Thursday 21 April 2011

A good choice

This week has been all about tackling one of my greatest fears in the kitchen......pastry. I wouldn't say pastry scares me but until this week I've never used flour except to thicken sauces and batter fish. I'd never made a dough in my life, pastry was something I stayed away from at all costs and I don't really know why, it's quite strange really. Suffice to say, this week I didn't operate in the kitchen with as much confidence as usual as we confronted various pastries from puff pastry to sweet pastry.

Below is a random selection of photos of some of the things we cooked. Unfortunately I keep forgetting to take photos of most of my finished products before I present them to the Chef and he/she dissects it completely and I subsequently eat, sorry!

Quiche Lorraine


Crepes with lemon syrup (I folded this one inside out, oops!)

Our puff pastries before being chilled over night

Everyone in action. I'm in there mixing a roux. We were only using two of the five hot plates to keep the kitchen as cold as possible for pastry.

What have I learnt this week? Some basic and some not so basic pastries used commonly in cuisine. 

I also spectacularly (at times) reaffirmed the fact that I'm not destined to bake cakes and desserts, and I made the right decision to focus solely on cuisine and not on patisserie. Evidently making pastry is not like cooking anything else, one cannot throw ingredients together to fix a mistake or get a desired taste. With pastry everything must adhere to a strict formula and if it doesn't it'll spectacularly fail...

Today we had a lecture on cheese from a seriously passionate cheese guy. We tried around 10 cheeses including some seriously noxious varieties which I really enjoyed while he made cheese from scratch. Cheese making really is fascinating, I can see how some people are fanatical about cheese like others are about nice wine and old whisky. I'd definitely like to learn more in the future.

Finally to end, a photo of the tray of ingredients some of the superior cuisine students were using in one of the kitchens.

Thats right, live lobster and quail. I really want to find out what they were cooking, what an interesting combination.

I'm really loving this school, I'm learning so much at such a furious pace. I can't wait to progress further and make friends with ingredients above!

3 comments:

  1. Those are clearly not lobsters, lobsters are red!
    Did you get to make any special Easter dishes?

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  2. Hey Adam, Just had a catch up on all the blogs. Awesome!!

    I love the photos and your beard guard thing is definitely high fashion... ;)

    If you're comfortable it'd be cool to post this link on Sabato's wall- kiwi boy tackling le cordon bleu etc etc

    Off to Soph's 22nd now, hope you're having a great Easter weekend!

    x

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  3. Hey Helen, yes definitely that'd be cool. Have fun at Sophs.

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