Thursday, October 4, 2012

Thursday, October 4, 2012

To cap off our busiest of weeks, we spent all day Thursday on pastry part two with Janine Sciarrapa. For the morning demo, Chef made crepes and had each of us come up and try a few ourselves. She brought in her own crepe pans. One was fairly large and the rest were maybe 4” across. To my surprise, I did very well at the whole crepe-making process. I am adding a crepe pan to my birthday/Christmas wish list! Chef took a few of the first crepes and filled them with chestnut puree, then she filled a few more with Nutella. To fill them without damaging the crepe, she folded them over once before spreading on the filling. Then she did a second fold and that was it—delicious little quarters of, well, deliciousness. The rest of the crepes were turned into a pretty little apple cake using a recipe that Chef learned from watching Julia Child on television. Chef recounted her childhood spent watching Julia’s show, and vividly remembers watching her make the apple crepe cake and being determined to make it someday. She now makes it for every semester she teaches at B.U. And it’s a super simple dessert. All you do is layer crepes with sweetened applesauce and crushed nuts and continue until the cake is as high as desired. She then sprinkled a liberal amount of sugar on top and baked it until caramelized. After morning demo, a few of us went back into the kitchen and heated up leftovers from yesterday and the day before. We had a good lunch of the remaining chowder, gnocchi, and Chef Ming’s duck.

In the afternoon, we split into the same teams as the previous day, with each group making a batch of profiteroles, éclairs, and gougeres. My teammate and I divided things up so we would each be responsible for one of the first two items and then we collaborated on the gougeres. I made the éclairs, which consisted of a chocolate pastry cream, pate au choux dough, and ganache. My teammate, Gab, made a vanilla pastry cream and a separate batch of pate au choux for the profiteroles. It was really fun to pipe out the dough into rectangles and see the magic of the oven and the ingredients as they baked into vaguely éclair-shaped pieces. It was even more fun to fill them! I decided to try the “chopstick” approach; I gently poked a chopstick through both ends of the éclair to make small holes. I then used another pastry bag to squeeze chocolate pastry cream gently through both sides. It was kind of messy, but all of the éclairs I tried were filled evenly and tasted delicious.

The gougeres we made were savory and blended with minced bacon and chives. We piped them out in smallish star shapes and they maintained the nice shape throughout the baking process. The finished product was a bit too spicy for my tastes—I’m not sure if my partner put in the amount of cayenne in the recipe or if he did it to taste.