field trip: baked

My name is Liz, and I have a cookbook problem. This "problem" began about a year ago and grew rapidly, eventually demanding its own bookshelf in my kitchen, where real estate is at a premium. While many cookbooks have a few standout recipes, occasionally a cookbook seems to be entirely composed of winning recipes. The cookbook from the folks behind Red Hook bakery Baked is one of the latter.

The brownies are solid gold fudgy deliciousness, the hazelnut cinnamon chip biscotti are just a notch below crack and Diet Coke on the addictiveness scale, and the chocolate flourless cake could satisfy even the most diehard chocoholic. I bought the cookbook this fall, shortly before I had the opportunity to hear founder/owners Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito speak at a PastryScoop conference about building their bakery. After hearing them speak, I was even more curious to check out the business (and the baked goods!) in person, but didn't get out to Red Hook until this week.

A classmate and I made the trek out to Brooklyn after school on a rainy afternoon. The 20 minute walk from the subway was a great excuse to choose a variety of treats when we got there, an arduous process given the number of delicious-looking options. We finally agreed on a slice of the "Coffee" Cake, a monster cookie with peanut butter and M&Ms, and an oatmeal cookie with nuts, cherries and white chocolate. I also got one of the hazelnut biscotti to go, curious to see how my interpretation measured up to the original. We settled into one of the hardwood booths to enjoy (and evaluate) our selections.

The "Coffee" Cake had layers of moist chocolate sponge sandwiched with a pale coffee buttercream and decorated with a chocolate glaze. While the chocolate sponge was very nice, the coffee buttercream just wasn't very coffee-flavored, and the cake overall lacked punch. The oatmeal cookie, on the other hand, was fantastic. Crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, it was everything an oatmeal cookie should be.

And the biscotti? I have to say, I prefer my less-traditional version - smaller, with more color outside and tender within - to the large, uniformly pale, thoroughly crisp version made by Baked. Although with hazelnuts, cinnamon, and chocolate, the Baked biscotti was still delicious! Overall, it was a great place to while away a rainy afternoon, and I can't wait to go back and try something new the next time. For anyone in the New York area, it's definitely worth the trip - and if you're in need of any cheap Scandinavian home furnishings or Swedish meatballs, NYC's closest IKEA is practically around the corner.

afternoon of desserts

thanks to those of you who made it out for this - I know the timing wasn't terribly convenient, occurring as it did during the middle of the afternoon, but hopefully the free (and delicious!) desserts were worth it. As some of you may know, the culinary students at my school work in the school's (highly rated, well-reviewed, bargain prix-fixe) restaurant during the last months of their program, gaining real-world experience on the line. For a variety of reasons, that format doesn't work with the pastry program. We have, instead, the "Afternoon of Desserts." Today approximately forty-five of our class' nearest and dearest descended upon the school in two shifts to enjoy the fruits of our dessert-plating labors and give us some experience putting desserts together to order. The menu for the occasion consisted of the frozen desserts we worked on earlier this week, fruit soups we learned how to make this morning, and a creme brulee and bread pudding chosen by students. My partner and I ended up manning the creme brulee station, a situation which greatly pleased my inner pyromaniac. Professional pastry chefs get to use some pretty serious blowtorches.

From what I've seen so far, about 98% of creating a great plated dessert happens before the customer even gets to the restaurant or sees a menu. It's all about planning and preparation. For us, that process began Tuesday with choosing our menu items. Upon drawing creme brulee, my partner and I decided to make a pistachio creme brulee with a chocolate ganache layer on the bottom, accompanied by chocolate cookies on the side. Yesterday we prepared the ganache, lined the creme brulee molds, made the pistachio custard, and baked the creme brulees. This morning we mixed and baked the cookies, selected plates, counted doilies and decided on a presentation.

Creme brulee is usually served in a simple manner, accompanied only by seasonal fruit or a cookie (or three), which made our job relatively easy. Half an hour before our "customers" arrived, we put together our station, assembly-line fashion, working left to right for maximum efficiency. Plates, doilies, a tray of cookies, demerara sugar and our trusty giant blowtorch awaited the first order, a sample plate for our chef. After he sampled it and pronounced it "very nice," we breathed a little easier. Just before service began, we had a short meeting to go over the process of expediting and calling out orders when they came in - one student would get the information from the waiter and pass it onto each station in a call and response fashion. "Ordering - one fruit soup, two panna cotta, zero mint dome, five creme brulee" and so on.

I've been externing in a restaurant, but the pastry team there doesn't do service, so this was my first experience plating desserts to order. I have to confess I had a few butterflies before we started - what if no one orders our dessert, what if I accidentally light myself or something else on fire, etc - but the first shift ironed those out. We posted a respectable five total orders, didn't ignite anything besides the sugar, and got our plates out in fine time.

The second shift, once we'd gotten the hang of it, was more fun. We served seven plates before we ran out of creme brulee, and got to read the comments from our diners. I'm willing to admit that some of the reviewers may have been a bit biased in our favor, but it was still fun to hear what they had to say. My personal favorite was a toss-up between the reviewer who said the description would "need Shakespeare to live up to the wonderful eating experience" and wrote "best creme brulee EVER" under "Additional Comments" and the one who just wrote "Amazing" in every category (at least that's what we think it said). Picture below, but I'm not sure it does the dessert justice - pistachio green doesn't photograph terribly well under institutional flourescent lights and a blanket of caramelized sugar.

It is a truth universally acknowledged

... that to be the best, you have to learn from the best. One of the highlights of my time at school has been the opportunity to interact with and observe some of the most accomplished and talented chefs working today. Yesterday afternoon I attended a demo by Jacques Torres, dean of our program and pastry legend. His resume is long and impressive, his pastries and chocolates are delicious, and his joy in baking is infectious. He laughed and joked with the audience throughout the two-hour demo, entertaining and educating with equal ease. The demo focused on yeasted dough products: croissants, pain au chocolat, and bomboloni, which are Italian cream-filled, sugar-encrusted doughnuts. Health food, basically.

Croissant dough is the starting point for both croissants and pain au chocolat, which are croissants rolled around batons of chocolate. The dough uses both organic and mechanical leavening to achieve its airy, delicate texture: organic leavening is provided by the fresh yeast added to the starter, while mechanical leavening is created by folding a sheet of butter into the dough, then "turning" it several times. This process of folding the dough upon itself creates alternate layers of dough and butter; when the croissant is placed in the oven, the butter melts away, creating steam, which lifts the layers of dough apart and leaves air pockets behind. Thus the butter gives a great croissant its tender inside and flaky crust and creates an interesting paradox - adding more fat (butter) to a croissant dough can actually make it taste "lighter"!

Chef Torres compared the elasticity of a good dough to chewing gum: the way that gum expands when you blow a bubble is the way dough needs to react when the CO2 produced by the yeast is released. A good croissant dough will be strong enough to stretch and inflate with this gas. This elasticity or "stretch factor" comes from gluten, developed when proteins in flour are hydrated and kneaded. Flour that is higher in protein will develop more gluten and be stronger - bakers usually use high protein flour for bread, and low protein flour for products like cakes that demand a delicate, not chewy, texture.

As he mixed and rolled the croissant dough, Chef Torres explained every step of his process, occasionally employing the time-honored TV trick of a "swap-out" at points where prolonged resting or overnight refrigeration would usually occur. One topic I found interesting was the distinct seasonal differences he noted in the process - in the winter more yeast is used and the dough is allowed to sit out briefly before being refrigerated, while in the summer warmer temperatures accelerate fermentation, so less yeast is added and the dough is refrigerated immediately after mixing. He also stressed the importance of fermentation for developing flavor, but pointed out that during the process, as sugar is transformed into gas the dough will get less sweet. So if you increase the fermentation of your dough, you must also increase the amount of sugar added in the initial mix.

A highlight of any demo is the part where they pass samples out to the audience, and this demo did not disappoint - the croissant and pain au chocolat were good enough to make me determined to try the recipe myself at the next possible opportunity. I meant to take a picture for you, but I ate it too quickly, so you'll have to settle for this shot of Chef Torres with his final product of the day, the bomboloni.

These bomboloni are basically pieces of brioche dough deep fried until golden and crispy on the outside and pale and tender on the inside, rolled in sugar, and filled with pastry cream, creme anglaise, or raspberry jam. Yum. If I didn't have a slight terror of deep frying, I'd be totally tempted to try these at home, too. The Food Network featured his recipe for these a few years back, so here's a link:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/jacques-torres/bomboloni-recipe/index.html.

plate after plate

From our third day of this plated desserts unit, I finally have something nice to show you! So far this unit has been all about "still-frozen" desserts. When a dessert is described as "still-frozen" the contrast being drawn is to ice-cream, frozen yogurt, or sorbet, which are frozen while being agitated, or churned. This results in small crystals and the incorporation of air, giving the final product that delicious creamy texture we all love. Some still-frozen desserts, like the Italian granita or French granite, have large ice crystals and a grainy texture - think snow cone. Others, like the French parfait (not the yogurt/McDonald's kind!) or the Italian semifreddo, are frozen mousses that have a smooth, creamy consistency thanks to the whipped cream that is folded into the flavored base before freezing.

Normally we would make the components for two or three desserts one day, and plate the desserts the next. However, owing to a freezer malfunction at the school, we didn't get to plate anything on Tuesday, and we plated no less than four delicious desserts yesterday. As you can see in this picture of our plate-littered workstation, that is a LOT of dessert! From the left, we have here a chocolate-hazelnut mendiant surrounded by a cute little chocolate fence, a white chocolate-citrus parfait with a strawberry salad, a white chocolate-hazelnut semifreddo with a cherry compote, and a mint chocolate dome with orange-mint salad. Choosing a favorite was hard, but the white chocolate-citrus parfait took the title by a nose for the way it harmonized the warmth of the white chocolate and the tang of the citrus. I often don't like white chocolate dishes, finding them either too bland or too sweet, but this was exceptional.

I also have to put in a good word here for the orange-mint salad, as my partner and I spent the majority of Monday afternoon supreming oranges for it. "Supremes," in a French cooking school, refers not to the amazingly talented and enduring Motown girl group led by Diana Ross, but to citrus segments that have been completely stripped of peel and pith. Creating these lovely naked slices of fruit is an exacting, laborious process. It took a little trial and error, some good advice from our chef-instructor, and a giant bowlful of oranges, but I went home Monday with newly acquired confidence in my ability to make beautiful supremes and hands that fairly reeked of oranges. On Tuesday we added some mint, cut into ribbons (or chiffonade, if you prefer the French), a little sugar, and a little Grand Marnier to make the salad. Yum!

Many things to be happy about

It's Friday, I finished the chocolate project without breaking my showpiece, and the sunshine outside makes it seem plausible that spring will eventually arrive even in the frozen Northeast. This project was a two-day practical exam and the culmination of our chocolate units in Levels 2 and 3. The theme - "My Favorite Day" - was open to interpretation, with some of the students in our class choosing a specific date or past event, and others choosing a recurring holiday or anniversary. Having been up in Williamstown for the women's crew reunion weekend at the beginning of February, happy college memories and Purple Valley nostalgia were percolating in my mind when we got the assignment last week. Thus inspired, I settled on Mountain Day for the theme of my showpiece. For those of you who have not been privileged to participate, Mountain Day is one of the most hallowed traditions of Williams College. Once a year, on one of the first three Fridays in October, when the air is crisp, the leaves are turning crimson and gold, and New England seems like the best place to live in the world, the College bells will ring early in the morning to announce Mountain Day. Classes are cancelled in favor of all-school outdoor frolicking, and everyone climbs, speed-hikes, or takes a bus up nearby Mt. Greylock. There, students drink cider, eat donuts, and enjoy the incredible Berkshire scenery and company of fellow Ephs. It's the sort of tradition college tour guides love to brag about, and in this case the reality lives up to the glossy admission brochure hype.

Having settled on a theme, my next challenge was translating the beautiful Berkshires into chocolate, while simultaneously, as our chef-instructor insisted in his awesome Austrian accent, telling a story. My final design featured Chapin Hall plastered with a "Gone Hiking" sign, mountains and trees painted with colored cocoa butter to imitate the brilliant fall foliage, and little hiking people made from piped chocolate. And of course a purple sign for Williams College. I was pretty happy with how it all turned out - let me know what you think!

a little something

We're in the middle of a two day chocolate project right now, so no good pictures from today. I thought I'd post a few of the cool things we've done recently instead:

One of my favorite plated desserts from the last level, a kiwi milk marmalade tart (much yummier than the name would imply:

One of our sugar projects, a nougatine basket with eerily realistic marzipan fruit:

Our final sugar project from Level 2, a pastillage cake stand with matching fondant-covered cake, decorated according to a theme that begins with the same letter as your first or last name - can you guess what mine was?

Sugar-paste flowers - beautiful and edible! I'm now available for wedding cakes, flower arrangements, etc...

Hope you enjoy, and happy almost-Friday!

hello, world!

For those of you who don't know, I'm several months into a Classic Pastry Arts program at a culinary school in New York.  So far it's been great, and I've learned an incredible amount.  We've already mastered flaky tart crusts, creamy buttercream, and tempering chocolate; still to come are restaurant-style plated desserts, planning our own menus, and the highly anticipated wedding cake project.  The fruits of our daily labors are becoming more and more photogenic, so I figured it was time to  set up a way to share them with the world and prove to my parents and doubting friends that I'm getting my money's worth from my fancy culinary school education.  Hope you enjoy!