So uhh… accidentally forget my recipe binder in my locker over our spring break hence the month-long hiatus😳 I have an overwhelming amount of backlogged food porn photos and Paris musings to share with you all, so buckle up!!
Last week of Intensive Pastry @ LCB
Oh how I’ll mourn the 7am-5pm days in the kitchen, losing feeling in my right foot from my chef shoes fitting a little too tight, my old locker buddies who have since graduated and moved onto bigger and better things (AKA J.O.B.s). Funny how I can feel sentimental for ending something that only started 3 months ago, but the breaking of daily routine is always hard - especially when Covid-times removes all other café-related distractions from my days.
In what seems like the blink of an eye, I am more than halfway through the Pastry Diploma program, 2/3rds of the way through, the bottom of the barrel, the end is near. Writing these updates really allows me to reflect and fully digest (lol) the weeks as they flash by, rereading the old recipes and reminiscing on creations of days past (“wow, that was a real piece of sh*t!”). While things like pastry cream and puff pastry come as second-nature to me now, I look back to December 2020 when I couldn’t even bake choco-chip cookies at my house without doubting myself and my culinary abilities. Even if I’m the only living soul that reads these emails, I’ve loved to mark my progress and see how far I’ve come, proving that (as I wrote in my application essay to culinary school):
“Anyone can cook!” - Chef Gusteau
That.being said, I’d like to shift to more of a formal (eww) newsletter style rather than these ultra-personal, very main character updates. “Food Critic” has been by dream job since day 1 (clearly the movie Ratatoullie had a huge impact on me as a child), so I want to have fun with things like recipe-writing, restaurant reviews, and food blogging in general - while still remaining very, very (almost too much so) Chloé.
Week #8: upd8ttteess
The Aperol Spritz Saga: on recipe-writing
Spring Break: on my Paris hitlist
Superior Pastry: tbd…
The first rule of plating a classic French bistro dessert is:
You don’t talk about how to plate a classic French bistro dessert, period.
As per the chefs, plating is something they just can’t teach, it’s in the bloooood. You either got it or you don’t. Seasoned veterans (like the resident Italian pastry chef at the French culinary school) look at the white, oval plate as their blank canvas. Just like the confusedmathlady meme, restuaurant patisserie pros do the mental math to calculate the positioning of each element, color scheme of ingredients, and customer POV to reach maximum overall droolability potential of a dessert.
While there may be no written rules to plating, I picked up on a few unspoken agreements among pastry gods all over on how to make or break a plate.
ODD NUMBERS ONLY: I committed a little booboo on this Baked Alaska by having two orange marmalade “suns” and two orange segments (at least I put the pistachios in threes). Why are humans more appetized by the odd numbers, rather than the evens? This is something we definitely didn’t cover in my Anthropology 101 class last. year. Evolution, man.
MOVE BABY MOVE: every good plate needs moooooveement. It’s like feng shui for your house but instead like… edible? Unlike the odds/evens one, this rule definitely comes more intuitively. Tapped into the ~vibrations~ of this floating island, I used a lil’ baby spoon and some creamy caramel to give this plate some soul (with the added touch of the angled almond slivers).
CLEAN PLATE CLUB: “ahh your plate iz a’cleeeean” - just about the highest praises I’ll get from a chef anytime soon. While this may not look like what one would consider a freshoutofthedishwasher plate, I was able to make every little crumb of caramel and drop of cremeux look intentional. A clean plate is but an artsy mess.
Not a game of croquet, not a croque madame, but a Croquembouche???
Okay… maybe I did live under some kind of rock back in North Carolina, because the croquembouche was *SURPRISE SURPRISE* yet another French tradition I was unfamiliar with. For our final practical class of Intermediate pastry, we were tasked with baking some odd 60 choux pastries, dipping them in flaming hot caramel, and using said flaming hot caramel to assemble a massive tower-like structrue without permanantly mangling our beautiful appendages.
People… eat… this? The croquembouche was explained to us as a traditional dessert at weddings in France. In that case, the choux pastries are filled with some sort of pastry cream and then assembled into the tower to be shared among guests at the party - sounds delicious and fun! Not going to lie, the symbolism as to why we made this as our final dessert of Intermediate is a little lost on me.
However, I suppose the structure of rock-hard, hollow choux pastries served as our introduction to “things made of sugar that you can’t eat” - as joined by this hand-pulled sugar rose we had created the day before. Patisserie truly is an art form (#deep). While I usually prefer to have my cake and eat it too, I am (masochistically) looking forward to more practical classes sweating under heat lamps while making confectionary floral arrangments.
LA FIN! And, with that, I had evolved from bad to not as bad to now halfway decent in the progression of Basic -> Intermediate -> Superior. Before my nearly THREE WEEK spring break, the only thing I had left to conquer was the final exam, the tart creation… which I’ll cover next email. What a cliffhanger!
Until next time,
Chloé
Chloe-love hearing about your experiences! Can’t wait to hear more and see more inspirational photos!