Pastry Camp - Day One

Every day on the way to work, I walk past The French Pastry School of Chicago. Since I love baking bread and making candy, it calls to me a little bit each time I pass. Eventually I found myself on their website, browsing their glorious pictures of pastries and other delights.

In later winter I went to their two hour open house and demo, where all manner of sweets were created by two of their chef instructors. This was pretty amazing to see, since they even did some pulled sugar work. After that class, I poked around the website some more and finally decided to try out the week long pastry boot camp. My hope was to get some exposure some areas of pastry that I have not been so great with in the past (pie crust, I am looking at you) as well as some more advanced learning on the stuff I already know pretty well.

When I arrived at the school, there was a little confusion since not only was the pastry camp starting today, but the main program had four new classes starting as well. When I found my right group, I discovered that I was the only dude in the class. This will make it hard to follow through on my promise to partner with another guy. We got a quick tour of the kitchen we'll be using and then paired up at the stations. I ended up with a girl who is going into her senior year of college with plans to take the full program after. She is absurdly young. Turns out she's a ringer: She spends her summers interning in a pastry shop. About half the class are there to try it out to see if the full program is right for them, a few already seem to be involved in the industry, and a few are there just for fun.

The class takes the form of a demo of about half the plan for the day, where the chef executes each recipe. We then go off in our pairs and do the same. There is a short break after this, then a second cycle of demo and us executing. In the break, we had a snack of puff pastry with caramelized hazelnuts, which was delicious. They must make their own puff pastry, which is such a marvel. Sadly, for things that advanced, one needs to take the full program. Throughout the entire session, the chef is available to answer questions and help out, as is her intern (though the intern seems to focus mainly on keeping up with our dirty dish output.

While the first day is a full day, the only product that we complete is a lemon pound cake. It's much lighter in texture than most pound cakes, and very delicious (we tasted the demo cake once it was out of the oven.) I suspect this is a recipe I will make again, and at night while eating mine and drinking gingered ice tea the idea of adding some ginger with the lemon zest strikes me. Everything else we make is prep for a dish we will do later in the week.

We prepared two yeast breads/starters (one for beer bread and one for beginets) both of which are retarding overnight in the fridge. I am a little worried about these guys, since where we set them to proof was in direct line of the air conditioner. We ended up letting the beginet dough rise for the rest of our session on our table to make up for it, and I was relived to smell the odor of yeast when I punched it down after this longer rise. The sponge is just a starter, so my fingers are crossed that it will be fine once it is incorporated into the main dough.

We also prepared finacier batter and tart dough, which need to rest in the fridge overnight to develop. Financier are defined by having brown butter and almond flour in them. That sounds pretty good on its own to me, though I almost always see these with chocolate in them. If they turn out well, I may try making them at home without the chocolate. Note to those using almond flour: Don't wisk until all lumps are gone, those lumps are bits of almond.

Finally, we made meringues which are baking in the oven overnight. These are almost entirely whipped egg whites and sugar, and will just dry in the ovens rather than actually baking as I would think of it. If all goes well, they should pick up no color from the baking and remain snow white. They were mostly little piped piles with the star tip to serve as petit fours, though some will decorate our lemon tarts that we are making later in the week.

So far, most of what we have learned isn't necessarily news to me. We talked about gluten formation and different flours, which are already things I am pretty familiar with. We did get to use a piping bag to shape the meringues which was Something I have not done. This is where the hustler nature of my partner came out. After having claimed that she had not really done much as an intern, she knocked out consistently good looking meringues with the star tip. Some of mine came out malformed, but after watching what she did I made them a bit smaller and was happy with the result.

Two useful tidbits that I learned today that I will definitely apply in the future:

1. If you are making a quickbread (or pound cake) you can draw a line of melted butter across the top (dabbing with a pastry brush, since the surface isn't really paintable) and it will cause it to split there. This is nice because the bread is going to split anyway, so this lets you make it nice and even when it does.
   
2. When covering bread dough with plastic wrap, I should be laying the wrap directly on top of the dough's surface. I always worry that this will restrict the dough's rise, but apparently I am worrying for nothing. This prevents a skin from forming and lets the dough expand enough.