Day One

This is a Blog that I am writing about going to school at the Culinary Institute LeNotre. It is a fine French school on the north side of Houston TX, and I am going for their Pastry and Bakery Diploma program. For those of you who are unfamiliar with baking it is more like chemistry then normal cooking, it is also a lot sweeter, thus the name of the blog, The Sweet Science.

Today was my first day and I met my Chefs, there were two of them and they were very French and had very French names that I do not remember at this time. It really is unimportant to learn their names because you can always call out “Chef” and one of them will come a running. They were good guys with strong accents and black aprons (as apposed to ours which were white). At the beginning of class everyone was nervous and had a hard time understanding the chefs and what to do. Did this stop our chefs? No! They plowed us forward into the crafting of a Vanilla Cream Sauce. Eggs, milk, sugar and a vanilla bean came together to make a wonderful sauce, or at lest I hope it is wonderful because we really didn’t try it. We just packed them away in the fridge and moved on to a custard and caramel combo whose name escapes me at this time. It was kind of fun making caramel on our induction hot plate, but it was a pain to work with. Those went in the fridge and we continued on to make French Meringue, which was 300 grams sugar, 300 grams powdered sugar, and 300 grams egg whites. It was a little tough to work with but we put into piping bags and got to make some fun designs on parchment paper.

By now it was 10PM, time to clean up and go. It is now 11:54, I am home, I am tiered, and I am going to bed. Come back tomorrow for another late night rant about my time at school.

PS: I totally cut my thumb while working with some vanilla bean.