Chef Josh (his name is Jocelyn, but apparently Americans can never pronounce it correctly) is our chef and there are 11 students in the class. I am currently in labs from 1 pm to 8 pm with a 15 minute break. We had croissants and pain au chocolate with café for our break yesterday.
We made two cakes in class today, gateau au chocolate and cake agrume (which is a citrus cake). Both were made in small loaf pans and then once they were taken out of the oven we dip them in heavy syrup, which is like simple syrup with an invert sugar added. The syrup is to keep a crust from forming on the outside of the cake, in order for the cake to be a uniform texture throughout. We only tasted the chocolate cake, but it was delicious. It’s a drier, denser crumb, while still being very soft, and it had chopped up almonds and hazelnuts inside. It had a taste like a homemade brownie, but a cake texture. Chef spends a lot of time telling us to watch the consistency of the batter. I know if a batter is really off, but I certainly don’t have the abilities to tell minute differences in batter consistency, so it will be interesting to learn.
Finally we made pate a tartiner, which is an unusual mixture of hazelnut paste, hazelnut praline, cocoa butter, milk powder and a lot of sugar. It tastes sort of life a caramel/butterscotch pudding, but with hazelnuts. I don’t really know how to describe it. Then we made chocolate cups to serve the pate a tartiner in. Oh!!! We have a tempering machine…its heavenly. At only $30,000 euros or so I think it sounds like an excellent Christmas present! Chocolate constantly pours out of the mouth of the machine, and all you do is take what you want and pour it into molds. Then, voila! 10 minutes later or so you can remove your cups and you have perfectly tempered chocolate, shiny and crisp.
Today we are supposed to make bonbons…I have no idea how. Can’t wait!
No comments:
Post a Comment