for custard is humble, homely bread pudding. Even Tiny Tim got to enjoy this ageless classic, which is simply custard mixed with cubes of bread and baked in a dish. It can be quite fine, though, if it’s made with a smooth, vanilla-infused custard, and bread of bakery-quality. Also, it helps when you take a bit of candied ginger and some golden raisins, pour rum over them, and flambé them, and then add them into the mix, as my partner and I did on Day 18, last Thursday. It was the one project we were able to take home at the end of the week, and it tastes even better than it sounds. With a steaming cup of dark coffee next to a small plate of this hot, simple, peasant dish, I did manage to have one of the loveliest Sunday mornings on record.

On a much higher hill in the kingdom sits the indomitable Crème Brûlée. I realize that I am developing a reputation for having too many favorite things, but truly, this is the one. Crème Brûlée is my perfect dessert. Its brittle, almost imperceptibly bitter crust, combines in sweet, tiny shards with the supple, velvet custard beneath it. I am certainly not alone in my love of Crème Brûlée; it shows up on dessert menus everywhere. This massive demand has led to a lot of people making it who can’t do it too well. Finding a perfectly harmonious one can be somewhat difficult, depending on your access to good restaurants, or the right kind of friends. But the quest is worth it, for when you find a good one, it is a religious experience. The one my partner and I created Thursday, the crown jewel of our reign together, was still too warm to finish at the end of class. We put it in the freezer for the weekend, and had something to look forward to for Monday, which was today. When we opened the freezer, our custards were there, still loosely covered with parchment paper. The new thing in the freezer, however, was an aroma such as you might expect in the processing area of a sneaker-recycling factory. I had been looking forward to it – my first professional-level Crème Brûlée. I guess I’ll just have to wait. I think mine are pretty good anyway.

We now seem to have one wheel off the rails. As of this evening, we’ve managed to finish two out of three projects from last Thursday’s class. We began two more as well, which we’ll hopefully finish tomorrow. These projects are also high on the list of Things People Like, but I’ll wait to see how they come out before I describe them to you. I’ll have a more complete perspective.

Besides, I can’t go giving everything away.

2007-01-03T23:59:00.000-05:00

Day 17: Hydration.

Continuing yesterday’s sugar-cooking theme, we explored several additional sugar products this evening. The first was the old classic, divinity. A marshmallowy candy with nuts and candied fruit or ginger folded in, divinity begins in very much the same way as an Italian meringue, only with a hotter syrup. We used pistachios and ginger in ours, and by the time it was cool enough to ingest, I was having away at it like it was going out of style (which, to be fair, it pretty much has). I stand by the decision to eat so much of it upfront, though, because once it cooled it became apparent that we had slightly overcooked our sugar syrup – the candy ended up a bit on the dry side. Yet again, my impulsiveness has paid off.

As I returned from the water cooler gulping down my second quart, we continued on with torrone, which appears to be much the same as nougat. This lovely, chewy candy, also studded with pistachios, was topped and bottomed with a layer of edible paper wafer. Maybe this one should have been called divinity since you get a bit of Eucharist with it. (Chef ignored our request for wine.) Whether it was the similarity to all those communions I so fondly remember, or the sublimely chewy texture of it, I’m unsure, but I did truly enjoy this one. Indeed, I continued eating it even when I arrived home.

Following that was peanut brittle, accompanied by a third quart of water. It seems like a fairly straightforward idea, tried-and-true, and all that. However, it hadn’t dawned on me ever to use honey-roasted peanuts in brittle, and, boy, do I feel stupid. Such an obvious little thing made such a tremendous difference. So tremendous, in fact, that it was my snack of choice on the subway platform on the way home. If you ever do feel like making peanut brittle (that is to say, heating up sugar and some other sweet things in a pot with a little butter until it’s nearly hot enough to ignite paper and then adding nuts and pouring it out onto something you own that can stand that kind of heat), please, use honey-roasted nuts.

Directly down the path from peanut brittle is nougatine. This appears to be much like a brittle, but it’s made with only sugar and sliced almonds. Additionally, the applications for it are far less constrained. It can be molded into whatever shape you’d like, as long as you can manage to comfortably handle a sticky substance that’s around two hundred fifty degrees. Practically limitless! Once it cools, it’s highly edible, as anyone in my vicinity this evening could tell you. My behavior tonight, in eating more than should be eaten of not just one, but of four different confections, prohibits me from further denying the existence of my sweet tooth. When people have told me that it makes their teeth hurt just thinking of something sweet, I have guffawed and rolled my eyes in that snobbish way I have. I stand humbly corrected; I finally get it.

We concluded this evening’s lesson with that old uplifting standby, cornet work. I was astonished when another student told me that by watching me and listening to what I said, he was able to finally figure out how to do this correctly. I have no idea what state of affairs his cornet work had been in before, but for him to have elevated his ability by following my example, something must have been going horribly, horribly wrong. This has left me in a state of emotional disarray, especially with our first-quarter final and practical exam a mere eight lessons away.

Now, for a glass of water. I’m parched.

2007-01-03T00:04:00.000-05:00

Day 16: Sugar and friends.

Well, patient readers, ours was no slow reentry into the world of learning; we began the moment we walked in with an exercise in cooking sugar. Sugar goes through stages as it’s cooked (with water, usually), named for the way the sugar behaves when cooled… thread, soft and hard ball, soft and hard crack, and finally caramel. We were all thoroughly impressed when Chef got the boiling sugar (yes, boiling) into the bowl of ice water by means of his fingertips. Certainly chilling his hand in the ice water beforehand helped, but they’re undoubtedly made of brass anyway.

We then went on to learn two different methods of making fudge. The first, which I will wholeheartedly recommend to almost everyone from now on, would be to head down to your local Price Chopper and see what you can dig up. You’ll find this first route easier by a considerable margin. Alternatively, for those people I wish to see become extremely fatigued and frustrated, I would recommend that they make their own. You begin by boiling sugar syrup, enriched with dairy, to the proper temperature – no stirring, as that would encourage the sugar to recrystallize, and we’re looking for smooth here. When that’s finished, you stir in chocolate (ours was Valrhona; apparently it’s still Christmas), and then heat the whole mess back up to two hundred forty degrees or so, again without stirring. This step only takes about sixty or seventy minutes, during which you can do whatever you want, as long as you stay right by the mixture, to make sure it doesn’t boil too violently or get agitated by a rogue stirrer who may be lurking around your kitchen. (If you can come up with a list of things to do while meeting that requirement, let’s hear it.) It’s surprisingly difficult to fight the urge to stir while you stand by watching something boil happily away. That hour or so spent, you pour the mixture slowly onto a giant marble slab, dot it with butter and whatever flavoring you’re using, and then, using a scraper, you fold the edges of it into the center over and over again. (Think of that I Love Lucy episode where she and Ethel spend the day working at the candy factory. Yeah, that one.) Here’s where all that time you were enjoying not stirring is paid back. You fold the mixture continuously for maybe thirty or so more minutes. The really fun part of this stage is that as time goes by and your arm becomes more and more tired, the mixture gradually becomes much more difficult to work with. Then, just as you reach the limit of what you’re willing to go through to make food, you add nuts, which immediately cools the mixture and makes it stiffer. This would be fine if you were done mixing, which you aren’t. After about fifteen more minutes of slapping this stuff around you are allowed to put it into a buttered dish so it can finally actually turn into fudge. How people ever had the stamina to figure out that you could do this is beyond my understanding.

It was really good fudge, though, I have to say.

Next, we moved on to the last country whose meringue we will be investigating: Italy. In contrast to the French method, where sugar is added directly, or the Swiss, where sugar is heated with the egg whites, the Italian meringue is made by adding blisteringly hot sugar syrup to whipping egg whites. This meringue has the same proportion of ingredients as the others, but is significantly more stable. The drawback is that it’s pretty elaborate. The egg whites and the syrup both have to be at the correct stages at the exact same moment before they can be combined, and then the syrup must be drizzled in at the right speed while a giant beater is revolving around the mixing bowl, trying to flick it everywhere but where it’s supposed to go. There were hardened globs of sugar syrup pretty much everywhere. I think I’ll stick with the Swiss method. As in a previous lesson, we went on to saturate our meringue with butter, tint it, and then pipe it out into cockle shells, fine as fivepence.

And they looked better this time.

2006-12-22T08:53:00.000-05:00

Day 15: More business. More tasting. More tests.

Our lecture continued this evening, and the prospect of taking the management course settled squarely into my mind, the wisdom of it having become apparent. Whether or not I will continue with that course when I have finished Pastry remains to be seen. One thing is certain: I’d write less. While the business management material is fascinating and tremendously important, writing about it would be far less stimulating, both, I would imagine, from my perspective and from yours.

After the lecture had concluded, we briefly tasted and identified a number of flours. Telling cake flour apart from rye is not a great stretch; however, identifying which of two flours is all-purpose flour and which is bread flour proves somewhat more difficult. Chef promised, however, that doing so will be second nature by the time that this very question comes up on our Module One practical exam, which, stunningly, is nearly upon us. He also mentioned that he will not be teaching us for Module Two (of four), which was enormously depressing to almost all of us. I’m certain our Module Two instructor will be excellent, but our current chef is the one who introduced us to the school, the business, and the craft. We’ve formed a familial bond with him, and, regardless of who follows, I’m sure his influence will be a strong hand throughout my career.

Chef went through each question that will appear on our second quiz, shortly after we return from the holiday week. He also went over certain details, such as the one I mentioned above, about our final exam, which will occur after just ten more lessons. My family will have the unadulterated pleasure of watching me practice cornet work over the coming week; I've taken several pounds of chocolate and a ream of parchment paper with which to practice, so that by the time this also appears on our exam, I will feel at least at the first-grade level.

It’s scary to think of our exam, perhaps, but it’s even more frightening to consider that after two more weeks of class and one exam, we will be a quarter of the way into the program. Time is moving startlingly quickly. Chef also mentioned that the time for chit-chat and early nights has passed, and that when we return, the workload will be redoubled.

To entertain you during this time of less-than-average material, I’ve added some photos, courtesy of my classmate Lana. Please enjoy them.

Happy Holidays!

2006-12-20T23:00:00.000-05:00

Day 14: Business. Unmolding.

The second segment of today’s lesson involved unmolding our panna cotta of the other day, and unwrapping and tasting our gelée. The panna cotta came out quite nicely, if a little too firm and spongy. It most certainly lost moisture, since we completely forgot to wrap or cover it, and it had been sitting in a high-traffic refrigerator for forty-eight hours.

Champagne and mint gelée, the invention of which we were so smugly proud, was much more fun to look at than to eat. It tasted like what you might expect if you went into your great-grandmother’s attic and found a really old, dusty book, and opened it as quickly as possible while inhaling sharply. It was rather depressing, but in all honesty it would have been a little surprising if two pastry students had invented a jaw-dropper in their fourth week of school. At least now we know the reason none of us has ever heard of this dessert.

The first three-quarters of class was a discussion with the director of the school’s Culinary Management program, followed by an hour-long tide of personal questions to Chef. The management lecture and discussion were very informative, and the importance of the topic was lost on no one in the class. However, it was not as materially exciting as lessons in which we fling meringue at one another or drag our sleeves through freshly-piped chocolate designs. Thus lacking anything with which to amuse you further, I shall conclude early this evening.

And skip dessert.

2006-12-19T21:32:00.001-05:00

Day 13: Outing.

I’ve been a naughty, naughty boy. I will never know what I have done to deserve an evening of such unrestrained decadence. But it was a very sweet evening.

We arrived at our posh restaurant, to eat dessert first, at six o’clock. In short order, the alumna who was their pastry chef came out, introduced herself, and answered our preliminary questions. She very kindly had them send us out a bottle of sparkling wine to take the sweet edge off the desserts we were tasting.

We began with the cake, fruit, and custard desserts, such as gingerbread spiced donuts with cranberry compote and vanilla ice cream, plates of warm cookies with hot chocolate, apple strudel with ginger wafers and cinnamon caramel ice cream, blood orange mousse topped with meringue and served with blood orange sorbet, apple sundae (the only one I found to be too sweet). The favorites of this first round were generally the maple crème caramel with pear sorbet, and the mascarpone-yogurt cheesecake with pineapple fritters and cashew-brittle ice cream. Also popular was the plate of four varieties of sorbet: blood orange, pear, concord grape, and quince. The value of a cheese plate on a dessert table became very apparent, as all of us needed something to offset the barrage of sweetness. The cheeses were excellent, and well-chosen. They weren’t too strong, but sharp and salty enough to cleanse and refresh our now beleaguered palates – or at least distract them.

We all sat back, sated completely but oddly relieved that dessert was over. Until they brought out the chocolate desserts. This second round brought chocolate-peanut butter icebox cake with banana ice cream, chocolate-hazelnut napoleons with praline ice cream, molten chocolate-peanut butter cake with chocolate-peanut butter ice cream, peanut butter-chocolate roll, chocolate-peanut butter roll… the parade was too long to recount everything that floated by, but we were all pining for large pieces of salty beef by this point, full though we were.

This was decidedly the heaviest tasting yet, and despite the public setting we did manage to learn quite a bit. The chef was quite congenial and patiently answered all of our questions, even the one I managed to eek out: “Do you, like, totally, love it?” (What a moron!) We noted in particular that although the décor of this extremely upscale restaurant was very sleek and modern – somewhat akin to a large wooden jet fuselage with a honeycomb theme – the desserts themselves were presented in a very down-home style. This isn’t to say that they weren’t plated beautifully; they were. They just weren’t overtly fanciful. We all tasted far more than we ought to have. But hopefully the gain won’t be just weight. I, for one, realized that in just four short weeks, my palate has begun to develop new abilities, not only to taste subtler flavors in things, but also to detect nuances in texture and composition. Maybe all these agonizing tastings are actually doing something more than leaving me with red marks around my waist at night.

Now I’m going to go find some nice, refreshing ham.

2006-12-19T00:09:00.000-05:00

Day 12: Jell-O. Jet-Puffed. Cool Whip.

Today’s lesson began with the revelation that some restaurants charge you a lot of money for a dessert called gelée, which is to say, Jell-O. There is more gelatine in the prepackaged variety, so it gets a bit firmer, and making your own from scratch is fifteen seconds slower; these seem to be the cardinal differences between the two. With a sigh of collective disappointment, we shelved the idea of starting class with a cornet session so our gelée would have time to firm up by the end of class.

It turns out that the Jell-O people aren’t that far off, if we assume that what we made tonight was the real thing. Who could forget the craze that started a few years ago, when people began using Champagne (or, more probably, “champagne”) as the liquid in their holiday Jell-O creations? (I seem to recall that it was right around the time that the good folks at Jell-O came out with the White Grape flavor. No disrespect to Jell-O, but Champagne is already flavored like white grapes.) The conflict here, then, is forcing ourselves, some of us who have been labeled “food snobs,” to do one of two things: either we ignore the fact that we consider gelée fancy and Jell-O not, or we allow our estimation of Jell-O to be elevated a bit. I think I’ll choose the latter, if only because it’s satisfying to admit I can allow for some personal growth.

The one freedom gelée-making does allow us, though, is choice of flavors. We were warned off the recipe in our texts for Belgian beer gelée; Chef said that although it sounds intriguing to almost everyone it tends to be the one most often left behind. I suppose it makes sense, since nothing would offend the sensibilities of a Belgian beer lover like tossing in a bunch of sugar. What my new partner this week and I decided to do was make a two-layer gelée (this is sounding more like a church picnic all the time, isn’t it?), the lower layer of which was Champagne gelée, the upper, Champagne and mint gelée. It wasn’t set before class finished, but if it’s as good as it seems like it should be, I’d say we’re in for a treat when we return and unwrap it. At the beginning of class, the Chef demoed pomegranate gelée, which he later topped with sweetened crème fraîche. Especially due to the whipped topping, I was reminded yet again of an ecclesiastical pot-luck, until I swooned over a spoonful of it.

Our next project was classic vanilla panna cotta, infused with the thinnest hint of lemon. Panna cotta is closest in texture to a custard, but it takes mounds less time to prepare since it’s thickened and set with gelatine (see the theme yet?), rather than very cautiously coagulated egg. While there’s little point in trying to imitate custard, panna cotta is awfully delightful in its own right, and I can’t wait to taste ours after it’s had some time to set up. I have no idea what happened to it, truthfully; I remember making it, and pouring it into molds, but after that it just seems to have disappeared. And my pants are still fitting far too comfortably for it to have disappeared to the usual place. Hopefully my partner wrapped and refrigerated it.

Our next variation on the gelatine theme was marshmallows. There were a list of options as to flavors we could choose to make, such as vanilla, rose, lemon, and so forth. I deeply wanted to avoid that lingering nursing-home feel which I still can’t help associating with rose-flavored things, and lemon just seemed odd. We had had such success in dreaming up the Champagne and mint gelée that we decided to stick with the mint theme. Apart from the one student of questionable judgment who deemed them Colgate-flavored, they were pretty enjoyable, and more than one of us could imagine them floating on top of a profoundly satisfying cup of hot chocolate.

Staying on the gelatine highway but rapidly changing lanes, we came to chocolate mousse. This was one of the most complicated recipes we’ve done, involving heating several different ingredients at various times so they could be added swiftly and at the correct temperature. It also required us to fold ingredients together quickly, a major source of angst for learning bakers. To do it properly you must be gentle, so you don’t deflate the whipped cream, but decisive, so the coldness of the cream doesn’t cause the gelatine to set, which would create lumps. Oddly, given all these conditions, nearly all of us turned out very decent chocolate mousse. I felt strangely undeserving of my success.

Egg white, sugar, and gelatine, alone or together, especially, go a long way toward making life very sticky. After we had cleaned up this gooey kitchen, we of course came back to cornets. Suffice it to say that Chef had us repeat the last design we had learned, and then do variations on it.

Which I felt I had really been doing all along.

2006-12-16T18:47:00.000-05:00

Days 9, 10, and 11: Crisp. Velvet. Mortar.

Thanks, friends, for your patience during my recent absence.

As it turns out, there was plenty more to learn about eggs. We had begun the week with a fairly basic introduction, separating eggs by different methods, whipping up some meringues of various national origins, and such. Day 9 was when things started to get really interesting, most notably in the form of the dacquoise, a lovely contraption of two crisp, light, nut-infused meringue wafers held apart by an intervening layer of buttercream. You can imagine my repulsion. My partner and I very fortunately used way too much rum to flavor our icing. I do now consider this confection solely responsible for my first step up the great ladder of the Freshman Twenty-Seven. We also crafted some small, fatless meringues, which we dried in the oven and later covered with stripes of melted chocolate. You can’t go completely nonfat; it’s pastry school.

I noticed during meringue-making that my pastry bag skills have improved exponentially. This is rather intriguing since, until Tuesday, we hadn’t worked with them, and I personally hadn’t touched one since I was festooning a cake back in September. The only explanation I can come up with is that the pastry bag is simply a large, friendly cornet. As I may have implied at some point, cornet work is not something that I would highlight on my résumé. Somehow, though, the motions you make with a pastry bag just seem like easier-to-control versions of the same work we’ve been “performing” with those spiteful little paper cones. I suppose it’s akin to the difference between painting a fence and painting delicate facial features on a creepy porcelain doll that will probably just end up in an attic somewhere.

We investigated different techniques for creating our eggy masterpieces, my personal favorite of which is the Swiss method. It differs from the classic, or French, method, wherein one merely adds sugar to egg whites at appropriate times as they’re mixing. In the Swiss variety, the sugar is added at the beginning, to the completely unbeaten egg whites. The whole mess (and believe me, that’s just how it ends up) is then put in a bowl over simmering water, until all the sugar is melted and the whites are hot (but not, obviously, coagulated). The mixture is then beaten for quite a while, until it’s too cool to melt butter. It becomes extraordinarily glossy and very bright white – it’s positively gorgeous. Oh, and if you’d like to add butter, now’s the time. And don’t be shy. The major advantage of the Swiss is that it’s extremely stable. So much so, in fact, that if you keep adding butter until the egg whites and sugar seem more an afterthought than actual main ingredients, you wind up with Swiss meringue buttercream. This is exactly what we did, and, as noted above, we treated ours to a short but effective holiday in Puerto Rico.

On Day 10, we took our first step inside the wide borders of the land of soufflés. Our first foray involved the flourless variety. Apart from accommodating sufferers of wheat-allergies, there is very little reason to make a flourless soufflé. The main reason they do get made, I suspect, is that the name sounds very fancy because about ten years ago every restaurant started putting flourless chocolate cake on its after-dinner menu. That particular dessert is now known for its richness, a lush medium in which excellent chocolate can be served without starch mitigating its texture or flavor. Soufflés crafted with no flour do puff up quite beautifully. However, the only thing holding all those tiny bubbles so wide open is the heat of the air inside them. There is approximately a one-minute window in which the soufflé must be removed from the oven, plated, picked up, served, and at least partially eaten, so that the person dining on it can remain convinced that his spoon was the thing that finally did it in. It must be a terribly practical menu item in busy restaurants with service staff paid nearly five dollars an hour. Even in the unlikely event that you actually receive your soufflé in time, as soon as you’re a few bites in, the portion you haven’t gotten to will have collapsed on itself. The reason a well-made soufflé is so exquisite is that it can carry forth a voluptuous richness, while remaining ethereally light in substance. I find it slightly upsetting when three quarters of it turns into an underbaked brownie.

Out of the flourless marathon, however, did come a lovely bit of strawberry soufflé, which I first read about in one Babar book or another, nearly three decades ago, and of which I’ve been dreaming ever since. It did not disappoint; it evanesced on the tongue, and was only slightly sweet. The team that turned it out nailed the texture; the egg wasn’t so much eggy as it was creamy, and we all know what creaminess does for strawberries. Before I give this soufflé too much credit, let me state that I stood, spoon at the ready, as it was pulled from the oven, and only partook of it within the first minute of its existence.

I realize that, as a bread maniac, I have a reputation for love of flour. I was therefore greatly encouraged when it was included in the soufflés which we made on Day 11. Don’t worry, though, the feeling didn’t last long. My partner and I created three soufflés, the first being mocha. This particular mocha, I surmise, was named for the coffee bean from Mocha, and not the mixture of coffee and chocolate that is and forever will be en vogue – there was no chocolate in this soufflé, only dark coffee and brandy. Ours overbaked, and the result was something like what you might expect on a turbulent early-morning plane ride, where you hit a particularly violent air pocket and your scrambled eggs tumble onto your thin, soggy toast, your coffee sloshes onto that pile, while the sugar packet you had just torn open tumbles from your hand and dusts the whole thing.

The chocolate soufflé which followed, however, was unquestionably the best I have ever turned out. It was lusty and velvety and perfectly smooth in texture, and it melted away on my tongue leaving nothing behind but the taste of happy. If there was any “Why?” in the soufflé area of my brain, it has now been completely eliminated.

And if it hadn’t been, it would have been anyway, as we progressed to our final soufflé of the day, and most sinful indulgence to date: the Soufflé à la Suissesse. If you’ve ever wondered how they stay warm in the Alps, prepare to be illuminated. We made seven individual parmesan soufflés, baking each in a five-ounce ramekin brushed with butter and dusted with grated parmesan. When those had finished baking and partially cooled, they were unmolded into a gratin dish which had also received the honor of being coated with both butter and grated cheese. The soufflés were then dusted with additional parmesan, of course, and then heavy cream was poured in until it reached halfway up their sides (let’s just say it was more than a cup and less than a quart). The dish was then returned to the oven where the soufflés puffed back up, this time to an even greater extent than the first, and then they began to soak up the cream. There was a small amount of cream still in the dish; there was just too much for the poor spongy masses to accommodate. This liquid began to bubble and reduce to a thick buttery sauce which combined with the melting parmesan. The top of the dish began to brown nicely, and when it all began to firm up just slightly, I pulled it from the oven and put one of the small soufflés on my plate, indulging myself it what is very likely to be the single most calorie-laden food I have ever ingested. I had another, just to be sure.

Somehow we were still moving as we began our final exercise for the evening, creating another Swiss meringue buttercream. This time we left out flavoring but added color. Just to be different, I chose black for our team. Our frosting gradually became grayer and grayer until the point that it looked the exact shade of wet cement. Fortunately, Chef arrived at that very moment to let us know that we would need so much black food coloring to make it truly black that it wouldn’t be usable anymore. So we settled for wet cement, a somehow appropriate analogy as we went on to become completely covered and stuck to things by it, during extended practice with the pastry bag. We piped both shells and rosettes, two of the very elementary buttercream-piping decorations. Somehow I still had the capacity, after the Suissesses, to turn my tongue a not-concealable shade of gray, before waddling to the subway.

Next week: Gelatin.

[This post is dedicated to Miss Celie, whose time as our pet and a member of our family was too short, and whose love for all people made the house warmer than it will be again. Her spirit will linger on in our hearts and in our home.]

2006-12-11T23:24:00.000-05:00

Day 8: Genesis. Exodus. Corinthians. (I mean, Cornets.)

Today we explored, in greater depth than most ever will, the noble egg: that insanely complete giver of life, a single food item that contains and provides all the amino acids a human could ever need. We even learned about the chalaza. It sounds like a Jewish bread with cheese and tomato on it, but it’s not, it’s that little spiraly thing you always try to get rid of because you think it’s a tiny umbilical cord. (It’s actually just an anchor for holding the yolk in place, as it turns out.) When it comes to baking ingredients, eggs are certainly up there, and not just for the aminos. They thicken. They coagulate. They leaven. They flavor. They emulsify. Is there anything they can’t do? Not really. I found it particularly amusing that one of the smokers in the class would ask, But, Chef, don’t they have a lot of cholesterol? God bless you, you’ve got to try to cut down where you can.

We were informed that one evening next week, we will be attending a posh Manhattan restaurant for dessert and coffee. The fog of hindsight may lay somewhat heavily on my overextended mind, but I cannot remember ever having had a field trip I was so excited about beforehand, the circus included. The pastry chef at the restaurant in question is a graduate of our school. We’re all hoping the desserts are amazing, for reasons both tangible and metaphysical.

And, alas, we came back to cornets today. I had not been mentioning it, in writing or in conversation, for fear of summoning it. It really is an amazing art. In most things where you practice repeatedly and under expert guidance, you can have some reasonable expectation of progress. Not in cornet work. We did a refresher today of several designs we had been poorly mimicking most recently, and then learned some new ones, of a more rococo nature. Imagine trying to build a doghouse, failing, and then progressing to a tool shed anyway. Not to start sounding off theories of conspiracy, but I’m coming to believe that making us perform these exercises in chocolate décor may merely be an attempt to keep our egos in check.

It’s certainly working.

2006-12-07T23:31:00.000-05:00

Day 7: More fruit. Sugar. Fear.

You think you have a pretty good idea of what there is out there. You know about Gateau St. Honoré and profiteroles. You’ve also poached a few figs in wine, and you’ve rolled out your own puff pastry. You seem to be getting a pretty good handle on things. And then something totally unforeseen rolls along and blows your mind. This happened tonight, in the form of roasted pears and figs in caramel. The fact that I definitely love all three things (surprising, I’m sure) never led me to consider putting them together, even though the technique it requires is simple and the ingredients are quite ordinary. This sultry combination was just symphonic, and the whop of vanilla ice cream Chef very kindly added made it more perfect than food deserves to be. The chewy halves of fig, the crispy seeds and the bits of charred pear, the sweet sticky caramel, the heady and refreshing ginger... Esther Williams wished for synchronicity like this.

Another surprising trinity found itself combined in my bowl: strawberries, balsamic vinegar, and tarragon. This delightful concoction waits in my refrigerator even now, dreaming of yet more vanilla ice cream. The acidity of the vinegar isn’t apparent in the dish, but its particular kind of sweetness mixes with the sugar and adds a grapey hue to the brightness of the strawberries. That same acidity, while it vanished from the dish, helped the pungency of the tarragon penetrate into the berries. This combination obviously sounds a little strange upfront, but it’s terribly engaging once you get past all that. Let it be the Bobcat Goldthwait of your party the next time you need to serve a little bit of fruit.

The profounder aspects of our education are becoming more apparent, at least to those of us who want to look a little more deeply into things. It’s not about learning how to make blueberry muffins or candied orange peel. It’s about allowing ourselves to examine things we’re already very familiar with – like strawberries or pears or vinegar – in new, less obvious ways. I have extraordinary luck to be in an environment where the equations I must balance are guided not by formulas, but by sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and chocolate. Realizing these things makes it all even more thrilling. Speaking of formulas, it seems that approximately two hours of sleep can be replaced by about four hours of hands-on excitement.

We also made some truly horrific apple chips.

The class was frightened at two distinct times. The first time was when it was announced that we will be taking our first quiz on Monday. That scare lasted only briefly since Chef went on to detail every question that will appear on it, which was awfully fair of him, I thought. The second time, however, was when he began to elaborate on yesterday’s sanitation event, introducing the subject of the New York City Board of Health. Those are the folks that can enter your establishment at any time, without prior warning, and tell you to pack your personal belongings and leave; they’re closing you down because they found too much dust on top of your refrigerator hinge. (Not that there would ever be dust on my refrigerator hinge; I clean that thing maybe fifteen times a week. Obviously.) This whole matter of sanitation is the intimidating one so far. To put it in very broad terms, it means that we have to stop licking our fingers. That sounds simple, but if you think it’s easy, go make a batch of gingersnaps and, starting now, don’t put another thing into your mouth until they’re done cooling. Not baking, cooling.

Then get back to me.

2006-12-06T23:36:00.000-05:00

Day 6: Classics. Playtime. Video.

To our collective delight, we took out our knives for the first time today. Thankfully, I was not also the second person to cut myself; that dubious honor went to someone else. (She’s okay.) We were not shown how to peel apples in the style of Iron Chef Sakai, at the base of some great machete. Our much more humble practice was a good basic introduction to knife handling for many in the class, and it was quite amusing to see little curls of plastic rolling off various cutting boards under the toll of these sharp new tools. Hacking apart apples and pears in various fashions led seamlessly into another tasting, this one consisting of an enormous variety of fruits. I must say, this was the most palatable tasting thus far, even though the cantaloupe was so far out of season that it tasted less like melon and more like a piece of a box someone had shipped cantaloupes in. At some point.

In addition to this extravaganza of sharp objects combined with acidic foods, we had our second bake today: that venerable old standby, blueberry muffins. The purpose of our baking today was not to learn how to bake blueberry muffins, but rather to study the effects of leavening (in this case, baking powder or baking soda). My team’s came out the best, but it was not our fault. Each team prepared the same muffin recipe, varying only the quantity or type of leavening used; my partner and I had the good fortune of being assigned the recipe as written. Others were instructed to replace baking powder with baking soda (darker muffins with a tinny aftertaste), to use no leavening at all (very pale in color and pasty in texture), or to add extra amounts of baking powder. The batch with the most extra leavening was the most exciting, as it ran over the sides of the pan, and looked as if a tiny green meteor had hit each one dead center, leaving not only a respectable crater but a piney tint.

For those wondering, we did indeed cut up our pâte de fruit of yesterday. I've eaten one piece of it. That's all the sugar I need this month. If anyone wants some, please just let me know.

Class concluded with a video presentation all about the glamorous world of sanitation. This was everything you would imagine a low budget instructional film from the 1970s to be. The narrator covered all areas of this broad field: the guy who comes to spray for insects, botulism, nose-picking, and, naturally, how to keep all parts of your mullet covered with a hairnet so none gets in your soup. Sanitation, particularly in New York, is heavily governed, so I have a feeling that we have not seen the last of this very exciting topic. The questionable decision to turn the lights off during the video reminded me of the French saying qui dort dîne: he who sleeps, eats.

Je dîne.

2006-12-05T23:08:00.000-05:00

Day 5: Goo. Bone dust. Ether.

To avoid the risk of redundancy, I recently omitted the fact that we had done more cornet work. I have a feeling this will be a very regular occurrence for us, so listing it daily seems somewhat unnecessary. However, we didn't have cornet work today, and I feel it worth mentioning that it feels enormously relieving to have skipped a day of this task, which is steadily becoming more laborious. It's also worth noting that those little paper cones, fragile as they are, are capable of eviscerating even the hardiest of egos with terrible haste.

On mise en place duty this week, I am obliged to set out any ingredients Chef will need for class, which today consisted of pectin, sugar, and a most beautiful boat of raspberry purée. Surely you've noticed by now that I tend to have a somewhat emotional attachment to a number of foods. You may add raspberry to that list, near the very top. When I've prepared raspberry sauces in the past, it has generally involved spending wads of money (money which was surely set aside for some more basic purpose, like electricity) on all the frozen raspberries I could find. I would normally then proceed to thaw the raspberries in an environment completely devoid of anything relating to the color white, and then press them through a strainer with the back of a spoon to remove the seeds, very necessarily. Now that you have some idea of what it actually takes to get a useful quantity of this gorgeous substance, you can be pleased to comprehend exactly how exciting a high-quality one-kilogram tub of it can be. We mixed it with the remaining ingredients from the mise en place, and cooked it, then pouring it onto oiled sheets to make what is called pâte de fruit. (That first word is said "pot," not "pah-TAY." There is no liver in with the raspberries this time around.) If this were a Dummies book, I would simply say it was a pretty sophisticated and delicate Jell-O Jiggler, and leave it at that. Our anti-Jigglers are setting up overnight, for further treatment tomorrow.

From pectin, a gentle thickener derived from plants and generally unoffensive to even the most sensitive among us, we proceeded to discuss and explore gelatine. This substance, not okay with vegetarians and present in very many foods, is derived from not only bones but also other unneeded animal components. Powdered gelatine is a familiar staple to every American, but much of what we dealt with this evening was sheet gelatine. This form of gelatine much more clearly evokes its origins. A few moments in clear water give it a texture and appearance which greatly shorten the gap in imagination between viscera and Jell-O. I take it as a sign of potential mental illness that my mind immediately went to braised meats, and the beautiful stuff that isn't flesh and isn't fat, but that melts throughout and gives the meat its succulence. Time will tell, I suppose.

We underwent another tasting today. This time our samples were markedly broader in spectrum, thankfully. We began with the innocuous, if cloying, preserves family. This included jelly, jam, and preserves, and a substance new to me called nappage, which is essentially firmer jelly used for glazing things. Following this we changed gears dramatically, and tasted baking soda and then baking powder. Placing salty and sour fizzing powders directly on our tongues was certainly a good start at eliminating the pasty lingering of sweetened fruit; although if left to my own devices, it's not necessarily the method I would choose. This whole brief ordeal was followed directly by the much less weighty extracts department. We began with that most familiar vanilla. Everyone who has ever held a bottle of vanilla extract has tasted it one time, having been invited in by its warm fragrance and just as quickly ushered back out the door by its bitter alcohol. We moved quickly on to pure orange extract, which when ingested directly makes one feel as if one has just inserted dentures made of very hot orange peels. The spearmint essential oil which followed will keep my breath fresh for another month. (By now, my hands smell like I have just been on a spree at Bath and Body Works.) Next, the rose water, which delivered quite adequately on Chef's promise that it "tastes like grandma."

Finally, we reached the liquers we had all been eyeing for three hours. There was a fairly straightforward spread of them to begin - cassis, Calvados, and something like Grand Marnier - and then the more exotic eaux-de-vie. These awfully crisp distillations of fruit into perfectly clear alcohol picked up where orange extract left off, in the task of sinus-clearing. (I'm not kidding, I could suddenly smell the sink across the room.) The clean finish to a heady tasting session, however, did not go unnoticed. The resultant belching from this inpouring of semi-liquids, fizzing powders, and fruity spirits is pretty much what you would expect if you ate fruit cocktail two weeks past its expiration date.

Which would certainly be cheaper.

2006-12-04T22:46:00.000-05:00

Day 4: Gifts. Treacle. Statistics.

We were all certainly relieved that the plate of brie, chèvre, nuts, grapes, and craisins, which we had seen on the first day and not since, had been reintroduced to our little (big) kitchen. This relief was alleviated - after the platter's contents had been eaten, naturally - when Chef revealed to us the statistic that the average weight gain during the program is twenty-seven pounds. It wasn't exactly shocking news, but hearing it said aloud seemed to violate some code of ignorance the greater part of us had simply assumed was in place. My prior decision, at the uniform store, to opt for the check pants that barely fit as opposed to those that were clearly much too large, has now been thrown into question, much in the style of 1970s paisley wallpaper or those seven extra vodkas that time in college. This of course is saying nothing of the balance of my wardrobe, on the circumference of whose boundaries my weight already presses. Well... raw eggs and undercooked pork are an FDA-listed health concern, and I haven't had a problem, so hopefully I just have a natural proclivity for statistical advantage. Please do duck, though, if you hear something like a ricocheting button. For your own good.

To more pleasant matters. Several times throughout the evening we were interrupted by members of culinary classes (as opposed to pastry), who came with platters of things. One was a large and varied array of sushi. Two were creamed spinach. Two, most blessedly, were plates of cheese, which we set upon with the vigor known to those of our kind. I had been telling a classmate only four days ago about Bobolink dairy (http://www.cowsoutside.com/), a mythical place in Vernon, NJ, which grazes its cows freely, but on particular grasses. Different grasses in, different cheeses out. The plates gifted today were graced with slices of a very garlicky cheese, which we were told contained no garlic, only what appeared to be chives, but that the cows who gave us this most excellent creation had grazed on garlic plants. It may be a strengthened belief in God, it may be a more optimistic outlook on life in general, or it may be something as simple as having reached the ultimate form of enlightenment and peace, but this cheese and the concept behind it just do something to you. Something good. I don't know if this was a Bobolink cheese or not, but I have a strong suspicion it might have been. In any case, it was simply illuminating. If you can, get some. If you can't, suggest sending me some money and perhaps I can arrange something.

This is to say nothing of the other varied cheeses on the plate, all of which were excellent. The sushi and the creamed spinach weren't bad, either.

Other than the moment of realization that I was extraordinarily fortunate to have been born into a world where such divine cheese was a real possibility, the big event of the evening was our first bake. In teams of two we all simultaneously prepared the same gingersnap recipe (which Chef referred to, somewhat callously I must say, as an exercise in weighing ingredients), promptly and completely filling the entire room (and floor) with the superlative aroma of caramelizing molasses. This experience, this blanket of soft, sweet smell rolling forth from the oven in such marvelous quantity was truly soul-warming, and it was our first olfactory reminder of where we were and what we were there for. It made me know that to be there, baking, was right, that it was me; that it was where I was supposed to be. Mind you, I really like molasses. No less than two days ago I confessed to my mother a secret fear that too few people use it and it'll be taken off the market. Laugh, yes; it's irrational. Our least rational fears have very little grounding in reality, obviously. I'm just really emotionally attached to molasses.

And cows that eat garlic.

[I dedicate this post to Jess, whose last day in our class was today. Without her company the first four days would have been less than they were, and the rest of us would have had far more to eat. Tell those people in the weekend course to treat you right!]

2006-11-30T22:38:00.000-05:00

Day 3: Cones, again. More toys. Shears.

On just my third day, I successfully earned the distinction that was no doubt expected by anyone who has ever been in a kitchen with me, and not least of all by myself. I was the very first one in my whole class to achieve it! It was okay, not too deep, and the Band-Aids were close at hand. Chef did ask if I needed stitches but I'm sure my body has started producing hyperactive clotting agents out of a basic need for self-preservation. For those curious: I was slightly too vigorously drying my just-disassembled pair of (get this) extremely sharp kitchen shears.

Apart from that little spree, and of course more cornet production and chocolate practice (which went markedly better for me), it was Big Toy day. Chef actually instructed us to play around with the large equipment, my favorite piece of which is definitely the three-tiered deck oven, the lowest deck of which is near my thigh, the highest at eye level. Picture two fully assembled twin beds on top of one another, all resting on a three-foot high platform. Or a Subaru Forrester. One that bakes things. There were other footsoldiers of the machine infantry at the front of the pack though: the twenty-quart mixer, the induction burners, the dough proofer... it's a stainless steel wonderland in there.

A visitor came from the career placement department and posed the usual question of suchly employed individuals: What Do You Want To Do? While I won't admit to myself that I intend to be the star of the first baking-themed television program that doesn't suck, I somehow decided that admitting it to a dozen people - all of whom are one sliver of acquaintance above "familiar face" - was quite a simple undertaking. Voicing it, however, did aid me in at least considering it as a remote possibilty. It was amusing to introspect in light of the new information she gave us regarding the facets of the industry that actually exist, and employ people like us. She also spoke at length about volunteering and externships (a word that still makes me insane, and will continue to). The two of these events, incidentally, appear to be the same thing except for the fact that at one, they're happy to have you help in any way you can for whatever time you can give, and at the other, they're happy to use you in any way they can get away with any time you're there, which is "most of the."

We did not ingest any concentrated dairy products today, which was, of course, a great relief to everyone after yesterday's butter fiasco.

The homework is thirty minutes of chocolate writing per day until we reconvene next week. This will undoubtedly produce something thrilling about which to inform you, so I'll amend this post as necessary.

After I wash my hands.

2006-11-30T00:24:00.000-05:00

Day 2: Cones. Weight. Butter(s).

After a brief repose on the hardest stools available in Manhattan (seriously, I almost opted to stand on the subway home), we created our first of what will undoubtedly be many of thousands small parchment cones called cornets (pronounced corNAY, in singular or plural). These are generally used for writing, particularly when the ink is made of chocolate. To see me make cornets, you'd think perhaps I'd done a few hundred of them in my day. It went well... quickly, efficiently, correctly. Oh, then we had to fill them halfway with chocolate, cut the barest slice off the tip, and proceed to practice writing and the generation of some basic designs. Here's where the illusion of experience I had presented fell away with little ceremony, leaving me fully exposed as the novice I actually am, rivulets of dark chocolate running up my sleeves, along my apron strings and towels, and on the side of my mouth (and the really screwed up part is I didn't even taste any, something I say not defensively but in complaint - if I had evidence of chocolate-tasting literally written on my face the very least I might have gotten out of it would have been actually tasting some). Only after a fair amount of correction and intense concentration was I able to get my "lines" of chocolate to appear in any way linear and my writing... well, in the Western alphabet if not exactly English.

The confidence of much of the class having suffered such a devastating blow right out of the gate, we undertook a small exercise in culinary math - how many teaspoons in a quart and so forth - which served to relax our nerves, at least for those of us for whom multiplying single digits by other single digits with the aid of a calculator proved a somewhat more accessible task than script in that least forgiving of all inks.

We then set about weighing various ingredients using different types of scales. I must say, getting flour on my hands for the first time in my new kitchen was exhilarating. Nearly as exhilarating as the monolithic fifteen-pound bag of pecans.

Subsequently, we came to the first segment of palate education: Dairy Identification. This wasn't a blindfolded test where we had to ingest something and then say what it was, but rather an open and conversational evaluation of differing dairy products that were passed around the table. We began with spoonfuls of milk of varying fat contents, cream both light and heavy, half and half, evaporated milk, and condensed milk. This sated our appetites for dairy almost as much as it called forth our pity for Heidi, the one lactose-intolerant girl in our class. (Am I the only one to whom the name "Heidi" implies a certain proclivity to dairy products!?)

Then came the butters. Let me tell you about butter. I enjoy butter. I like to use butter in, on, and around things that I eat. I feel that it enhances the quality of just about any food to the point that the very soul-satisfying nature of it counteracts any negative health effects (just let me be delusional and keep reading). Nor have my friends known me to be stingy with it. I have come to realize in a very brief span of time, however, that even I have some level of tolerance for it. Tonight we did some butter tasting. We tasted five unsalted butters including a special one from Denmark that was a first for me and quite remarkable. Then a number of salted butters - and let me tell you, when you've tasted five unsalted butters in a row and then moved on to one even lightly salted one, you will notice the salt. The salt in the first salted butter we tasted was at once repellent, because it seemed so strong, and a boon, because it was any flavor other than unmitigated milk fat. There were an equal number of salted butters passed around before the margarine was introduced. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I take no pains to mask my distaste for this product to begin with, but tasting it after such an inrush of The Real Thing served only to unveil its phony aspects all the more. I really did take a moment to thank God when Chef decided only at the very last second that we didn't have to go through tasting the Country Crock. Seriously. At least all was not in vain; I managed to name a favorite of all these butters - Plugra, the French-style extra-fat butter (surprised, friends?), whose name when properly pronounced is a homonym for plus gras, which translates quite unabashedly to "more fat." It's really, really good. If there were silkcows in the manner that there are silkworms, this would be their product.

To make sure we had enough substance in us, we topped off this light little parade of sixteen products (only two of which were composed of less than 20% fat, and only five under 40%) with some crème fraîche, mascarpone, and cream cheese. A large sundae; a planetary cherry. In all we tasted nineteen dairy products. One very queasy subway ride later, this particular chef-in-training is going to go lay down now.

And dream of unsalted crackers.

2006-11-29T23:38:00.000-05:00

Day 1: Policy. Safety. Brie. Oh, and toys.

I realized that I was at last in long-imagined company when I saw that I was not the only bulb that shone more brightly on the tree when our kits arrived. (Quite sadistically, our registrar-orienter had pointed out the boxes and hinted at what was in them some hours before receipt of same.) Each of us beamed more and more brightly as we all inventoried our brand new toys in concert, to the point that sunglasses may have been an advisable inclusion. It was so enthralling that I found myself ridiculously pitying the few people who had already received their kits - those participating in another program, etc. - because they were unable to join in the exquisite ritual of tearing off the wrapping paper. A surprisingly accurate replication of the most useful fraction of my home kitchen's equipment, the kit was comprised of the tools one would expect, and some really nice knives from that town in Germany. Even managing the crate's bulk on the subway did very little to dull my enthusiasm for its contents, to the point that I emptied it onto the dining room table as soon as I arrived home, determined to find ANY Dremel tool bit that would allow me to monogram the costlier portions. (Which I did.)

Policy was read. Common-sense was dispensed, with a side of brie, chèvre, peanuts (and how refreshing it was to see genuine peanuts; I was beginning to be convinced that the airline people had taken ALL of them away), dried cranberries, baguette, old coffee, and attention-gettingly-lemony water. I felt better, actually, after it was announced with utmost seriousness that knives were never to be left in the sink. Granted, it seems like everyone in the class is perfectly sensible, but I'd just as soon not have to worry about reaching into a sudsy murk and paying the ultimate price.

Our Chef delivered a particularly poignant number on uniforms, noting that as soon as they were donned, the donner was a culinary professional; that to wear the clean, bright uniform evinces the respect for and devotion to the craft borne by the wearer. This immediately instilled in me sparkling but surprisingly solemn pride, and, in so doing, tacked my confidence in my new instructor firmly up onto the corkboard. The lockers suck; they're dishearteningly small, yet we're expected to have "clean and wrinkle free" uniforms. I think culinary-student-clean-and-wrinkle-free means something different than the non-prefixed term. I hope it does, in any case.

It always seems that the sense of possibility one has about a desire, long-awaited or not, tends to deflate somewhat on arrival at the actual threshold of that possibility: The hotel room isn't precisely the right temperature, the fuzzy kitten is a real moron, the car really only gets twenty-six miles to the gallon on a good day instead of the advertised thirty-five. Fortunately and to my great excitement, it seems that any prior sense of possibility I had about the culinary field was much narrower than I would have let myself admit.

Things are going to be happening.