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baked oats |
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green chile chicken enchiladas |
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chow mein |
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bakery-style butter cookies |
Our third class in the pastry skills series involved enrobing truffles in tempered chocolate, making chocolate decorations, and working with lots and lots of tempered chocolate. Surprisingly, half of our class was missing tonight. I realize things can come up, but for the amount of money we pay for the course that is a hefty price for missing out on a class.
Tonight we began working with chocolate: ganache, tempering, and enrobing. I chose to make Earl Grey and Kona Coffee truffles. They will be enrobed next week. This week, we took out the fondant and caramel we made last week and enrobed those with tempered chocolate.
Tonight I attended the first of my pastry skills classes at the Culinary School of the Rockies (my reward for completing my dissertation). It was terrific! I think I probably had the most experience of the students there, but it was still really educational. My partner happened to be the woman who annoyed me the most. She’s the one who talks about herself to anyone who will listen. She wasn’t very skilled, and that was okay… the part that annoyed me was how she was completely undisciplined and had no sense of priorities, time, urgency, or organization. Still, we got along and she seemed to really like me. Perhaps that was a miscalculation on my part – I should have been a total bitch so she won’t partner with me next week. She really needs to get her mise en place In Place.
We worked on candymaking tonight. It’s quite intense. We arrive, get a brief overview lecture from Shan, our instructor and pastry chef, then it’s like they shout “GO!” and we’re off! In 4 hours, we made fondant, caramel, chocolate caramel, orange hazelnut brittle, lollipops, and then some caramelized sugar decorations. I was in my groove – this was my element! Multi-tasking, mise en place, timing the sugar, cooling the fondant… AND I also took tons of pictures. The best part about it all? There were two dishwashers. I mean two people hired by the CSR to WASH DISHES. Our brittle was the only one to turn out properly – everyone else’s seized. Maybe it’s intuition after years of experimenting on my own, and I like to think that part of my success is because I understand much of the science behind it. Either way, it rocks and I love it.
