The Culinary Tales Week 18: Story of My Life

July 3, 2014

 

I wish I can say finals week of Baking 1 went off as smoothly as my menu had promised. I didn’t expect it to, but I had certainly hoped.

I practiced piping letters and roses like I was itching for carpal tunnel. I even did a dry run on the bearnaise sauce (which, for refreshers’ sake, is basically hollandaise sauce with a tarragon-vinegar infusion added.) I also practiced poached eggs – even though I thought I did this well on the egg practical at mid-terms. I even made muffins – finally! (After unsuccessfully trying to find some extra time during class to squeeze it in. I didn’t really have to do it, since I didn’t pull it for the finals, but I still wanted to show chef that I made a good honest attempt on every product we had to make, especially since I never made it to skills class during the term.)

 

I spent so much time practicing the practicals that I left myself hardly any time to actually study for the written. In the end, I managed a respectable A- on it, which surprised me a little considering I thought I did much more poorly on it.

 

(At this point, after doing some calculations, I had given up on an A for class. Mathematically impossible.)

 

Of course, we still had knife cuts and then there was the piping practical. For piping, we had to pipe two different kinds of borders and make roses with decorator’s icing (a.k.a. American Grease Cream) and pipe “Happy Birthday + our name” and “Congratulations + our name”. I thought my final products were 1000 times better than my in-class work the week before (which was so pathetic BOTH chefs simply shook their heads. Chef Satan had even said “You could do better” in the same tone my mother used instead of yelling the time my first semester grades came in my freshman year of college – the first time a grade of mine dipped below a B.)

 

We also had a cornet practical – which you’d think is silly, but there are reasons why we do these things. Cornets are basically paper “cones” – you make them out of parchment paper and it’s what people in the business use to pipe because the plastic piping bags you can get at Michael’s or any baking supply store are just too expensive. Word on the street was that the chefs took a pitcher of water and poured it into the cones to check on the tautness.

 

 

I actually “got” cornets. I’m awesome at origami – just ask my friend Dianne, for whom I helped fold hundreds of paper cranes for her wedding. And for once, I was actually jamming on timing. UNTIL the cornets.

We had to make two each of smalls, mediums, and larges. The small and medium sizes were easy enough but I ran into a problem with the large size. If I had known how problematic it would have been, I would have practiced this too. I struggled so much with it that whatever time advantage I earned dissipated and at that point, put me behind. In the end, I said F*** it, and turned in two large cornets with holes so big you could drop marbles through.

 

I couldn’t really be bothered. The tough part of the night was over – written test, knife cuts, and egg and sauce practical. I knew I rocked the poached eggs, though my practice ones at home were much better shaped. The chefs weren’t really supposed to give us feedback, and Chef almost said the bearnaise was “gorgeous” (one of her favorite words) then held back. I later learned that I was one of the few people to strain my sauce. I’m just happy it held.

 

You might hear chefs talking about “holding” and “breaking” sauces. Most sauces are emulsions – combining immiscible substances and allowing them to “hold” once combined. Salad dressing is what’s known as a temporary emulsion and when left for a while, you’ll see that the components separate. You know that water and oil don’t mix, but cooking often calls for mixing the two (whether it’s oil or fat or both). What you should have is a homogenous-looking product, and sometimes, a little extra heat or water will “break” it. It’s an unfortunate thing to happen during finals because a broken sauce can turn an A grade into a B.

 

My hollandaise broke during Intro 1 finals; I think I got a 60 on it. Then I broke a couple of beurre blancs during Intro 2 final. But I scored 100 on it this time, which proves that practice makes perfect.

 

Day Two of finals week was set aside for prep time, and we were to turn in two products each the following days. For the first time, I had a finals week where I was less worried about the work than I was about leaving the class. And this was baking!

 

Just as some of us didn’t want to leave, it turned out that Chef Satan felt the same way. Can’t tell you how good it felt to be part of a group that the resident Nazi said was one of his favorites. He even got teary eyed on the last day. (I got teary eyed when he told me I had bigger balls than he did.)

 

And to help with the pressure-lessening, we were allowed up to five index cards and we could put whatever we wanted on these. Baking is an exact science, really, and they couldn’t possibly expect us to have all the proportions memorized.

 

I turned in an orange pound cake and sourdough batards one day, and then croissants and a raspberry chocolate ganache tart another.  I prepped well enough to take some pressure off and not have need to panic, so of course, my recipe card for the sourdough and pound cake went missing when it came time to make them. I’m not pointing any fingers, but it’s one of those things that I think Creepy Guy would do just to fuck with me.

 

I managed to bum the ingredients off Handsome Rob (one of my classmates who also happened to be an advertising brunout.) HR drew the same menu as I did, though he didn’t have much detail on his recipe card: just the ingredients quickly scribbled and hardly any directions.

 

I was ok flying blind on the pound cake, but I needed help on the sourdough and the final product showed. Turned out I undercooked the batards, which look almost like a baguette except that they are shaped slightly more almond-y to resemble flat footballs. I got my lowest grade on this.

 

The pound cake turned out so divine that I got 100s across the board on that one – flavor, presentation and technique.

 

One thing that Chef Satan kept insisting that had to be done the night before it was due was the ganache tart. It looks beautiful and sounds glamorous, but this tart is just about the easiest dessert to make. Sure, the tart shell takes a little bit of an effort – we did have to mix it from scratch. But once it’s baked, the filling is a piece of cake: heat some cream, dump in a bowl of chocolate chips, then stir. Pour the sucker into the tart shell and leave some chocolate to pipe rosettes. That’s it!

However, you have to leave some time for the chocolate to set, and Chef Satan insisted that there was no way the chocolate would set in one night; it had to be done the night before.

So I got mine done the night before it was due. And then cleanup happened. As I was trying to put the sucker away for the night, I dropped plastic wrap on the top, which messed up the surface. Chef told me I could still save it the next day – just melt some more chocolate and pour on the top to make a smooth surface.

 

Day 4 came and the first thing I did was to salvage the tart. Something must have been off because the chocolate did not spread smoothly. Then I had the brilliant idea of covering the whole surface with plastic wrap, let it cool, then peel it off. Sure, I had an even layer, but the plastic also took away the ganache’s beautiful, shiny gloss.

 

At that point I made a decision to make another tart (thank goodness I had extra dough.) I took a chance and hoped it would set in time – and if that didn’t work out, I still had the shitty one to turn in. So I got the second tart done and threw it in the blast chiller to speed up the setting.

 

To make matters worse, I was having problems with my croissants. First, I didn’t roll the dough big enough to make more than the required six pieces. I had hoped to make at least 8 or 9; that way if I had burnt ones, I had some breathing room. But no. The dough was so stubborn that day I couldn’t roll it out to give me more than what I needed. I had to cross my fingers that all would turn out (I had to turn in six pieces.)

 

On top of that, it took all night to proof. And it wasn’t until about an hour left in production that I realized the settings on the proofer weren’t right. I cranked up the temp and humidity settings and fortunately got the croissants proofed enough. I had just enough time to bake them and they plumped up nicely. Except that when chef tasted them, they were much too salty than they should have been. Either I copied the recipe wrong or I dumped an extraordinarily large amount of salt.

 

The ganache, it turned out, did set. Ha, Chef Satan, it can be done!  Then I realized to my horror that I forgot the raspberry layer. There was a little battle of the conscience going on on my shoulders at that point: the devil told me not to say anything and the angel said to fess up.

 

I fessed up.

 

Chef said it didn’t matter… it was one of the best ganaches she had had in a final. I got a solid 100 on it. And even a clear conscience to show for it.

 

I ended up with an A- in the class, which was pretty much what I expected.

 

During my exit interview, Chef Giggles advised me not to overthink going into Baking 2 because the ability is there. When I was on, I was “phenomenal” (her words.) When I was off, I was just dreadful.
Story of my life, Chef, story of my life.

 

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