Week 1: Fruits, meringues and forgetfulness
First week of school done! I survived, just about. Thankfully I don’t get marked this week, or I would not be star baker, that’s for sure…
This week was mostly about getting us used to the kitchen and how our schooling is going to work, as well as getting us used to our knife kits and all the bits of equipment we will need to use. Oh, and making sure we know not to set fire to thins, health and safety is always fun!
Our first practical session was just spent making sugar syrups, fruit salads and doing “fancy cuts”. I got a bit too into the fancy cuts. I enjoyed myself far too much. Kinda wanted to just keep cutting fruit into pretty shapes for the rest of the day.
The sugar syrups were pretty standard, there wasn’t anything particularly exciting to photograph there, but we did have to do the hand test for the different stages of sugar cooking. The hand test is used to determine whether your sugar is at a soft ball stage, hard ball, crack, hard crack, etc etc. So you have your sugar syrup reducing down, getting hotter and hotter, and what you do is put your hand in an ice bath, then in the POT OF BOILING SUGAR SYRUP, pinch and put your hand back in the ice bath. Then if you can roll the sugar you pinched into a ball or crack it you know what stage you are at. We honestly could not believe that we had to do this when the chef demoed it, but turns out, not actually that bad. Still, gonna stick to the thermometer for now…
My fruit salad and fancy cuts were rated “good and also good” by the chef, so that’s something I guess.
Fancy cuts? Yes please.
The next day we did meringues, crème patissiere (pastry cream) and its various uses, such as crème diplomat or crème mousseline. The practical sessions mean that sometimes you have to stop what you are doing and gather around in a big group to listen to what the chef has to say. Things were going pretty ok up until halfway through making my creme pat, I went to go listen to the chef, came back and started trying to thicken it. Turns out, completely forgot to add the flour. Not a great start. Thankfully the chef helped me to the save it, but still. Need to make sure that I know exactly what I’m doing in future and not let myself get distracted…
The chef’s meringues and creams from the demo. Definitely not mine. Mine were not this perfect.
All in all though, I really enjoyed my first week at Le Cordon Bleu. I’m a little nervous about it still, but I think that it’s just going to keep getting better. Plus I am extremely loving the uniform look, kinda want to wear it all the time. Do you think people would look at me weird in the street?
Gonna post a weekly update on what I’m doing at patisserie school from now on I think, but won’t be posting the recipes that we make in class for the most part. Might throw in some fun hints and tips that they give us though. Is that ok? Would you be at all interested in that? Let me know!