puff pastry

Chef Mark's Advanced Baking & Pastry class is very structured, not unlike the beginning pastry experience I had with him first semester. Every one or two weeks we explore a different topic: first pâte à choux (which went undocumented for lack of camera), then puff pastry.

It doesn't surprise me that puff pastry is one of the hardest things to get right - puff pastry was always one of my favorites because the puff just seemed so magical. And previous I had been limited only to the commercially-made kind in the freezer section, which, as I learned, is made with shortening and contains none of the real butter taste of real puff pastry.

Making the dough is similar to making the croissant/danish dough from first semester. There's vocabulary that's particular to puff pastry, however. There's the dough part (mostly flour, some butter) called détrempe, and there's the butter part (mostly butter, some flour) called beurrage, and the combination for the finished dough package is called a paton. Here's me making détrempe and looking very happy because I love kneading things:



Here's chef sandwiching the beurrage between the détrempe.



After that the edges are sealed to lock in the butter (there's a number of ways to do this but the sandwich method is the simplest).



This is sheeted long and folded in four for a total of four times (with a half hour rest between each sheeting and folding). Which means that by the time it's done, the puff pastry dough has 512 layers (2 original layers in the sandwich x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4). Butter between each of those layers means that when the dough is baked, butter melts and generate steam (due to high heat, which is why puff has to be baked at over 400 degrees), which leavens the dough naturally and allows it to puff so much.



Chef taught us to many different shapes to make with our dough. He also made a pithivier cake, which is just like the French gallette des rois (king cake) I had in Paris.



Some of the shapes Marianne and I ended up making were in honor of Valentine's Day. Others were just because I liked them (palmiers, which involve puff pastry dough coated with sugar on both sides, the folded up and cut into thin sections). I added cinnamon to the sugar though, as a variation.



The finished product was a little flat. Our beurrage had been too soft, as it oozed out of different spots each time we sheeted the dough. Chef was right, puff is one of the hardest things to make.

arroz con pollo special

With the little prep time we had, the special on some days were really simple. Arroz con pollo (chicken with rice), for example, was just a re-plating of ingredients we already had in our mise-en-place.

Mexican rice, corn (leftover from elote), jalepeños, grilled chicken, chipotle mayo. Here's the sample plate we prepared for display next to the cashiers:



This is how the actual order looked:



And here are the samples I prepared so people could try:

elote special!

Between McKenna and I we had to come up with one special every day. My idea was to do grilled Mexican corn, or elote. My first experience with this dish was at Habana Outpost in Brooklyn. They have an outdoor patio where food is served out of a truck. The corn wasn't just freshly grilled, it was topped with cotija (crumbly white) cheese, chili powder and lime. I fell in love with the crunchy creamy spicy tangy sweet savoriness of it and wanted to replicate it.

First grilling the corn:



Then I smothered the corn in a mayonnaise mixture (with cayenne, salt and lime juice - exact measurements here), sprinkled queso fresco over it (cotija wasn't available for order) and garnished with cilantro and lime wedges.



My sources say it tasted pretty good. I liked the mayonnaise mixture myself - could probably use it on all manner of fried foods.

Since I grilled 24 ears and we only sold 10, we cut the kernels and used them up for specials the next day - as garnish for our chorizo and beef nachos. Yum!

burrito station

After two weeks of staring at this (and repetitively ladling and occasionally burning my hand) I was very glad to switch into doing some actual food assemblage.



My next station assignment was the sandwich/nacho station in the Latin Quarter, the themed quick-service outlet we have next to the cafeteria that I did prep for last semester. The sandwich/nacho station is merged with burrito station, which meant that McKenna was my partner in crime. Here she is with our daily batch of guacamole. Gangster.



I don't know why but guacamole used to be something we ordered pre-made. Not that I'm all for pre-made stuff, but we go through so much a day it's extremely helpful to have it pre-made. That and we never have time to prep - that's the secret of third semester: you have to find time outside of class to prep.

Thankfully though, most of our station's stuff is prepped by second semester students. We just have to make sure to order everything we need (and enough of it) the day before. Here's the hot stuff:



And the cold stuff:



McKenna and I learned how to make each other's items so we could cover for each other as orders came in, as sometimes they come in really fast. Within a two-hour window we make about 50 burritos, 20-30 nachos and 10 sandwiches. And this excludes our specials...



Don't worry, I took this picture when it wasn't busy :)

a year in

I recently read a blog post about prioritizing positive energy in one's life. I concurred wholeheartedly because that's what led me on this whole life path. I was at an energy-sucking job, so to take my life back I decided to invest completely in an activity that had a proven record of focusing and exciting me (cooking).

Sadly, this third semester hasn't involved much of that. As my degree will be in Culinary Arts & Hospitality Management, this semester is focused on the hospitality side of things, which for now means that I am serving people in the cafeteria. More specifically, I am ladling out the soups I used to make as a second semester student.

Gone are the tight-fitting white commis caps and checkered pants. They were never very fashionable, not like the baseball caps and black pants I now outfit myself in every day, but funny how I long to be wearing them again, and again straining myself to carry hotel pans and stockpots and sweating next to the steam kettle.

It's not that I'm not cooking at all. I'm taking two advanced classes - Advanced Baking & Pastry, and Garde Manger (cold foods). So far in Garde Manger we've only been watching Chef do demos, which is nice and all - but it wasn't until I ducked out of class to sheet some puff pastry dough for Advanced Baking did I feel some of that - the intense task absorption that to me is an oasis of calm.

I have to find more of that, or else I'm going to lose it. Purpose, life. What I spent the last year holding on to.