Piping and Griping

Good Morning!
When we got to class last night, first thing we did was rehash Monday night’s field trip- I love debriefing. We discussed the staff working at each place, the inflated prices, and, of course, the product. Oh, the euphoria of describing the chocolate brioche from Amy’s Bread and the macarons from La Maison Du Chocolat. I nodded earnestly to all comments-even the contradicting ones, wanting to fit in. Also, I didn’t have enough energy to speak for most of last night’s class, so I generally just nodded a lot.
In fact, on three separate occasions classmates called me out on this and called me a Zombie, or just stared at me quizzically waiting for me to notice (which took a good fifteen minutes. This elicited even more good natured teasing. ) During our debriefing, we sampled the gelees and panna cotta from Sunday’s class. The gelee didn’t look like anything special (and my classmates told me I want missing much). They are like fancy flavored Jellos. The panna cotta, however, looked fantastic. Like a mix between jello, pudding and mousse. A trifecta of textures. The milk chocolate flavor in particular looked amazing- note to self, figure out how to kosher-fy panna cotta.
Chef showed us how to quickly ID three different types of flour- all purpose, cake flour and whole wheat. The two fast ways to tell are color and how easily they cake when you squeeze a handful in your palm. Cake flour binds easily into a single clump under the pressure of your fist. Regular is a bit less uniform and breaks easily and whole wheat barely forms a clump at all. Next week we are going to go more in depth with the different types of flour, but Chef rushed the lesson a bit so that we could move on to Nut identifications and Italian butter cream making. And one and a half hours of piping said butter cream. I’ll get to that.
Much like our dairy product and fruit IDs, Chef laid out dozens of types of nuts (whole, ground, cooked and raw) into unmarked and unlabeled cups and had us all sample them and then describe them. Boiled chestnuts were described as “putting an old man in my mouth” and raw tapioca pearls as “chewing on plastic beads”. I kno, we use such specialized culinary terms. If you want me to decode these terms later, let me know.
We then made our Italian butter cream for the second time. Remember, this starts with an Italian meringue base (Hot sugar at the soft ball stage slowly added to beaten egg whites at the soft peak stage) that has been cooled. Pounds (literally) of butter are added until everything is combined into a smooth, fluffy, artery clogging butter cream. Then Chef gave us a demo on how to fill a pastry bag and pipe out simple shells, roses, hearts and fleur de lis. He makes it look so easy, with a flick of the wrist and a quick squeeze he pipes out so many roses I nearly ask him to do the flowers for my wedding. Then we try. From eight untill 9:45 we pipe. After the first hour, my classmates are feeling mutinous. It is hot in the kitchen and the butter cream is melting and our hands are cramping and we feel greasy and there is FOURTY FIVE MINUTES MORE OF DOING THE SAME THING.
I am happy to report that I am a natural at shells, but my roses leave much to be desired. To an untrained eye, they look great. This is why I triumphantly called Chef over to see after a half hour of practice. Unfortunately, Chef has a very well trained eye, and pointed out three things wrong with my roses. After a lot more(pipe onto parchment paper until bag runs out, scrape your lovely work back into bowl and refill your bag. Repeat endlessly) my roses were marginally better. Chef came over again and told me I had the hand motions right, but I am not consistent. “You will have to pipe a thousand or so more until you have perfected it and can make a perfect rosette every time”. I actually smiled and started to laugh at his obvious exaggeration. He wasn’t joking.
- "I wanna panna cotta" Baer