Salt Crust

I got all excited today because I thought we were going to make an ACTUAL salt crust around our lamb saddles today. You know the kind I'm talking about with the sea salt and the tap tap tap to get your deliciously briny perfectly cooked piece of meat out?....no. What it WAS was a dough with a great ratio of coarse salt in it...so it was a faux salt crust. A salt crust, like a pie crust, not a salt crust like a crust made out of salt. Get it? It was kind of lost in translation I think.

Basically we took this lamb loin, trimmed it down, made a parsley/garlic/breadcrumb/butter mixture on top, wrapped that bad boy in the faux salt crust, baked it, cut it out, and served it with the inedible crust as decoration. No tap tap tap. Heartbreaking.

Believe it or not but this was the LAST class in basic. Yowza. I knew the time would fly, but this was insane. We already did 30 lessons...amazing. So today was totally chill and relaxed and we had time to cut up extra protein to practice...and I sliced my finger up a bit with my deboning knife just to spice things up.

Here's the picture of the bottom of the faux salt crust after sawing it open to retrieve the lamb.

The Patron Saint of Pastry

St. Honore....the patron saint of pastry chefs...this cake is named for him or her...I have no idea. This is the weirdest cake ever. From the bottom to the top it is pie crust, choux pastry ring, little choux pastry balls filled with chibouste cream (pastry cream + gelatin+ Italian meringue) then dipped in caramel on both sides, stuck to the choux pastry ring, then the whole thing is filled with the remaining chibouste cream. Strange, no? I mean, why the pie crust? It isn't the pate sucree either, it's the pate brisee...which you use to make things like quiche....totally bizarre. And no, it's not a salty sweet thing, because the french don't do that. The pate brisee isn't salty enough either.

Let's the get the bragging out of the way now. The chef said I had perfect chibouste cream, that my italian meringue was the best he'd seen me do, and that my little choux pastry balls were so perfectly piped that they looked like they came from a machine. That's money folks. Money. Unfortunately I had to follow a mess on the spun sugar station so my sugar decoration is filled with her globs of sugar...when everyone else got a clean whisk to work with...Sabotage (as they like to say) so it's not as light and airy and angel hair-like as it could have been. But all in all, a great day. They say it's the hardest cake in basic pastry. Ain't no thang.

Monday's Veal Chop

Ah the veal chop...sooo good, so easy. I rocked it. Mine was so good, though slightly underdone (I didn't think so...) My sauce was AWESOME. A lot of people in my class didn't add enough cream to their sauce (it WAS a cream sauce) and had this goopy brown slime on their plate...mine was magical.

As you can see, I made the tiny hat for the bone, yet again. whoopee.

Those peas are great too, bacon and onions in them...yum. The demo chef said to drain the peas, and serve the "sauce" on the side...when the practical chef said our peas were all too dry...we had a good laugh over the ludicrousness (ludicocrity?) of that idea and I made a crack about "pea sauce."

"It's a Hen, not a Drag Queen"

That's what the chef tells you when you put too much green garnish in your cornish game hen's cavity....of course he didn't say that to me, as you can see, my hen is tastefully dressed, but he did say it to a friend of mine, which made us laugh.

This is the cornish game hen, roasted, and served on a bread "coffin" filled with liver farce (like pate). If you look at the closeup you can see it better....served with a side of pommes pailles, which is basically a fried potato of the julienne size. It was a good day, though my chicken was mildly underdone due to lack of searing on the leg side, but otherwise it was good. I happened to have a lot of fun today, so that must count for something.

Our exams are coming up in about a week or so, so this weekend will be spent studying and practicing things that need work...so if some of you could come and eat the things I need to make, I'd really appreciate it.

Pave du Roy

Today in pastry we made the Pave du Roy...which is a chocolate "biscuit" as they call it. It's really a thin thin sponge kind of cake spread onto a baking tray to bake, if that helps you visualize at all. The biscuit is then cut into three, imbibed with rum simple syrup (barf) and then layered with ganache that we have perfectly cooled to the right consistency. It's then covered in ganache and you run your bread knife over it to make a pretty pattern. Of course I blew it on the top...my cake wasn't flat because of how it cooled on the rack...so when I ran my bread knife over it wasn't so good...then I went back over the spot that got missed and, well...you can see what happened. Everything else was perfect though! And yes, in case the eagle-eyed among you are wondering, those are sprinkles around the edge...jimmies.

My chocolate decoration was awesome...some of it too thin (and thin is hard to do). Check that out, it's whisker thin! That's a shot of it from the side and you can barely see it. (nice camera, no?) I had to use my thicker ones on the cake because you have to be able to poke it into the cake. The chef tempered the chocolate for us (that's how it gets so shiny).

When we get to intermediate we have to temper our own. And it's not easy. He showed us how to do it today, but he did it for us and then we just had to use it to make our decoration, which involved spreading it on acetate, skoring it and letting it cool between baking sheets in the fridge so it doesn't curl. The chocolate deco part is the most fun and new to me, which is why it makes me the most nervous to do...but it is what I came here to learn! Upon closer inspection...it would appear that some water was snaking its way onto my chocolate at the end there. But here's a picture of the leftover shards, which get melted back down.

Hare in my Food

Monday was a rabbit stew. Things I learned: 1- I don't think that rabbits have a bone that connects their front legs to their bodies. Seriously. Rabbit is surprisingly easy to take apart with no elbow grease needed...but it's not as good as it is easy....which brings me to 2- I don't like rabbit that much....Well that's not fair. I've had rabbit before and liked it, but this red wine stew business....with a white meat? Not my thing. PS - I handmade those noodles. And they were good.

Also, note the little rack of rabbit here...to give you perspective on how tiny that little frenched rack is, that brown thing to the right of it is a QUARTER mushroom....