I've finally decided to hunker down at the kitchen table to give an update(sorry it's been so long) which might prove harder then I thought. I'm going to have to dig pretty deep to remember what happened two weeks ago especially since these past few weeks have been jam packed with food and adventures that all seem to blend together. Here we go...
After spending a week doing chocolate work, we were all looking forward to getting back to pastry. To be more specific, I was definitely looking forward to pastry again. We started off week 18 in the kitchen doing cuisine for the second time with Chef Schaefer. Again, we made a menu based on the ingredients we were provided and some direction from Chef Schaefer. I'm always excited about cuisine class because it's rare and we get to eat what we make for lunch instead of cafeteria food. However, this time, I was a little skeptical when chef threw out some of his ideas for the menu. Has it ever crossed your mind to combine sweet potatoes or cauliflower with passion fruit? It clearly crossed chef Schaefer's mind; he proposed making a sweet potato/passion fruit soup and a cauliflower/passion fruit soup. All of you know that my emotions make themselves known through my facial expressions and the chef got the message that sweet potato or cauliflower + passion fruit = hmmm, I don't think so in my mind. Yes, I know I'm in the culinary field and therefore expected to try new things but I didn't see how in the world that combination was going to work. That's how I ended up making sweet potato/passion fruit soup on a Monday morning in Paris.
Besides the soup, I also made vegetable chips (sweet potato/beet/zucchini) and a bulgur/vegetable salad while my classmates tackled veal with ratatouille, scallops cooked in various ways, chicken breast mousse, homemade sausage, etc. When it came time to taste the infamous sweet potato/passion fruit and cauliflower/passion fruit soup, I took a spoonful of each with an open mind and quickly realized that my taste buds were closed to the idea of this "interesting" combination. I tried, I really did. At the end of the class, the chef said to me laughingly, "Keep the passion, but without the fruit!" Amen to that.
Zucchini chips
Sweet potato/passion fruit and cauliflower/passion fruit soup
Scallop seviche
Homemade pork/vegetable sausage
Our cuisine buffet
We spent the rest of the week making 4 different entremets (layered cream/sponge cakes). Entremets are the beautifully decorated cakes you see in pastry shop windows and now I know the secret to making them! Between starting the different layers of our entremets on Tuesday and finishing them on Thursday, we had restaurant service. This service was a little more hectic than the others because certain elements of the plated desserts were still being made when service had already began. Luckily, I was on pre-desserts and we made a lemon spoom - unstabilized sorbet mixed with meringue. Whoever decided to combine these two elements is a genius - we couldn't stop eating the leftovers! We received more rave reviews after service so all in all, it was a pretty good night.
Spoom
Macaron ananas estragon - Hazelnut/szechuan pepper macaron filled with anis pastry cream and tarragon spiked pineapples
Mogador - Raspberry soaked chocolate genoise with chocolate whipped cream and fresh raspberries topped with raspberry jam and coated with cake crumbs
Equateur (pronounced egg-water by our chef ;)) - coffee daquoise layered with crème brulée and coffee flavoured St. Honore cream with a caramelized sugar crust
Fraimboisie - A shell of pistachio joconde/dacquoise filled with vanilla St. Honore cream and raspberries topped with pistachio buttercream and raspberry swirled glaze
We were off on Friday (thank goodness!) so I went out to a delicious lunch with a few classmates and bummed around Montmartre with the 5 million tourists who had the same idea. Those 5 million tourists and I spent the rest of the weekend walking around Paris and enjoying the blue skies and spring sun ;)
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