Fundamentals, Day 9, Practical Day 9

1. Today was mostly about butter cookies, a lot of butter cookies! I made 2 pounds of dough, which makes about 75 cookies. We piped them into 3 shapes (rosettes, shells, and s's). I was paranoid when I first put them in the oven, beacuse they spread really quickly. They were the first cookies in the oven so I was worried that it was to hot, but it turned out ok. The s's were a little large, but oh-well.

2. We then tempered 1 pound of chocolate. We used this to decorate the cookies, and to do filigree piping.

3. Finaly i had to do knife cuts on both potatoes and carots.

In the end I got a 96% on the practical. Yeah! I don't know my overall class grade yet, but I assume it will be on par with the practical. Fingers crossed......


Here Is someones final cake from the class nextdoor. It is actually kind of ugly, but I figured I would show it to you anyway.

Fundamentals, Day 8, Practical Day 1

1. So we started our practical at 7 sharp. There was nothing too difficult, just time organization. Each table only gets 2 burners and one scale, so we had to coordinate timing. We were not allowed to talk during the final, so it took a little planning.
2. We each had to make: creme anglais, one poached pear, one sautéed apple, and one batch of hand whipped cream. We also had to do ingredient identification, which was very easy. (With the exception of telling baking powder from baking soda)
3. We had until 11:30 to get all of this done, but my friend Brandi and I were done at 9:15. So our chef had us reorganize the ingredient racks, and churn all of the cream anglais into ice cream. It was a very easy first practical, which is a nice start.
4. On Monday, we have the second part of the practical and the written final. I am anticipating that too will go smoothly!

Fundamentals, Day 7

1. Knife cuts on potatoes and carrots.
2. Chocolate filigrees from tempered chocolate.
3. We sliced and sautéed apples with our clarified butter.

4. We had another long lecture.
5. We then plated all of the things that had made so far. We piped diplomats cream onto cinnamon sugar pie disks. We sliced the poached pears. We put the apples and pears with the cream disks, and drizzles with the poaching liquid. Finally we topped them with filigrees, and served to the culinary students.

6. We had another long lecture, so again not much production.

Fundamentals, Day 6

1. We baked disks of pie dough, with cinnamon sugar on them. They were like thin little cookies.
2. We roasted. pineapple with butter and brown sugar. We used these later that day.
3. We poached pears in 6 different flavored liquids (saffron, cinnamon, grenadine, red wine, vanilla, etc.). We refrigerated them for the next day.
4. We made a very stiff pastry cream. We refrigerated it, then made diplomats cream (50 percent pastry cream, 50 percent whipped cream). We kept this for the next day.
5. We piped filagrees out of tempered chocolate. These can be peeled off the parchment paper and stood up.
6. Finally we put all of the components into a platter dessert. Pie dough disk, pineapple, ice cream, and chocolate filigree. We took these upstairs and gave them to the culinary students. We also delivered the carrot cakes with cream cheese icing from the day before.

Fundamentals, Day 5

1. Knife cuts on potatoes and carrots.
2. Chocolate piping.

3. Cream cheese icing, use with our carrot cakes.
4. We cut out rounds of cake, and topped each with piped icing. Not the prettiest dessert, but we were mostly worried about the techniques to make them.
5. We made creme anglais, as a vanilla ice cream base. Creme anglais on it's own as a a sauce is not very good. It tastes like thin custard (obviously!).
6. We spun the creme anglais into ice cream, which is quite good. I don't know why it tastes so different, but it does. Probably because we used really good vanilla beans, which you could only really taste once it was that cold.
7. We learned how to temper chocolate, which just takes a lot of patience and stirring to get right.


Here is another sophmore cake, tropical fruits and rum.

Fundamentals, Day 4

1. Knife cuts on potatoes and carrots.
2. Chocolate piping.
3. More butter cookies. We then decorated them with tempered chocolate.
4. We had a long lecture this day, so we did very little production.

Part of our lecure was on cheese, so we had a cheese tasting.

The sophmore cake class is in the kitchen next to ours, so they bring us cakes almost every day. Here is a raspberry, chocolate, and frambroise cake.

Fundamentals, Day 3

1. Cut potatoes and carrots.
2. Chocolate piping. We keep all of the piping from throughout the class to show our progress at the end of the class.

3. Making pie crust. So easy, but so many people still manage to mess it up. We made 4 portions, so we could use it over the next few days.
4. We made quiche lorraine with our pie crust. I am not a big quiche fan, but it was good.

5. Finally, we made butter cookie. It was a very simple recipe, but a lot of people over-mixed them (which makes them spread into shapeless blobs when they are baked). We piped them out using a star tip in a pastry bag. We made a bunch of different shapes, just like when you buy a box of butter cookies.

Fundamentals, Day 2

Day 2:
1. Potato and carrot knife cuts.
2. How to do recipe conversions to scale up or down the yeild.
3. Chocolate piping. We used piping chocolate, which doesn't require tempering and cool as quickly as regular chocolate. Piping isn't to hard, but to takes a very steady hand.
4. We made carrot cake, but not with shredded carrots. We had to brunoise 2 pounds of carrots, which took quite a while. That is a LOT of peices of carrots!! We did this for the cutting practice; once the cakes were baked you couldn't really see the carrots. We baked the cake in sheet pans, and refrigerated them to use another day.

Fundamental Skills and Techniques

I am about to finish my first class at JWU! I has been pretty easy, which was expected. The class focused on basic knife cuts, ingredient identification, and basic cooking techniques. It has been very fun, although not super challenging yet. I figure that the best way to tell you about my days is to tell you what we did everyday. So here it goes.......

Day 1:
1. Of course we started off by choosing our seats in the kitchen. We will all be together until November in the same room. There are six table with tThree people at each table. The entire class is girls, which is rather interesting. I chose to be right in front by the chefs table. I want to always be able to see what is going on!

Here are the girls at my table, Brandi on the right and Daniela on the left. I took the photo with my phone, so it is not very good, I know!

2. We then went on a tour of the building: kitchens, store rooms, nurse, chef's offices, etc.
3. While in the store rooms, we got our knife kit and books.

4. We had the first lecture, which was on kitchen policies, safety, etc.
5. The class wrapped up with the basic knife cuts that we were suposed to perfect throughout the class. Batonnet, julienne, and brunioise on potatoes and carrots. We have a "cut ruler" that we have to pass all of the pieces through. Potatoes are easy, but the carrots curl which makes them much more difficult.

6. That was day 1!!!