The Culinary Tales Week 14: It’s A Man’s World

June 19, 2014

For most of us, the kitchen was Mom’s domain. Ironically enough, the professional culinary world is a testorone-driven universe, probably owing to a misogynistic, sexist French tradition.

 

Chef Satan liked my potty mouth because, as he justified it, the industry is rife with mysoginistic, sexist A*holes and he wanted the girls to fight back. Especially petite, demure, little girls like me. (cue laugh track)

 

Gone are the days when chefs can really abuse the lower ranks (we still got a kick when remembering Chef Bad Cop’s story of how he once threw a pot at a waitress) but they can still be temperamental jerks (I’ve seen some pretty shitty behavior and in places that shall not be named, I’ve seen sous chefs be really mean to their line cooks.)

 

So while he made it clear the yelling was for our own good, Chef Satan found a way to get on your case if you gave him reason to. That means the first person he saw doing something off was his target for that day. I was his target one day during Week 14, and it seemed everything I did just wouldn’t go right.

 

We had a savory refresher on Wednesday, when we had an egg cookery practical and had to make poached eggs. While I cooked my eggs just right, I forgot to (a) serve them on a warm plate, and (b) reheat them after having them sit in an ice bath. It didn’t matter that Chef Satan wasn’t the one who was grading me, he still gave me a “stern” lecture. (And to be fair, I wasn’t the only one.)

 

The theme of the week was laminated dough, which produces layered goodies like croissants, danishes and puff pastry (for Napoleons and vol-au-vents). Laminated dough is a labor-intensive process (then again, I think all of baking is labor-intensive, so labor-intensive that my biceps have bulked up from all the kneading.  Seriously!) Lamination involves layering dough (called a detrempe) and butter (called a beurrage), then folding them and “turning” them… and depending on the effect you want, can take however many turns. For the croissants and danishes, we turned them three times each.

 

 

 

 

To get this kind of dough (and it really isn’t as hard as it sounds), first you get the beurrage together – throw into a mixer and mix with whatever ingredients the recipe calls for and mix until it’s soft. Then you form it into a square block and refrigerate while you work on the dough.

 

This time, instead of kneading by hand, we used the KitchenAid mixers. So go figure, I got stuck with the broken one. (I always get stuck with the broken one.) And was there a spare left on the shelf? NOOOOOO. Of course, the slowest student would end up with the mixer that didn’t work. Murphy’s Law.

 

Once the dough is mixed, you roll it out to the size of a sheet pan. Depending on the instructions, the way you put the butter varies. For one of the recipes, we had to smear the butter on top of the dough before folding in the dough three-fold. For the other, we took the butter block and wrapped the dough around it like a parcel. After the dough-butter mix is folded, you roll it out to the size of a sheet pan and let it rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. You do this step three times before the dough is ready for shaping.

 

Now imagine having to do this for TWO doughs, and getting this done in four hours. WITH A BROKEN MIXER.

 

 

Good thing they scheduled the croissant/danish production to go over three days – because, while we started on Wednesday night, I didn’t get to bake them until Friday. Of course, half the class baked theirs on Thursday night, but at least I wasn’t the only one lagging. And I had the excuse of having to share a mixer.

 

My danishes turned out perfectly – from shaping (we had to do about eight different shapes at least once) to the baking part. Considering that I was running late (my dough would not proof to save my life and took forever!) and had all of ten minutes to cut up over a dozen different danishes, this was a huge victory. But since we know it’s a rule that I can’t ever have a perfect night, the croissants were a tad burned. Lots of people ended up burning the bottom of theirs; Lightning Fury even cut her finger something awful as she tried to scrape the burned bits off.

 

It was a nice way to end the week though, I felt as though I was finally “getting” this baking stuff. Aside from baking the dough on Friday, we also had to start working on our dough for puff pastry, and it was on Friday that I finally learned how to roll the dough into a perfect-looking rectangle. Up until then, every time I rolled out the dough, I got squiggly, uneven edges and couldn’t quite figure out how to straighten it.

 

One of my classmates actually came up to our bench (that’s what we called the tables we work on) and remarked, “So this is what perfection looks like.” If he only knew… Every night was a damn struggle. So much so that Class Buddy had taken to reprimand me when I got stressed out and pissy every time something didn’t go well (which was pretty much every half hour.)

 

 

I spent most of the first two weeks of Baking being utterly frustrated – from having non-working equipment to kneading forever to get my dough to the right consistency to not getting my dough proofed enough.

 

But funny thing about learning new things: you can be confounded as all hell, then as if by magic, it suddenly clicks and then you get it. The same thing happened when I took up knitting and several people tried to teach me how to undo the yarn when fixing a dropped stitch, but I could never figure it out. I was stuck in an airport terminal for three hours with absolutely no idea how to fix a mistake when a friendly traveler offered help. Maybe it was the way she talked through the solution, but it was as if a light bulb turned on and everything was clear and made sense.

 

Finally. Baking started to make sense.

 

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