Chapter 13
Honing Our Sweeter Skills (Days 46 to 50)
The final phase of our training program, a few days of making baked
goods, pastries, and sweets, is the dessert end of the menu.
We’re introduced to choux, a simple pastry, but one that’s very
difficult to make. It’s one of the cornerstones of the French pastry
château. The choux is the little round pastry puff that is the base of
many of the decadent concoctions that we all love.
The patisserie in France is one of my favourite destinations. Only in
France could you have a shop that specializes in desserts. Hundreds of
desserts, all lovingly made in the dark of night, freshly displayed each
morning like fashion models on a runway and, when sold, carefully
wrapped and presented to the purchaser with the pride, care, and
attention matched only by Japanese gift-givers.
To learn to make choux is to open the door into that patisserie. Chef
Patrice promises that we’ll all make choux several times on his watch.
It requires a short list of ingredients: water, butter, salt, sugar, flour,
and eggs. Gathering the mise en place is crucial, because steps move
forward at a very demanding and specific pace. If you don’t have
everything ready in advance, your risk of failure rises exponentially.
Even the piping bag has to be set. Double-baking pans are necessary
because of the high heat in the oven.
Chef Patrice walks us through each stage of our preparation and
execution to give us a marker for what we need to accomplish to be
successful. Finally, we pipe the choux onto the baking tins and pop
them into the oven.
My first attempt is successful. Although large and slightly misshapen,
they’re light, empty in the centre, and an inviting brown colour. Choux
pastry must be empty inside. They’re a vessel for carrying goodies.
They must taste perfect in their own right, but they’re produced to be
filled with various concoctions and to become their better known final
transformations – cream puffs, profiteroles, and several other French
celebratory sweets.
Chef demonstrates the fillings for that empty space inside the choux.
First, he shows us how to make crème Chantilly. Basically, it’s whipped
cream with some sugar – simple and easy to make, especially with a
KitchenAid mixer. We also make crème Anglaise and pastry cream,
which are necessary recipes for any chef who makes desserts from
scratch.
We learn to make quick breads. A quick bread uses some combination
of baking soda and/or baking powder but no yeast to provide a
chemical reaction that produces carbon dioxide, a gas that lightens
and aerates any bakery product. Heat enhances and accelerates the
process. These products are characterized by careful measurement
and mixing of ingredients in precise formulas according to strict and
careful procedures.
We make cranberry muffins, cornbread, and sour cherry scones. These
are all quick breads. The cornbread is delightful. We enhance it with
the addition of some hot green peppers left over from our Indian
cooking lessons. Who says we can’t be a bit creative?
Culinary chefs describe pastry-makers as glorified chemists, slavishly
adhering to formulas set down for them. By contrast, these chefs see
themselves as artists, carefully adjusting a myriad of factors to deliver
a perfectly tasting dish that’s unique.
We learn to strictly adhere to recipe instructions in pastry-making and
baking, because failures can’t be tinkered back to life. If it calls for
eggs no allowance for mistakes, wrong measurements, substitute
ingredients, or changes in procedures. Cooking and ingredient
temperatures must be followed exactly. A flop usually goes in the
garbage. In a restaurant, these flops are time-consuming, expensive,
and embarrassing. Keeping a customer waiting while you redo the
dessert doesn’t lead to return customers.
If you do exactly as told, you can make a dessert that will weaken the
knees of grown men. Who knows what a good dessert does to women?
Baking and pastry-making offers some long periods of waiting between
stages of the baking process. Dough must be proofed, buns must rise
and be punched down, and baking times can be long. It allows us to
talk. During one of these breaks, Chef Patrice talks about changing
traditions in cooking. “Few of my students come to this school with
much experience cooking with their family,” he says. “They do not
learn to cook at home at an early age, and not many of them sit down
for family meals anymore.
“We learned to cook and we ate together as a family,” he reminisces.
“We shared meals at home, and we had family events at restaurants
only once in a while. Every celebration involved food and family.”
My remembrances are similar. We all ate at home, and we all ate
together. My mother made almost everything from scratch. She made
bread weekly. Every Friday afternoon, we came home to a house that
smelled like a bakery. Bread was everywhere, cooling and set to be
bagged for the freezer. After making the bread, she usually made a
tray of cinnamon buns. They would still be warm when we came in the
house, and they became our after-school snack. We learned our way
around the family kitchen and learned to cook serviceable meals. By
the time I left home, I could cook pretty well. A few of my student
colleagues knew how to keep from starving, having mostly learned
from their moms along the way.
Baking brought back a flood of memories of learning to cook as a
child. It was reassuring that the lessons learned long ago had stayed
with me, and that those traditions of cooking with friends and family
were now back in vogue.
Adventures in baking continue, and we create dessert after dessert.
We work pastry dough, using pastry shells to make flans, fruit creams,
and other delicacies, including one stuffed with frangipane. Frangipane
is one of those concoctions that only the French could have dreamed
up. It’s a gooey creation of eggs, sugar, flour, and ground almonds
that can be used to fill a cavity in any pastry you wish.
Then we master custards. My favourites on the dessert menu and the
cornerstones of my guest menu for the next decades are laid out
before me. Crème caramel, crème brûlée, pastry creams that fill the
choux, and of course, crème Anglaise – they’re all here. There’s a
world of custards, and I hope to master them all.
We make crème caramel and crème brûlée first (recipes are in the
Appendix). While everything ends well, we have a few near misses.
The simplest things destroy a simple recipe, and mine are some classic
rookie errors. I have to make molten caramelized sugar to pour into a
ramekin – the first step in making crème caramel. It’s simple. Put
some sugar into a saucepan and add water, then cook it until the
water evaporates and the sugar caramelizes and turns a delightful
amber colour. Next, put the saucepan on ice for a moment to arrest
the caramelization process, and pour the caramel sauce into a
ramekin.
I try and fail twice. The first time, I use too little water and stir it with
a wooden spoon. It’s not supposed to be stirred with anything, and it
crystallizes harder than diamonds before it turns amber.
I start over. I wash the saucepan out and remeasure and replace all
the ingredients. Clean saucepan on the stove, I add water and sugar.
All it does is froth. The saucepan isn’t clean enough, and I have
contaminated the sugar solution.
So, I start a third time. I clean the pot thoroughly this time. I add
sugar and water, then heat the sugar solution in the saucepan. For a
moment my culinary future is suspended between survival and abject
failure. I look at the pan, and it’s working! The sugar water
caramelizes nicely, turning golden amber. I rush to cool the pot and
capture the perfect colour, setting it into an ice bath. Oops, I cool it
too much and my caramel hardens. I slowly reheat the pot so as not to
deepen the amber colour or burn the caramel. I finally pour a few
ounces of gorgeous, pure, amber caramelized sugar into the bottom of
our two ramekins.
Not bad for a rookie on the first day of custard school. It takes three
attempts, three times as long, and three times the ingredients, but I
finally have caramel for my crème caramel. Are all my desserts going
to be this cruelly challenging?
At least I don’t cry. Apparently, as in baseball, there’s no crying
allowed in cooking. I don’t swear or yell at my pots, my stove, or my
station mate. I don’t lose it and run screaming from the kitchen. I
don’t panic – completely. Well, okay, a little. It might be a bit
grandiose to quote Rudyard Kipling at this point, keeping my “head
when all about you are losing theirs” . . . blah, blah, blah. Since it isn’t
life-threatening, caramelizing sugar should not be a drama. There’s
something about the kitchen that fuels such meltdowns.
Beside us, Felix and Antonio, another top student, are charging ahead.
They’re a good team. They’ve done both their crème caramel and their
crème brûlée without a hitch and are getting ready to put them in the
oven. They need ours to go in the oven we share, but because of my
do-overs, we’re way behind. We all decide they should go ahead, and
we’ll find another oven.
Felix loads the oven with his completed crème caramel and crème
brûlée. Then he, too, confronts the cruel nature of fate. A splash of
water in the bain-marie, a heated, shallow, water-filled pan that
provides a temperature-controlled bath for cooking the custard, spills
into his crème brûlée as he’s loading it into the oven. We’ve been told
that if water contamination occurs, the crème brûlée will not set. We
must throw it out and start over.
I’m just putting my crème brûlée together when this happens. Felix
has some of his original recipe left over and, combined with mine, we
end up with four ramekins of crème brûlée, enough for both stations.
We’re back in the game. We pop them straight in the oven.
Over the rest of the afternoon, we make several other pastries, cook a
rather elaborate dinner for ourselves, and watch a few demos. Luckily,
we remember to check the crème caramel and crème brûlée in the
oven and find they’re done. They’re removed carefully from the water
bath and put in the fridge.
After dinner, we go back to the kitchen for a demo from Chef Patrice
on how to remove the crème caramel from the ramekin without
breaking it into pieces. Broken crème caramel in a restaurant goes in
the garbage. At home, we
change its name to
pudding and eat it. The
crème brûlée is easier to
complete and much more
fun. It stays in the
ramekin, and we spread a
thin dust of sugar on it,
then use the blowtorch to
caramelize the sugary
surface to make a hot
caramelized crust. This is
the most fun of the
evening.
Chef gives us a moneysaving hint. “If you want to
buy a torch to caramelize
the sugar on your crème
brûlée,” he says, “don’t
buy those stupid little
flambeaus in the kitchen
supply houses. Go to a
hardware store and buy a
good plumber’s propane torch. Get a flame thrower. It works much
better.”
Too late, I’ve already bought one of those silly little candle lighters.
I’m delighted to be sent to a hardware store to buy kitchen supplies,
so I vow to regift the baby torch to an unsuspecting acquaintance.
After we each caramelize our crème brûlée, we get to consume as
much of our custards as we think healthy, then we clean up. What’s
healthy got to do with it? I eat both of mine. They’re both delicious,
and I vow to practise making them until they’re perfect. Of course,
constant practice demands the custards must be consumed, a
necessary consequence of my diligence and desire to learn.
In the hour left, we clean up our mess and put the kitchen back in
perfect shape, because chef releases us only when it’s in perfect
shape. As I walk out into the dark at 8:30 p.m., I feel like I’ve been
spit out of a huge spaceship from another planet. I’m out on the
street, tired yet exhilarated, beat up pretty bad, yet strangely happy
about it all.
I look back at what we accomplished in one day, and I realize how far
we’ve come since our first day of class. We can multitask – we can
prep and cook several recipes at the same time and in sequence. We
work as a team, helping each other through each process, making
results better, building efficiency. We do most of what we’re doing with
more confidence, authority, and certainty. We know when we’ve
screwed up, and we can recover. Meltdowns are not allowed.
I drop off several tarts and seven choux filled with pastry cream for
Kristen and Chris. I’m Mr. Pillsbury whistling “Nothin’ says lovin’ like
somethin’ from the oven” all the way home. Call me sentimental, but it
feels good.
In pastry-making, machines really make sense. I already have my
eyes peeled for my next big acquisition – a KitchenAid mixer. It’s a
real industrial-strength mixer, with a bowl, a powerful motor, and
enough attachments to make bread and pizza dough, grind meat, and
whip meringues. They even come in a wide array of colours to match
your kitchen decor. So far, it looks like one of these will cost more
than my first car, but a serious cook needs professional equipment.
Right?
During our last night in the teaching kitchen with Chef Patrice, we
make ladyfingers for tiramisù. While we’re working, Chef tells us his
favourite story of this delicious Italian dessert. At some point in the
eighties, a tiramisù craze swept through Vancouver like some flu virus.
Every customer wanted it for dessert.
Chef Patrice developed a recipe that he could make consistently in his
restaurant and added it to his dessert menu. “I didn’t like to serve it,”
he says. “It is complicated to make, and the ingredients are
expensive.” But his customers demanded it, and he responded and
served it up.
In the middle of the tiramisù craze, he had a call from a friend who ran
a hotel kitchen. The hotel was facing the same demand from their
customers, and they were looking to secure a supply of tiramisù. They
asked if Chef Patrice could send over a sample of his dessert, then
possibly supply the hotel needs.
When an opportunity to make a lot of money presents itself, such as
Chef’s restaurant supplying a large hotel kitchen with a huge inventory
of an expensive dish, it’s gold nuggets on the ground.
Chef tweaked his recipe to make it easy to prepare in large volume,
sent several samples over, and waited. None were quite what the hotel
chef wanted. This went on for a few weeks, with none of his
submissions quite hitting the target.
In the meantime, a local frozen food supplier had jumped on the
tiramisù bandwagon, too. The supplier had called and offered to supply
Chef Patrice with his frozen concoction. In exasperation, Chef ordered
some, and when it was delivered, he ripped the label off the frozen
factory product, repackaged it as his own, and sent it off to the hotel.
They were delighted! Could he supply the quantities they needed?
Could he name a price? “Yes, yes, no problem,” he said. A deal was
struck. Chef then called the frozen tiramisù fellow and cut a deal.
“Send me all you have.” he said. “My customers love it.”
He even negotiated a lower price based on the high volume he
ordered. “It was perfect,” he says. “The frozen food man sent the
tiramisù over with no need for logos on the boxes, so I got a better
price. I then put my restaurant logo on the boxes and shipped them to
the new customer. No one was the wiser, and everyone made money.
“I did very well with that tiramisù. Every chef has to be a businessman
first,” Chef suggests.