Week 16: Sure to rise

While I am a pretty good baker overall - and modest(!) with it - bread has never been my strength. It just never seems to do what it should.  Indeed, nearly 40 years ago I became permanently traumatised by the mirth of my sister-in-law-to-be as she scorned my feeble efforts.  Unless I use a breadmaker (which is obviously cheating) my loaves tend to have the appearance of small windowless buildings, so this week I look forward to mastering the mysteries of yeast products.  Following the long weekend, we commence our school week on Tuesday with basic bread rolls, basic sweet buns, doughnuts and cream buns and Hot Cross Buns - more on those later.  We use fresh yeast, which I haven't used before as I just buy the dried stuff from the supermarket.  Fresh yeast is easy to use but doesn't keep long so probably only good if you are going to make yeast products very regularly.

The basic bread dough and bread roll shaping passes without incident.  We scale the dough to ensure the even size and weight of each roll.  Using the basic sweet bun dough we make doughnuts and cream buns.  The hunter gatherer is gutted that we make these early in the week and that they will be given away rather than carried home on Friday - my ex work colleagues are the happy recipients.  To make the doughnuts we mould the dough around a spoonful of  raspberry jam.  Into the deep fryer they go, then - contain yourselves..... we roll them in in cinnamon sugar.  Yum - deep fried dough and sugar.
 

To make the cream buns we roll them out and shape them, and give them a little sugar wash when they come out of the oven.  When they are cool, we cut a slit in the top and plop in a dollop of raspberry jam and pipe in Chantilly cream (this is just whipped cream with a little icing sugar added).  Just like the ones Billy Bunter eats.  Yum - baked dough, sugar AND fat!

The Hot Cross Buns expose a cultural rift.  This day I am sharing the bench with our lovely overseas student from Kenya, and he makes the dough.  I don't take a lot of notice as I am busy making another mix, but when I look at his dough which he has set aside to prove, it looks rather anaemic. When I ask if he thinks it looks a bit pale for Hot Cross Buns he says he doesn't know what they are, and has never seen one, never mind eaten one! It transpires he hasn't put enough spice in.  We decide to rename ours Kenyan Cross Buns. I couldn't resist taking a photo of him "taste-testing" the cream buns.

Wednesday is no day for weaklings - I thought beating up that gnocchi last week tested my arms!  Today we make Genoese sponge, a double recipe, without mechanical intervention.  This requires hand whisking 8 egg yolks with sugar in a bowl over a warm water bath - the bowl that is, not me - until it is thick and pale reaches "ribbon" stage.  That is when you can lift the whisk and make a figure 8 with the mix and it will hold a little before melting back.  THIS TAKES AGES.  Use a freaking mixer!  However, our tutor is a sadist and wants us to know the "feel" of the mixture.  By the time we have made the sponges and hand mixed Semolina Syrup Cake and Chocolate Cup Cakes I am ready for a full body cast - or at the very least a shoulder massage.

And the next day we get on to yeast baked desserts: Savarin and Rum Babas.  The process here is a bit different as the yeast ferments in the flour.  It will be of interest  - at least to my family who grew up with our Polish grandmother's expression 'stare babka' (old woman or grandmother) - that baba is a diminutive form of the Polish babka. And I have no idea why or where a rum old grandmother may have given the genesis to a rum soaked yeast dessert, so don't ask!

However, the original Baba was introduced into France in the 18th century by Stanislas, the exiled king of Poland. In 1844, the Julien brothers, Parisian pâtissiers, invented the "Savarin" which is strongly inspired by the "Baba au Rhum" but uses a circular ring cake mould instead of the cylinder usually used for Rum Baba (thank you wikipedia).

The week's upper body exercise regime is complete when we also make Sauce Anglaise - egg custard but without any custard powder or thickener  - just egg yolks.  This is not as easy as it sounds - first you have to whisk up the eggs and sugar until pale and frothy, and then pour in your hot milk before putting it all back in a clean pan and gradually cooking - stirring all the time - until it thickens slightly i.e. coats the back of a spoon. If it goes too far you get scrambled or curdled eggs.  Not good. But the Anglaise is particularly good with the warmed chocolate cup cakes (which, going against the grain, I do not ice).

Assessment this week is the Fruit Flan (first made a couple of weeks ago, vol au vents - fortunately this time I remember to dock the bases, and Sauce Anglaise. It is a busy session and I don't think one of my finest efforts, but I come out of it with a Merit again - reinforcing my view that Merits are not hard to come by. That said, several fail the assessment.

And back at home we commit vege infanticide to enjoy lunch on a sunny Marlborough spring Saturday: baby broad beans, baby spinach, baby carrots with smoked salmon and  homemade bread rolls. Now that really is yum - and no sugar or fat in sight.

Yes, I know it is upside down but I loaded the image twice and that's the way it wants to stay!

Week 15: They let us cook for paying customers

Excitement! This week we are the chefs at Bistro 107, the restaurant attached to Weltec.
- the fiery pit where hospitality students practice their dubious and imperfect skills on the unsuspecting public. And customers pay for it! But not much.
$25 buys you two courses, $35 three courses from a set menu.

As I mentioned last week, our group, the fabulous Novotel, divides into two and I am in the group cooking the lunch menu on Monday and Tuesday. Our Chef Tutor tells us to arrive early and bags the dish we want to cook. 
And the menu is:

Entrees

French Onion soup

Niçoise Salad
Mussels Grilled with Sauce Provençale (dinner only)


Mains
Layered Gnocchi Romaine
Chicken Breast with Herbed Rice Pilaf and Madeira Jus
Grilled Sirloin Steak with French Fries and Béarnaise Sauce


Dessert
Lemon Meringue Pie
Tiramisu
Vanilla Pannacotta with Raspberry Coulis and Praline (dinner only)

The upside of the lunch service is it isn't as busy as dinner so we have time to find our feet. The downside we don't find out til Monday morning - as the first service of the week there is no prep done for anything so we are starting from scratch.

Having perused the dishes and recipes over the weekend, I decide I want to do the gnocchi dish. It has several components (gnocchi, wilted spinach, tomato sauce, and mornay sauce) and that makes it interesting.  Also, more challenging than anything else on the menu, and more appealing than hand cutting kilos of potatoes for the fries.

Duh! I should have known better. Do you know that, in Italian, gnocco means an idiot or a stupid person? I do now.

The gnocchi  for this recipe is made with semolina which, you will be as surprised as I to know is the purified wheat middlings of durum wheat. If you have made polenta  (cornmeal ) before, this is the same way I now make the gnocchi. Bring milk, garlic, nutmeg and seasoning to the boil and then "rain in" the semolina in a smooth stream, beating like buggery all the time so to avoid lumps.  This is all well and good when making it at home in small quantities, but I am beating 720gms of semolina into 3 litres of milk in a BIG pot - think thick porridge and lots of beating.

As I don't have guns like Madonna, so I find this somewhat of a task (note to self: go back to the gym one day). I do manage to avoid the  glassy lumps that can occur if you do not beat hard and fast. After adding butter, Parmesan and egg yolk to the mix  I wrestle it into trays to cool before cutting it into shapes and frying it off in preparation for service.  In between all this I am making the other sauces, and washing and destemming 2 kg of spinach. Spinach doesn't weigh much, so 2 kg is a lot of destemming and cleaning.

You'd think 4 hours was a looonnngg time to do all this prep. At least that is what I think as I look at the recipe and time it out in my head the night before. But nooooo, I fail to factor in how much longer large quantities take to prep and cook. Lesson learned.

The various other characters in my group also manage their ends adequately. The lazy ones of course select the dishes that require the least effort (they think! until they have to peel and slice kilos of onions for the soup) or the safety of what we have done before in class (Lemon Meringue Pie). All in all, Monday's lunch service passes without too much drama as there are only about 17 covers - restaurant talk for how many people get fed during a service. 

Tuesday, some of us switch around after a bit of heavy encouragement. There are pros and cons to doing the same dish. You tend to be faster the second day, and if you are a reflective type, will have decided what to do differently or more efficiently. I have a much easier day of it by doing the Niçoise Salad, the side salads that go out with the main courses, and helping out with the dessert section. Taking over the gnocchi, our little china boy burns the first batch and then fails to stir the second lot well enough to avoid lumps and finds himself in a world of pain. Overall however, it is another slowish day so generally more relaxed. We fear for our Novotel colleagues who will do service the following night, as they haven't been in the production kitchen before and have 40 covers for dinner. Yes, we fear for them while chuckling in a evil manner and twirling our moustaches, thankful our introduction to commercial service was more gentle.

Even though there is a lot of left over prep from our service the day before and the other group's dinner, we do more prep to make it easier on the next shift, so there isn't really any down time. And, of course, there is always the big clean up. No dishies (dishwashers) in our kitchen.

So a short but intense two days and then some days of leading up to Labour weekend and the BIG MATCH. How come I don't feel like we won when we did? The weeks are going by fast. Next week we are baking again, but this time it is bread and buns and other yeasty goodies.