A better way to pipe

Exam week #3. One of the products we had to make was a cake covered in buttercream, decorated with 2 different types of piping techniques.

There's a few problems with this:

- I suck at piping. I can make a good rosette (a rosette is a little circular swirl made with a star tip) about 1 out of 4 times.

- The only way to get better at piping is to spend roughly 103830834083 hours practicing. Since I have no interest in being a professional cake decorator, that time would be better spent doing something else.

- If you pipe a reject onto a cake, you have to scrape it off and start over. This is annoying and time consuming, especially when your skills are at a level where 3 out of 4 of your piping shapes are going to be rejects.

I had to come up with a better way. Knowing that buttercream can be frozen gave me an idea. How about if I pipe a bunch of rosettes onto a Silpat and freeze them? Then simply stick the frozen rosettes onto the cake?

So I piped rosettes on a Silpat in a sheet pan until I had about 10 good ones, then put it in the freezer. 20 minutes later I had 10 perfect rosettes that I just scraped off the Silpat, smeared a tiny bit of room temperature buttercream on the bottom as a glue, and stuck onto the cake. HAHA! Brilliant!

Fun with fondant

Today I learned why fondant is usually very thick. "Thick" meaning at least 1/8 inch, sometimes as much as 1/2 inch. If you ask me, any fondant on a cake is too much, but that's beside the point.

You make fondant by mixing together shortening, glycerin, gelatin, and a shitload of powdered sugar. Sounds yummy right? Then you roll it out. Then you lay it over the cake and smooth it out. The problem is that the thinner it is, the more difficult it is to work with. If it's less than about 1/8 inch, it rips and wrinkles all over.

Today we practiced rolling out fondant and covering a dummy styrofoam cake. When I rolled the fondant out to less than 1/8 inch, it was impossible. It ripped apart in several places, and it's easier to roll the whole thing out again than to fix the rips. When I rolled it out to more like 1/4 inch, it was easy.

Tomorrow we finish assembling the delicious three-tiered, fondant covered styrofoam "cake." Then we'll attach our purty gum paste flowers on it somehow.

5 things you will never see in my restaurant/bakery/pastry shop/whatever

#1: Whipped cream on sorbet

This is a crime. The whole point of a sorbet is the fruit or whatever flavor is the main component of the sorbet. The only thing whipped cream can possibly do is cover up that flavor.

#2: Fondant

Hey, I've got an idea! Let's spend a lot of time and effort making a really nice layer cake. Then, let's cover it with a 1/4 inch thick shell of vapid flavorless sugar paste that will make people gag when they put it in their mouth and totally ruin their entire cake-eating experience!

Shockingly, there are people who say they like fondant. These people will try to tell you that there's good fondant and bad fondant. These people are idiots. There is no good fondant. There is horrible fondant, and slightly less horrible fondant.

#3: Inedible Garnishes

Here is a picture of a plated dessert. It's roasted pineapple with pineapple sorbet and pineapple chips. It tastes good, but suffers from a huge presentation fail.

Yes, those are pineapple leaves. Inedible. You will need to pluck them off the plate. And yes, that's a WHOLE VANILLA BEAN. What exactly is the person who ordered this supposed to do with a whole vanilla bean? If it were me, I guess I'd stick it in my pocket and take it home.

#4: Baked Meringue

Never have I been eating something and thought to myself "you know what, this would be better if it had some chalky flavorless whipped egg whites on it." I'm not talking about all meringues here. Italian meringue has some legit applications. Baked French meringue is similar to fondant in that it instantly ruins anything you put it on.

#5 Piped Cake Decorations

You might have the impression that cake decorating requires great artistic ability. This is true for some modern specialty cake decorators. But the vast majority of cakes do not require artisitic ability. In fact, they don't require any thought either.

The only things they require are a star tip and a KitchenAid bowl full of white shit (whipped cream, meringue, buttercream, etc.). Plus maybe some food coloring. Just squirt the shit out onto the cake and you can be sure some old geezer rube will come along thinking it looks purty and buy it.

Piping with a star tip is for pastry chefs who are devoid of artistic ability.

Exam week #2

Exam weeks generally make me angry. I know that I'm not going to be learning anything, so it's a waste of time and money to begin with. On top of that, if I'm confident I can make all the products perfectly, the only way I could feel is disappointed if they don't come out perfectly.

Usually we have two practice days before the three exam days. But this time, on monday we were forced to watch a 6 hour gum paste flower demo. It was every bit as boring as I thought it would be. It might have been better if we were actually making the flowers and practicing the techniques. But no, we just sat there in hard plastic chairs and watched chef Lodge make little flowers all day. I actually fell asleep for about 10 seconds, and then sprang up when I almost fell over onto the lap of the dude sitting next to me. Wedding cakes are not my thing. To add insult to injury, chef Lodge used the demo as a way to repeatedly make an aggressive sales pitch for his line of instructional DVDs, tools, and equipment for making wedding cake decorations. He was like an older, gay British version of Ron Popeil.

Tuesday was practice day for exams. I spent the entire day making chocolate candy shells. The techniques chef Sebastian taught us during chocolate candy class don't work very well. I followed his instructions exactly three times during chocolate candy class and the shells would never be good enough to sell in a chocolate shop. So I bought Peter Greweling's book and followed his directions for making shells.

There were three things Greweling says you must do, which chef Sebastian said didn't matter or didn't say anything about:

1) You should flip the mold over and keep it elevated after pouring out the chocolate. If you don't, the chocolate will collect at the bottom of the mold (the top of the shells) causing the tops of the shells to be too thick, and the sides too thin.

2) Warm the mold to 25-30*C before pouring chocolate into it. If the mold is significantly colder than the chocolate, the chocolate won't set evenly.

On tuesday, I made 4 molds full of shells, tempering my own chocolate each time, and they all came out perfect. I didn't fill the shells with anything and make actual candies, I just unmolded them after they set.

On thursday during the exam, I forgot about the third thing Greweling says, which is to warm up and soften the filled shells with a hair dryer or heat gun before capping them. This helps the newly poured layer adhere to the sides of shells. Since I didn't do that, some of my shells cracked and separated on the seam between the bottom and sides.

I also think I poured out the chocolate too early when making the shells. The tops were a little too thin. They cracked or shattered in a few places, and some of them were impossible to unmold. I might still get a decent grade on them though, because the chefs here seem to have rather low standads for chocolate shells.

The other products for this exam were a lemon curd tart with sweet dough crust, and simplified versions of the sugar and chocolate showpieces we made in each showpiece class.

The lemon curd tasted like ass, I have no idea why. The showpieces I don't really care about, I just did them as fast as possible.

The next two weeks are cakes with chef Dimitri. There's 6 cake recipes in the textbook. I'm allergic to 4 of them.

Lemon Profiteroles

Choux paste, piped into balls. Filled with lemon curd. Otherwise known as profiteroles, or cream puffs. I think I'll stick with profiterole since cream puff just sounds lame.

Usually these are made with pastry cream as a filling, but I had so much lemon curd left from making three lemon tarts this week so I wanted to use it up. They were pretty awesome.
Speaking of pastry cream, I struck gold on friday. Chef said we could make a tart with pastry cream and flavor it with whatever we wanted. Naturally, I went straight for the booze section in the storage room. I grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam and poured about 30-40g of it into the pastry cream (about 700g of PC). OMFG this was the best thing I've made so far in pastry school. If I ever get my own pastry shop, bourbon pastry cream is gonna be one of my specialties.

I think the tart week was the best week so far. This came as a shock to the chef. He has the impression that I hate being there because I don't smile all the time, or something. I think I need to work on my ass-kissing and bullshitting skills.

Tomorrow we'll be spending the entire day watching a gum paste demo. I honestly don't really know what gum paste is and I don't even care enough to look it up on google. I know it's for wedding cakes and not much else, so I don't give a shit about it. Then the rest of the week is exams.

KFC bowls

Never before has someone described exactly the way I feel about something so accurately and eloquently as Patton Oswalt on KFC Bowls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnflT0t7wtw&feature=related

More sorbet formula results

I calculated a bunch more sorbets. It turns out the textbook formula will usually result in an acceptable sweetening power. The reason is because the flaws in the formula cancel eachother out to a certain extent. The assumption that all solids in fruit are fructose makes for an innaccurately high SP. But when you adjust for the correct 170% SP of fructose (from the book's 125%), this usually brings the SP of the mixture just barely back into the recommended range of 25-33%. The textbook formula gets less accurate as the fruit content increases for a given type of fruit.

Still, I think I'll stick to my adjusted formula from now on.

Here are the SP results of all the formulas I've calculated, all using purees with no sugar added, adjusted based on the USDA statistics for the fruit's sugar content:

Banana 60% fruit
Textbook Formula: 32.65 SP
Adjusted Formula: 21.8 SP

Blueberry 50% fruit
TF: 30.77
AF: 26.9

Pear 60% fruit
TF: 31.45
AF: 26.35

Apple 60% fruit
TF: 31
AF: 28.11

Peach 70% fruit
TF: 31.26
AF: 25.33

Apricot 50% fruit
TF: 30.65
AF: 26.23

Apricot 70% fruit
TF: 31.35
AF: 25.16

Blackberry 60% fruit
TF:  31.3
AF: 22.48

Cantaloupe 70% fruit
TF: 30.65
AF: 27.71

Sour Cherry 60% fruit
TF: 31.6
AF: 23.41

Sweet Cherry 60% fruit
TF: 31.6
AF: 25.82

Kiwi 60% fruit
TF: 31.7
AF: 25.55

Pineapple 60% fruit
TF: 31
AF: 26.77

Plum 60% fruit
TF: 31.75
AF: 23.13

Raspberry 50% fruit
TF: 27.95
AF: 24.46

Red Currant 50% fruit
TF: 30.9
AF: 25

Strawberry 70% fruit
TF: 30.82
AF: 25.13

PS: No, I'm not going to "show my work." I don't feel like typing all that shit out. If you want to see the full charts of the ingredients, follow that USDA link, get out your calculator, and do it yourself.

Isomalt flower

First day of sugar showpiece week. We started by making isomalt flowers. I'm happy with my first effort:

Ice cream is fascinating, chocolate candy is boring... who knew?

When I signed up for pastry school and looked over the schedule, two classes stuck out as the ones I was most eager to learn: Chocolate candy and breads.

The two weeks of chocolate candy class ended today, and I'm glad it's over. Chocolate candy is fussy, tedious, repetetive, messy, and just a pain in the ass. Now I know why you need to charge $2 for 20 cents worth of chocolate to make a profit selling chocolate candy.

That's not to say I don't like chocolate. I still love to eat it. I still want to learn more about how to work with it and how to pair chocolate with other flavors. What I know now is that I wouldn't want to be a chocolatier, at least until I somehow had the money to buy all the equipment and/or employees to do the enrobing, molding, piping, and packaging for me.

On the other hand, ice cream is not something I was particularly interested in before the ice cream/sorbet class. I never realized how much scientific knowledge is required to create a good ice cream recipe. Getting the recipe to the right balance of solids, fats, water, air, stabilizers and sweetness is surprisingly complex. So many factors affect the taste, texture and consistency, including the size of the ice crystals. As I pointed out in my previous post, even the formula some professional chefs use to balance IC/sorbet recipes is obviously flawed.

Textbook rant

During the first week of school, one of the chefs said "these are twenty-one thousand dollar books, so take care of them." The $21k referring to the tuiton.

I don't think so. The books have a few problems.

Problem 1: Sometimes a recipe will have an ingredient on the ingredient list, but the directions for the recipe don't say where to add it. It's usually a less significant ingredient like vanilla or salt, but still, wtf? Leaving out the salt or vanilla in a dish can make a big difference in flavor.

Several times I've made the mistake of actually trying to make something by following the recipe in the book. When I'm finished, I'll look on the table and see a little container of salt or half a vanilla bean and be like "fuck, the recipe never said anything about that."

Problem 2: Sometimes the directions are so vague as to render the recipe almost useless without seeing the chefs' demonstration first.

Problem 3: The directions for a few recipes say "make a creme anglaise with the first 4 ingredients." I know how to make a creme anglaise and it's pretty easy, but there's no recipe for creme anglaise in the book. Did they decide to leave it out just because it's so easy? If so, why is there a recipe for simple syrup? Creme anglaise is one of the most basic pastry recipes, I kinda think it should be there at least as a reference.

Problem 4: The ice cream and sorbet balancing formulas are flawed. The formulas make 3 incorrect assumptions.

The first is that all the solid content of fruit is sugar. Fruit contains fiber, vitamins, minerals, fats, and proteins, all of which are solid. For example, bananas (according to the USDA) are 25% solid, but only 12.2% sugar.

The second is that all the sugar in fruit is fructose. This is very wrong. Again using bananas for example, fructose is slightly less than 40% of the total sugar. There's actually more glucose than fructose in a banana.

The third is that the sweetening power of fructose is 125%. According to On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee, fructose has a sweetening power of 170% below 60C, and 120% when heated above 60C. Ice creams and sorbets are obviously well below 60C, so for an IC/sorbet formula, you would need to calculate it as 170%.

What these flaws add up to is an extremely innaccurate result for sweetening power. The only way to get an accurate sweetening power would be to calculate the amounts of sucrose, glucose, and fructose separately, and use the correct 170% sweetness for fructose. Some fruits also contain maltose and galactose, but rarely more than 2% of total sugars.

Using the textbook formula for a banana sorbet recipe with 60% fruit puree (no sugar added) will result in a sweetening power of 32.6%. Near the top of the recommended range of 25-33%. If we use the same 60% banana puree, but calculating the actual sugar content, we get a total sweetening power of 21.8%. The reason for this huge difference in sweetness is because of the large amount of glucose in banana, which is much less sweet than fructose. I haven't tasted a banana sorbet using this formula to create a recipe, but I'm guessing it's not sweet enough.

40% bankroll increase!

Tonight I drank a bottle of reisling (ok I didn't drink the whole bottle, I put about 1/4 of it in a risotto) and played some 1c/2c NLH. Won about $8, which brings my roll up to $28.

I cashed out everything in my poker accounts a few months ago and just started playing again, trying to rebuild from nothing by playing freeroll tournaments and microlimits. I took down a 2400 man razz freeroll on Full Tilt for $15 two weeks ago. Playing 8 hours of razz for $15 is not something I'd like to do again.