Madness DAY

Pissaladiere one i did, originally uploaded by FinasZ.

WOW so I’m alive ! Today was my first insane 3 classes in a row day; we had demonstration at 8:15am, then practical at noon and then one more demonstration at 3:30pm. Since I haven’t figured out which channel shows the weather like channel 24 back in Toronto, which was news and weather 24/7. I had no clue what the temperature outside would be, since the last two days were arctic hell I decided to dress super warm. I don’t normally wear a scarf out or a scarf with a hat, but when I do it’s a sign of how cold it really is out there. For some weird reason, the past two weeks I’ve been going to sleep pretty late and only getting like 5-6 hours of sleep on school days yet I still manage to function properly during school. I feel tired and all yet I don’t sleep till midnight or one to two in the morning. I guess that’s something my body has developed and my biological clock is telling me I’m messed up.

Josh came to pick me up at about 7am, I’m soo very thankful that I was able to meet him and he’s been extremely helpful in offering me rides to and from school. It was a good thing that his car had seat warmers, else I would’ve froze my butt off the whole way there. We arrived at about 7:20 am, got dressed, hung around the student lounge a little bit and hurried off to class in order to get some good seats. Today I managed to sit in the middle of the second row, it’s a pretty good seat considering the fact that you can still see the t.v. (it does up close angles on what the chef is doing) and still be close enough to see the chef. When we first walked into class I thought something was wrong since the chef wasn’t our usual cuisine chef, instead a pastry chef was teaching us. So on today’s lesson plan, we learned more on different dough and what they’re used for. The recipes we covered were pissaladiere, sugar tart, saucisson brioche and we got to taste the pate pantain from last class. The sugar tart and the saucisson brioche were shown to us just as a demonstration; the one we had to actually make in practical was the pissaladiere. It pretty much looks similar to a thin crust pizza with no sauce, onions, olives and anchovies. This dish is supposed to be served as an appetizer in restaurants. Making the dough wasn’t too bad, for me it was a lot better than what had happened on Wednesday. This time the dough was doing what it should have been doing, it also looked similar to what the chef had shown us. This is actually my first time making any kind of dough that contained yeast, I didn’t know that you can’t add salt to yeast else it dies. This was also the first time I ever had to make dough and then apply oil after kneading it. I think my dough wasn’t that great since the chef said when we were doing applying the oil, no oil should be left on the outside and it should be all incorporated into the dough. I however had some oil coating the outside of the dough and still some left in the bowl. Oh well I managed to somehow fix it and get on with the rest of the recipe. After the dough was put to rest, we had to emincer onions, I think I managed to cut my onions too slow and some of the gas got released, which meant me tearing up for a little while. After that we had to sautee the onions, and then cut up olives and anchovies. After all that was done, we’d have to get the now fermented dough and roll it, the shape was suppose to be a circle, but I managed to make it into an oval. When the dough is done, you have to lay it onto a baking tray and let it rest so it can rise a bit more, this was the one step I kind of overlooked (which caused me some trouble later). Then we just put on the onions, then place the anchovies in a decorative design and the onions in the holes the anchovies create. Leave about a 1-2 finger crust around the pissaladiere, cover the crust with some olive oil and bake for 10-15 minutes (or when it looks ready). I was finally done and I wanted to get my dish reviewed by the chef who was looking after us in class. But there was a big line up so I decided to clean up, one thing I didn’t mention earlier today was also my first time being the sous chef. The sous chef for the practical class has to come in early and grab the ingredients from the production kitchen. When class is over the sous chef has to get everyone to help out and clean the kitchen up. So today I was sous chef and I had asked Chris (one of my classmates, pretty cool guy) to go to class 20 minutes early and help me get the supplies. So due to the line up, I started to clean all my tools and then worked on the rest of the kitchen, by this time a few more people were done their reviews. I started to assign them some tasks, like sweep the floor, help the dishwasher, clean the counters and so on. Things went pretty smoothly and when I was about to finish up the final touches, it was my turn to get my review. I was a bit nervous since I knew that my pissaladiere wasn’t perfect, or at least the exact way the chef made it during demonstration. The first few things we talked about were what I did wrong, I listed off the things I knew was wrong, the chef however did give me some good points. He did say that my onions were cooked just the way he liked them, if I put in a tiny pinch more salt he would have loved them even more.

With that class was over, now usually my days consist of going to one class, or going to two. But today was insane day, so I had one more class at 3:30pm which gave us about 30 minutes of actual break time, since we got out at 3pm. At this point I was feeling hungry and pretty tired since I only had really 5 hours of sleep the night before. Class starts up and the chef tells us we have a few more pates to learn, which would cover all the pates we’d ever need to know (in cuisine at least). We learned pate feuilletee, pate a choux, pate a nouilles and pate a crepes. Pate feuilletee was the one we were going to be doing in the practical kitchen Monday morning. The chef gave us an equation on how to figure out the butter, flour or water content. After the chef explained it to us, I came up with the equation of flour = X, water = Y to get Y you have to take X/2 = Y, butter = Z to get Z you have to (X+Y)/2 = Z (after writing this down, I’m thought quietly to myself, omg math is still haunting me). The pate feuilletee is suppose to be the hardest of the pates to make, since you require to knead the dough at cool temperatures. It’s pretty much just a mixture of flour, water, a pinch of salt mixed with a crap load of butter. Its extremely hard to produce, since you need to fold the butter into the dough and then keep folding till you arrive at 729 layers of dough, butter, dough, butter and so on. I’m sitting there going CRAP, one of the reasons why I didn’t want to go into pastry was because I knew I had pretty warm hands. With warm hands you can’t really handle the delicate cold pastries, well I’m sure you could, you’d just have a harder time. After the chef explained to us in full details, I was still quite freaked out about how I’m going to reproduce this, but at the same time it didn’t seem too insanely complicated. Its just the technical part, kneading the butter into the dough, was the hard part. The other three that we learned were pretty much daily stuff you see everywhere. Pate a choux was a paste used to make gnocchi (it can be used in other forms) in today’s class. Pate a nouilles is the dough used to make noodles and pate a crepes is used for making CREPES! (the crepes part of the name should have given it away).

Ding the chef is done cooking all the things he’s suppose to demonstrate and we’re allowed to do a taste test on the foods, WOW the gnocchi was amazing! I loved the sauce that was made with it and the crunchy cheese that melted away on the top. The rest of the dishes we tried weren’t that insanely special, pretty much reminds me of food I’d normally have if I go out. After the taste test, I hurried downstairs to change and head on home. Arriving home was such a joy, not that I don’t like school or anything, it was just after a long day of non stop classes going home to rest was great! Good thing today my roommate Andrew decided to make burgers and I could be lazy and not cook hehe. After dinner I lay on my bed and reflected on what happened today. Yes the classes were long and I was dead tired, but I thought this is pretty much what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life. Working long hours, doing lots of work and always feeling somewhat tired. It scared me a bit, since I kept trying to imagine when I’d have time to just sit back relax and do nothing. After a few minutes on this topic, I took this thought and threw it out, since the reason why I am willing to go on with these long hours is because I love cooking. I’ve always found joy when I cooked for my friends, sometimes cooking for my family and when I’m not so lazy, randomly cooking for myself. Even though today was quite a long day, I still had a pretty decent day. I managed to make the dough for practical right and was complimented by the chef on something.

The one that I made in practical class:

The one the chef made during demostration class: