Pastry Camp - Day Two

French (the language) is more than a little bit my nemesis. I am very bad at looking at a word in french and coming anywhere close to pronouncing it correctly. Because of this, I have been very careful to write down everything phonetically near it's actual spelling. Ben-yay. Fin-an-SEE-ay. Pot duh Fwee. It's not very graceful, but at least I don't sound quite as dumb when I speak. Now if I ever had to write these words without a reference handy, I would be in a world of hurt.

Much of day two was spent progressing or finishing the products we started on day one. Despite my fears, the two yeast doughs managed to survive the air conditioner blast and rose appropriately in the fridge overnight. We shaped the Beignets into little balls and proofed them in a makeshift proofing oven (the school's real one being taken up by a bread baking class.)

We also used the starter from yesterday to make the dough for our beer bread. This is a rustic loaf with part bread flour and part rye, as well as potato flakes to help hold in moisture. The beer comes in later in the afternoon. Because there is only one mixer in the kitchen large enough to mix this much and this stiff of a dough, we had to pair up tables (four students total) and mix in batches. The dough proofed for another hour before shaping.

Finally, we baked the Financiers. We piped cupcake-like molds one third full, topped that with a few pieces of candied orange peel and hazelnut chocolate chips, then repeated the process. These baked in the deck oven for a while and came out wonderfully. They were lighter and less sweet than a normal brownie, and had a fantastically rich flavor. I will definitely try these again, both as is and without the cocoa powder but with chocolate chips in place of the orange peel. During the break, we had housemade raspberry and mango jam with some lovely tender, but not rich, rolls. They seemed like they would be sweet, but ended up being very savory and delicious. I sat with a few other folks in the class and we chatted about bread and other topics. One of the women with us was given the class as a mother's day gift from her daughter, who had graduated recently from the full program. It was interesting to hear her talk about her daughter's and her own experiences.

Back in class, we got busy frying our beignets. Three frying stations were set up, using vegetable oil in a heavy pot rather than a deep fryer, which they don't have. It seems like beignets are they only thing they fry, so a fryer would be wasted. The dough was lovely and soft, having been enriched with butter and egg. As they fried, they puffed up and took on a golden color. Just a quick roll in sugar, and they were done. Still warm from the oil, they were the best donuts I had had in a long while. Even now having cooled for a bit they are still pretty amazing. Since my partner is staying in a hotel, she only took a handful home, leaving the rest for me. I myself am going to a cubs game tonight, so I snuck half of the batch to the folks at work to enjoy while they are still fresh.

The beer bread, once done with the first proof, got portioned and shaped into rustic triangular shapes. Some more rustic than others. It was a pretty soft dough, so it was challenging to work with. The really fascinating part of this recipe, for me, was that a wet paste was made with beer, water, rye flour, and yeast and brushed on top of the shaped dough before the final proof. This was then dusted with a liberal coating of rye flour. Once baked, this resulted in a dried riverbed look on the top of the loaves (they called it 'leoparding',) which was gorgeous. We sampled the bread that the chef had baked in demo and it was amazing -- I can't wait to eat the three loaves we brought home. With the tart dough from yesterday, we lined two large tart rings (for lemon tarts) and six small ones (for chocolate tarts.) This was a fascinating process, since we used tart rings rather than more normal fluted tart plates. To line the ring, you roll the dough out to an eighth of an inch thick (they had guides for us, which were very useful.) You then drape the rolled dough over the pastry ring (which has no bottom) and push it down and against the side. A little smooshing and a cut later, and you had lovely round tart shells all ready to go. The real trick is that when the dough is cold it isn't too sticky but cracks easily, but when it is warm it is sticky but doesn't crack. This makes it an odd race to get the dough to the right thickness and pushed into the ring while it's not too hard to work with. Overall, our shells look good and I was happy with how this went. I am not usually great with pie crust-like items, so I was pleased to have made these work so well (even if I did have to toss one shell when it went very awry.) The last quick thing we did was prepare Pate de Fruit. This is basically a fruit flavored gelled candy that will get rolled in sugar once cut. It was pretty easy to make, and just involved getting things to the right temperatures at the right times. The really interesting bit was talking about the science behind it. If you wan to use different fruits (we used apricot and passion fruit) then you need to be sure to balance the amount of sugar and pectin you add so that you end up with the proper amount. Every fruit has different content of these items, and having them at the right concentration is what makes things set up. Overall day two was a bit more involved than day one with more going on, but still incredibly fun. Even when the one tart shell went south I was having a good time, which is certainly a good sign.