What a long week! We were only in class from Monday-Thursday but we spent 48 hours at 28, rue de l'Abbé Grégoire cooking, tasting wine, burning our fingers, rejoicing over our last drawing class and making lots of yummy bread. The reason our schedule was so full this week is because we had so many "extra" classes. Even though we're studying pastry, we also have cuisine, wine, drawing, and bakery classes all of which we had this week on top of having Friday off - it was an interesting week to say the least.
We started off the week in cuisine with a new chef, Alain Montassier, our school's charcuterie chef. As the charcuterie chef, he knows everything there is to know about pork (a vegetarian's best friend!), catering, and savory pastries. Three different items were on the menu: Quiche (vegetable and quiche Lorraine with pork belly chef cured himself), tatin de chèvre(layers of smoked ham, potatoes and goat's cheese topped with a puff pastry crust) and gnocchi parisienne (tart shells filled with a creamy cheese sauce and cubes of poached choux dough). I chose to make vegetable quiche (what a surprise) and it was delicious, especially since it had more vegetables than egg filling. The tatin de chèvre was every one's favorite, even mine - you can't go wrong with potatoes, ham/bacon, goat's cheese and puff pastry. My classmates couldn't get over the fact that I ate a tatin even though it had smoked ham that was cut like bacon. What can I say...I have a thing for bacon. The gnocchi was not my thing mainly because it was really rich and chef added a healthy dose of rum to my recipe - I've never seen a culture put rum in so many things!
Veggie quiche
Tatin de chèvre
We spent the rest of the week burning ourselves and cursing in pain also known as making croquembouche. Croquembouche is a traditional wedding "cake" in France that has four main elements: nougatine for the base/decorations, royal icing to decorate the nougatine, chox pastry, and caramel. Two of these elements, nougatine and caramel proved to be our worst enemy. If you had walked into the pastry lab when we were making the nougatine or putting the croquembouche together with ridiculously hot caramel (300-350 degrees Fahrenheit) you would have seen the burn dance - jumping up and down and saying/screaming choice words while you waited for the caramel to cool down enough so you could remove it without removing your skin too. Sounds like fun doesn't it? My croquembouche came out a little off kilter but not too shabby for my first time.
Croquembouche
We ended the week in the bakery sauna making pretty much any bread we wanted to - our chef gives us free range and we run with it. My partner and I made pain viennoise which is kind of like brioche but softer, pain de mie (sandwich bread) and pretzels! Chef showed us how to twist the pretzels and we were off. At the end of class, I was super excited to go home so I could relax and take a shower after the sauna like conditions in the bakery but the powers that be had another plan in mind. When I went down to the locker room to open my locker, I looked in my bag and realized that my keys decided to escape and go on an adventure - they were nowhere to be found. I dumped my bag and searched everywhere but could not find my keys. To make a long story short, I decided to check with security for the 2nd time (the 1st time I clearly asked the wrong person) to see if anyone had turned in keys and...they had my keys! Note to self - make sure keys are secured before leaving the locker room.
Wonsang mastering pretzel twisting
Pretzels
I had a really good three day weekend complete with a lovely dinner and a delicious Ladurée breakfast with some fellow classmates, dancing the night away with Laura in the very classy Pigalle area and taking a 3 hour African dance workshop = sweat fest.
I'm compiling a list of food places I've been to in the past few weeks which is why I haven't gone into detail about places I've been to recently. We have a calm week ahead so hopefully I can make some progress on it.
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