Day thirty-three: From learning to pizza to pretzels to learning
Posted on | August 24, 2009
By the time school ends, using some very rough math, I will not have made 360 of the recipes we are given to make in the kitchen.
That’s 360 chances to learn something I won’t have.
Sure, there is some overlap, but not always, not always.
You see …
“I hate people who are not serious about their meals.”
~ Oscar Wilde
In my last post, I talked about how we learned in the kitchen. And this got me thinking about the recipes which, of course, are the key learning tools at culinary school.
So, during the drive in this morning, my husband and I were talking about this.
“I’ve been thinking. Every day we get a bunch of recipes. Say, on average, about four recipes per day per team. Now, I’ve been in teams up to five people. For the sake of convenience, let’s average that to four people. Do you follow?”
“Yeah.”
“So that means every team member gets to make one recipe.”
“So?”
“Well, that means that I only get to do one out of every four recipes.”
“Is that so bad? I mean, it’s only three recipes you didn’t get to do.”
“Yes. But that is three recipes every day. See, my first term at school was forty days. At four recipes a day for forty days, that’s 160 recipes in total. I only got to make 40 of those. And I never get to cook the other 120 recipes.”
“That’s a lot of recipes. That’s 75% of all the recipes. That’s 75% of the cooking you don’t get to do. That’s 75% of the learning.”
“More or less.”
“So yesterday, when you made the biscuits, the other people in your team made other things. Like the other student in your group you said made the chocolate muffins. He made the muffins while you made the biscuits and you’ll never get to make muffins because today you’ve moved on and you’re making something else, right?”
“Right.”
“So you’ll never get to learn how to make muffins. And by the time you are done school, you never get to learn to make 360 of the recipes. No wait. Is that right? That can’t be right.”
“It’s right.”
“So if you look at the school material, you can assume you will only make one, just one, out of every four recipes listed. Just 25%.”
“Well, that’s a pretty rough estimate.”
“Still, it sucks.”
“I know.”
“Big time.”
“I know.”
And off to school I went.
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relatives.”
~ Oscar Wilde
The first thing on the agenda was handing in all the paperwork that went with the lunchtime live fire we did, from menu and recipes to plate analysis and plating diagrams. Yesterday, I found out we needed to color our plating diagrams. I had drawn them already, but I would not have time to color them, too, so Mr. Big colored them. However, I found out today he ended up doing it with two neon markers, one purple and one green, so you can imagine what the pictures looked like (my mac ‘n cheese with the bechemel sauce and spinach salad side was particularly electric).
Had I known he was going to do that, I would have had my cat color them. Heaven knows, he could not have done worse!
Then off to the lecture room.
Now, while we’re talking about education, I’ve got to tell you, Chef Ewok is the best lecturer, yet. His lessons are always on target, clear, interesting, and amusing. He never loses patience, even when Stern Girl and Giggles gab through his lectures, and it is amazing how much he knows. So one of his lectures? I am so there.
Today, the most interesting parts of the lecture were on the baking methods.
Last class, we learned about two methods for making quick (as in, no yeast) doughs: Biscuit and muffin. Today we learned the third method: Creamy method. This is simply creaming the sugar and flour together. You use this to make cakes and cookies and so on.
Then we learned three methods for making yeast bread.
Straight method
This is, yawn, simply adding ingredients together and mixing, especially easy to do if you have a mixer, such as a KitchenAid. You use this for everything from pizza dough to baguettes.
Sponge method
This one uses a starter. A starter is simply yeast plus flour and water. See, the yeast eats the flour and produces carbon dioxide and alcohol. Alcohol is what gives it that great taste and aroma. What you do is take your sponge and add liquid and flour and anything else you want to make whatever you want, like a nice sourdough bread (yum yum!).
Laminating
Say hello puff pastry and good bye diet! I once saw a video clip of Julia Child making this and she added stick after stick after stick of butter to her dough. I was horrified at how many sticks of butter. And let me clear up something that may be a confusion for you (well, at least it was for me). Puff pastry is layers of pastry interspersed with layer after layer of solid butter. Because of the butter (the water in the butter steams as you cook the dough which makes your pastry airy) it is nice and light and flaky. And, erm, fattening as hell. Phyllo dough, on the other hand, uses melted butter instead of solid butter (you brush melted butter on the sheets of dough). This means it will be light and crisp, but not flaky (melted butter has no or little water which means no or little flaky). And also fattening.
Fascinating stuff, don’t you think?
“Don’t take a butcher’s advice on how to cook meat. If he knew, he’d be a chef.”
~ Andy Rooney
Today I made soft pretzels and put some toppings on dough Mr. Big made (he made enough for everyone in our group to top a pizza of their own; not out of any great generosity, he was just given a recipe that made a lot of dough). And, while I waited for my pretzel dough to relax, I got a head start on tomorrow and made a tart dough. Then I topped my pizza.
I decided to make a Margherita pizza (minus the tomato slices which I don’t like). All I did was stretch out my crust, cover it with a thin layer of shredded fresh mozzarella, then put on a layer of basil leaves, and topped that with another fine layer of more shredded mozzarella. I do it this way so the basil leaves do not burn on one hand and so you can still see them on the other. See, I remember the first time I made this pizza. I put the basil leaves on top and they got unpleasantly crunchy (erm, read burned) in no time. Very disappointing. Then I put them under all the cheese and they just disappeared. Also disappointing. But I found if I sandwiched them between two layers of cheese, total delicious.
Pretty good, eh?
The last thing I cooked were the pretzels. I asked my teammates if they wanted to help (because I also did the dough for tomorrow, I was running late and they were just standing around). One said “I don’t give a shit about pretzels” while the other wandered off. So She Chef, who overheard the comment and was pretty annoyed about it, not only showed me how to roll them, but she even kindly helped me get my batch finished so I could boil them and pop them in the oven.
That’s what I call good learning. Because if anyone ever asks me to roll some pretzels, you better believe I totally know how to do it.
Comments
4 Responses to “Day thirty-three: From learning to pizza to pretzels to learning”
Leave a Reply
August 24th, 2009 @ 12:25 pm
I wouldnt be too upset about not making all the recipes. The things that you are learning are techniques, and you’re basically learning to work in a professional kitchen.
After doing work experience, I realised that what was most important was getting used to some of the larger equipment, learning about sanitation and that sort of thing.
August 24th, 2009 @ 6:54 pm
Great Post. I like reading anecdotes about others lives (much more interesting than mine, I think). You’ve already learned that cooking is a creative process that evolves as you learn what doesn’t work out… that’s a good thing.
August 24th, 2009 @ 8:38 pm
When you crunch the numbers it does sound like you’re missing a lot. If you decide to go into a restaurant or catering firm to work, it’ll be even less. You’ll spend weeks plating desserts never getting near a mixer, or knife or hot stove!
But then again, how fun is the baking week! It’s my favorite venue. Dough is such a comfort. I can hardly wait to hear about the tart. I love tart dough. once you’ve got it in the pan, take a sniff of your fingers. Pure delight the unsalted butter, flour, sugar, vanilla and eggs all there with that scent of pure heaven!
I am so loving living vicariously through you!
August 25th, 2009 @ 8:21 am
[...] Day thirty-three: From learning to pizza to pretzels to learning : cookingschoolconfidential.com/?p=534 – view page – cached #RSS 2.0 RSS .92 Atom 0.3 » Day thirty-three: From learning to pizza to pretzels to learning Comments Feed index How I ended up in cooking school Day thirty-two: I’m baking — From the page [...]