Woohoo! Made it through another week of class. I took a look at our syllabus this week and realized we’ve already completed 8 weeks of class and only have another 16 to go?! Really crazy how quickly this program moves.
Over the course of the week, as a class, we made a total of 14 different ice creams (chocolate, caramel, hazelnut praline, peanut butter, ginger, green tea, white chocolate, spiced, vanilla, pistachio, honey, coffee, coconut, and earl grey) and 6 sorbets (pineapple, blackberry, strawberry, exotic fruit, mango, bloody Mary) and at least a few others I’m probably forgetting. I’m not huge of ice cream, but I really liked the pineapple and mango sorbets. Several of these ice creams and sorbets we used in creating various types frozen cake desserts, and some of them we got to just take home by themselves.
The process of making ice creams and sorbets is actually pretty simple: cook the ice cream or sorbet base to 85 degrees Celcius to pasteurize all the ingredients, which are some combination of milk, milk powder, sucrose, glucose powder, cream, egg yolks, stabilizer(s), and flavoring. Cool the mixture in the refrigerator overnight to develop the flavors, and then “spin” the mixture in the ice cream machine to -6 degrees Celcius. The ice cream machines we use are crazy powerful and the whole process from liquid base to frozen ice cream or sorbet only takes about 2 minutes.
The first thing we made this week was the “Pineapple Surprise,” or, according to Chef Jacquy, the “Pineapple SURPRISE!” –more on Chef later. I love him. It was a pineapple sorbet with candied pineapple chunks, and a raspberry coulis sauce that we served in a cut half-pineapple, and then piped more sorbet on top. This was definitely my favorite thing we made this week!
We also made “vacherin” cake – a French meringue (yes, those crunchy, sticky, airy meringues from Passover) base, then layers of pineapple and blackberry sorbet, topped with another French meringue disk, then covered with vanilla whipped cream, more meringue cookies, and frozen berries.
2 other frozen cakes we made were a “wood grain” cake – layers of a hazelnut dacquois cake, caramel ice cream, chocolate ice cream, and another layer of dacquois, and another cake we referred to as the “bomb” – a chocolate ice cream dome enveloping raspberry coulis, and vanilla ice cream, and then decorated with whipped cream, meringues, and berries. My piping on the bomb was so absolutely horrendous that I’m not even going to post a picture. But here’s a picture of all 4 of Chef’s cakes from this week!
Alright, a bit about Chef Jacquy: we change chefs every time we change units, and this was my first time really interacting with Chef Jacquy, who is a master pastry chef from France and one of the two co-founders of the The French Pastry School. He wrote a cookbook called The Art of French Pastry and is the focus of a documentary called Kings of Pastry (it’s on Netflix, look it up!). It was really special for us to learn from him this week. As an added bonus, he is absolutely H.I.L.A.R.I.O.U.S.S.S.S. It was such a breath of fresh air for us to be having such a fun time in the kitchen (while also working hard.) Some of my favorite Chef Jacquy quotes from this week:
“It’s just like 3 seconds…French seconds…I don’t know what that means. Is that a bad thing?”
“And with the leftover dough, you can make little ‘dudes’…… that’s technical.”
“I’ll tell you what, Uncle Jacquy put your meringues in the oven for you.”
“So the flavor in the chocolate is 1.333. …Flavor Flaaave! What happened to Flavor Flave?”
“A lot of people think rolling dough is about STRENGTH, about GRRRRRRRRR”
(When beeping the thermometer to the right temperature) “I’m sending messages to aliens.”
And one of my favorites, when dismissing us each day: “You may go. Have a nice life.”
Chef Jacquy is awesome, and his French accent makes him even better. It was really fun working with him in the kitchen this week.
Next week we start plated desserts and have Chef En-Ming Hsu again (same as the chocolate candies unit). This week was a bit of a break compared to the stresses from exams last week and the upcoming stresses of plated desserts this coming week. Looking forward to getting back in the heat of things with plated desserts!
With a Side of Butter 