A lesson in sarcasm (and other things).

Last day of the restaurant section today. Phew. We made it! I am so happy that section is over. Our next section is decoration work, which is pretty much just melting chocolate over and over and over again. It doesn't seem as high stress though it is a lot of detail work. But it's in a completely separate room than the rest of the class, so maybe it's slightly less chaotic?

The day began with a demonstration of how to make "bubble sugar" which I don't even think I could adequately describe. More for plating than for eating. But very cool. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

The first thing we made today was vanilla ice cream. I realized after we left that it was still in the blast freezer... so I hope you can't over freeze ice cream. Uh-oh. Jean-Luc said that the ice cream is best when it sits for at least 12 hours, so we're going to finish it off tomorrow. All we did was mix all of the ingredients together except the eggs, heat it up on the stove to a strong boil, temper the egg yolks, and then heat the mixture for about 30 seconds on low heat. Then we passed it through a chinois and put it in the blast freezer. If only everything we made was that easy.

After that, we remained in the area of delicious frozen things and made sorbet. We each got to choose what flavour we wanted to do, but had to base it on what was available in the freezer. I debated between lychee and mango, but went with the mango in the end because I felt like it would be the more popular choice. In our group we had mango, coconut, strawberry, blackcurrant, and raspberry. All of those sound delicious to me. Having an ice cream machine makes making sorbet pretty easy; you just combine everything but the fruit into a syrup, add the (frozen, pureed) fruit into it and wait until it is melted, and then throw (pour) it all into the (amazing) ice cream machine and wait. Pictures of mango sorbet in an industrial stainless steel container are never going to be attractive, but here it is anyway. It was so beautifully yellow. And delicious.

Once we'd cleaned the sorbet off of ourselves, the floor, the machine, the counters, etc. we caramelized some apples that we were going to use later. Simple enough. I actually didn't caramelize any apples. We were doing the sorbet in shifts, so I peeled and sliced the apples, and someone else in the group caramelized them while I was doing my sorbet. Teamwork! Yes!  Speaking of teamwork, we also made two batches of tulip paste between the five of us for later.

Speaking of later... after we got back from break, we added food colouring to our tulip paste (red, yellow, and green) and got out three different-sized leaf shapes, and then made autumn coloured leaves. Except the red was actually pink (whoops) and then we mixed it with red but it was still pretty pink (whoops), so our leaves were sort of weirdly coloured. They didn't look as strange when cooked though. Jean-Luc is a master of the sarcastic compliments though: "Really nice colours, guys. Reminds me of autumn in Cape Breton." I was somehow in charge of putting the leaves into and taking them out of the oven again. My fingertips are losing more feeling (read: getting stronger) by the day.

"Just like autumn in Cape Breton." -Jean-Luc

We lay them (dropped them... they were hot) on spoons in
different positions so they wouldn't just be flat. Don't they
look realistic...?

Once we had made our leaves, we were ready to move on to our next task. Let me try to remember what it was. Oh. How could I forget? Sugar cages. The ones we made on Friday didn't really make it. The humidity in the air in the kitchen made them do weird things, like melt, or dissolve, or mysteriously become partially invisible. So we had to make more for plating the desserts for the restaurant. Making sugar cages while two other people are trying to use the same pot of sugar as you gets a little difficult, because you are all trying not to burn yourselves or each other with the sugar and there are just strands of it everywhere. On everything. Also, burning yourself with sugar-cage sugar is pretty much insta-burn. It really hurts. And it sticks to you so you can't even get it off that quickly. And if you're mid-sugar-cage, you don't really want to stop to remove the sugar that is burning your skin. Speaking from experience. And I only dripped the tiniest drop onto my finger.

The tulip paste leaves and the sugar cages were both for plating our crème caramels, which I had almost forgotten about, but not quite. The plating, as usual, was pretty complicated. But we managed to keep it together. I think we did about six orders for the restaurant and then four for the cooks afterwards. We were more assembly-line-esque than everyone trying to plate their own dessert, which does make things go more efficiently. (Though if you're not assertive enough, you always end up with the jobs no one else wants.)

Crème caramel, three caramelized apples, little rosette of
whipped cream (hidden, but delicious), two tulip paste
leaves, and a sugar cage for good measure.

All in all, I'm pretty glad the restaurant section is over. There's something about making the desserts in real time that really stressed me out. Jean-Luc said that he'd be harder on us next time, but I think (/hope) he was just joking. We made it through without any serious mishaps, aside from that time I burnt the sugar. Twice.

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Today's Recipes

Vanilla Ice Cream
750 ml milk
50 ml cream
180 g sugar
vanilla
6 egg yolks

Mango Sorbet
1000 g pureed mango
100 g atomised glucose
25 g inverted sugar
335 g sugar
755 g water 

Tulip Paste
130 g butter
130 g icing sugar
2 egg whites
100 g flour

Crème Caramel 
For the custard: 
500 ml milk
4 eggs
100 g sugar
vanilla
For the caramel:
200 g sugar
75 ml water
50 glucose