The End of All Things Savory

Somewhere around Lesson 7 of Level 2, a dark cloud hovered over the FCI as we began pastry courses. Now that I've come out of the other side with all limbs in tact, I can safely say, most of us in that class weren't cut out for pastry. My mood by the end of last week can best be described as wretched. Every day was a series of failed attempts at being precise, or whatever mysterious talent pastry people were born with that grants them the magic to brulee and souffle successfully. It wasn't just me wallowing in the misery of flour and egg whites. Team morale had dropped significantly. Creme Anglaise got the best of my partner who didn't make it out of pastry with us. The entire class was jacked up on sugar stressing out about their butter being to warm or whether or not their souffle was rising. And somewhere...gluten was developing more than desired! Anyway, I snagged a new partner but we still couldn't manage to get a souffle to rise for the life of us. Rough week. Some pictures from our plight:

Chocolate Souffle

My oven is on, so I've got that going for me.

Making a buerre manie to thicken the milk.

Adding the chocolate...

Beating the eggs with a little rum and vanilla.

Preparing the egg whites that will hopefully bring me to the gates of a beautifully light and fluffy rise...Now I've just got to carefully sacrifice some of the whites into the chocolate to get them to a closer consistancy so I can fully incoprate the two without losing all the air I just beat into the eggs.

Uh huh...all seems to be going according to plan...

VERY IMPORTANT STEP! Coating the ramekins with a consistent and directionally uniform layer of butter so that the filling can move up the mold easily.

Coating the butter with sugar and shaking the ramekin out.

They want to rise, they look like they might!

But...

They never do. They kind of smidge up the sides of the ramekin to the peak height of -.0098203cm and then cracking at the top. The worst part about an unrisen souffle is I can't just fix this. I can't serve this no matter what kind of disguise I can conjure. The jig is up and I'd have to start the entire batter from scratch again. Maybe my whites were deflated in the incorporation process, maybe I didn't butter the molds properly. Who knows. This is the mystery of pastry that put me in a tizzy all week.

More pictures from the week:

Pate Feuilletee that actually took 3 classes and a full weekend to make. Imagine ending up with a crap puff pastry at the end of that. That's why pastry doesn't need knives.

Ahh yes. The Genoise Cake I "forgot" to bring to work for family meal.

Although I despised pastry, the week and a few honest people taught me some good lessons. A level three student was commenting on me and my partner's performance, which was far below our abilities. He asked me if I could have done better, to which I responded with, "Yes." If I can ever answer that question that way again, I'll be seriously disappointed in myself. When you are fully capable of doing something better than you've just done it, but you just chose not to, what does that say about your character? It says you're lazy and simply don't care. And this week, I was lazy, and simply didn't care enough. Hearing it from someone else was all I needed to turn that complacency around. Granted school is fun, I want to come out of it knowing I did the absolute best I could and that means every single day, even if it is freaking apple tart day.