Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Carnivore's Paradise


I wish I were more of a carnivore so that I could have a greater appreciation for all the meat I'll be cooking over the next three weeks. I keep thinking of Zack and how much he would love everything we're learning in Meat Fabrication (Meat Fab for short). Our wise-cracking chef, Chef K., is of the same meat-loving mentality. Yesterday he sauteed up some green beans to go with all of the protein we had cooked. He bit into one and said "vegetables just don't taste as good as meat." I must say, I have to disagree! I love vegetables and am always more drawn to them than to the meat on my plate, no matter whether they're virtuously steamed or drenched in butter.

I'm certainly not a vegetarian, but I could probably get by as one pretty easily as long as I could eat fish. I believe the term is pesco-vegetarian and I was one, actually, for about three years between sixth and eighth grades. This time period included an entire summer spent in Italy with my family, where I'm sure I missed out on tons of delicious things made with meat. And then I chose to break my vegetarianism one evening at summer camp when the chicken nuggets served at dinner just looked really, really good. But I digress...

In Meat Fab, we'll be cutting up and cooking meat from pretty much every animal. On our first day, we broke down chickens, which have been a staple in my diet ever since that chicken nugget day at camp. We learned how to cut a whole bird into the traditional 8 pieces: breasts, legs, thighs, and wings. To get a little more fancy, Chef K. showed us how to cut airline chicken breasts, which have the clean wing bone sticking up for a more fine-dining-style presentation. We then de-boned the leg and thigh quarters--a lot easier than it sounds--and stuffed them to make little roulades. My group made a tasty stuffing with chunks of baguette (probably made by us last week in Baking & Pastry!), spinach, sundried tomatoes, and goat cheese.

The amount of food prepared in this class really is over-the-top: on chicken day, each student broke down a chicken, so that means we had about 25 whole chickens cut up once we were done. It works out because Meat Fab provides all of the portioned meat for other classes: when we cooked chicken breasts in Skills 2, the Meat Fab class had cut them.

Today, we got into red meat. Chef showed us how to cut all kinds of steaks, and now I actually understand the differences between them. He brought out a huge hunk of meat which turned out to be the short loin of a cow. From that, he cut a few porterhouses, T-bones, and New York strips. We then took top sirloin meat off the bone, mixed it with fat (80:20 ratio of lean meat to fat), and put it through the grinder to make hamburgers.

Our meaty buffet, complete with steaks, burgers, and bacon (to go on the burgers)

We also made some vegetables and steakhouse-style sides to round out this buffet of beef--from the insight above, you probably guessed that I found this to be the most fun. One of my classmates who is a restaurant kitchen vet showed me how to make a killer creamed spinach with bechamel sauce, onions, white wine, and parmesan. Our class also made our own fries, onion rings, and mashed potatoes.

Our creamed spinach cooking

Hand-cut fries seasoned with a spice blend that we threw together...a pinch of chili powder is a great touch.

As if this weren't enough steak for one day, after class Zack and I headed over to Atlanta's new branch of BLT Steak for an opening event. Laurent Tourondel, the New York-based French chef who heads the BLT empire, was in town to unveil his latest outpost. I thought it would just be a few nibbles and schmoozing, but we were seated for a full multi-course lunch. In addition to Tourondel's famous popovers (I got the recipe!), there were multiple cuts of steak and tiny cast-iron pots filled with sides. I loved his Southern-inspired riff on creamed spinach, replacing it with collard greens. There were a few other sides that you wouldn't see at BLT in New York or DC, like grits with crumbles of gorgonzola and spicy creamed corn, and I actually found them to be the best. I'll be skipping dinner tonight!

BLT's ethereal popovers

Creamy collards

I'm so sick of tuna tartare, but this one was really excellent, layered with avocado and topped with crispy shallots.

Naturally, I forgot to take a picture of the steak at BLT Steak! For the record, Zack thought the New York strip was great (very tender and flavorful) and the hangar steak was also well-cooked but that cut is a bit too chewy for his taste.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Baking Wrap-Up

When I bit into the chocolate tart mentioned (and pictured) in my last post, I wished I could Fed-Ex a slice to Wally, Zack's dad. He's my partner in crime when it comes to desserts, especially chocolate ones, and this tart was so simple yet decadent: a thin, buttery crust topped with fudgy dark chocolate and a light coating of silky ganache. Easy to make, too...I might have to whip one up just for Wally the next time they come to visit. It's so dangerously good that if left to our own devices, the two of us could probably polish off the entire tart ourselves!

Yesterday we showcased the baking and pastry skills we've learned over the past three weeks in our practical exam. In four hours, each group had to produce six baguettes, two dozen cookies, an almond tart, and a fully decorated layer cake. It sounded pretty daunting at first...when I explained the practical to my mom, she remarked that it would take her a week to make all of that! In reality, it was pretty straightforward. We actually had a lot of downtime while things were baking and setting up--nothing like the chaos of the Skills 2 "mystery basket" practical.

On Wednesday, we each decorated our own cake to practice for the practical. I toiled over cutting my yellow cake into three layers, applied even layers of buttercream between them, iced the thing, and piped roses on top with a pastry bag and rose tip. My cake looked pretty decent, but this is definitely not my thing--the process really stresses me out. After sweating over my imperfect buttercream roses, I now have a great respect for all of the wedding cake designers that used to harass me to get onto the Washingtonian's wedding guide!

So, needless to say, I was up for doing anything my group needed during the practical as long as I didn't have to go near the cake decorating. Fortuntely, one of my group members had decorated his cake perfectly--and calmly--so he volunteered. I made the pate sucre crust for our tart and assembled it, lining the crust with a layer of raspberry jam, then a thick layer of frangipane (almond) filling, and then decorating it with cherries and almonds in a pretty circular pattern. I loved how it turned out, and I may or may not have brought the leftovers home that evening to share with friends, who loved it too.

Our photogenic cherry-almond tart

The chocolate chip cookies were another story. We thought this would be the simplest task of the practical, but it turns out that the easy recipes are also easiest to mess up. Our cake and tart were nearly perfect, but the simple baguettes and cookies had some flaws. For some reason, none of the groups in our class ended up with great cookies that day.

When we got our batch into the oven, I noticed immediately that they weren't spreading enough. I took them out when they were getting very brown around the edges, but they were still slightly dome-shaped and golden on top. They tasted good--it's hard to make a chocolate chip cookie taste bad unless you burn them--but the cookies that we'd made in class previously had been flatter and less cakey. It could be that the batter was undermixed, or that an ingredient was scaled incorrectly, or that we had to use the convection ovens to bake them because the other ovens were full of breads, cakes, and tarts. Anyway, not thrilled about the cookies, and our baguettes were a bit too dense (from not bench-resting them long enough, probably), but we still felt good about the practical overall and came away with a good score from the chefs.

Our spread for the final practical: iced yellow cake, baguettes, cookies, cherry-almond tart

Next week, I move past bread and cake and on to...meat! My next class is meat fabrication, so I'll be writing about butchering and cooking all different cuts. Hopefully after three weeks of this, I'll know exactly what to do with an untrimmed rack of lamb if I ever get it again in a mystery basket. Seafood is involved too, apparently. Stay tuned.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Sugar Rush

Have I mentioned that dessert is my major weakness? Even if I'm really full, I always need to cleanse my palate with something sweet (even if it's just an apple....but something chocolate is obviously preferred). It drives me crazy that Zack isn't a big dessert person. I always beg him to share one with me at restaurants, and then he ends up eating one bite and leaves the rest to me! He'd rather save room for an extra appetizer and is much more tempted by bad-for-you salty food like french fries and chips. Me, I could easily pass on the fries and often do. But put something chocolatey in front of me and it doesn't stand a chance.

This week in B&P, we've been doing mostly sweet stuff. We're going through the kitchen's supply of sugar like crazy: light brown, dark brown, confectioner's, granulated, molasses, honey...you name it. The resulting sweet treats have been pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.

Though not technically a dessert, muffins are one of my ultimate guilty pleasures. A while ago, I totally ruined them for Zack's mom, Candy, when I let her in on the little secret that muffins (even bran ones) are far from health food--they're really just big cupcakes minus the frosting. I still feel bad about that! Though it's certainly not great to eat what is essentially cake for breakfast on a regular basis, I treat myself to a muffin once in a while--usually when I have to fly somewhere early in the morning and get breakfast at the airport. I always thoroughly enjoy them, but a fresh bakery muffin really is a big step up from the Starbucks variety, as was evidenced by the ones we made in class:

Miles of muffins

Strawberry, Banana-nut, and Blueberry

From there, we moved on to cookies: we've done classic chocolate chip, fudgy double-chocolate, peanut butter, oatmeal-cranberry, almond macaroons, icebox cookies (rolled in a log, a la slice-n-bake), gingersnaps, spritz cookies (those little butter cookies that are often topped with sprinkles and served at teas). As you can imagine, with a batch or more of each kind, the number of cookies coming out of our bakeshop was pretty ridiculous.

Here are our double chocolate cookies waiting to be baked--truly a chocoholic's dream. How much do you want to lick the bowl from that cookie dough?! Not so appropriate in class. Portioning out the cookies with an ice cream scoop produces beautiful results. The cookies bake up round and uniform in size, but still look rustic and "homemade." Below, cookies fresh from the oven.

Over the past few days, we've also worked on a number of pies and tarts in several stages. One day, we made pie dough and pate sucre, a sugar-cookie-like dough used for tarts. The next, we made a bunch of fillings. Yesterday, we baked the shells and filled them--a more complicated process than one would think. Some pie shells are fully baked and then filled once they've cooled (like lemon meringue), others are par-baked and finished in the oven with the filling inside (pecan), and some fillings are baked start-to-finish in the raw pie dough (apple). Finally, today, we got to put on the finishing decorative touches. Check out the spread from Chef H.'s demo:

From left: chocolate tart, pear tart, key lime pie, apricot tart

Now here's our group's effort. Despite my lack of artistic ability, they turned out pretty well! Naturally, when it was time to split up our group's duties, I focused on the chocolate tart. It's a sugar crust filled with a rich dark chocolate batter. I decorated it with a layer of chocolate ganache--made from cream and more dark chocolate--and a pretty swirl of caramel. Then we covered up most of the tart and gave the edge a light dusting of powdered sugar. We'll slice into all of these next week--I hope the chocolate one tastes as good as it looks.



Monday, January 12, 2009

Various Baked Goods


My post-vacation plan to get back to healthy eating has been seriously challenged by all of the delicious carbs we've been baking up in class. I'm amazed by how much we've covered in just over a week: baguettes, danishes, croissants, brioche, bagels, challah, and more. The dessert side of baking--think cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, cream puffs--is still to come. Oy.

I'm proud to say that I now know how to make two delicious breads that date back to my Jewish ancestors. How gorgeous are those bagels? We learned the importance of quickly boiling them before baking--about 1 minute in boiling water on each side--to achieve that crispy, caramelized exterior and chewy texture inside. Today, we tackled challah. Chef showed us how to do different braids, and I got ambitious and went for the six-strand version. Here's how it turned out, pre-baking:


The ends here look a little questionable, but Chef assured me that it would bake up beautifully. Here are our finished products:

How'd they taste? Let's just say it was really hard to limit myself to just a little piece. But challah is health food compared to the laminated doughs we've been working with. We started with danishes and moved on to croissants and then puff pastry. Each recipe calls for more butter than the next. The amount of butter in the puff pastry dough we made today was nothing short of alarming:

See that block in the middle of the dough? That's straight-up butter, 2 pounds, mixed with just a little bit of flour. The dough is wrapped around it like a present and then rolled out several times to create the puff pastry's hundreds of flaky layers.

The wrapped butter pocket:

Now the dough is rolled out and resting overnight in the cooler; we'll bake all kinds of puff pastry treats tomorrow. I'll try to put that block-of-butter image out of my mind when I taste one. Another rich dough that we learned last week was brioche. Brioche is delicious in any form--it makes amazing hamburger buns (they use them at Flip, a new burger joint in Atlanta that I checked out recently), bread pudding, French toast. Now I know why it's so good. You guessed it...butter!

Some of the goods we made with the rich, eggy brioche dough, clockwise from left: galette with pastry cream and cherries, brioche loaf (reminded me of the Parker House rolls at DC's CityZen, perhaps my favorite bread of all time), brioche a tete, and pain au chocolat (made with croissant dough, not brioche).

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Fun with Flour

I've always been told that cooks and bakers are two different species. Cooking on the line is fast-paced and, obviously, hot. It requires improvisation and experienced cooks take pride in never measuring ingredients. In the bakeshop, on the other hand, everything is precisely measured: volume measures like cups and teaspoons won't even do; in Intro to Baking & Pastry, all of our ingredients must be scaled by weight. And baked goods aren't nearly as forgiving as savory dishes. If you screw up a cake batter, you may not even know it until the cake comes out of the oven totally ruined. Though this all sounds stressful, Chef D.'s bakeshop is nice and cool and feels less frenetic than the cuisine kitchens I've been in so far.

This rotation was one of my most anticipated. I love bread and dessert and the smells wafting from the bakeshop were always so enticing as I sweated over sauce pans in Skills 2. My previous baking experience is pretty limited: I make the occasional batch of from-scratch cupcakes and am a pro when it comes to boxed No Pudge brownies. But I figured that my type-A personality might prove to be well-suited to baking--I like the idea of having everything measured just so and following a formula (recipes in the bakeshop are called formulas, because they're all based on ratios). I'm still not sure where I fall in the cooking vs. baking divide, but it's only Day 3, so we'll see how these next three weeks play out.

My group already had our first dough mishap, which gave us a hands-on example of why it's so important to scale everything precisely. On Day 1, we made danish dough, and when we rolled it out yesterday after letting it rest overnight, it was way too moist and sticky. Somehow, we'd gotten the proportions a little bit off. So when we tried to laminate the dough--this is when you fold in copious amounts of butter--it didn't work out too well. The chefs helped us to get it to a decent state, but delicate even layers of dough and butter definitely didn't happen. Still, we were able to salvage the botched dough and make several kinds of danishes from it: sticky buns, "snails", pinwheels, etc. They just didn't puff up quite as perfectly as the ones Chef demoed with the danish dough he'd made himself.

Chef D., a hilarious guy with a strong New Jersey accent and a serious passion for baking, is our lead instructor. His assistant, Chef H., is a former musician who graduated from Julliard. They seem like a great team so far, and hearing Northern accents makes me feel at home. They've been especially great about mistakes, stressing that in the bakeshop that's the only way to learn.

Though the danish experience was frustrating, I haven't lost all confidence in making dough because the baguettes that we made yesterday were awesome. I couldn't believe how beautifully they turned out on our first try. Soft on the inside with a gorgeous, crisp, golden brown crust. Fortunately, we get to make them again next week and then again for our practical, so there will be pictures to come.

For now, here are the hundreds of danishes that our class produced. Once ours were baked, filled, glazed, and iced, the dough crisis was pretty much forgotten.