Fire in the Kitchen..

Wednesday, November 15

Well, the pastry test was a bit stressful... making the apple galettes and having someone over your shoulder checking your every move and looking at the consistency of everything you are preparing and then a careful disection, review and tasting of the end product. At one point, she was looking over my shoulder as I rolled out the dough between two parchment papers and tried to get it round, smooth and consistent in depth and texture, and I could feel myself sweating under the pressure and tried to focus on my breathing and the dough. It was a challenge! At one point, when we were lightly sauteeing our apples, a guy at another burner threw his apples into a very hot pan and the water from these apples into the pan with oil and on to the bruner flame created a huge flame that seemed to grow bigger and bigger. I learned this earlier on, by a similiar but smaller mistake, never to do this or take the pan off for a while while you do this, which I did during the test. Everyone was very quiet in the room until this point, then everyone stopped in surprise and I let out a small shriek as I thought the flame would be coming over to me. He soon got it under control and I tried not to look further that way to avoid attention on him but it didn't matter much as he probably couldn't have done anything that would have created more attention from the teacher. She went over immediately to him to help him and was not pleased. Call me psychic but he may have lost a few points because of this.

So in the end, I am galette pro and I did very well. She said I was really good at working with the dough, which was a surprise to me as I thought the shaking and warm hands would ruin the dough. So, I felt good but am not motivated to go into professional pastry work, at least right now. It is very meticulous and highly sensitive, in particular to get the right consistency for the dough and during the test we had to put our pastry in the fridge at three different stages, and for appropriate times, which they believe produces the best results - once when we had our dough ready, after we rolled it out and cut out the shape, and the last time before the oven.

This afternoon, we had our first discussion on the Friday Night Dinner that we will prepare., which is exciting and daunting, knowing that our time will be up soon and we will have a lot of work to do before then. Our team's dinner is on January 5 so if anyone is in NYC during that time please do come and taste what I've learned and been up to. Our team of six has to prepare a four course dinner from scratch, including menu planning under various criteria such as: the usual taste, texture, variety and colour but the school also wants to ensure we incorporate macrobiotic, ayurvedic, Chinese 5 phase theory and other principles of healthy eating; costing and ordering; theme creation and development; testing, etc. and following strict Friday Night Dinner guidelines and rules. The testing and development process for the dinner is quite thorough, with our first recipe test for six people in about two weeks, for a larger group in three weeks for further recipe and menu development, and then a group of eight teacher chefs as the last review for crititique and minor adjustments in about a month and a half. The final test is of course on the dinner date of January 5, 2007. It's like a play or piece of writing you have to put out there and detach from as you await critique and comments, in order to create the very best product possible for the audience. Our group is very interesting and diverse and if we can work with it, vs against it, then I know we will come up with a dynamite dinner... from early 20s to late 50s, three women, three men, backgrounds that include Indian, Japanese... a former high school teacher from Harlem, an aspiring young chef from Louisana, a Japanese macrobiotic and raw food teacher in Tokyo who wants to open up an upscale raw food restaurant, a young guy who wants to further help communities in India and his mid-west town learn about sustainability and growing organic crops, a woman from the corporate world who is making a career change and would like to open up a catering business with her partner who has already completed a culinary degree, and then there's me...