The Culinary Tales Week 21: Running on Empty

July 17, 2014

 

 

It had been a monstrous June. I was closing in on the halfway point of school and had survived fairly, and then all parts of my life jockeyed for position… suddenly everything was important, everything had to be done, and I couldn’t put something on hold, if for just a few days.

 

 

Week 21 was off to an interesting start when, after an interminable enough Monday, I had to go back to the office after school. I pulled an overnighter and worked until morning and well-rested colleagues were nice enough not to mention noticing I was wearing the previous day’s clothing. I tried to leave early and get a little shuteye before school started, but all I had was enough time to shower and charge back up to Pasadena.

 

 

At least I changed into fresh underwear.

 

 

Thankfully, it wasn’t a “push” week; we only had to make flan, creme brulee, pot du creme, crepes suzette, bananas foster, sherbet and sorbet, present the semi-freddo and ice cream that we made from the week before, AND make a mystery box dessert.

 

 

The hardest thing about presenting the frozen souffle (semi-freddo) was making a chocolate sauce to go with it. The only thing going for that ghastly pink concoction was that it wasn’t a lot of work: just peel of the acetate strip that secured it while the cream set, scoop out a tiny part of the center with a melon baller, and squirt some chocolate sauce inside. (Cassis and chocolate apparently make a classic combination.) Voila, dessert!

 

 

And, as I predicted, was not a fan.

 

 

Custards, on the other hand, are some of my favorite sweets on earth. Flan, pot du creme and creme brulee are simple mixtures of egg and milk or cream (pot du creme has the added bonus of chocolate) and baked in a water bath. We just needed to make sure not to splash water on the custard as we poured it into the water container or when checking on done-ness otherwise the custard wouldn’t set.

 

 

I managed to get through two of the custard tasks, when, as I was pulling the pot du creme out, disaster struck and the oven rack tipped over, water spilling into my ramekins. We made four but needed to present only one, and Chef said to wait and see what happened, because I could have one that can still be useable. As it turned out, I had exactly one presentable pot.

 

 

Although it pissed me off a little that Chef insisted we didn’t have to be perfect (because it was our first time making a lot of these desserts) but she didn’t relax her standards when it came to grading. (Chef Satan said this particular chef had extremely high expectations.) So we really did have to be perfect.

 

 

Then we learned how to make crepes suzette and bananas foster – easy breezy flambé desserts (we loved anything flambé because we got to set the pan on fire and yell “Flambé!” like it was a big old party.) Our chefs demoed the Baked Alaska, and if we had time to do it, we were welcome to. (Of course, I didn’t.)

 

 

Up next were sorbets (or sherbets) and again we were allowed to work in pairs. Advertising Buddy and I teamed up again and decided on a white peach/mango sorbet.

 

A sorbet, by the way, is fruit juice and ice mixed together and then ran through the ice cream machine. And for the record, a sherbet (not sherbeRt) is a sorbet with dairy added. AB and I worked well together because we were both pretty easygoing (with the exception of my tendency to freak out under pressure) and more importantly, fairly passive.

“I was thinking mango.”

“Yeah! Me too!”

“What do you think of adding peach?”

“Sounds good!”

“Try this.”

“Add more mango.”

“OK. Now try it.”

“Too sweet, maybe we should add another squeeze of lime?”

“OK.”

“Mmm, yeah. That’s money.”

 

 

Meanwhile on the other side of the worktable, Sweet Momma and Class Buddy were bickering like an old married couple.

“But we should really try (insert strange combination of ingredients) in it.”

“No, that’s going to taste disgusting.”

“No, it will taste fine!”

“It tastes good.”

“It tastes like shit.”

 

 

To present our frozen goodies (sorbet and ice cream from the week before), we had to create fancy “vessels” and serve up some culinary artistry.

For starters, we made tuile – which translates to “tile” and is a thin wafer cookie shaped using stencils. It’s in the oven for about a minute and as soon as it’s taken out, molded in however way before hardening. I actually shaped out a six-petal flower and went as far as putting a chocolate border around it – but I ran out of time when turning it in so I didn’t have time to take a picture. I was so proud of that thing.

The tuile vessel held a scoop of my chocolate ice cream and accompanied by strawberry coulis and  caramel sauce. There were, of course, issues with the caramel sauce, including (1) not having enough cream – somebody shook the table too much that about 1/4 of my cup runneth over, (2) and (3) over-cooling and overcooking the sugar to the point where the sauce was too hard to get out of the squeeze bottle. Plus I overreduced the coulis. Oy.

 

 

And sauce-making was supposed to be one of my strengths.

 

 

The sorbet went much more smoothly. For this, we used nut lace (sometimes referred to as a “florentine”) as a vessel and I thought I did a good job of shaping one to look like an oyster shell (the sorbet was the “pearl.”) We were supposed to get extra points if we presented the sorbet (and/or ice cream) as quenelles instead of just scooping them. Quenelles are a fancy way of presenting soft, malleable foods; they look like little footballs and are formed using two spoons. Seasoned pros can do it one-spooned, but I was neither a pro nor seasoned. (It’ll take me a while to master the one-spoon trick, but I made a decent one the amateur way. I was able to do this with the sorbet but ran out of time to bother with the ice cream. Quelle surprise.)

 

 

One thing we needed to master was fine-dining desert plating, which meant the piece had to have the following components: the main item, a crunch factor (this could be the vessel it was on, caramel wedges, or nuts), and one or two sauces. Chocolate and cream were optional. But it also had to be a well-balanced plate, so you needed to take into account texture, color and design. And most of all, portion size was key. In a fine dining setting, a dessert portion should be small – enough bites to satisfy a normal person after a multi-course meal yet small enough for bulimic model to expectorate into a napkin.

 

 

This was an especially important lesson to learn as we had the first of three “mystery box” challenges. Mystery box was where we were given a cake type, a fruit, a cream and a nut – and improvised a dessert out of those components. It was loads of fun, because it was freestyle but under pressure.

 

 

We had a choice of flourless chocolate cake or financier cake (a type of white sponge cake), then we also had to make a fruit semi-freddo, a sabayon sauce and a second sauce. I wanted to make chocolate cake but when I couldn’t use the particular mold I had in mind, switched to the financier cake at the last moment. I used a pyramid mold for it and lined the tips with almonds and pistachios.

 

 

I went with a strawberry semi-freddo despite my anti-pink food leanings and decided on strawberry for my second sauce.

 

 

We were given a certain amount of time to complete the test. And wouldn’t you know it? I got a broken mixer. Again.

 

 

About the only good thing about the night was that all I had to do at that point was whip some cream, easily accomplished by hand.

 

What wasn’t easy was the sabayon, equal parts egg yolks, sugar and white wine whisked over a bain marie. (Sabayon is known as zabaglione in Italian, at which point Marsala wine is substituted for white.) It was frickin’ HOLLANDAISE all over again! Whisk, whisk, whisk, take off the heat, whisk, whisk, agitate, agitate, put back on the heat. Yikes.

 

 

I don’t think I ever had so many things going on at once: reducing the strawberry sauce, making the sabayon, making a chocolate garnish (which meant: melting the chocolate and then smearing over a transfer sheet, AND having to slice up patterns on the sheet and then having to throw it into the freezer because the chocolate wasn’t setting up fast enough) and THEN plating up the dish.

 

 

To top it all, my semi-freddo went AWOL. Chef went around the kitchen and found someone else had been using my product. The culprit said he thought it was his; forget that my name was written in thick black Sharpie on a 2-1/2″ x 5″ strip of masking tape.

After salvaging enough semi-freddo to present, I went with the deconstructed approach. I took the pyramid-shaped pistacchio-topped cake and positioned it in the center, with a quenelle of semi-freddo on one side, and squigglies of sabayon and strawberry sauce on the right end. I stuck a long piece of chocolate garnish for height, which snapped in half during the presentation.

It wasn’t the best-looking plate on the table but it was the most modern-looking, and no one else attempted the deconstructed look. It wasn’t my best work either – not enough sauce, plate was too big, but the cake tasted great and was the perfect portion size. I didn’t have time to top the cake with my glazed strawberries, nor have time to take a picture. It didn’t deserve to be remembered, honestly, but the plate was a symbol of something bigger.

Considering the obstacle course that was the entire week, I thought out of the box and crossed the finish line. I was worn and tattered, gasping for air, and even injured a little, but I crossed. And, boy, were my arms tired.

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