This entry is still a draft, because it's 2am and time to go to sleep. I might revise it later, and fix typographical errors or instances of the same word in ten sentences in a row. But I wanted to put it out there, so those of you that I don't ever have time to talk to anymore know what this cooking school is like when there's work to do. The times I give below are all approximate, and there's even more going on than I bother to describe, so don't get too analytical and figure out that somewhere as I describe it there were fifteen minutes in which all I did was peel one potato or something.
Tonight was our "mock midterm," where we go through the process that we will experience for our exam coming up in three weeks. A lot of people that I've described this to have said, "That sounds like fun." And I guess it would be, if you were any good at it. At least two people I know of in our class had fun tonight, because they work really fast, which is, as you will soon see, the key. Most of the rest of us got tortured, as usual.
The way our exam works is that you randomly draw a number from a hat, and your number corresponds to two dishes (either a soup or warm vegetable salad along with a main course meat, or a fish dish along with a dessert) and assigned serving times for your dishes. I drew the third serving time, which meant that I had an extra 14 minutes to work with, and for where I am at the moment as far as speed and skill (mainly speed), it was a good thing. Had it been the real exam and I'd drawn the first time, I'd probably have ample free time for myself in the next few weeks because I don't think I'd still be in the school.
The two dishes that I made were a simple rustic vegetable soup (probably the easiest dish in the whole Level 3 program) and a whole roasted chicken with very brown (caramelized) garnishes. We began cooking at 6pm, and my serving times were 8:59pm for the soup and 9:48pm for the chicken. You're probably already thinking, "You had 3 hours just to make a vegetable soup! How can that be hard?" I wonder the same thing every night as I drag my sore and tired self to the train to go home. The truth of the matter is just that I work too slowly, and let simple things bring me to a halt. Some of my difficulty is that there is a contingent within our class that behaves like little kids, turning their back on every mess they make, so tonight as an example there was one sink that I unclogged 3 times in the first 90 minutes of the exam. But that's more of an annoyance and a distraction than a drain on time. Mostly I struggle with getting things (ingredients, containers, pots and pans) quickly and efficiently enough.
For example, one of the tasks for making the soup is that you need to cook some green beans in boiling salted water, then cool them in an ice batch when they are done, and finally drain them and hold them until a few minutes before you serve the soup. That takes a pot for the cooking, a bowl for the ice bath, and a small hotel pan or sizzle platter to keep them on after they've been cooled off. I'm not very good at getting all of those things in one trip, so I end up wasting a lot of time moving around the kitchen. And by the way, in addition to wasting my time, that's also bad citizenship on my part, because the more people you have moving around, the harder it is for everyone to do their work. So why do I end up doing it this way? As the three year old who just hit his sister says when asked why he did it: "I don't know." A lot of it is simply not knowing the recipes or the process well enough, so instead of being in control of it, I'm just reacting to it. In the example of the beans that need the pot, bowl, and platter, I'm not setting out at the start of that process to cook green beans from beginning to end, because you can't devote all of your attention to that one task. So there's no moment where I think to myself, "Self, let's cook some green beans. OK, we need something to cook them in and then someplace to put them later." Instead, the mental process is more like this: "OK, I've got my base vegetables sweating to make stock for the soup, and now I should truss up my chicken. But wait, what could I have going while I'm working on the chicken? I know, I'll put some water on so it'll be ready to cook something when I'm done prepping the chicken." So off I go and get a pan and some water and salt, and put that on the flattop (because the stock is on the only burner I have) and forget about it (because it's going to take about 20 minutes to boil on that dumbass flattop) and start on my chicken.
It is certainly possible to do all of this in a lot less time than I spend. One guy in our class is usually by far the fastest cook in the room, and often likes to do extra stuff. Early tonight, when I crossed paths with him in the kitchen at one point, I said to him, teasing, "So what are you going to make us for family meal in the middle of your exam tonight?" About a half hour later, when I bumped into him again as I was on my way to get something, he said, "I left something on your board for you." It turned out that in his spare time during the exam he had made a separate dish for me to eat that is in our Level 3 book but was not part of the exam tonight: a macedoine (small 5mm dice) of cooked vegetables, plated in a ring mold, with a poached egg on top of them and a warm egg yolk emulsion sauce over the top, with a decorating garnish of a few strips of peeled and julienned plum tomato placed on top of the whole thing. He was making the same dishes for the exam that I was making, with earlier serving times, and while I struggled to come within 5 minutes of my assigned time, he cranked out an extra dish because I teased him and because he could. I never had time to eat it.
Here is roughly the process I went through this evening:
For the first 10-15 minutes, I was simply rounding things up: carrots, turnips, celery, leeks, onion, potatoes, cabbage, bacon, mushrooms, pearl onions, fresh green beans, frozen peas, veal stock, white wine, oil, butter, salt. All of this needs to be put in bowls or other containers, washed where necessary, and carried back to the station. The vegetables then need to be peeled, and the potatoes once peeled need to be kept on your station in water.
Next, after peeling them, I squared off my carrots (so that I could later cut them into "paysanne," or confetti-like squares about 6-7mm on a side, and 2mm thick) and then roughly cut up those trimmings, along with the leek greens and a bay leaf and other trimmings as I made them, and put them into a small pan with a bit of fat and put them over low heat to "sweat" for ten minutes or so (that is, to soften them and bring out their flavor without browning them at all, because this should be a light and bright-colored soup). At this point, it was already about 6:45.
Then, because I hadn't sorted myself out enough yet to know what it was important to do, and having at least learned in the past few weeks not to just stand there and think about it, I peeled potatoes and started cutting a couple of them into "cocotte," or little football-like shapes, because I would need 12 of those later to go with the chicken. In the middle of that, I poured the water over my sweating vegetables to start the vegetable stock.
I finished my footballs a little after 7:00. (I had a good night at tournage -- sometimes that can take a half hour if I screw up a bunch of them.) My water was boiling for beans by now, so I threw those in. At that point, I started to get worried about not having started the chicken yet, and I fetched my chicken from the refrigerator. I cut away the excess fat around the back end, removed the wishbone at the front, trimmed off the ends of the wings, and cleaned up the ends of the wing and leg bones so they'd look nice on the finished plate later (sort of like frenching rib bones, but on poultry they call this manchonner instead of frenching). I had about a five minute delay in this process because Chef Phil stopped by and was chatting about nothing in particular while I was working on my chicken, and as I was taking the wishbone out and glancing up at him in conversation now and then, I cut the index finger on my left hand and had to run off and wash it up, stop the bleeding, and bandage it. (It was a very small cut, not to worry.) Finally I seasoned the chicken inside, trussed it up, seasoned it outside, stuck it in a bowl, covered it with plastic, wrote my name on it with the Sharpie I always carry in my pocket now, and put it in the fridge for later.
It's now getting near 7:30.
My green beans are done now, so I take them out, realize I've never gotten ice in a bowl yet and run off to do that to cool them, and throw the peas into the hot salty water to thaw out for a few minutes. Then I remember that I ought to get some water on because the first step in cooking the footballed potatoes is to blanch them in (unsalted) water. So I fetch another pan (which I should have gotten at the same time as the ice for the beans, along with a sizzle platter that I probably didn't get but I don't recall for sure), put the footballs in it with just enough water to cover them, pull the vegetable stock off my one burner and put the potatoes over the high flame. I strain the vegetable stock into another pan.
Now it's about 7:45, and I realize that I haven't really started cutting my vegetables into paysanne (confetti squares), and we're getting to where the soup is up in not much more than an hour. So I cut my carrots and turnips into confetti squares, and thinly slice the celery and leeks. In the meantime, the potatoes have come to a boil, and as soon as they do, I pull them out and set them on a towel to air dry. (More on the potatoes later.) I get my vegetables into a pot with a bit of fat, and put them over low heat to sweat.
Eight o'clock, and I begin worrying that I haven't really started the chicken yet at all, other than getting it trussed. But my one burner is busy making the soup that is due up any minute. So I start doing the only things I feel like I can do on the chicken, which are throw some bacon lardons (that I had cut earlier from a whole slab bacon) in a small pan on the flattop, and start peeling pearl onions, which is about the worst thing in the world to have to do if the clock is not your friend. Eventually, the vegetables have sweated enough that they are soft, and I throw the vegetable stock on them (which I had degreased in a spare moment), add potatoes that I've cut into paysanne (their starch will thicken the soup a bit), and heat it up to a simmer and move it from the burner to the flattop so that I can cook my pearl onions in a small pan on the main burner. The bacon cooks up while this is going on, and I set it aside and toss some quartered mushrooms into the bacon grease to cook. The onions and mushrooms finish about the same time, and I toss the pearl onions, bacon, and mushrooms, all nicely browned, into a small hotel pan and set them aside for later.
It's about 8:20, and finally I get the chicken on, just in time. The chicken has to be browned in hot oil for about 4 minutes on each of 4-6 surfaces, which takes about 15-20 minutes. While that's going on, I finish off my soup by throwing a bit of cabbage in it that I had earlier cut in chiffonade (thin ribbons, which I trimmed short in this case to match the texture of the paysanne vegetables) along with the beans that I had cooked earlier (and subsequently diced in a spare minute) and the peas.
8:45, and at last the chicken is browned on all sides and can go in the oven, which frees up the burner to heat the soup up to boiling just before serving. There's a chance now I might even get the soup out on time! But wait, I forgot to make croutons with cheese! Fortunately I had grated the cheese earlier, so I slice up some bread, hit it with cheese, throw it in the oven on a sizzle platter, and run for a plate to get warm to serve it on alongside the soup in bowls (which have been warming on a shelf made from rods above the stove and flattop).
8:55, I begin plating the soup in my warm bowls. Just as I get one ladle into the second bowl, I realize I haven't seasoned the soup. Doh! So I salt it, taste it and see that it's not enough, and then in my haste I basically have a salt spill and the soup is now pretty much inedible except that I've got two bowls partly plated that might be salvageable. (We must present four plates of each dish, all identically prepared.) At this point, it is what it is, I finish plating it, get my cheesey bread out of the oven and arrange it in a pinwheel on a separate warm plate, and carry it all up to the front, about one minute late. Chef tastes the soup and says it is excellent. The assistant chef tastes a different bowl, and it is so salty that it cannot be eaten at all. They look at each other puzzled for a moment, and I explain, which I'd rather not do because I've got work to do yet on the chicken.
It's 9:10, and I've dumped my bowls of soup (because there is no surface anywhere on which to keep them, and they're so salty they can't be eaten anyhow) through a strainer and put the vegetables from them into the compost. Now I start the next step of my football potatoes, which is to saute them in oil until they are nicely browned all around. 9:20. Then I take the chicken out of the oven, set the chicken aside on a sizzle platter, pour off the excess fat from the pan, deglaze it with white wine, and add veal stock to the mirepoix (chopped onions and carrots) left in it to make a sauce for the chicken. 9:25. While that cooks for a bit, I cut the cooked chicken into quarters, and set it aside again on its sizzle platter. 9:30. Then I strain the sauce into another pan, skim it to get the grease and crud off the surface, and heat it up to reduce it some. 9:35. While it reduces, I go back to the chicken and cut each quarter in half, removing the thigh bone from the leg quarters (so now there are eight pieces, four with a bone -- two breast parts with one trimmed wing bone, and two leg parts with a leg bone -- and four boneless pieces. I pop those into the oven, along with a container holding the pearl onions, mushrooms, and bacon cooked earlier, and the potatoes in their skillet where I sauteed them earlier.
All of this has taken quite a bit of time, and it's after 9:40 now, the dish due up in under 10 minutes. I clean up my board because otherwise I'll have no clean surface on which to set up my four plates. I set my warm plates out on the board, spoon a bunch of the sauce (which is still too runny -- it hasn't reduced enough) onto each plate, get the chicken out of the oven and arrange two pieces on each plate so that each plate has one white and one dark piece, and one with a bone and one without. I spoon the browned pearl onion, mushroom, and bacon garnish around one side of the plated chicken, and nestle three browned and roasted football potatoes to one side of the garnish up against the chicken pieces. I take it up at 9:51, three minutes late.
Chef says, "OK, tell me what's wrong with this plate." I say, "The sauce is too loose. The skin on some of the chicken pieces is torn." Chef says, "The sauce is a little bitter -- you burned your mirepoix again. The mushrooms are too brown. The chicken is really pretty good."
Friday, May 16, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Perspective
Immersing yourself for months in a new activity eventually changes the way you think about a lot of things. The other day, I was talking to a friend at school after we had been trimming up and frenching the bones on a rack of pork chops. While washing my hands, I was still thinking about butchering and preparing meats for cooking, and for no particular reason I thought of and said, "Man, can you imagine having to bone out a hand? That would be really hard." "Oh my gosh, that would be an awful job."
About a minute later, it struck me how strange it was for two people to share that thought just as a simple observation, an objective statement of fact. It's the kind of thing that anyone might think of and say, but before having gone to chef school for awhile, I would certainly have said it as a wisecrack or joke, or maybe a far-fetched exaggeration or satire. But now, it is only an observation about the relative difficulty of preparing and presenting different ingredients. It really would be quite a chore to bone out a human hand and keep it in any kind of shape for cooking and presentation on a plate. Probably a lot harder than, say, a quail, which I've also never yet prepared. You'd have to practice it a lot to become any good at it. If you drew that as your assignment for an exam, you'd be screwed.
About a minute later, it struck me how strange it was for two people to share that thought just as a simple observation, an objective statement of fact. It's the kind of thing that anyone might think of and say, but before having gone to chef school for awhile, I would certainly have said it as a wisecrack or joke, or maybe a far-fetched exaggeration or satire. But now, it is only an observation about the relative difficulty of preparing and presenting different ingredients. It really would be quite a chore to bone out a human hand and keep it in any kind of shape for cooking and presentation on a plate. Probably a lot harder than, say, a quail, which I've also never yet prepared. You'd have to practice it a lot to become any good at it. If you drew that as your assignment for an exam, you'd be screwed.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
School: Level 3 Begins
Earlier this week at school, my classmates and I began Level 3 of the culinary arts program. Level 3 is all about consistency and timing in both preparation and presentation. It concludes the first half of the program, during which we only cook for ourselves and our instructors. In Levels 4-6, we begin cooking for the public, at first in Level 4 for the other students, faculty and staff at the school, and then in Levels 5 and 6 when we go work in the school's restaurant.
In Level 3, each of us has one or two dishes to make every night, and an assigned time to present them to the chef. You make four servings of your dish, plate them all identically, and carry them up to the chef for evaluation at your assigned presentation time. For the first couple of classes, chef was fairly lenient and allowed people to show their dishes up to ten minutes or so late, but last night (our third class) he finally enforced at least one hard deadline, yelling over the room, "If you don't have those eggs up here in two minutes, you can just throw them in the compost." ("Those eggs" in this case were an appetizer or warm salad consisting of several vegetables cut in a small dice, cooked separately, then combined and plated with a ring mold, and topped with a poached egg which was covered in hollandaise sauce.)
As a group, we make the same dishes over and over again. There are four stations in the kitchen, and there are four recipes used throughout Level 3 at each of the stations, for a total of 16 different dishes. The stations in the kitchen are: garde manger (soups and salads), poissonier (fish), saucier (meats), and patissier (desserts). The recipes emphasize very basic classical preparation and cooking techniques, rather than interesting or fresh or modern tastes, and the idea behind them is that these are the things you need to be able to do properly even if you're having a bad day. You want to get to where everything is perfectly cooked, seasoned, and plated, and then served before it begins to suffer in quality from waiting around if you finish before the assigned service time.
Level 3 has a much more regular routine to each class, and although we work at a station with one partner, we prepare all of the dishes on our own. When it makes sense, partners can share some of the prep work, such as cutting up vegetables, but usually it's easier just to do your own thing and not try to coordinate with someone else. If you get in a jam, especially as you approach your plating and presentation time, if your partner has a moment to spare, you might be able to ask for help for a minute. Otherwise, everything about your dish is up to you.
The routine for the class begins with the usual gathering of ingredients that precedes the official start time of 5:45pm. From 5:45 until about 6:15, the chef instructor will lecture or demonstrate something new or something that he's noticed people having trouble with. Then for the next two or three hours, we're off on our own to prepare our dishes. Right now, everything is served between 8:30pm and 9:30pm, though chef might plan to move this schedule up in the coming weeks:
8:30: First garde manger dish
8:37: First fish
8:42: First meat
8:49: First dessert
8:56: Second garde manger
9:03: Second fish
9:10: Second meat
9:17: Second dessert
Once presentations are done, we clean the kitchen until about 9:35, and then have a half-hour break. After the break, chef will talk or do more demonstrations, and then we usually finish early around 10:35 or so. While it would seem to make sense to skip the break and leave for the night a half hour early, I think the school has a rule for the instructors that they need to keep everyone in class until at least 10:30, and given that it is nice to have a few minutes to wind down from cooking before we have a bit of post-game lecture and discussion.
For the first couple of classes, each of us had only a single dish to make, which allowed a lot of time to learn our way around the new kitchen we are in for this level. For last night's class, the third one, the garde manger and dessert stations were told that each person should make both of their dishes for the night. You'll soon realize this adds up to an awful lot of food we are making and can't possibly eat, even if we weren't sick of eating the same things class after class. There are four people working each station, and if they both make both dishes, each person is producing eight finished plates, for a total of 32 servings from that one station, with only 20 people in the room to consume it (18 students and two chef instructors). So altogether we can end up with about 32 full four-course meals every night.
The exam at the end of Level 3, which is the midterm exam for the program, is said to be the most difficult exam we will take. For the exam, the chef selects some of the dishes from the collection of Level 3 recipes, and then each of us will randomly draw an assignment to determine what we will make. Our assignment will either consist of a garde manger and a meat dish, or a fish dish and a dessert, along with our assigned serving times. The dishes are served to a panel of judges made up of recent graduates from the school. As our previous chef said, "They can be very tough. Since they finished at the school, they've been working in the trade for two or three months, and they think they know everything now." In addition to the finished product and meeting your assigned serving time, you are also graded by proctors who watch as you work in the kitchen, looking at everything from how clean and organized you are and whether your knives are sharp to whether you are preparing the recipes in a logical order and using proper techniques.
For the exam, you cook the recipes without any notes, which means you need to have them memorized. Before we got to Level 3, I had heard from several people that we make the same things over and over again, so I was surprised to learn that some of these dishes we will only be scheduled to make a single time during the Level 3 classes. I've found that one of the most important reasons to be on time with your presentation is that you can be there to hear chef evaluate the other people who made the same dish, and learn from his observations on their plates. Even though you might make some of the dishes only once or twice, you can learn something about each of them every day by seeing the things that go well and go badly for others around you. In addition, our chef wants us to push ourselves to make as much as we can in every class, to get practice at organizing the production of multiple dishes as we will have to do for our midterm, so if ingredients are available and you organize your night well, you can give yourself another chance to make something you are having trouble getting right.
In Level 3, each of us has one or two dishes to make every night, and an assigned time to present them to the chef. You make four servings of your dish, plate them all identically, and carry them up to the chef for evaluation at your assigned presentation time. For the first couple of classes, chef was fairly lenient and allowed people to show their dishes up to ten minutes or so late, but last night (our third class) he finally enforced at least one hard deadline, yelling over the room, "If you don't have those eggs up here in two minutes, you can just throw them in the compost." ("Those eggs" in this case were an appetizer or warm salad consisting of several vegetables cut in a small dice, cooked separately, then combined and plated with a ring mold, and topped with a poached egg which was covered in hollandaise sauce.)
As a group, we make the same dishes over and over again. There are four stations in the kitchen, and there are four recipes used throughout Level 3 at each of the stations, for a total of 16 different dishes. The stations in the kitchen are: garde manger (soups and salads), poissonier (fish), saucier (meats), and patissier (desserts). The recipes emphasize very basic classical preparation and cooking techniques, rather than interesting or fresh or modern tastes, and the idea behind them is that these are the things you need to be able to do properly even if you're having a bad day. You want to get to where everything is perfectly cooked, seasoned, and plated, and then served before it begins to suffer in quality from waiting around if you finish before the assigned service time.
Level 3 has a much more regular routine to each class, and although we work at a station with one partner, we prepare all of the dishes on our own. When it makes sense, partners can share some of the prep work, such as cutting up vegetables, but usually it's easier just to do your own thing and not try to coordinate with someone else. If you get in a jam, especially as you approach your plating and presentation time, if your partner has a moment to spare, you might be able to ask for help for a minute. Otherwise, everything about your dish is up to you.
The routine for the class begins with the usual gathering of ingredients that precedes the official start time of 5:45pm. From 5:45 until about 6:15, the chef instructor will lecture or demonstrate something new or something that he's noticed people having trouble with. Then for the next two or three hours, we're off on our own to prepare our dishes. Right now, everything is served between 8:30pm and 9:30pm, though chef might plan to move this schedule up in the coming weeks:
8:30: First garde manger dish
8:37: First fish
8:42: First meat
8:49: First dessert
8:56: Second garde manger
9:03: Second fish
9:10: Second meat
9:17: Second dessert
Once presentations are done, we clean the kitchen until about 9:35, and then have a half-hour break. After the break, chef will talk or do more demonstrations, and then we usually finish early around 10:35 or so. While it would seem to make sense to skip the break and leave for the night a half hour early, I think the school has a rule for the instructors that they need to keep everyone in class until at least 10:30, and given that it is nice to have a few minutes to wind down from cooking before we have a bit of post-game lecture and discussion.
For the first couple of classes, each of us had only a single dish to make, which allowed a lot of time to learn our way around the new kitchen we are in for this level. For last night's class, the third one, the garde manger and dessert stations were told that each person should make both of their dishes for the night. You'll soon realize this adds up to an awful lot of food we are making and can't possibly eat, even if we weren't sick of eating the same things class after class. There are four people working each station, and if they both make both dishes, each person is producing eight finished plates, for a total of 32 servings from that one station, with only 20 people in the room to consume it (18 students and two chef instructors). So altogether we can end up with about 32 full four-course meals every night.
The exam at the end of Level 3, which is the midterm exam for the program, is said to be the most difficult exam we will take. For the exam, the chef selects some of the dishes from the collection of Level 3 recipes, and then each of us will randomly draw an assignment to determine what we will make. Our assignment will either consist of a garde manger and a meat dish, or a fish dish and a dessert, along with our assigned serving times. The dishes are served to a panel of judges made up of recent graduates from the school. As our previous chef said, "They can be very tough. Since they finished at the school, they've been working in the trade for two or three months, and they think they know everything now." In addition to the finished product and meeting your assigned serving time, you are also graded by proctors who watch as you work in the kitchen, looking at everything from how clean and organized you are and whether your knives are sharp to whether you are preparing the recipes in a logical order and using proper techniques.
For the exam, you cook the recipes without any notes, which means you need to have them memorized. Before we got to Level 3, I had heard from several people that we make the same things over and over again, so I was surprised to learn that some of these dishes we will only be scheduled to make a single time during the Level 3 classes. I've found that one of the most important reasons to be on time with your presentation is that you can be there to hear chef evaluate the other people who made the same dish, and learn from his observations on their plates. Even though you might make some of the dishes only once or twice, you can learn something about each of them every day by seeing the things that go well and go badly for others around you. In addition, our chef wants us to push ourselves to make as much as we can in every class, to get practice at organizing the production of multiple dishes as we will have to do for our midterm, so if ingredients are available and you organize your night well, you can give yourself another chance to make something you are having trouble getting right.
Cheese: Sprout Creek Farm
In late winter, I got to visit Sprout Creek Farm, a cheesemaking and educational dairy farm just over an hour's drive north of New York City. Sprout Creek raises cows, goats, and sheep, and makes cheese from all three types of milk. They practice sustainable farming and offer educational camps and other opportunities to learn about farming and food. We talked mainly with two people on the farm: one spoke with us about how they farm and raise their animals, and then we went into the cheesemaking facility and listened to their cheesemaker and tasted a variety of their cheeses.
As it happened, we were visiting just before the start of goat cheese season. To make goat cheese, you need goat's milk, and a by-product, as it were, of goat's milk is an awful lot of baby goats. The day before we visited, they'd had about forty baby goats born during the day, and when we arrived around 1pm on a Sunday they'd had twenty-six more so far that day. Goats, I learned, are very playful -- watching small groups of baby goats jump around and occasionally poke at each other is a lot like watching little puppies, except that the goats are surprisingly well-coordinated and able to control their movements and walk normally even at an age of just a day or two old.
Sprout Creek names all of their animals, and the people working on the farm have an emotional attachment to the animals that shows. Nevertheless, they also slaughter the animals for food at the end of their lives. One of the farmers talked about this as we were standing in a barn full of both adult and baby goats. She said that it is always difficult to slaughter an animal whose personality you have come to know over several years, but that on their farm they felt like they handle the ends of the animals lives better than many of the more common ways that they might otherwise end, either in the wild or in a commercial feedlot and slaughterhouse. They care for and love the animals, they appreciate what the animals contribute to the farm and to our lives, and they take on the responsibility of making sure that the animals lives end peacefully on the farm among people that are grateful for everything they give us.
The cheesemaker, Colin McGrath, produces something like thirty thousand pounds of cheese a year from the milk of this one farm in just two small rooms, each about the size of an average residential bedroom. He came to cheesemaking after making beer in his earlier years and then going to culinary school. Colin says that he has always been destined to end up fermenting something, whether it's beer or cheese or soybeans or something else. When he took over the cheesemaking operation a few years ago, Sprout Creek was making only 3 or 4 cheeses; today he makes more than a dozen, and is always working on something new. We got to try one of his newer efforts, a blue cheese that he was not yet satisfied with, though it was very good -- his main criticism of it was that its texture was a bit dry and it crumbled apart into very small bits easily.
Listening to the people at Sprout Creek talk about the farm and the food it produces, you get a great sense of the direct connection between what we eat and the land around us. One of the farmers talked a bit about the "eat local" trend, and that you can take that too far and affect your health negatively. As an example, she said that the soils for miles around the farm did not have any selenium in the soil, and consequently the grasses and plants grown there did not have any, and the animals that ate those plants also do not have any in their meats. Selenium is an essential nutrient for us ("essential nutrient" means that we require it for good health, but our bodies do not manufacture it, so we must get it directly in our diet). If you were to eat only the meats and plants produced on a farm from that area, your health would eventually suffer. (While we didn't go on to talk about this, I assume that this problem was avoided before the days of large-scale transportation by hunting and fishing for food that ranged over a wider area.)
They also talked about the effects of the farming operation on their most widely-consumed end product, cheese. The farmers keep detailed notes on what was going on with each of their groups of animals throughout the seasons. When Colin tastes something interesting in his cheese, he'll go ask the farmers what they were doing with the animals around the time that the milk for the cheese was produced. Recently, he'd had a bunch of cheeses "blow up" because they produced so much gas as they began to age that they blew their rinds off. When he checked with the farmers, he learned that they had just brought the herds in for winter and begun to feed them from the large bales of hay you often see in fields in the late summer and fall. Those hay bales begin to ferment in the middle, and the fermented hay in the cows' diet was what caused the cheeses to explode.
The cheesemaking environment also introduces some variation in the flavor of the cheese. Colin remarked that the cheesemaker's job is mostly that of a janitor, constantly hosing down and washing everything in the room. While he keeps the room clean, he doesn't completely sanitize the workspace or equipment. Cheese is the result of naturally-occurring bacteria acting on milk, and if everything is sanitized then bacteria will need to be re-introduced to make cheese. Allowing whatever bacteria happen to be present to act on the cheese can give it distinctive local character, and sometimes yields surprising results. Since Sprout Creek is an educational farm that conducts tours, the constant parade of foreign living organisms (which is to say, people, and all of the living micro-organisms that accompany them) through the facility can alter the resulting cheeses. Colin mentioned that recently some maintenance people had been in the room to work on some of the equipment, and about a week afterward he saw a lot of different and unusual surface molds showing up on his cheeses.
Goats born the morning we visited Sprout Creek Farm.
Baby goats, one day old.
As it happened, we were visiting just before the start of goat cheese season. To make goat cheese, you need goat's milk, and a by-product, as it were, of goat's milk is an awful lot of baby goats. The day before we visited, they'd had about forty baby goats born during the day, and when we arrived around 1pm on a Sunday they'd had twenty-six more so far that day. Goats, I learned, are very playful -- watching small groups of baby goats jump around and occasionally poke at each other is a lot like watching little puppies, except that the goats are surprisingly well-coordinated and able to control their movements and walk normally even at an age of just a day or two old.
The cheeseboard we sampled at the end of our visit.
Sprout Creek names all of their animals, and the people working on the farm have an emotional attachment to the animals that shows. Nevertheless, they also slaughter the animals for food at the end of their lives. One of the farmers talked about this as we were standing in a barn full of both adult and baby goats. She said that it is always difficult to slaughter an animal whose personality you have come to know over several years, but that on their farm they felt like they handle the ends of the animals lives better than many of the more common ways that they might otherwise end, either in the wild or in a commercial feedlot and slaughterhouse. They care for and love the animals, they appreciate what the animals contribute to the farm and to our lives, and they take on the responsibility of making sure that the animals lives end peacefully on the farm among people that are grateful for everything they give us.
Colin, the cheesemaker, holding forth next to
some new cheeses being salted by brining.
some new cheeses being salted by brining.
The cheesemaker, Colin McGrath, produces something like thirty thousand pounds of cheese a year from the milk of this one farm in just two small rooms, each about the size of an average residential bedroom. He came to cheesemaking after making beer in his earlier years and then going to culinary school. Colin says that he has always been destined to end up fermenting something, whether it's beer or cheese or soybeans or something else. When he took over the cheesemaking operation a few years ago, Sprout Creek was making only 3 or 4 cheeses; today he makes more than a dozen, and is always working on something new. We got to try one of his newer efforts, a blue cheese that he was not yet satisfied with, though it was very good -- his main criticism of it was that its texture was a bit dry and it crumbled apart into very small bits easily.
The same cheese at a couple of stages: fresh curds resting to form
rounds on the left, and then drying to the right.
rounds on the left, and then drying to the right.
Forming larger wheels of cheese.
Listening to the people at Sprout Creek talk about the farm and the food it produces, you get a great sense of the direct connection between what we eat and the land around us. One of the farmers talked a bit about the "eat local" trend, and that you can take that too far and affect your health negatively. As an example, she said that the soils for miles around the farm did not have any selenium in the soil, and consequently the grasses and plants grown there did not have any, and the animals that ate those plants also do not have any in their meats. Selenium is an essential nutrient for us ("essential nutrient" means that we require it for good health, but our bodies do not manufacture it, so we must get it directly in our diet). If you were to eat only the meats and plants produced on a farm from that area, your health would eventually suffer. (While we didn't go on to talk about this, I assume that this problem was avoided before the days of large-scale transportation by hunting and fishing for food that ranged over a wider area.)
Cheeses on drying racks.
They also talked about the effects of the farming operation on their most widely-consumed end product, cheese. The farmers keep detailed notes on what was going on with each of their groups of animals throughout the seasons. When Colin tastes something interesting in his cheese, he'll go ask the farmers what they were doing with the animals around the time that the milk for the cheese was produced. Recently, he'd had a bunch of cheeses "blow up" because they produced so much gas as they began to age that they blew their rinds off. When he checked with the farmers, he learned that they had just brought the herds in for winter and begun to feed them from the large bales of hay you often see in fields in the late summer and fall. Those hay bales begin to ferment in the middle, and the fermented hay in the cows' diet was what caused the cheeses to explode.
Fresh rounds of Barat cheese, one of which
was cut for us to taste the mild and milky cheese before aging begins.
was cut for us to taste the mild and milky cheese before aging begins.
The cheesemaking environment also introduces some variation in the flavor of the cheese. Colin remarked that the cheesemaker's job is mostly that of a janitor, constantly hosing down and washing everything in the room. While he keeps the room clean, he doesn't completely sanitize the workspace or equipment. Cheese is the result of naturally-occurring bacteria acting on milk, and if everything is sanitized then bacteria will need to be re-introduced to make cheese. Allowing whatever bacteria happen to be present to act on the cheese can give it distinctive local character, and sometimes yields surprising results. Since Sprout Creek is an educational farm that conducts tours, the constant parade of foreign living organisms (which is to say, people, and all of the living micro-organisms that accompany them) through the facility can alter the resulting cheeses. Colin mentioned that recently some maintenance people had been in the room to work on some of the equipment, and about a week afterward he saw a lot of different and unusual surface molds showing up on his cheeses.
The ripening rooms. Each wheel of cheese in these rooms is turned every day.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Restaurant: Di Fara Pizza
A little over a week ago, I at last visited Di Fara Pizza, hidden away in an off-the-beaten-track neighborhood in Brooklyn. Di Fara is a place you often hear about if you spend any time looking around for "best of" sorts of food experiences in New York. While high-class restaurants come into and go out of fashion all the time, and people debate the merits of various wood or coal oven New York pizza icons like Grimaldi's or Totonno's whose popularity is continuously maintained by a platoon of people in the kitchen cranking out pizzas for hundreds of groups of customers every day, Domenico DeMarco keeps turning out one pizza at a time from his tiny kitchen at Di Fara Pizza, and whether you agree or not that it's one of the best pizzas you've ever had, if you try it you at least have to acknowledge that there isn't another pizza experience like it. I was finally persuaded that I needed to make the trek out to Avenue J when I heard someone ask the sweet, gentle, quiet, and opinionated Becky Wasserman, who lives in Burgundy, France, where she made it a point to eat when she had a couple of days in New York, and she answered that of course she loved to go to Daniel Boulud's restaurants with every visit to the city, but also had to get to Di Fara for a pizza. To say that I was surprised to hear that from a quiet old English lady known as an expert on some of the best wines in France would be an understatement.
For over forty years, Dom has been making pizzas his way. This is the only place I've ever been where pizza is truly "artisanal" -- it is made by an artisan, slowly, one pie at a time, and at Di Fara the pizza is never made by anyone else. Until it is delivered to the customer, no one handles a pizza at Di Fara other than Dom. He takes five to ten minutes to make a pizza, and between pizzas he spends a few minutes shuffling the one or two pizzas he has in the oven at any given moment, or finishing (detail on what this means follows below) and cutting a pizza that has just come out, which means that he produces something like 8 pizzas in an hour. Between a third and half of those get sold by the slice, so if you want a whole pizza unto yourself, and you're fourth in a line of people waiting on whole pizzas, you'll wait about 45 minutes to an hour once you place your order.
When I visited, Dom had one assistant working with him. The assistant never touched a pizza in any way, whether as it was being made or after it came out of the oven for a customer. He had two missions: first, he kept a list of names and pizza orders in a stenographer's notebook. Dom makes one pizza at a time, and he always concentrates exclusively on the one or two pizzas in the oven and the next one he is making; he has no awareness of how many or what kinds of pizzas are coming up next on the assistant's list. When he gets a pizza into the oven, he simply asks the assistant what to make next, and then begins working on it. The second job the assistant has is to keep Dom supplied with things from a small storage area behind the little pizza assembly workspace. He'll carry out buckets of sauce, or portions of dough, or various toppings, and put them on the counter where Dom works. But the assistant never has a hand in making a pizza. Conversely, Dom has no interaction with the line of waiting customers or the money, other than to indicate that a pizza is ready by looking up and saying, "OK," or, "There you go," and immediately turning his back to move on to the next pizza.
I wanted to get some pictures of Dom making pizzas, but it's hard to do so unobtrusively since you're only about 10 feet away from Dom. I asked a friend, "Do you think they care if you take their picture?" and he said, "I don't think he cares about anything except making a pizza." Along with not being concerned about having his picture taken, at Di Fara they also don't seem to be too worried about collecting your money. We didn't pay when we ordered; we didn't pay when we got the pizza; no one asked about money when we carried the empty pan back up to the counter. At last we got the assistant's attention and told him what we ordered and that we needed to pay for it. Having to stop to handle the commercial part of the transaction almost seemed to be the only thing they considered a distraction from their work. I don't think they care about anything except making a pizza.
Watching Dom methodically construct a pie before it goes into the oven can be very relaxing. There is something about watching him slowly stretch out his dough and spread out his base of sauce, cut solid little thin squares of cheese onto it using the flat slicing side of a box grater, and then drizzle it with olive oil, all without any concern for the crowd of people all watching and waiting for him just a few feet away, that makes you wonder why you ever let yourself feel the pressure of all of the chores you haven't gotten to. He slides raw pizzas from his long wooden pizza peel onto the floor of the oven, but once they are in he simply uses his hands to move them around. You are struck dumb the first time you see him reach into the oven and remove a hot pizza by dragging it to the front of the oven by hooking his fingertips over the edge of the crust, and then lift it out by sliding it onto his bare hands and carrying it over in no hurry to a pizza pan waiting on the counter a few feet away.
While watching him prepare and bake a pizza is soothing, watching what he does with a pizza after it comes out of the oven is inspiring. Usually the customer that ordered a pizza can tell when his pizza is the one being worked on, and when it is finished baking, the customer is standing at the counter where Dom places the hot pizza on a pan right in front of him. But the pizza isn't quite done: there are still at least three steps left in its preparation before it is ready to be cut and eaten. First, Dom grates more cheese onto the top of it, probably parmesan but the ceremony seems so much more important than the ingredient that I neglected to pay attention -- it might have been mozzarella or even cheddar. Then he drizzles it with more of the nice fruity olive oil from his brass oil can. Finally he'll add some herbs, by cutting or tearing off leaves from a bunch of basil, or holding a big bouquet of oregano over the pizza as he snips away at it like he's giving it a haircut with a pair of scissors. At last he takes his small pizza cutting wheel and makes four slices across the pie to cut it into eight pieces, and only then does he look up at the customer for only a second or two, and with just a hint of a smile, which seemed to me not to be as much an interaction with the customer as simply an indication that he was pleased with his creation, he turns the pizza over to its new owner and then heads back to his counter to start stretching out his next ball of dough.
When you get the pizza, both its appearance and its flavor confirm what you already knew from watching it being made: there are a lot of carefully crafted layers of taste and texture. Many of the ingredients on the pizza have been applied more than once, so that you get two different effects from everything on the pie: cheese forms the base but is also used as soon as it comes out of the oven; likewise olive oil went onto the pizza both before and after baking; half of our pizza had pepperoni, and some of it was nestled below the cheese while a lot had been placed on top of the pizza when it was already in the oven and about halfway done. And perhaps this is what separates Dom's pizza from every other version I've ever had: Dom is cooking pizza, not just making pizza. His process isn't simply assemble and then bake -- he's handling each of the elements of the pizza like a chef handles his raw materials, adding each one to the dish when the time remaining in the process is just enough to bring it to perfection just as it arrives in front of the diner.
Here are a few other blog entries I found on Di Fara Pizza:
Orangette
This Little Piglet
Off The Broiler
The Slice entry about Di Fara:
Slice on Di Fara
Dom's workspace, where he makes one pizza at a time.
For over forty years, Dom has been making pizzas his way. This is the only place I've ever been where pizza is truly "artisanal" -- it is made by an artisan, slowly, one pie at a time, and at Di Fara the pizza is never made by anyone else. Until it is delivered to the customer, no one handles a pizza at Di Fara other than Dom. He takes five to ten minutes to make a pizza, and between pizzas he spends a few minutes shuffling the one or two pizzas he has in the oven at any given moment, or finishing (detail on what this means follows below) and cutting a pizza that has just come out, which means that he produces something like 8 pizzas in an hour. Between a third and half of those get sold by the slice, so if you want a whole pizza unto yourself, and you're fourth in a line of people waiting on whole pizzas, you'll wait about 45 minutes to an hour once you place your order.
The start of a pizza.
When I visited, Dom had one assistant working with him. The assistant never touched a pizza in any way, whether as it was being made or after it came out of the oven for a customer. He had two missions: first, he kept a list of names and pizza orders in a stenographer's notebook. Dom makes one pizza at a time, and he always concentrates exclusively on the one or two pizzas in the oven and the next one he is making; he has no awareness of how many or what kinds of pizzas are coming up next on the assistant's list. When he gets a pizza into the oven, he simply asks the assistant what to make next, and then begins working on it. The second job the assistant has is to keep Dom supplied with things from a small storage area behind the little pizza assembly workspace. He'll carry out buckets of sauce, or portions of dough, or various toppings, and put them on the counter where Dom works. But the assistant never has a hand in making a pizza. Conversely, Dom has no interaction with the line of waiting customers or the money, other than to indicate that a pizza is ready by looking up and saying, "OK," or, "There you go," and immediately turning his back to move on to the next pizza.
I wanted to get some pictures of Dom making pizzas, but it's hard to do so unobtrusively since you're only about 10 feet away from Dom. I asked a friend, "Do you think they care if you take their picture?" and he said, "I don't think he cares about anything except making a pizza." Along with not being concerned about having his picture taken, at Di Fara they also don't seem to be too worried about collecting your money. We didn't pay when we ordered; we didn't pay when we got the pizza; no one asked about money when we carried the empty pan back up to the counter. At last we got the assistant's attention and told him what we ordered and that we needed to pay for it. Having to stop to handle the commercial part of the transaction almost seemed to be the only thing they considered a distraction from their work. I don't think they care about anything except making a pizza.
Our raw pizza on the counter ready for baking
as Dom works in the oven.
as Dom works in the oven.
Watching Dom methodically construct a pie before it goes into the oven can be very relaxing. There is something about watching him slowly stretch out his dough and spread out his base of sauce, cut solid little thin squares of cheese onto it using the flat slicing side of a box grater, and then drizzle it with olive oil, all without any concern for the crowd of people all watching and waiting for him just a few feet away, that makes you wonder why you ever let yourself feel the pressure of all of the chores you haven't gotten to. He slides raw pizzas from his long wooden pizza peel onto the floor of the oven, but once they are in he simply uses his hands to move them around. You are struck dumb the first time you see him reach into the oven and remove a hot pizza by dragging it to the front of the oven by hooking his fingertips over the edge of the crust, and then lift it out by sliding it onto his bare hands and carrying it over in no hurry to a pizza pan waiting on the counter a few feet away.
Applying the final touch of olive oil.
While watching him prepare and bake a pizza is soothing, watching what he does with a pizza after it comes out of the oven is inspiring. Usually the customer that ordered a pizza can tell when his pizza is the one being worked on, and when it is finished baking, the customer is standing at the counter where Dom places the hot pizza on a pan right in front of him. But the pizza isn't quite done: there are still at least three steps left in its preparation before it is ready to be cut and eaten. First, Dom grates more cheese onto the top of it, probably parmesan but the ceremony seems so much more important than the ingredient that I neglected to pay attention -- it might have been mozzarella or even cheddar. Then he drizzles it with more of the nice fruity olive oil from his brass oil can. Finally he'll add some herbs, by cutting or tearing off leaves from a bunch of basil, or holding a big bouquet of oregano over the pizza as he snips away at it like he's giving it a haircut with a pair of scissors. At last he takes his small pizza cutting wheel and makes four slices across the pie to cut it into eight pieces, and only then does he look up at the customer for only a second or two, and with just a hint of a smile, which seemed to me not to be as much an interaction with the customer as simply an indication that he was pleased with his creation, he turns the pizza over to its new owner and then heads back to his counter to start stretching out his next ball of dough.
Our finished pizza, plain cheese on the right half,
with pepperoni on the left.
with pepperoni on the left.
When you get the pizza, both its appearance and its flavor confirm what you already knew from watching it being made: there are a lot of carefully crafted layers of taste and texture. Many of the ingredients on the pizza have been applied more than once, so that you get two different effects from everything on the pie: cheese forms the base but is also used as soon as it comes out of the oven; likewise olive oil went onto the pizza both before and after baking; half of our pizza had pepperoni, and some of it was nestled below the cheese while a lot had been placed on top of the pizza when it was already in the oven and about halfway done. And perhaps this is what separates Dom's pizza from every other version I've ever had: Dom is cooking pizza, not just making pizza. His process isn't simply assemble and then bake -- he's handling each of the elements of the pizza like a chef handles his raw materials, adding each one to the dish when the time remaining in the process is just enough to bring it to perfection just as it arrives in front of the diner.
Here are a few other blog entries I found on Di Fara Pizza:
Orangette
This Little Piglet
Off The Broiler
The Slice entry about Di Fara:
Slice on Di Fara
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Chef Profiles: Ducasse and Chang
I've come across a couple of good in-depth profiles of well-known chefs that are worth reading if you're interested in the personalities behind the big-time restaurant scene.
First, New York Magazine had this article about Alain Ducasse. Ducasse is one of the most famous chefs in the world, but he has never managed to open a successful restaurant in New York. Somehow his restaurants have so far always failed to match the current moods and trends in fine dining. He has just opened Adour in Manhattan in the St. Regis hotel near the upscale shopping epicenter at the intersection of 5th Avenue and 57th Street. The anecdote in the article about the prim and proper Ducasse's encounter with carpe diem personified in the larger-than-life-in-every-way form of Mario Batali is priceless. (Batali saunters right up to the quiet and reserved Ducasse, who is formally dressed in a nice suit, smothers him in a bear hug, and says enthusiastically to anyone within ear shot, "This guy is fucking awesome!")
Second, The New Yorker, in its issue dated March 24, has a profile of David Chang, who has become all the rage in the last few years after opening, of all things to launch a career as a star top chef, a noodle bar, Momofuku (which literally translated means "lucky peach", but also happens to be the name of the inventor, or at least the popularizer or commercializer, of Ramen noodles). He has since expanded to a couple more restaurants, each a bit different in its concept and food, and this profile is written as the third of his restaurants is set to open. Momofuku Ko is an ambitious restaurant in a style I first heard about in Chicago when Schwa became famous: it is a very small restaurant that makes the style of food with the kind of ingredients that you find at the best fine dining establishments around, with only a handful of seats and no waitstaff because everything is served by the chefs and cooks who prepare it. The New Yorker article is not available online, but Ed Levine wrote a worthwhile summary and commentary on it here.
First, New York Magazine had this article about Alain Ducasse. Ducasse is one of the most famous chefs in the world, but he has never managed to open a successful restaurant in New York. Somehow his restaurants have so far always failed to match the current moods and trends in fine dining. He has just opened Adour in Manhattan in the St. Regis hotel near the upscale shopping epicenter at the intersection of 5th Avenue and 57th Street. The anecdote in the article about the prim and proper Ducasse's encounter with carpe diem personified in the larger-than-life-in-every-way form of Mario Batali is priceless. (Batali saunters right up to the quiet and reserved Ducasse, who is formally dressed in a nice suit, smothers him in a bear hug, and says enthusiastically to anyone within ear shot, "This guy is fucking awesome!")
Second, The New Yorker, in its issue dated March 24, has a profile of David Chang, who has become all the rage in the last few years after opening, of all things to launch a career as a star top chef, a noodle bar, Momofuku (which literally translated means "lucky peach", but also happens to be the name of the inventor, or at least the popularizer or commercializer, of Ramen noodles). He has since expanded to a couple more restaurants, each a bit different in its concept and food, and this profile is written as the third of his restaurants is set to open. Momofuku Ko is an ambitious restaurant in a style I first heard about in Chicago when Schwa became famous: it is a very small restaurant that makes the style of food with the kind of ingredients that you find at the best fine dining establishments around, with only a handful of seats and no waitstaff because everything is served by the chefs and cooks who prepare it. The New Yorker article is not available online, but Ed Levine wrote a worthwhile summary and commentary on it here.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Heat, Chemistry, Pastry
We are in the middle of two weeks of pastry classes at school right now. Like most cooking schools, the FCI has a full program just for pastry training, but everyone in the culinary program goes through some of the basics of pastries. Many pastry preparations can be used to make savory (non-dessert) dishes, and in addition any chef who aspires to run a kitchen or other food service operation needs to have some understanding of pastries to better work with his pastry chef and to fill in when the pastry chef is not at work.
Most elementary pastry preparations that underlie any finished product are involve more chemistry and science than the usual off-the-cuff throwing together of interesting ingredients that you see on something like Top Chef. Where we taste and adjust dishes as we go in cooking, when preparing pastries we measure precisely and follow directions carefully. In addition to measuring ingredients to the right proportions to get the desired chemical and structural transformations take place, I'm learning that the precise application of heat is often even more important to many recipes.
The process of tempering chocolate is one of the more interesting examples of how varying heat within a small temperature range changes the properties of one of the most common ingredients used in sweets. Chocolate has a structure that consists of a couple of different kinds of crystals. One of the crystals, the "unstable" one, melts near room temperature, at anywhere from 59F to 82F; the "stable" crystals melt at 89F-93F. In addition to the desirable "melts in your hands, but not in your room" property of the more stable crystals, they also have a glossier appearance and a less gummy texture than the unstable crystals. If you melt chocolate, to use as a frosting for example, if it cools rapidly (as it will if spread in a thin layer, like a frosting) there will not be enough stable crystals formed before it cools below 82F and unstable crystals take over and determine the crystalline structure of the solid chocolate. To "temper" chocolate, which makes it look and feel nicer on things, the cook melts solid chocolate and then cools it to the point where crystals form but it can still be stirred, and then gently heats it to a temperature above the melting point of unstable crystals but below the melting point of stable crystals (about 88F) to eliminate any unstable crystals that formed. It is held at that temperature to allow enough stable crystals to develop that when it is further cooled there will be enough of them to establish the structure of all of the solid chocolate. This is something I've only read about and never done, and in the basic pastry training that the culinary students get at the FCI we will not be doing it. I've heard (but never seen with my own eyes) that one of my friends who is a trained pastry chef can go through this process just by feel, without using a thermometer. She can also always recognize that most chocolate-covered desserts, even in many upscale bakeries and fine restaurants, have had some wax added to the chocolate to make it more shiny and stable and look like properly tempered chocolate.
We've been through a couple of simpler careful heating processes in the past week during our pastry classes at school. The first was to make Génoise cakes, a very light sponge cake that rises and becomes airy through creating and cooking egg foam, without any chemical or other leavening agents (such as baking powder or yeasts). The first step in making Génoise is to whisk together eggs and sugar into something like a sabayon (which normally includes only egg yolks, not the whole eggs used in Génoise). As the eggs are whipped, they will increase in volume as air is incorporated into them, but the foam is not stable enough to survive the amount of heat and time it takes to bake the cake. To make them more stable, you heat the eggs and sugar as they are whisked. The heat causes the tightly-wound proteins in the eggs to lengthen into strands that can bond with each other and form a more stable network in which air can be trapped for a longer period of time. In many pastry sauces and creams, eggs can be heated as the binder in a liquid all the way to boiling and will not curdle (scramble) if they are handled properly and stirred constantly. But for Génoise, we want to heat the eggs just to the point that they can hold a foam structure long enough to last through the baking process. If they are heated beyond that, the cake will become tough and chewy as the network of proteins gets more solid. To achieve the result we want, the eggs must come to a temperature of at least 110F, and we usually heat them to a minimum of 115F for the best results, but if at any point they go over 120F, we'll throw the mixture away and start over. When the cake is baked (after adding a little bit of flour to make a batter out of the whipped eggs and sugar), the foam is just stable enough to last through the baking process, and in fact if you remove the cake from the oven and it is not baked all the way through, the uncooked batter will quickly deflate and you'll have what Chef Marc derisively calls "a flat tire." There is no recovery if this happens -- you just have to start over.
The second preparation we made that involved achieving a narrow temperature range was classic buttercream frosting. As our assistant instructor Chef Matthew (who worked for awhile as a pastry chef) told us, a colleague once told him that the only real purpose of Génoise is to serve as a platform for the delivery of buttercream. The frosting is made from only 3 basic ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, and butter. The frosting is not cooked and there is no liquid in which to dissolve the sugar, but we want the sugar to be soft and not grainy when the finished preparation is at or below room temperature. The solution is to heat the sugar to a stage where its crystal structure will be permanently changed and it would cool into a soft and pliable solid if left on its own and not mixed into our frosting. We'll get this result by heating the sugar to what is called the "soft ball" stage, between 234F and 240F. When it is in that temperature range, a bit of the sugar cooled in ice water can be rolled between your fingers into a soft but cohesive ball. If heated to just below that range, the sugar upon cooling will tend to spin fine threads rather than forming a solid lump or ball; if heated above that range, it will form crunchier and eventually rock-hard solids when it is cooled (this is how hard candies are made). To make buttercream, you beat egg yolks and then mix hot sugar brought to the soft ball stage into the eggs, then cool the mix enough that it will not melt butter, and whip a whole lot of butter into it to form a frosting.
Most elementary pastry preparations that underlie any finished product are involve more chemistry and science than the usual off-the-cuff throwing together of interesting ingredients that you see on something like Top Chef. Where we taste and adjust dishes as we go in cooking, when preparing pastries we measure precisely and follow directions carefully. In addition to measuring ingredients to the right proportions to get the desired chemical and structural transformations take place, I'm learning that the precise application of heat is often even more important to many recipes.
The process of tempering chocolate is one of the more interesting examples of how varying heat within a small temperature range changes the properties of one of the most common ingredients used in sweets. Chocolate has a structure that consists of a couple of different kinds of crystals. One of the crystals, the "unstable" one, melts near room temperature, at anywhere from 59F to 82F; the "stable" crystals melt at 89F-93F. In addition to the desirable "melts in your hands, but not in your room" property of the more stable crystals, they also have a glossier appearance and a less gummy texture than the unstable crystals. If you melt chocolate, to use as a frosting for example, if it cools rapidly (as it will if spread in a thin layer, like a frosting) there will not be enough stable crystals formed before it cools below 82F and unstable crystals take over and determine the crystalline structure of the solid chocolate. To "temper" chocolate, which makes it look and feel nicer on things, the cook melts solid chocolate and then cools it to the point where crystals form but it can still be stirred, and then gently heats it to a temperature above the melting point of unstable crystals but below the melting point of stable crystals (about 88F) to eliminate any unstable crystals that formed. It is held at that temperature to allow enough stable crystals to develop that when it is further cooled there will be enough of them to establish the structure of all of the solid chocolate. This is something I've only read about and never done, and in the basic pastry training that the culinary students get at the FCI we will not be doing it. I've heard (but never seen with my own eyes) that one of my friends who is a trained pastry chef can go through this process just by feel, without using a thermometer. She can also always recognize that most chocolate-covered desserts, even in many upscale bakeries and fine restaurants, have had some wax added to the chocolate to make it more shiny and stable and look like properly tempered chocolate.
We've been through a couple of simpler careful heating processes in the past week during our pastry classes at school. The first was to make Génoise cakes, a very light sponge cake that rises and becomes airy through creating and cooking egg foam, without any chemical or other leavening agents (such as baking powder or yeasts). The first step in making Génoise is to whisk together eggs and sugar into something like a sabayon (which normally includes only egg yolks, not the whole eggs used in Génoise). As the eggs are whipped, they will increase in volume as air is incorporated into them, but the foam is not stable enough to survive the amount of heat and time it takes to bake the cake. To make them more stable, you heat the eggs and sugar as they are whisked. The heat causes the tightly-wound proteins in the eggs to lengthen into strands that can bond with each other and form a more stable network in which air can be trapped for a longer period of time. In many pastry sauces and creams, eggs can be heated as the binder in a liquid all the way to boiling and will not curdle (scramble) if they are handled properly and stirred constantly. But for Génoise, we want to heat the eggs just to the point that they can hold a foam structure long enough to last through the baking process. If they are heated beyond that, the cake will become tough and chewy as the network of proteins gets more solid. To achieve the result we want, the eggs must come to a temperature of at least 110F, and we usually heat them to a minimum of 115F for the best results, but if at any point they go over 120F, we'll throw the mixture away and start over. When the cake is baked (after adding a little bit of flour to make a batter out of the whipped eggs and sugar), the foam is just stable enough to last through the baking process, and in fact if you remove the cake from the oven and it is not baked all the way through, the uncooked batter will quickly deflate and you'll have what Chef Marc derisively calls "a flat tire." There is no recovery if this happens -- you just have to start over.
The second preparation we made that involved achieving a narrow temperature range was classic buttercream frosting. As our assistant instructor Chef Matthew (who worked for awhile as a pastry chef) told us, a colleague once told him that the only real purpose of Génoise is to serve as a platform for the delivery of buttercream. The frosting is made from only 3 basic ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, and butter. The frosting is not cooked and there is no liquid in which to dissolve the sugar, but we want the sugar to be soft and not grainy when the finished preparation is at or below room temperature. The solution is to heat the sugar to a stage where its crystal structure will be permanently changed and it would cool into a soft and pliable solid if left on its own and not mixed into our frosting. We'll get this result by heating the sugar to what is called the "soft ball" stage, between 234F and 240F. When it is in that temperature range, a bit of the sugar cooled in ice water can be rolled between your fingers into a soft but cohesive ball. If heated to just below that range, the sugar upon cooling will tend to spin fine threads rather than forming a solid lump or ball; if heated above that range, it will form crunchier and eventually rock-hard solids when it is cooled (this is how hard candies are made). To make buttercream, you beat egg yolks and then mix hot sugar brought to the soft ball stage into the eggs, then cool the mix enough that it will not melt butter, and whip a whole lot of butter into it to form a frosting.
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