C...is for Cake!

I'm sorry it's been a while. I've been having some serious laptop issues with downloading pictures. Anyway, I have now completed Advanced Pastries and Showpieces! It was absolutely my favorite class I've taken and the one I was most looking forward to. I really like the artistic side of it and being able to create things with my own designs in mind. I also got to help out on some pretty cool outside projects.

In this class we spent one week each on three different stations: Cake, Sugar, and Chocolate. Not a bad combo right? I spent the first week on cake. That station also makes 2 desserts for the restaurant at school. I found two of my new favorite desserts and probably some of my favorite things we've made. #1 Individual Baked Alaskas made with homemade ice cream. Pretty perfect. And I also really loved Pear Tiviers. It's amazing I haven't put on 20 pounds. Such a sucker for sweets!

We also had three cake projects. And I will put the pictures below, but please be kind...These were my first attempt at any of this! But I was happy with the results and quite a few of my projects have been put in the schools permanent display!

This was my first cake...a birthday cake. It's just a simple one tier with decorators buttercream. The base has piped shells, the top piped scrolls, frosting roses/petals, and of course piped Happy Birthday. Sorry the pictures aren't very good quality.

This was my next cake..a wedding cake! Three tiers of the same cake/frosting. It has a basket weave bottom and top layer, and swiss dot center, shell borders, with yellow buttercream roses. The basket weave is a little tricky at first, but once you get the hang of it, it is super easy! Here is an upclose shot.

My last cake was a fondant covered cake. The flowers are handmade crysanthemum/water lilies that were a LOT of work! Each flower had 8 layers of petals! I hand painted the leaves to make them look more lifelike and coordinated the whole thing with brown ribbon that has topstitching in blue. Making flowers is so fun!! I love working on cakes. I like the small detail work and making everything just perfect.

A close up of one of the flowers.

M...is for MORE MEAT!

A note to my readers: The below contains some icky pictures and gross descriptions. If you are lame and weaksauce (or my pregnant sister) maybe you shouldn't read it, maybe just skim the pictures to get the drift. But if you are awesome, and tough and want to see what culinary school is REALLY like, check it out. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Well, the dreaded day arrived when I had to begin my Meat Fabrication. It is certainly the most feared class on campus and definitely the grossest. The chef is how do you say.....strict (I'm being polite). But, I survived. I didn't blog because I just couldn't bear it. Not in the middle of the chaos. Somehow that class just seemed so much more intense. I would come home everyday and have to take a 2 hour nap just to function! And a shower, because I smelled. Imagine me, Miss Neiman Marcus, coming home covered in blood and guts. Jose wouldn't even let me put my towels and uniforms in the same room, let alone load, as his dirty clothes. That bad. Apparently worse than stinky mens gym clothes. Anywho...

Most days consisted of either actual meat fabrication (or butchering of meat), making stocks and sauces, or making "family meal" (aka fancy school lunch). Everything in this class was really ramped up. In basics for example we would make a gallon of stock at a time with 8 lbs of bones. In meat fab, we made 10 gallons of stock at a time, with 80 pounds of bones! That's a lot of dead chickens and baby cows, respectively. The meat we fabricated is served in the restaurant at school. Some days it was red meat (beef tenderloin, NY strips, filet mignon, etc), others it was fish (halibut, monkfish, snapper, etc.) or sometimes shellfish like lobster. And we usually did a few chickens a day in preparation for our chicken fab test.

For the chicken fab test, we had to take a whole chicken and cut it down into it's parts and "french" them in 5 minutes to get an A. The very first time I did it took about 30 minutes. Frenching the leg takes some practice. Basically, imagine taking your leg (or a chickens) and cutting it off at the hip socket, then scraping all of the meat off towards your ankle in one piece so it is entirely inside-out and boneless by the time you finish. Getting around the "knee" is a killer. Did you even know that chickens have kneecaps? They do. Then you break the bones apart at the knee, cut all the cartilage out, and flip it back right-side out and stuff the bottom leg bone back in. This is a typical french preparation and often the legs are stuffed with filling, wrapped in caul fat (pig stomach lining) and cooked. Anyway, the pressure was on and I practiced really hard and was able to do it in 4:52. I was pretty proud until my girlfriend at school did it an entire minute faster and kicked my butt. But I'm still proud anyway.

One of the more fun things I got to do was to fabricate an entire hind quarter of a veal (baby cow, 3 months at slaughter) all by myself! It is the image on the right in the above diagram. Be thankful I gave you one of those instead of a picture. It was enormous, almost 75 pounds and cost the school over $700. I know it sounds crazy that I thought it was fun, but it was sort of relaxing. You cut all of the fat off and then find the natural separation between the muscle groups and cut. Pretty amazing. It really was neat to see how their bodies are made up, and really ours. Because they have almost identical anatomy in this part of the body. Chef said maybe I should have been a surgeon. Ha! Anyway, these are what I was left with when I was done....

I wrapped them up because they were quite bloody. Did you know that even after a cow is dead it has arteries and veins that still have blood in them? When you cut them, they bleed like they were alive. It's super weird. Pretty big bones though, huh? Especially for a three month old! (That is the Femur on the right and the Hip Socket on the left, fyi.)

But by FAR the grossest thing I had to do was to fab a monkfish....ICK (see photo above - and that is not a joke, it is what it looks like). Basically it is the worlds ugliest fish. It also smells worse than anything I have ever smelled. And it has a layer of blubber you have rip off before you can get to the meat, which coincidentally tastes just like lobster! A lot of nastiness to get to some good flavor. But I was so grossed out, I couldn't even eat it. In fact, cutting up fish is so gross to me that I haven't had a single piece of fish since I started school. I don't know how long it will be until I can eat it again. Because things like how I know that Halibut has both of its eyes on the same side of its head like here...

Umm - creepy. (I spared you another photo - you're welcome!)

I would like to now officially state that anyone who ever thought I was a sissy, or whiny girl, or baby, or not tough, or "weaksauce" was officially, for the record, WRONG. I survived meat fab, you cannot gross me out now. And I even got an A...which makes me really hardcore.

C...is for Croissants and Conchas!

I know I've been absent from the blog for a while, but things have been busy. Lame, I know. Anyway, I wanted to catch up a little on what has been going on. I finished my baking class and I absolutely loved every minute. I set a new school record on highest score on the test ever. But here are the two things I am the most proud of...

My Croissants were beautiful. Chef said they were textbook, picture perfect. They are pretty tricky to make and use LOTS of butter, but there is nothing better than a homemade croissant fresh out of the oven. It's mostly a process of rolling dough and folding in butter to make all of the little layers, which eventually give it it's puff and flakiness. The little pockets you can see on there are how you know they are made properly. Someday if you are really special....or you give me something really awesome...maybe I'll make you homemade croissants.

The next fave is Conchas. Conchas are a Mexican bread that I have really come to love. They are little "shells" and have a design on the top that looks like a shell. Everytime we are in Mexico I always have to hunt down a panaderia and find some...I LOVE them. We even had a little place in Dallas where we could find them, but it closed. :( Anyway, I thought they would be such a fun thing to learn to make so I asked Chef to teach me. They turned out really well. I wish I had scored the topping (shortening, sugar, flour and food coloring = YUM!) more so it would've cracked more, but they really tasted wonderful. The dishwasher ladies LOVED them and they are both Mexican, so I felt like that was a big compliment.

Anyway, all good things must come to an end and baking did. Luckily Chef has asked me to help him on some outside projects so I will get to keep baking. I am helping make all the desserts/pastry for graduation and also doing a charity Gingerbread House event for the holidays. Should be fun!

C...is for Challah

So I know I am terrible about posting pictures on this blog. Frankly, we are just moving too fast in the kitchen. Some days I'm lucky if I even get time to taste everything I've made. But today I made sure and snapped up a picture of the Challah bread I made yesterday. It really turned out beautiful.

Challah (the C is silent) is a traditional, sacred Jewish bread. It is meant to symbolize the manna from Heaven that fell in double quantity before the sabbath and holidays. It has a place of ritual and is eaten at each of the Sabbath meals (Friday night, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon.) It is also served on sacred holidays. The ones I made would technically be considered a Turban Challah because of their ring shape. It would traditionally be served at Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) to symbolize the cycle of the new year. Challah is easily recognized by its braided appearance and golden color from the amount of eggs in the dough.

So that's probably way more than you ever wanted to know, but I thought it is really beautiful in appearance and significance and you might enjoy seeing something I actually made myself. :)

And Sorry it is a crappy picture, I snapped it real quick with my iPhone.

B...is for Bread!

This week I am on the bread station. We make bread to be served in the restaurant and for a variety of other uses. I think that the smell of fresh baked bread, or even the yeasty smell of rising bread is among the greatest smells in the world. It just smells fresh, and homey. The kind of smell that makes you feel like everything is going to be alright.

Anyway, so far we've made sourdough, marbled rye, French baguettes, Italian, Foccacia, honey whole wheat, bagels, hot dog buns, hamburger buns, and pizza dough to name a few. Tomorrow we are braiding Challah and we have many more in the works.

I found a bunch of great quotes about bread and since other people are so much more eloquent than me...please enjoy!

“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.”James Beard (1903-1985)

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

"How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?"Julia Child

"Bread is the warmest, kindest of all words. Write it always with a capital letter, like your own name." Anonymous

"Without bread all is misery." William Cobbett, British journalist (1763-1835)

"Bread is like dressed, hats and shoes -- in other words, essential!"Emily Post

“If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.” Robert Browning (1812-1889) English poet

"I am going to learn to make bread to-morrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, saleratus, etc., with a deal of grace. I advise you if you don't know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch."Emily Dickinson, American poet (1830-1886)

I really love that last one from Emily Dickinson. Think of ME tomorrow with my sleeves up, covered in flour, making bread. And if you don't know how, learn with "dispatch." It isn't nearly as hard as it seems. It just takes a little patience and a little time, as most worthwhile things do.

D...is for Dessert!!!!

This week I started my Baking class and I absolutely LOVE it!! It is so relaxing to me, and really natural. In some ways, a lot like what my days would be like if I wasn't going to school...making cookies and cakes.
We have 3 rotations in baking and I have spent my first one in Desserts. Basically I make all the desserts for the restaurant at school, plus all the cakes for the advanced baking class to decorate, and then a bunch of other things to feed the school during morning break. Initially I was a little worried because I got put in a group I didn't feel very confident in, but we divided out the work and do it individually and it has made a huge difference. Chef said today that he thinks my work is "top notch" and "some of the best work he has ever seen from a student." I sort of feel like it's things I have been making since I was 15, so it's no biggie! I mean how do you screw up cookies? Apparently it happens.
Some of the delicious things I've made this week are: creme brule, chocolate creme brule, angel food cake, devil's food cake, strawberry rhubarb pie, apple pie, oatmeal rasin cookies, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, pie crust, lemon pound cake, cheesecake, orange-cranberry sorbet, vanilla caramel ice cream, coca-cola cake, and a bunch of other things I can't remember.
When we make a recipe, we also make A LOT of it. Like 10 dozen cookies at a time or 15 - 8"and 10" cakes. So big quantities and everything has to be measured very precisely. I think one of the things I'm most proud of making this week is the Coca-Cola cake. Chef asked me to make it for the advanced pastry Chef's Wife for her birthday....no pressure right? He also added that he had made the recipe 2 times and once it was great and once it was a total disaster. Luckily it turned out PERFECTLY! I was really happy. : )
I love Baking...I think it is my Happy Place.

H...is for Hell Week.

Week 6 is what is affectionately called, "Hell Week". It is the final week of basics and consists of 5 exams in 5 days and an oral report. Also 6 homework assignments. Pretty intense!

My written exams went really well. I got high A's on both of them. The three practical exams were much harder for me. I did well, but it just demands a lot more out of me. 2 of the practicals were plating exams, where you are given a menu and you have 2 hours to make everything and present on a plate hot, like in a restaurant. The timing can be a little tricky to make it all come out at the same time. For example: Chicken Consomme appetizer, Frenched chicken leg & thigh stuffed with Mushroom Duxelle in caul fat, Mushroom Supreme Sauce, Dauphanoise potatoes, and glazed carrots. (That was my 2nd plating). It feels a little Iron Chef-ish racing against the clock, and running around like a crazy person. Chef was a pretty tough critic, but it went pretty well and I'm really glad that it is over.

We also had a practical knife skills test. Basically taking different vegetables and cutting them extremely precisely against the clock (see image above for reference). We had 45 minutes to concasse 2 tomatoes, med dice a potato, cut 2 ounces of julienne carrots (1/8"x 1/8"x 2"), 2 ounces of brunoise carrots (1/8" cubes), and 4 tourneed potatoes (7 sided football-like shapes, 2" in length, 3/4" thick). 45 minutes may sound like a long time for all of that, but it really isn't. Especially because 2 ounces by weight of little tiny cubes is a lot of freaking carrot. And the tournes are really quite difficult. Chef even got out a ruler and measured each little piece. Time really got the best of me and I wasn't very happy with my exam. I did a lot better than most people, but I was disappointed with myself. Oh well, it's only one test.

The dreaded Tourne...striking fear in the hearts of culinary students the world around!

Overall, I felt like the week went pretty well. I'm fairly certain I'll get an A and I'm really excited to move on to the next class. I won't be the new guy anymore. And I can't believe I'm already a quarter of the way done with my classes!! (6 months of class, 3 months of internship).

Tomorrow I start Bake Shop!!!!! : )