Jessica's Dinner Party

by jessica yoon

europe

Lesson 6, 7, 8, & 9

I’m behind on my lesson updates!  There’s been a bit of internet drama during the past two weeks, but the important thing is that I have a connection now and will (hopefully) continue to have one.  Luckily, classes have been pretty slow averaging one to two demos/practicals per week.  After this mini-massive update, everyone will be almost up to speed.

These past four lessons are actually quite intertwined and related to each other.  We’ve been combining different techniques to create a range of desserts and pastries. In Lesson 6 we learned how to make pâte à choux or choux pastry, an important base for many French pastries such as chouquettes, éclairs, choux chantilly, as well as the St. Honoré and Paris-Brest in Lesson 8. The dacquoise, a meringue based almond sponge cake, from Lesson 7 is also featured in the tarte meringuée aux poires caramelisées in Lesson 9, while the praline buttercream used to frost the daquoise is similar to the filling of the Paris-Brest.  Furthermore, the pear tart from Lesson 9 is essentially the same as the tarte aux pommes but with pears, a partially almond pâte sucrée (also used as the base of the St. Honoré but without almond meal), and a meringue top.  Confused yet? To summarize: pâte sucrée, pâte à choux, and meringue have been the main areas of focus and are important to master.  During the various practicals, we made chouquettes, chocolate eclairs, a dacquoise, St. Honoré, and a meringue topped pear tart.

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Lesson 5: Feuilletage

Feuilletage or puff pastry is quite possibly one of the least tackled techniques of the home baker.  It is tedious, laborious, time sensitive, and a bit messy.  I have only made it once at home and am pretty sure that tally will remain steady for a long time.  Not because the recipe is difficult to make, but because I just don’t have the space and equipment.  I have a small toaster oven, which could fit probably two palmiers max, in an apartment without air conditioning.  The dough needs to be worked fast and kept as cool as possible so as not to melt the butter- impossible during the summer.  There’s also a question of who will eat a dozen apple turnovers containing a total of you-don’t-even-want-to-know amount of butter.  Two non-culinary friends plus me divided by x amount of butter equals way too much butter per person.

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Lesson 3 & 4: Cake et OFII

Week two began with a lesson on simple cakes.  We learned different methods of incorporating butter to make three different types: madeleines, cake aux fruits, and week-end.  To the delight and dismay of everyone, during the practical we made madeleines (delight) and fruit cake (dismay).  Most students (the sane ones) would have much preferred taking home two loaves of the more tedious lemon glazed week-end, but unfortunately we ended up with 250 grams worth of disgusting candied bits of jellied fruit embedded in rum drenched cake.  One of my cakes found a good home with my friend’s boyfriend who likes cake aux fruits (really?), and the other “somehow” found its way to the trash (surprise!).  I did eat some of it, carefully picking out the neon nibs of toxic waste, but it turned out to be too much work for too little pleasure.  Fruit cake is actually more work and complicated to make than it seems.  It requires creamed butter, alternating additions of eggs and flour, and enough beating to make elastic.  I under mixed, which is why my cake didn’t rise and flattened at the top.  Over beating is probably worse, as it causes the cake to be tough, but it’s also not great to under mix as it doesn’t develop the gluten enough.  During the demo the chef flamboyantly decorated five different fruit cakes with an assortment of dried fruit and spices, but ours were more humble with just a sprinkling of powdered sugar.

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Lesson 1 & 2: Sablés et Pate Brisée

I feel like I’ve been in school for a month, despite the fact that it’s only been a mere seven days. That’s always the case though, the beginning feels long and suddenly two seconds later it’s the end. My friend once sent me a birthday card that said the first twenty years of life are the longest, which made me incredibly sad because I had just turned nineteen and thus, only had one more year until everything would start moving ten speed. However, as much as I wish it wasn’t, that statement is so very true. I’ve already been here for over a month, school has started, and I’ve started to worry about final exams. I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but the thought of having to memorize recipes and execute them under time and pressure makes me nervous. Actually, just being in the kitchen with a short tempered chef makes me nervous (and stressed), so maybe I should think about getting over that before thinking about exams.

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Orientation

Yesterday marked the official start of Le Cordon Bleu.  All new students starting Basic Cuisine and Basic Patisserie gathered for a day long orientation that included a meet with chefs, administrative staff, and fellow classmates.  It was interesting to see the cultural distribution of the student body.  As each person made a brief introduction of themselves, I was semi-surprised to hear a lot of “Je suis Chinois/Japonais/Américain.”  The three were the most dominantly represented countries, however, in total, I believe there were 36? different nationalities in the room.  I expected there to be a lot more Koreans, as I had heard LCB is a popular choice for aspiring chefs, but there were only two or three students from South Korea, whom I have yet to meet.  Oh…the Canadian count was also quite similar, and I have yet to meet them as well.

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