Weeks 6 and 7: Sugar rush
Sweets on sweets on sweets
Weeks 6 and 7 of culinary school marked a period I had been looking forward to since the minute I signed up for this program: pastry! In fact, instruction on pastry was a prerequisite for any program I was considering when doing my initial research on culinary schools. We spent about a week and a half making custards, tarts, cakes and other confections, and it was absolutely fantastic — I was sad when it was over. I loved the precision of it, the emphasis on artistic final presentations, and, of course, the wonderful range of flavors, from fruit to chocolate. I’ve always enjoyed baking, and this module really kicked it up a notch from there. I can now pipe a mean rosette and am no longer intimidated by making dough for tarts and pies!
My first round of meringue rosettes.
A classic French apple tart - a perfectionist’s dream!
Very proud of my gianduja layer cake.
The main reason that you learn basic pastry technique in a culinary program is that pastry has many essential savory applications: the way you make a lemon tart is not so different from a spinach quiche; a chocolate soufflé and cheese soufflé are pretty much the same preparation; crêpes can go both ways, and so and and so forth. It’s important as a chef to have an arsenal of pastry techniques under your belt because you might end up in a life or death situation where your survival is dependent on your ability to make an adequately rising puff pastry. No but seriously, you might work in a small restaurant where there’s no dedicated pastry chef and need to put together a dessert selection, or you might want to create a dish that centers around a savory custard. Without some pastry knowledge, you’d be at a real disadvantage.
Quiche Lorraine is a savory “pastry” with a custard base filled with bacon and gruyere cheese. Basically a fancy bacon egg and cheese.
Cheese soufflé is one of the few cheese and carb dishes that manages to be light.
Me, making savory buckwheat crêpes
Our crêpes with their creamy ham, cheese, onion and mushroom filling
It’s healthy if there’s salad, right?
Quick time out: School is still awesome
Backtracking for a minute, in the unlikely case that anyone was unsure at this point, I am continuing to love school. Beyond the overall amazingness of cooking all day every day and eating fabulous things all the time, there are moments of hilarity that make my day even brighter.
For example, take this useful lesson we learned the hard (and funny) way: I will now never forget that you should ALWAYS label things in the kitchen if they’re not in their original containers. In a professional kitchen, there are many types of white powders and crystals floating around — no, not that kind...at least not in our school…that I know of. Anyway, at the very least, you have a few flours (e.g., all purpose, 00, cake, and bread), powdered sugar, cornstarch, sugar and salt. Mixing any of those up would be disastrous to a recipe, especially a pastry recipe that requires precision and accuracy to work, so if you aren’t sure what it is, you should probably give it a taste. What’s the worst that could happen?
Well, our instructor was about to dust some profiteroles with powdered sugar from an unmarked container when it occurred to him to give it a taste first, just in case. We watched as his expression turned from placid to puzzled to disgusted as he sputtered, “well that wasn’t powdered sugar.” He did not elaborate, so someone asked, “Chef, what was it?” A two word response: “meat glue.” Not the ideal garnish for your afternoon éclair. We just about died laughing! You learn from your just-barely-averted disasters, or your instructor’s, in this case. You also learn that meat glue is a thing, and a thing that you will soon be using in your charcuterie module coming up in a few weeks. Pray for me.
I also encountered some amusing, highly technical terminology being thrown around the kitchen. For example, when we were learning how to make rosettes, which are little decorative floral designs you make with a pastry bag, we were taught how to use pressure and movement to not create "poop emojis” (actual instructions). In fact, it’s quite helpful to have such a specific visual to avoid a certain end outcome — how would you describe a poop emoji otherwise? And when piping out lady fingers, which are the eclair-shaped little cakes used in tiramisu, it was important to check that the batter didn’t “bloop” out of the pastry bag — it had to be thick enough to come out of the bag slowly and evenly, not fall out into a sad ploppy mess when you pressed it. We were also told to be careful to not let our buttercream frosting “plotz” onto our sponge cake while icing it, aiming for a thin even layer instead. I really love the onomatopoetic approach to instruction. It's way more intuitive than using all those French words!
But not everything is fun and games. Ironically, the week when we were using our knives the least was the exact moment when I got my first bad cut. I was reaching into my kit to grab a microplane for grating nutmeg when my giant serrated knife took off a chunk of skin at the base of my right ring finger. The pain and blood are one thing, but really it’s just humiliating wearing a bright blue condom on your hand (sorry, “finger cot”) around the kitchen for days. Note to self: never, ever rummage around in a bag of knives and then look away.
My practice round of rosettes looked a little like 💩
Trying my best to not let my ladyfingers “bloop” out of the pastry bag.
Behold, the finger condom of shame.
Ok, back to business
First up - eggs!
Eggs marked the transition from our regular culinary study into pastry, which makes a lot of sense from a theory perspective. We spent a whole day on savory egg dishes such as omelettes, scrambled eggs and poached eggs, and in the process learned about the science of egg protein coagulation, a perfect segue into sweet egg-based desserts like custards, meringues and cakes that we were going to make in the coming days.
My favorite egg dishes that we made were the simplest and also hardest ones: poached eggs and a French-style omelette. Success had eluded me in the past on both of these fronts, but with the clear demonstrations and instructions from our teacher, they both turned out great the first time. There was also a ridiculously rich French version of deviled eggs called eggs Chimay made by mixing egg yolks with sautéed mushrooms and cream sauce, piping that back into the cooked egg white, and topping it with a slice of gruyere cheese and more cream sauce to get brown and bubbly in the broiler. Even deviled egg haters could get behind this one.
Piping in the filling for eggs Chimay.
An elevated picnic snack.
Everyone has different philosophies on how to make the best poached eggs, and I thought that the one we learned worked really well. These are the steps:
Strain each egg individually through a fine mesh sieve to get rid of the runny white part. The thick white will stay behind.
Make sure the water is just simmering (around 170 F)
Add a dash of white vinegar to the water to help the whites coagulate, about 1 tbsp per cup of water
Create a gentle vortex with 3-4 slow clockwise swirls around the edge of the pot
Drop the eggs in one by one from a small bowl or cup into the simmering and barely swirling water, making sure your drop point is very close to the surface.
Don’t touch! Let the eggs cook until the whites are set, around 3-4 minutes. Don’t worry, they won’t stick to each other.
Gently lift each egg out of the water with a slotted spoon, blotting the bottom of the spoon on a paper towel before placing the egg on your plate. Don’t drain the eggs directly on a paper towel as it makes them more likely to stick and then break when you pick them up again.
All of these things together resulted in perfectly poached eggs that did not taste like vinegar.
We poached our eggs in barely simmering water with a splash of white vinegar.
We pulled them out after 3-4 minutes, when the whites were just set.
The money shot.
On the French omelette front, our homework was to study the technique of the legendary Jacques Pepin, who has made multiple videos on how to make the perfect omelette and also happens to be a dean of our school. A properly executed French omelette has a smooth exterior with no color and a very creamy interior with small “curds” — the coagulated bits from scrambling. With Pepin’s expertise in my back pocket, I got it right on the first try. First, I frantically scrambled the eggs with a fork in my special omelette pan while jiggling the pan forwards and backwards. I let the bottom layer of egg set, and then gently coaxed the formed (but open) omelette down to the bottom of the tilted pan. One approach to loosening the omelette from the pan is to bang on the pan as the omelette gets to the bottom, so it was a pretty noisy 15 minutes in our classroom with clanging pans jarring you from all sides of the room. The hardest part is at the end, when you need to create an oval shape by folding the omelette in thirds and then flip it from the pan onto to the plate. My shape was a little wonky, but having the right texture and color was a huge success in my book!
This video of the master Jacques Pepin making an omelette from the New York Times made me confident going into egg day.
My shaping (and centering on the plate) could use a little work, but my instructor said that the doneness and texture were perfect!
There was one major flop on egg day though, literally. Eggs over easy were not overly easy for me. They involve frying an egg in a pan, tossing and flipping it in the air, and catching it in the pan to cook it on the other side. I am not sure how this happened, but mine literally catapulted to the opposite side of my stove and splattered all over the flat top. Hand eye coordination was never my strong suit. Good thing an over easy egg is not on the Level 2 practical exam!
Oops 🙈 Like how did this even happen??
Onto the sweet: The three Cs: custards, crèmes and [ice] cream
With these fundamental savory egg dishes behind us, we moved into sweet applications of eggs: custards and crèmes, which ultimately evolved into ice cream.
A custard is a cooked mixture of egg yolk and liquid dairy, and, in the case of a sweet version, sugar. We learned to make the stirred custard crème anglaise, which is a classic sauce poured into a chocolate soufflé tableside as well as a base for other types of custards; crème caramel, which is a baked custard like a flan or crème brûlée, but with caramel sauce on top; pastry cream, which is what often fills the bottom of fruit tarts; and Bavarian cream, which is a version of crème anglaise that is thickened and stabilized with starch and gelatin. Our default flavor was vanilla, but you could infuse any flavor into custard (will discuss when I talk about ice cream in a minute).
I had one snafu with the crème caramel, specifically with the water bath we baked our ramekins in. A water bath buffers something during the baking process, insulating it and preventing it from from overcooking / burning. In this case, we put our custard tins in a large, high walled sauté pan filled about halfway up with water before putting them in the oven. Well, it turns out that a big pan of near-boiling water and custard-filled ramekins is actually pretty heavy, and if you don’t have a good grip on the pan handle coming out of the oven, you are in trouble! Oven mitts are not a thing in a professional kitchen, so you need to use a folded hand towel, and I realized mid-lift that I simply could not carry this heavy pot by its single handle with my towel. So...I dropped the pan back on the oven rack, burned myself on the side of the pan, and spilled the water over half of our custards. Fortunately, two of the custards were mostly fine after some careful dabbing to remove the moisture on top, so we were able to present an untarnished final product. I have since learned that I should really use two rags if I need to when pulling something heavy out of an oven, and/or ask for help!
For crème caramel, you coat the bottom of a ramekin with a sugar syrup, made by carefully boiling sugar with water until it’s almost a ruby color, then pour uncooked custard on top, bake it until it’s set, and try not to burn off your arm when removing it from the oven.
My partner on custard day was lactose intolerant, so I got to take home both batches of chocolate Bavarian cream that we made. It was right before Thanksgiving, and I really wanted to put it to good use, so when I got home I made an impromptu pie crust out of ground up Tate’s chocolate chip cookies and butter, lined the crust with Nutella, and then filled it with the Bavarian cream to make an elevated chocolate cream pie. Topped off with some rosettes of whipped cream, it was a hit! I definitely want to work on it again and post the recipe on this blog. It feels great to be feeling more creative and inspired through this learning experience, and I can’t wait to develop some original recipes when I have some free time.
My chocolate Bavarian cream pie with a Nutella cookie crust, served at Thanksgiving.
I think they liked it! I’m excited to make it again and post the recipe on this blog.
Finally, ice cream. Ice cream also starts with a custard cooked on the stove, like crème anglaise. For this batch of ice cream, we infused our milk and cream by scalding it on the stove with lemongrass and ginger for the first flavor, and fresh mint for the second. After letting it cool slightly, we stirred the infused milk into our whipped egg yolks and sugar and cooked that mixture gently on the stove to make a custard. We then cooled it to let it thicken, put it through the ice cream machine until it was the thickness of soft-serve, mixed the mint batch with chocolate chips, and froze it in large pans. Over the course of the following days, our instructor pressured us to eat it after lunch every day, which was awesome, but also a lot when we were making other confections all day. #culinaryschoolproblems. I am not sure if I would make ice cream at home when I live so close to incredible gelato places like Caffe Panna, Venchi, and Eataly, but it would obviously be great to be able to do it in a restaurant setting, and the idea of having a blank canvas for an endless array of your own flavor dreams is pretty exciting.
The humble beginnings of fresh lemongrass and ginger ice cream - an infused custard made with milk and cream.
The custard rolled around in the ice cream machine until it was the texture of soft-serve, and then we immediately put it in the freezer to harden.
Finally, we ate it with a fork since there were no clean spoons around — gotta make do with what you have! Pictured here is fresh mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Rising to the occasion
After wrapping up custards, which utilize egg yolks, we moved onto meringue-based recipes which harness the power of whipped egg whites to make them rise: specifically, soufflés and mousses.
The base recipe for a soufflé is egg whites whipped to peaks, combined with a béchamel sauce (flour, butter and milk cooked together until thick) mixed with whatever other flavorings you might want to add, like chocolate or cheese. The air whipped into the meringue is what makes the soufflés rise in the oven, as the air expands and steam is released from the batter in a process called mechanical leavening. So you better have a solid meringue as your base! We learned that you must make sure that there is absolutely no fat present in your egg whites before whipping them into a meringue, otherwise they just will not thicken into peaks. That means checking to make sure there’s no speck of yolk left when separating your eggs, and fastidiously cleaning your bowl before whipping.
Even when you get your meringue technique right, I learned that soufflés are in actuality just as finicky as their reputation claims. They need to be made, baked, and eaten as quickly as possible to preserve this air in the meringue that forms the foundation of the batter. Waiting just 5 minutes after they come out of the oven to eat them will result in serious deflation, which is a real waste of all the elbow grease you put into whipping up the perfect meringue in the first place. But when they work, they are truly magical. It’s amazing how much they rise when you bake them for just 10-15 minutes - 30-50% above their original height, when just emerging from the oven. I didn’t test the old wives' tale that singing an operatic high note can thwart the rising of a soufflé, but perhaps I’ll give that a try at home and report back.
You can’t get more classic than a chocolate soufflé for dessert. Pour a little vanilla crème anglaise on top and you are golden.
Mousses require some care to preserve their volume as well, but they are more forgiving than soufflés. They are whipped in multiple ways, with both meringue and whipped cream. So when you’re mixing the different ingredients together, you must take care not to crush the air out of any of your whipped components by using proper folding technique (see the Tips and Tricks section at the bottom of this post for more on this).
Our mousse was wonderful eaten alone, but its true destiny was to stuff profiteroles and éclairs, acting as a vehicle for creative expression. This day was one of the first days I felt that I could “play”, as we had time to decorate our confections however we pleased without the pressure of presenting them by a specific time. We started our decorating session with the base of pâte à choux pastry dough, which we had piped into cream puff and éclair shapes earlier in the day and then baked. Our instructor demonstrated how to make a swan by cutting up the pastry pieces and piecing them back together with mousse as glue. Edible arts and crafts - I was obsessed!
Choux pastry dough, which you make on the stove and then pipe into various forms before baking.
As it bakes, choux pastry puffs up and hollows out on the inside, so it’s perfect for filled treats like profiteroles (cream puffs) and éclairs.
Filled with chocolate mousse et voilà! Maybe I should become a sculptor. Thoughts?
Have your cake and eat it too
We wrapped up our pastry module by making beautiful tarts and cakes, starting with the foundation of tart doughs. First, we made pâte brisée, which is a buttery, flaky, neutral-flavored dough that you can use pretty ubiquitously. You’ve definitely had it — you’ll often find as the base of a quiche, and it’s very similar to a classic American pie crust. This dough introduced us to two things that are essential to achieving a flaky texture: the importance of using very cold butter, and of not overworking the dough.
First, the butter: cold butter is key to achieving the much-sought-after flake. In the case of pâte brisée, keeping the butter cold while cutting and smushing it into the flour (using a combination of metal scraper and your hands) ensures that there are mini pats of butter layered throughout the dough, versus mixed completely with it. This is good. These little fatty islands floating in a sea of flour will become delightful air pockets in the dough as it bakes, when the water present in the butter evaporates as steam and the fat melts away, leaving behind a hole where the butter once lived. These caverns lift the dough from the inside out, resulting in that that light and flaky texture you’re after. If you were to fully incorporate the butter into the dough, you wouldn’t get the same effect, as there wouldn’t be big enough air pockets to create the lift and flake. Along the same lines, it’s recommended to refrigerate or even freeze your molded dough to ensure that the butter is still super cold so that the steam effect occurs.
Second, overworking. This just means that you don’t want to manipulate the dough too much as you are shaping it. The first reason for this is that the more you touch the dough, the more the butter warms up and mixes into the flour, which sabotages that flaky texture you are working so hard to create. The second reason not to overwork the dough is that as you put energy into it, the protein molecules in the flour (otherwise known as the gluten) will bond together and create longer, stronger strings of proteins, which translates to elasticity and chew in the dough. This isn’t always a bad thing - we want a nice chew to a pasta and certain types of bread, so we will knead that dough a lot. But for a flaky crust, chewiness is your worst enemy. So only touch the dough as much as you need to - no more, no less!
Below, Melissa and I took extreme care with our tart doughs!
The second dough we made was pâte feuilletée, also known as puff pastry. This is a long and complicated process requiring many hours of folding, rolling, and refrigerating that I am not going to go into, and frankly I don’t think is worth doing on your own unless you really perfect your craft and then open a bakery. I am very happy to use the store bought stuff, which works just as well as, if not better than, the one we made in school (in my opinion). If you really want to know, then contact me and I will walk you through it 🙂
We “docked” (poked holes in) the bottom portion of the puff pastry so that it wouldn’t rise as much as the sides, allowing us to fill the tart more easily. But why go to so much effort to create a million layers of puff when you’re going to deflate 90% of it??
At least the decorating part was fun. We used apricot glaze to make the berries extra shiny.
The third dough we made was pâte sucrée, which translates to "sweet dough”, which is the more dense, cookie-like crust you’ll often encounter with a fruit or chocolate tart. For this dough, we used a stand mixer to cream the butter with powdered sugar, then added eggs and flour. So, because we let the butter warm up a bit during the creaming process, it fully incorporated into the dough, and we ended up with a denser final product that could stand up to more robust fillings.
Remember the pears we poached with white wine, honey, and vanilla and then canned on food preservation day?
We opened those babies up to create a beautiful pear and almond tart. It was delicious! I would definitely make it again.
The capstone dessert we made was a sponge layer cake with buttercream frosting, which was super fun because we got to dream up our own frosting flavors. My weakness on a dessert menu is any kind of chocolate and hazelnut confection, so my partner and I made a gianduja buttercream using hazelnut praline and cocoa powder. We also learned how to frost a cake (see the tips and tricks section for details!) and practiced our piping designs with pastry bags. The final thing I will say about this is that I now know why buttercream is called buttercream. We put SO MUCH BUTTER in the icing just for two small cakes. I would say each 8 inch cake probably had half a pound of butter’s worth of icing and a third of a pound of powdered sugar. Worth it!
Below, a ridiculous amount of butter and sugar turned into a very messy (but delicious) icing, which ended up as a pretty tidy cake!
And that’s a wrap! Read on to take some of my pastry learnings into your kitchen at home.
Tips and tricks
To become a master of all things eggs:
Always whisk your whole eggs together before adding any other liquid to them, or adding them to anything else. Otherwise, you’re likely to have strings or pockets of egg whites that are much harder to homogenize when other things are present. You can probably get away with not doing this when using a stand mixer, but whenever you’re mixing by hand, whip those eggs together first!
Whisk your eggs together with a fork, not a whisk. Why? When I asked Chef why he was doing that, he said, “Because I’m not an amateur.” There you go.
Specifically on the egg white end, when you’re making a meringue with egg whites and sugar, make sure to get the egg whites frothy on their own and starting to solidify and become opaque before adding sugar. If you add sugar at the beginning, they will take forever to whip because the presence of sugar makes it harder for proteins to coagulate. This is especially useful if you’re doing this by hand and not in a mixer!
To set yourself up for success with cakes and tarts:
If baking a cake or tart where you need to grease your pan, have your molds and dishes prepped with butter (or whatever fat you’re using to grease) so that whenever you’re ready to fill them and put them in the oven they can go immediately in. Also, it helps to use chilled butter - it will prevent the dough/batter from sticking better than room temperature butter. If you want to make it easy on yourself, you can smear the pan with warm or room temperature butter in advance and then put it the fridge or freezer until you’re ready to load in your goods.
When icing a cake, frequently rinse your offset spatula with warm water to avoid getting crumbs in the icing. This also warms the icing so it becomes nice and smooth — but don’t make it too hot, you don’t want to melt the butter in the buttercream! Using a revolving cake stand also helps to get a nice even exterior.
Don’t leave your pastry dough uncovered for too long — it will dry out, causing it to crack and be more challenging to roll out. Wrap it up in plastic as soon as you can!
To fold ingredients like a pro:
There’s an actual technique for folding which involves cutting through the middle of the ingredients in your bowl, lifting them together, and then scraping the side of the bowl while rotating the bowl at the same time. Frankly it’s easier to get it if you watch rather than read, so here’s a helpful video on the mechanics of folding technique.
When you’re folding one ingredient into another, make sure you don’t crush your light ingredient with your heavy one. If you’re making chocolate mousse, for example, don’t pour your melted chocolate on top of your whipped cream — push your whipped cream over to one side of the bowl, then put your chocolate in the empty part of the bowl, and fold together.
It helps in this scenario to make what’s called a “sacrifice” (technical term) by folding a little bit of your lighter ingredient into your heavier one to lighten it up first before incorporating them together, further preventing crushing the air out. So you’d mix a little whipped cream in your chocolate to lighten it up, THEN put your chocolate in the bowl next to the whipped cream before folding. Such dramatic terminology, I love it!
If you have to fold in whipped ingredients in multiple steps, like with a mousse, do it in order of heaviest mixture to lightest mixture. In the case of chocolate mousse, which is made with melted chocolate, whipped cream and meringue, you would fold the chocolate into the cream, and then the chocolate cream mixture into the meringue, since the meringue is the lightest and most delicate of all.