Confection, not Perfection

Good Morning!
Class was hectic and busy last night, so I will jump right into the action. And believe me, nothing is more action intensive than a pastry chef’s kitchen. Especially when you are dealing with making candy. Or as we like to call it in the biz, confections. This week we are concentrating on sticky confections, it seems, and we made Torrone (Italian nougat), Divinities (a nougat like candy/cookie), peanut brittle (a teeth shatteringly delicious treat) and a diluted caramel in preparation for tonight’s dessert (a custardy treat!).
All of these things, like Sunday night’s fudge, have a boiled sugar base. The higher temperature you cook the sugar to, the harder the end result. For example, the peanut brittle is cooked to the hard crack stage- about 300 degrees. It is crunchy and, well, brittle. The nougat and fudge, in comparison, are cooked to lower degrees and are pleasantly chewy. Or at least they should be. If you remember from yesterday’s post, my partner and I scorched out fudge, bringing it over the specified heat. Our fudge, after sitting overnight, was not fudge like at all. It was crumbly. Let this be a lesson learned for all of you. If you are going to listen to your classmate read your horoscope, do so with one eye on your fudge.
In all seriousness, when cooking/baking/candlestick making, you really need to use your eyes, ears, hands and nose just as much as your mouth. Take it from someone who isn’t tasting anything- the other senses are very important. You can see when sugar is boiling too ferociously (I wouldn’t recommend touching this, though Chef does it). You can train your nose to pick up the lightest burning smell, and hear when your confection is crunching when it should be smooth. I did learn a thing or two about being a Leo though, so the whole fudge process wasn’t a total waste.
An important thing to note about class this week is that I’m on sink duty, along with two of my classmates. Normally this isn’t a big deal; every week we switch jobs, from garbage to floors to countertops. But sink duty is normally the worst, and when you mix in boiled sugar and nuts you get a real hard knock of a job. You ordinarily need to stop your work every once in a while to check that things aren’t piling up and quickly wash a pot or two. But boiled sugar hardens in an instant and takes an extreme amount of scrubbing and soaking and very very very hot water. Because everything needs to soak, the sink and its surrounding area becomes covered with dirty pots and equipment. Standing there, washing, is like Sisyphean feat. The load is never ending. After helping my partner prep, I run to the sink and wash a bit. I don’t actually know how to make Divinities, but I know how annoying it is to clean nougat. I would liken it to scrubbing melted laffy taffies.
You might have noticed that I demurely resisted from telling you exactly what we were using the caramel for- I didn’t name tonight’s dessert. This is because I didn’t catch what Chef was saying about the different types of custards (starch-bound, stirred and baked) and what we were to do tonight, over the nuts/boiling water geyser going on in the sink in from of me.
The sink water, which slowly boiled my hands, had pasticcios, almonds and peanuts floating all over. It was a murky brown color for the caramel. It smelled weird. But my classmates and I carried on..and on and on. Unfortunately, we also overflowed the sink, getting water all over the floor. I would like to blame the nuts which clogged it and wouldn’t allow for proper drainage. Others blame the thick nougat which didn’t dissolve in time. Others still blame us for attempting to drain the sink as we were re –filling it with more water.
The last thing we made, dry caramel which we later diluted, burned a finger or two, but soaking it in the very hot dish water helped a bit. I know, this was a whiny post. Rest assured- I’m chipper about the dishes in class. In comparison to my Chef cursing, caramel lamenting, grumbling teammates I seem like I love nothing more than scalding my hands while chipping solidified caramel off of the sides of pans.
- Sob-Story Sarah