Pastry Camp - Day Four

Since day three was about preparing a lot of parts of products, day four was all about finishing those up. The morning demo covered a lot of smallish things, and since very little oven time was needed folks seemed to all attack them in different orders.

We started out by preparing Passion Fruit Creme Brulee, since they had to cook the longest and were likely to have the most oven contention (only one deck oven was set for this, so only three could bake them at once.) This was a pretty easy mixture of eggs, sugar and creme, which got baked in dishes in a water bath. The chef warned us that if we didn't mix the sugar into the eggs (but rather just dumped it in and left it in a lump) then it can actually cause some of the protein to coagulate. A good tip, and I'll be more careful in the future when I am mixing these particular ingredients. This was placed in the fridge overnight and will get bruleed tomorrow.

We then made a chocolate custard to fill our small tart shells. This was pretty similar to the lemon curd in process. We had to give a few of our shells foil collars, since we had been a bit over-aggressive when pressing the dough into the rings and left some holes behind. The other shells mocked them relentlessly. This was baked in the deck oven until almost set and then once cooled decorated with the nougatine crisp from yesterday. The demo tarts were delicious, with a great bitterness balanced by just enough sweetness. We had a ton of nougatine crisp leftover, so we broke that up and brought it home to have just as candy. We also had some leftover chocolate custard mixture, which we froze and brought home. This is actually perfect, because we also have some spare dough in the freezer for making tart shells. Problem, meet solution. Delicious, delicious solution.

The earl grey ganache was next deployed in filling our macarons and as truffles. Some folks had had issues with their ganache, so the intern Laura (not to be confused with the chef Laura) had made some flavored with Darjeeling so we'd have spare. While our ganache was good, we decided to leave a few macarons for the darjeeling so we could sample another flavor. Here I will admit that I am fully converted to the piping bag. We filled many, many macarons in not a lot of time since we could easily and quickly pipe filling onto them. These got smooshed together into little sandwiches and packed away. Since my partner is staying at a hotel, I ended up with way more than half so I sense another delivery to work coming up.

The truffles were pretty easy to make. These were rolled ones, so we didn't need any special molds for them. We piped little marble sized dollops of the ganache and chilled them in the fridge until they stiffened up. We then rolled them between gloved hands and let them chill again (again to stiffen.) From here they got two thin coats of chocolate and a dusting of cocoa powder. Let me tell you, these suckers are something I will make again. The earl grey ganache was good but subtle in the macarons, but in the truffles it was miraculous. The flavor of the tea really came through, but melded so well with the chocolate of the ganache and the thin shell.

The second demo was to show us ice creams and sorbets (which only got demoed since it'd be hard to take home.) They approach this in an even more scientific way than other foods, and thus have recipes that perfectly balance solids versus liquids, water versus fat, etc. They use a stabilizer to help control the ice crystal formation some, and I may actually look it up online to help keep my ice creams smoother at home.

The last thing of the day was to make caramels or chocolate caramels (each table did one or the other.) Both followed similar patterns, and diverged just in what got mixed in in the end. Though I make toffee at christmas, that involves heating sugar with a fair amount of liquid and fat from the get go. For these, we heated just sugar and glucose (think corn syrup) until it was way on the brown side of golden brown (she warned us that she was going to make us take it past where we were comfortable.) Then you whisk in butter and cream (carefully) and heat and whisk even more, until you get the right temperature and consistency. At this point we added melted chocolate and brought it back to temperature, then poured it into a prepared pan. That will set and cool overnight, then we'll cut and wrap it tomorrow.

We also got back the meringues that we made on the first day, and used the 'petals' to decorate our lemon tarts. We were given some bags, boxes, and ribbons to put the remaining meringues, nougatine crisp, and truffles into. We had an incredible amount of food to bring home today, and it's pretty overwhelming. I asked the chef (who had been through the full program) what one does when they get this much candy and sweets every week. She said that you become your doorman's favorite person, your dry cleaner's favorite person, your friends' best friend, etc. Because we spent so much of the day finishing up the products that we had started on previous days, I could really feel the finality of the impending program end. We have one day left, and I am quite sad that it's coming to a close. I've really had a blast.