Day Thirteen

Ok so a lot happened last night. First we prepped some Madeleines, it was normal stuff, eggs, flour, sugar, honey, butter, trimoline. Then we added some almond extract, we poured it straight from a big bottle, and I got it all over my hand. It smelt good. We put the batter in the fridge and moved on.

Next chef showed us how to roll out our puff pastry. First you take your dough, which is called de trampe, and you roll it out from the center, leaving the very middle untouched. So you roll it out into a cross with a tower in the middle, then you roll out the sides to turn it into a square. Then take your frozen butter and put it on you tower so that it forms a diamond to you square dough. Then fold the points of your dough square over the butter and seal it. Now you have a dough envelope with butter inside all ready to be rolled out.

Speedy Delivery, it's and envelope of dough filled with butter.

So start rolling, roll that sucker into a long strip of dough then fold it into thirds. This was my first fold, or turn. We then wrapped them up in plastic wrap and got out our inverted puff pastry dough. Remember that with this one the butter is on the outside. First you roll your dough out to a little larger then half the size of your butter, then take half your butter and join it to you dough. I’ll let chef show you how.

You do that to both sides and then roll it out and fold it like the one before. When working with the butter you put a lot of flour down so that nothing sticks to it. each of the pastries needs to be turned 6 times, we only got two in because the kitchen was so hot that we had to refrigerate between each turn.

Next was lemon cake, lemon cake is so easy it hurts. Just a basic cake dough with lemon vest and juice added in. every thing is tossed in a kitchen aid and mixed on high for a few minutes, then added to a pan, like you would bake banana bread in. then we took a knife and cut a line long ways across the top of the batter, then we filled the line with melted butter, that way when the cake cooked, the top split right in the middle in a nice line.

Then we took out our pastry dough for another turn.

Then we started on Financiers, which by all indications seem to be some sort of small cake. We only got to the batter stage but the important thing is we learned about brown butter. Brown butter is also called Noisette, or hazelnut butter. It is made by melting butter in a pan until it turns brown and smells and tastes a bit like hazelnut. Then it is strained into a bowl to get out the burned bits, but low and behold some of the tiny burned bits got through, what ever will we do? Well toss your bowl into an ice bath and bring it down to 40 C, this way when you pour your butter out all the burned parts have stuck to the bottom in the cooled butter. Sweet trick and props to whoever figured it out.

Then it was time to clean and go to dinner, on the menu was frog legs, and yes I tried them. Was not impressed, don’t see what all the fuss is about, but they are not disgusting.

Frog Legs