Tonight, tonight, I cooked some stuff tonight. So first we made marble cake. Half of it was chocolate and half of it lemon, and all of it looked good. It’s a recipe I am excited about because of its simplicity. If it tastes good I can see myself cooking it a lot. The one thing I did not like about it was having to mix the coco powder with the milk before I added it. I kind of knocked some out onto my apron and it was there all night.
Next we made a savoie biscuit, which seams to be a type of heavy sponge cake. It was fun to make at first because you mix the yokes and the whites at the same time in two different kitchen aids, but they the horrible truth is revealed. You have to fold in the flour and corn starch into the yokes and it dries them out so much that working with it is a big pain in the butt. But once that is done you fold in your whipped egg whites and the moister returns and the batter becomes wonderful again.
After that was an exciting time in my life, for when I looked on the white board and saw what was written there my heart gave a little jump, croissants. Everyone loves croissants, and everyone wants me to learn how to make them so that they can eat them. But my excitement was short lived when my eyes found the page with the recipe on it. Two butters needed to be prepared, the first at 200 grams, the next at 830. 830 grams of butter, which could only mean one thing, the dough would be layered with the butter like puff pastry. That’s a lot of work, which is a lot of rolling. Well the prepared the dough as a big group and mixed it in a big mixer. Chef taught us about measuring the temperature of the dough, which is a way to make sure when your dough comes out of the mixer it is the best temperature to prove. The formula goes as follows.
Basic temperature – (Room Temp + Flour Temp) = Temp for liquid
So you subtract your flour temp and room temp from the basic temp and it gives you the temp that your liquid should be when you add it to the dough, pretty cool right. Chef Phillip talked about this last week in theory class but I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Chef Kris talked about that two weeks ago when he told us that we would not understand what we learned in theory class until we used it in the kitchen, and that is why he doesn’t like to teach theory class. Now my dough is sitting in the fridge waiting for me to come back and do something to it.
Next we worked on Brioche dough. Brioche is a highly enriched French bread, whose high egg and butter content give it what is seen as a rich and tender crumb. It has a dark, golden, and flaky crust from an egg wash applied after proofing, at lest that what Wikipedia says. It was an interesting dough to make because it is in the mixer for some thing like 30 minutes. You add the butter a little at a time and when it’s all over your kitchen aid is burning hot and you have a very sticky dough just waiting to go into the fridge for the night, which is where we parted ways.
Now that is about the end of my night but I want to take a little time to introduce you to my new Lab partner, Jessica. Jessica is a very industrious student, always ready with equipment and always ready to help get ingredients ready. She prepared all the ingredients for both mine and her croissant dough’s while I cubed all our butter, which took a really long time. So far I like working with her and I hope all goes well the rest of the week, and I do nothing to piss her off because I gave her the address to this blog tonight too.
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