Tanta Robina

Time to start distilling some culinary wisdom from my first three months in school. Here I pass onto you a few of my discoveries.

• Whole wheat dinner rolls freeze and reheat extremely well.
• So do Danish and croissants.
• I can freeze food even after it's been licked by Pipie. If I don't have antibodies by now, I shouldn't be living with cats anyway.
• Beignets are not bignè.

• I hate the American measuring system even more than I thought I did. If NASA scientits couldn't get conversions right, why should I bother? BTW, may I interest Mr. Gore to propose a 6-month conversion-to-metric plan in addition to his other inconvenient proposal?
• Laminated dough does not, repeat NOT, like LA summer weather in a baking kitchen with 32 people, several deck ovens, convection ovens, stoves and proofing boxes, and broken air conditioning.
• You can go in the walk-in refrigerator and scream without anyone in class hearing you.
• After a few hours in a hot kitchen trying to roll laminated dough while your butter is oozing every which way, screaming in the walk-in can be a Very Good Thing (TM).
• I don't like rye bread.
• There are always at least three ways to do anything.
• There are three ways to incorporate a butter block into a dough (or a beurrage into a détrempe). En pointe and clover leaf work best if you are in a hurry, but if you need to relieve tension, go for the rolling pin method (the proper term escapes me) and whack the hell out of your butter block.

• Some people have never heard of Battlestar Galactica.
• Most students and many instructors smoke.
• Half the people at school have visible tattoos.
• Dental floss is your friend. My non-cinnamon rolls had the best cuts in class, cuz everyone else used butcher's twine to cut theirs. I knew all the flossing would do me good in the end.
• Read the recipe.
• Read the recipe again.
• Read the re.ci.pe. "3oz eggs" does not mean 3 eggs.

Today I baked my first croissants and proudly brought them home in my new caddy, acquired for the occasion. Forget that they are not perfect – far from it – but they are my first croissants. It's like the first kiss; you can only have that once. So, regardless of the actual results, they are special.

All my boys were duly impressed, and two of them (Ben and Kelvin) expressed their admiration in gentlemanly fashion.

Pipie… well, he just can't contain himself when it comes to food.

Feigning disinterest

We all knew that wouldn't last long

Considering his options

Sniffing the goods

Getting too close before being told off… for all of three seconds.

But Pipie's got the fastest tongue west of the Mississippi. Can you see the pink blur between his face and the croissant?

Not perfectly round, but I rather like the rugged look of my very first pizza.

My focaccia dough trying to explode after I left it too long in the proofing box.

I am happy to report that there were no casualties. In fact the focaccia turned out okay, a bit too poofy but crusty on the outside, moist on the inside, and with good flavor.

The whole wheat pitas are thicker than I am used to and different in texture because of the whole wheat flour in the mix. Tomorrow we'll try them with the hummus made by chef in class today. After eating pizza, focaccia and gelato tonight, we didn't have any room for more bread.

We made gelato alla crema from yet another recipe. I think this is our fourth batch, every time from a different recipe. Our excuse this time was that tomorrow is Ben's birthday and we had no ice-cream left in the freezer and clearly you can't have a birthday without gelato. This is our most successful batch so far, from an Italian book that my mother mailed us a few days ago. The next thing from that book – Ice Dream – will be sorbetto al vino rosso e fragole (red wine and strawberry sorbet). Doesn't that sound divine?

More than half of the focaccia ended up at our next-door neighbors' house, because willpower alone is not enough to fit more food in the fridge.
The leftover focaccia is now in the microwave oven, where it should be safe from you-know-who until tomorrow.

and the living is easy… or at least easier than last term. In spite of having two classes instead of one (last term I didn't have to take any academics) and in spite of those classes being on two campuses, having no convenient parking available at either location, no A/C in our old car while temperatures are in the nineties and hundreds, me driving in the middle of the day, etc.… in spite of all that, I am enjoying my first week in Baking more than I had expected.

Today's production

And the math class doesn't seem too bad either. Granted, it's early days so I may have to review my assessment, but things are looking good and our fridge and freezer are overflowing with baked goodies.

Challah

This term is all about baking bread and this is a summary of my first week in Baking & Pastries 1.

• Monday: made French bread dough (overnight fermentation)
• Tuesday:
  • baked baguettes + épi with the French bread dough
  • Made whole wheat dinner rolls
• Wednesday:
  • Made Pan de mie and Challah
  • Made brioche dough (overnight fermentation)
  • Made yogurt starter for sourdough bread next week
• Thursday:
  • Baked brioches à tête and Nanterre loaf from brioche dough
  • Made Amish style soft pretzels
  • Made bagels
  • Made pizza dough for tomorrow
• Friday:
  • Will bake pizza
  • Will make focaccia
  • Will make whole wheat pita

Baguette and épi

There's no more room in the freezer and we are having breakfast for dinner. Tonight we had a rather strange dinner with pretzels, bagels and brioches, followed by Ben's latest sorbet creation. We started with lemon-vodka sorbet last week and now we are having lemon/lime sorbet with tequila, à la margarita. Hey, we like Mexican food and it's informing our experiments. If you spot typos in this post, blame it on the tequila. :)

Pain de mie

Did I mention that the whole household is enjoying this baking adventure? Tuesday night Pipie was sitting on the kitchen counter with his face covered in flour. He had gotten to the bag with the baguettes – sprinkled with a dry wash of pastry flour – but I was too tired to run for the camera.

Finals are over and school is on summer break, a whole week off before my next classes: Baking and Pastries 1 and Math 202.

I really needed a few days without deadlines after the previous two weeks, what with the dental work, massive doses of antibiotics (ten days of unpleasant side effects aggravated by the ban of alcohol), and finals. And if that wasn't enough stress, my liquid/soft diet has to go on for a month. How come they didn't tell me that *before* the surgery? But all's well that ends well; I am back to my glass of red wine with dinner and enjoying being lazy. I had had unrealistic expectations of myself in terms of all that I would achieve this week, but it's okay to shift to a slower gear every now and then.

I'm learning from the master.

So, what's going on chez tantarobina? You mean, beside eating gelato and crème brûlée?

For starters, last week I received a care package from my mother – the first food package ever since I've been in California – containing a bottle of excellent olive oil and one of aceto balsamico tradizionale, the real thing. The combination has prompted a renewed interest in mixed salads and we've been having quick summer lunches with just mixed lettuce, heirloom tomatoes, various cheeses, bread and red wine. And really, if I don't touch the stove for another few days, I won't miss hot food. If you've never had good balsamic vinegar, you should add it to the list of things to do before you kick the bucket, along with eating white truffles, visiting Portugal, buy a winery, and all that.

Other than catching up on some non-school stuff and getting back to a web development project of our own (as opposed to work for hire) that's been neglected for too long, things have been pretty quiet around here. Fortunately, tomorrow we'll have a couple of guests and that'll liven things up.

Oh wait… we've had some interesting visitors already!

A mama raccoon and her two babies spent almost twenty minutes outside our French windows downstairs feeding on loquats fallen from a tree, playing with each other and having a grooming session.

Raccoons are my favorite animals around here and it's always a treat to see them, especially at such an uncharacteristic time.

On the culinary front, I've been researching the perfect croissant recipe. Croissants are one of my weaknesses and I have to learn how to make them. Baking & Pastries 1 will include a croissant making day, and I sure hope they taste better than those in the school café. The recipe on the school's handouts includes lemon juice, an ingredient not mentioned in other recipes I've come across, including two versions of the famous Pierre Hermé croissants. Anyone has insider information or opinions on that?

Given that Pierre Hermé's croissants have been decreed the best in Paris, I am inclined to go with his recommendations… as soon as it's less hot and I can face the intense process involved in making those little love handle builders, that is.

One chef's sole vin blanc

Last Tuesday I went to school for two shifts in a row, to make up for the time I was going to miss on Wednesday. Our program includes three shifts: schedule A, B and C, so if you miss a class you can make up by going to a different schedule. In my case, I wasn't really making up because I missed the Wednesday dishes and got to cook the Tuesday dishes twice instead, but by doing so I wasn't penalized from the point of view of grading. Me caring about grades may surprise you, but without a good GPA I won't be eligible for an international externship, which is what I would like to do next spring, after I am done with all my classes.

Another chef's sole vin blanc

Schedule B – the only sane choice for me – goes from noon to 5PM (actually it ends up being six hours, but still manageable). Schedule A and C fall in the insane realm: 6AM-11AM and 6PM-11PM, times where I cannot be trusted to be conscious enough to handle sharp knives and hot burners.

So, Tuesday I was running around the lab like a headless chicken for eleven hours straight, not an experience I care to repeat. Sleepiness and feet+back pain aside, it was extremely interesting to see how differently two chefs can run their ship and cook the same dishes.

We used this Robo-Coop to make salmon mousse

and we passed it through this sieve, called "tamis"

Sole paupiettes with skewers

and without

The morning lab has only one class with about ten students, while our lab includes two classes for a total of 32 students; that alone causes logistic differences in prep and cleaning routines. We clean individually as we go and work as a team only after we have presented our dishes. In schedule A, students drop dirty items in the sinks and when those are full, they all pitch in to wash and put away pots and pans. That system would not work in a class our size.

The really interesting part, though, was watching two demos and cooking the dishes twice. Our dishes for the day were Sole Vin Blanc and Shrimp Gumbo.

My morning gumbo

My afternoon gumbo

In the course of the day I learned:

• two ways to gut a flat fish
• two ways to clean a shrimp
• two ways to make paupiettes
• two ways to plate the dishes

Other differences that day were:

• one chef made the salmon mousseline for us, while the other had us prepare it
• in one class we made fish fumet in groups of 5-6 students, in the other we made it individually

As luck has it, shrimp gumbo is one of the dishes I have to cook for my finals. We pulled menus yesterday and today we prepped for the next two days of cooking.

Tomorrow my dishes will be:

• French onion soup
• Grilled Mahi-mahi, sautéed vegetables, ginger-lime beurre blanc and (maybe) rice pilaf
• Poached salmon fillet, steamed broccoli, sauce Béarnaise and gaufrette potatoes

Wish me luck!

Chuck, rib, loin, round…

Shoulder, rack, loin, leg…

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…

Prime, choice, select, standard, utility…

Prime, choice, good, standard, utility…

Prime, choice, good, utility, cull…

Meat terminology alone makes me want to turn vegetarian.
Why is a cow's shoulder called chuck, a veal's shoulder a shoulder and a pig's shoulder a Boston butt? But the butt is called ham or leg, of course. And Monsieur le porc has another shoulder apparently, called picnic shoulder.

Meat grades are even worse: the same term means different things when applied to different animals. To make things more interesting still, veal is graded for quality but not yield, and pork grading is combined for yield and quality. Do you see why I am going crazy studying for finals?

And what to say about cooking temperatures for various degrees of doneness? The Gisslen says one thing; one set of school handouts another, and another handout gives yet different temperatures. I should just take the day off.

At least my notebook is finished and this term I have a top notch notebook, if I can say so myself.

Roasted lamb chops

This time I have photos and notes for all the recipes and various fabrication techniques. Talking about shoulders… pat, pat.

Fabricating a flat fish

My first gnocchi

Well, this was a good break but I do have to get back to study. In addition to all the material from this term, I have to go over all the stuff from Intro 1.

Stay cool out there, wherever you are. Our old house is melting and we are keeping our fingers crossed that the neighborhood's A/C units don't cause a black-out.