With the passing of bread season comes the beginning of pastry season. We just had our orientation for our 3-week Pastry Techniques block today. This means that for roughly 4 hours, our Chef Instructor went over the roughly 41 recipes that we will make during this block. For each day coming up, we’ll prepare our handwritten recipe cards by integrating his instructions with our printed recipes, which come either from the CIA Baking & Pastry book or handouts. Usually the changes or clarifications have to do with technique, ingredients, or oven temperature. There are three stations that each of the 6 teams of either 2-3 people pass through for 4 days each: Breakfast Pastries, Cookies, and Desserts.

I was assigned to the Cookie station first, so over the next few days, I’m most looking forward to mud slide cookies, white choc macadamia cookies, almond anise biscotti, and almond macarons. Then, there are such things as chocolate eclairs, paris-brest, tiramisu, angel food cake, and creme brulee to be made…. Followed by quiches, panettones, hot cross buns, donuts (yeasted and cake AND jelly), apple fritters, and Colomba di Pasqua. I foresee much of my attention being focused on piping, custards, consistent products, cooking time, and rolling out dough. It will also be the first time that I’ll deep fry.

I appreciated the chef’s strong encouragement for us to branch out to different cultures around the world for recipes that we have to research; culinary schools tend to get reputations for being a bit staid, so I’m happy that we’re inspired to try new things and that they make an effort to find the ingredients we request. We have to research recipes for a quick bread (other than zucchini or pumpkin), a savory and a sweet bread pudding (using the bread we’ve made that’s been frozen), an Easter yeasted bread, Easter cookies (alas, Peeps discouraged), and an Easter Rice Tart. Frankly, I hadn’t thought about Easter much before today, but thank goodness I can now plan for it… and know that I’ll be armed with treats. Anyway, if anybody has any leads for such recipes that they’d like to share, let me know!

And you may be wondering what we do with all this food that we make. As much as possible goes to the buffet dessert table for lunch right away… and much is frozen (sometimes not yet baked) for future use. So, this means that at the end of every meal, we are confronted with a table that looks something like this…..

Usually there aren’t so many breakfast pastries… but without them, I never would have realized that fresh Danish made with Plugra is one of the best things in the world.

Also, each class goes through a plated desserts block, so for the past few weeks, the class across the kitchen across from us has been serving us desserts directly to the table.

Either way, I don’t remember the last day in my life that lacked dessert.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Culinary School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.