If the last practical made me focus on making consistent products, this time it was about working fast. We had 3.5 hours this time (instead of the usual 4.5, with the last half hour supposed to be for baking and clean up only, not decorating) to make:

• 6 eclairs (made out of pate a choux) with chocolate pastry cream and chocolate fondant top (fondant and simple syrup pre-made)
• 6 paris brest (made out of pate a choux) with praline pastry cream filling and topped with almonds
• 1 cherry pie with a lattice top (dough pre-made)
• 2 genoise/sponge cakes, undecorated and unmolded

If made at home, one at a time, I think they’d be nice, leisurely projects with flexible in-between time between stages, but when made at school with a deadline, they’re more like boot camp.

That said, I was in a very good mood that day, and frankly, practicals don’t really scare me now. If they were about grades… well, we’re graded on our work every single day… and grades are intrinsically subjective and crude measurements; if they were about making products on our own… well, we divide up the work in our groups, and you are relied upon for your work; if they were about making good products… well, this is often the second or even first times we’re making some things, after only 2 months of working in an academic/professional kitchen for me… and we make good things on other days; if they were about working under pressure… well, I’ve had some ridiculously stressful jobs before.. and have learned that there is always a time when things go wrong, go boom and life goes on.

Now, that said, I do appreciate practicals as an exercise to focus on your own techniques and accountability for a day while making a variety of products. We’d get complacent otherwise, especially since we’ve often had extra time most days in the past few weeks and have made a lot of great things. I’ll probably be more concerned about practicals later in the program when my cumulative abilities should be more developed from more experience and practice and kitchen wisdom… Since my pastry career will have to start for real soon after, I better be able to make consistently good stuff before I graduate.

So, as far as this practical being about speed, it was good to see how I reacted to the time crunch. I liked that my instincts have been acclimated to the kitchen to the extent that I prep bowls/equipment/ingredients more efficiently, know the general rhythm of recipes, have a sense of dividing up my space, and at least notice what is going wrong (and fix it, if I deem it worthy of the time) rather than being in an oblivious or suprised haze.

But, things did get out of control… I’m usually rather neat when I work, but my space occasionally became a kingdom of dirty bowls, pots, tools, and splattered pastry cream/chocolate/batter/dough/cherry pie filling. And when I did wash a star tip, it cut my finger. I couldn’t take the time to clean everything all the time; to make matters harder, we arrived to find that most of the dishes were still dirty from the previous group, so we had to hunt for and wash most of our dishes. I also lost all sense of time (and a clock that I used to rely on has disappeared from our kitchen wall), so I only had a Pavlov’s dog’s reaction to my kitchen timer to make me walk to the ovens; so I should stop forgetting to hit or inadequately hitting “start” after punching in the time, and I should keep a better tally of the state of things baking at the time. As described below, I also had to let some errors go uncorrected… Right or wrong, I wanted nothing more than to finish, so that’s what drove my decisions. And I did finish, at 12:58.

Eclairs and Paris Brest
There were two issues with these: the amount of pate a choux we were told to make didn’t provide enough for me to make 6 each so I had to make more separately (after twice trying to re-pipe the first dough out to the right amount without success) and there are so many little steps (cooking pate in a saucepan, moving it to a mixer and adding eggs, piping them out with star tip, egg washing them, baking them, waiting for them to cool, cutting them open, making pastry cream, cooling pastry cream in ice bath, mixing half with an eyeballed amount of cocoa paste made out of eyeballed amounts of cocoa powder/milk/cream, mixing the other half with an eyeballed amount of pre-made praline paste, making chocolate fondant by melting eyeballed amounts of melted unsweetened chocolate (a step in itself)/fondant/simple syrup and applying it before it cools, sprinkling paris brest with conf sugar). Even when thinking about making these, I’m worn out by the time the fondant has to be made.

I think making the pate a choux twice (and trying to make the first one work for a while) threw off the whole day because it took up time and introduced a kind of uncertainty that sticks.

Good:

• Improved uniformity of length and diameter in piping.
• Shiny fondant on top, instead of the dullness caused by overheating the fondant, which has haunted me in the past.
• Successfully made tasty pastry cream
• Successfully made pate a choux… twice
• Successfully flavored pastry cream with praline paste… without having made it before or tasting it (which, actually, isn’t a good habit, but I had no time and knew that if I grabbed a tasting spoon, it’d wind up used and lurking somewhere on my table, which is gross)
• Did not put too little cocoa in the chocolate flavored pastry cream, and did not make too small an amount of cocoa paste (of cocoa powder,milk, and cream) to put in, as I usually do
• Evenly cut them open horizontally.

Bad:

• Overbaked, eclairs kinda burnt.
• Put too much cocoa paste into the pastry cream for the filling.
• One eclair broke as I was cutting it.
• Should have put more simple syrup in the fondant to thin it more.
• Eyeballing so many elements is hard.
• Probably shouldn’t have either made the pate a choux twice or only re-collected the paris brest batter to pip again, but instead re-gathered all the batter, and re-piped the chocolate eclairs smaller so that the paris brest could at least be bigger than pinky rings. The goal here was more about uniform size than big pastries (even if I did originally aim for the prescribed measurements).
• Piped pate too thick or too thin in places. I have to figure out how to hold the bag when piping circles. Perpendicular produced the best result, I think, because when it was on an angle, it was always thinner in the curved areas. I also get air pockets in the bag, which burst into craters.

Cherry Pie

The big issue for some here was weaving the lattice (which is done a floured cardboard round and then transferred on top; chilling it helps to stiffen it up), but for me, it was that it exploded last time.

Good:

• Tasted very good. Of course, I just followed the recipe, but once I had a bite, I was hooked. They use a bit of nutmeg and cinnamon with the cherries, which add depth to the flavor.
• Did not overcook the filling too much while trying to bring it to a boil, as I did before.
• Good uniformity of lattice, even if it did slide onto the pie skewed because I didn’t have time to chill it, so I had to fix it; I probably should have just left the diamong pattern instead, though. It looked nice.
  Rolled out two pieces of dough to uniform thickness (1/8 inch) and round shape, something that I couldn’t do a couple months ago.
• It did not explode into a bull’s eye, as before.

Bad:

• Kinda burnt the crust.
• Exploded in little splotches.
• Lattice unevenly baked around overlapping dough. I was later told that rolling the lattice thinner would result in a more uniform baked appearance. Also, when I was egg washing it, some of the cherry filling got on the brush and then on the crust, so that also produced some darker spots.
• Crust a bit un-uniform on edges.

Genoise (Sponge Cake)

This is made by a foaming method in which you heat up the eggs, sugar, and salt in a double boiler until 120 degrees while stirring constantly, transfer it to a mixer for 18 minutes, and then fold in flour and then butter. The trick is that if incorrectly mixed, folded harshly, or improperly agitated, it might not rise. It could also have pellets of flour that weren’t completely folded, as mine did.

Good:

• It rose.
• It was baked properly.
• I got it out of the oven before the time limit for the practical.

Bad:

• It had a few unmixed flour bits interspersed.

Grade:

78%. It’s not uncommon to get 66% or 50% or less for an element that goes wrong. If I hadn’t overbaked my pate a choux and my cherry pie, I wouldn’t have gotten grades like 10/15, or less, for things like appearance, taste, and workmanship. So, basically, if I’d gone to the oven a few minutes earlier a few times, I would have fared a lot better. As it is, it’s a new low, but I once did well. It’s possible to blame others for the lack of a dishwasher that we usually rely on and for the inadequate amount of pate a choux we were told to make for the size of the products we were told to make, but whatever. I certainly learned from the experience, and I got 100% on the written test for the block, taken the day before. So, touche.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 10:20 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.