pastrygirl

I ate parmesan marshmallows at el bulli in 2005 that were really light and melt-in-the-mouth and way cool. They might be in the cookbook. Otherwise, I'm thinking a foam (via isi NO2 canister) might be a good direction, maybe with dry ice involved? If you have a reasonable amount of gelatin, you can get a moderately stable foam, but then you'll have to set it quickly. Too much gelatin and it sets up in the canister, or you can play with the canister temp I guess. Chocolate goes with almost everything, haven't tried it with salmon but now of course I have to. First thing Monday morning! I did make a salmon ice cream once, served with candied salmon skin and a bit of roe. The guy I made it for liked it, but then again, he'll eat anything.

I just took four days of chocolate classes from a chef who was very adamant about not relying on thermometers, they only tell you what the temperature is, not whether the chocolate is in temper/properly pre-crysatllized. I am motivated to try to wean myself off the thermometer - the two I bought today are for other candy, I swear! You do have to get to know your chocolate, how it looks when it is right, and test very frequently. Having nice half hotel pan melters and a heat gun really helps with the whole program, it gets to be such a bigger pain to keep it in the working zone without proper equipment. I dream of proper equipment...

Or instead of worms, a candied violet or rose petal or even a little white chocolate flower for Easter (maybe not a big holiday in Israel?), May Day, Mothers' Day or whatever flowery spring holiday you can convince people to buy stuff for.

Meat grinder = genius! I recall you mentioning putting your candied ginger through the meat grinder also, do you have a dedicated pastry grinder, or do you just clean it really well between meat and sweets? Great, another piece of equipment we're all going to want to buy

Copyright 2008. You are correct about his career path, also was at River Cafe but now at the CIA. I picked up a copy in Bangkok last week; haven't had a chance to get into it yet, but it looks like a great resource.

It seems like if you are going from an 8" layer to a 10" layer, the larger cake will take longer to bake, and evaporate more liquid in that time, so more liquid needed makes sense. According to RLB: the larger the pan size, the less baking powder is used in proportion to other ingredients. This is because of surface tension. The larger the diameter of the pan, the slower the heat penetration and the less support the rising cake receives because the sides are further from the center. Baking powder weakens the cake's structure by enlarging the air spaces, so decreasing baking powder strengthens the structure and compensates for retarded gelatinization and the decrease in support. Hmmmm, so what about baking soda? Same rule?

That IS good stuff. Sneak pinches and eat plain (or combined with a few chocolate chips) every time you go into the storeroom good stuff.

Have you tried making your own? You won't get quite as smooth a consistency, but it may be worth it to be able to control what goes into it. You need a good heavy duty food processor, like a robot coupe, almonds, sugar, maybe a touch of almond extract. If you consider glucose and invert sugar artificial, you could try honey and a thick simple syrup. I've made decent marzipan, it's not too hard but maybe it depends on what you want to use it for?

Rolled buttercream? As in meringue buttercream? You chill it, roll it, cut it out and put it on top of the cookie, or how does that work? As for the glitter...it does look fun, but probably has limited applications. I'd eat it at least once. I've used luster dust on chocolates and some cookies, nice for holidays or in a mix of less sparkly things, but best when not overdone.

You can have some of mine. I tell ya, hanging out in the office all day surfing the net and huddling under blankets at home all winter trying to stay warm - meanwhile munching on cookies and Toblerone bars - is a really good way to cultivate the belly fat. The Japanese are going to be hunting me for my toro any day now. But seriously, a high performance machine needs high performance fuel. If I'm busy (not so much these days), I don't want to take the time to stop and eat, but it is true that you'll be better off for the rest of the day if you take 15 minutes to have a burrito than if you take 2 minutes to grab a piece of fruit or a pastry. It sounds like you have plenty more food available than those perfect, non-selling croissants, so you really have no excuse. I don't see anything wrong with two or three pastries a day, but you do need a few other things to round it out.

I own my condo, actually. At the time that I bought it, I was a server and my (then) boyfriend was a line cook, which was just a little before the time that I did my foodblog on eGullet. After that, I took a job as a pastry chef and he got promoted to sous chef, and we were still doing OK. When we broke up, I was down to one income and went back to waiting tables, but I've still been able to manage. Of course, I do work an average of about 50 hours per week, and I've been serving for a long time at one of the busiest restaurants in Atlanta, so I plan things very, very carefully. I don't go out drinking with my co-workers and I work hard and watch what I spend all the time. Still, I don't feel like I do too badly, even when I do a lot of cleaning and extra work for my $2.13/hour wage. Now, I did take an intense beating in the stock market last year, but that's entirely another topic. . . ← Aha! a relatively financially successful server, great to know it can happen. So would you attribute your success more to: A) working 40+ hours a week at a busy place and being careful with your income or B) chasing down living-in-the-'50s-octogenarians, clueless foreigners, and the unrepentantly cheap to try to get an extra six bucks after they left only 9%?

I'm actually shocked that this statement could be made in response to something that I wrote more than anything else in this thread. I mean, wow. ← I am befuddled by your shock, but upon further reflection, I don't think my statement was true, and I would like to apologize for upsetting your equilibrium and issue a retraction. I will say too many can't be bothered to remember the sorbets du jour, a personal pet peeve. I think what I meant to say was that I am disheartened when servers don't seem to care as much about the food itself as I'd like them to, meaning care about eating it or have a deep understanding of the processes. When a server at a French bistro looks at a dessert that consists of a chocolate bombe sitting in a pool of creme anglaise and asks, 'so...which part is the creme anglaise?', that only proves his individual boneheadedness. When a server at a different place asked me what is the difference between baking powder and yeast, I appreciated his curiosity, even though it was a very basic (to me) question that indicated he might not have ever baked anything in his life. That is OK, but somehow it still confuses me when people who don't cook make their living (even though sort of indirectly) from food. Service is customer care and sales, the kitchen is where you go when you want to geek out over micro chervil and rare citrus crossbreeds and such, I'll try to keep reminding myself of that

I was referring to the information shown on this chart. Keep in mind that this site is trying to lure people into the Philadelphia area, so if anything they would want to underestimate the cost of living. Of course, it would probably be easy to find a different chart that showed something completely different. The ACCRA estimates come from this organization, and are for 2008 3Q. ← Two places I've lived and worked - a studio apartment in Seattle costs around $700-$900, depending on the age & location of the building (my last apt (2 yrs ago) was $635 in a convenient for me but not super hip location). A one bedroom is around $800-$1000. A line cook with a few years of experience might make $12-14 an hour, a pastry chef in a restaurant is lucky to get above $30 - 35k (not a whole lot of full time pastry chef jobs there), sous chefs generally make about 25% more than pastry chefs, but also work longer hours and have more staff to manage. If you head south, add 30% for East Bay/SF 'burbs and 50% or more (at least for rents if not wages) for San Francisco proper. Unfortunately this industry is not one in which you can expect a super high standard of living. You should be able to hope to get beyond the collegiate-style sharing a house with friends or strangers, but the hope of owning your own home is a distant dream unless you have a spouse in a much more lucrative industry.

If you're hourly and you go home early due to no business, it doesn't matter what side of the pass you're on. Not sending cooks home but cutting servers instead is just an oddity of your GM, and I agree that it doesn't make sense. Although from your earlier post on a good night vs a bad night, it does seem that you are not appropriately rewarded for your efforts, I have a hard time with people who seem to want a full time income from part time work. Sure, if you were promised 32 hours and you got cut a shift and only worked 25, and the tips were lousy to boot, that's really going to suck. But the usually less than 40 hours a week is another of the trade-offs, and what makes serving attractive to students and the stereotypical starving artist/actor, or a good second job for people who are particularly ambitious. The trade-off I'm making right now was to leave my home, friends, family, and a good job when they were about to open a 2nd restaurant (could've meant a nice raise) to come and live in fucking Bhutan so I could save more money so I can either hope to retire in 30 years or maybe be an investor in my own place someday. The retirement plan of 'marry up' that one chef suggested doesn't seem to be happening. This can be a really hard place to live in myriad ways, but it does make you realize how little you need to survive, how little these people need to be happy. The per capita income is around $2000 and the King's mantra of Gross National Happiness (instead of GN Product) is for real, these people are poor rice farmers with nothing, but are very happy. Admittedly, I prefer and enjoy indoor plumbing and hot water, and I know that trying to live on less than about $25k in a US city is truly a struggle. Money sure comes in handy, but it is not everything, and if it is important to you to have more, sometimes taking a huge risk and doing something way outside of what you know can pay off. Sorry, we already have an F&B manager, but I'd be happy to forward your resume to corporate headquarters in Singapore.

Boy, I never worked at a place -- from saloon to formal French -- where the wait staff didn't work clearing tables, serving coffee, fetching drinks until long after the cooks had gone home, one by one, as the last orders passed from salad to dessert (or, in the saloons, the last bacon cheeseburger went out). There also those slow shifts designed entirely to have the waiters come in and make $20 in tips while cleaning the glass and mirrors, scrubbing the bar coolers, spritzing the chairs etc. Better to have the waiters clean up at $2.85 than have to pay a dishwasher actual minimum wage. ← I worked at one place where the servers came in in staggered shifts, so the opener who comes in at 4 does the opening sidework, gets the early tables and leaves at maybe 10, the closer comes in at 6, probably stays until midnight doing closing sidework. All of the servers there seemed pretty happy, check average was around $45 and we were busy, 90 seats and my last year there we didn't do less than 100 covers for months on end, usually 150+ on Fri/Sat. My first restaurant job was two blocks away from an arena, and we would get swamped for the two or three hours before professional basketball games. Not a normal situation to be sure, but that was where servers would come in at 4, make a wad of cash, and be out early. Oddly, I think that was also the only place where some of the servers had day jobs. Isn't part of the tips-as-wages deal that the restaurant is responsible for making up the difference between you $2.85 an hour and minimum wage if you don't get the tips? So they are counting on you making just enough in tips to make minimum while you clean? Yeah, that's shifty.

It depends on what type of food you are doing. If you're getting all molecular and playing with sodium alginate and methylcellulose and sous vide, precision and accuracy are a little more important. You don't just want to throw a handful of agar into your tabasco caviar mixture, better to measure by grams or at least teaspoons. As a pastry chef, of course I have recipes, but there are still times when you have to adjust to taste for more or less ripe fruit, and bread is mostly by feel, some days the flour needs more or less water. I never used to have sorbet recipes, because fresh fruit can be so variable, but I have some now because it takes a lot of practice to know how taste corresponds to frozen texture, and my assistants are not there yet. I guess at some places I've worked there has been a recipe book, but most of the cooks eyeballed things anyway. Everybody knows cooks hate to measure

Katie, don't take this the wrong way, but it is sort of nice to hear the truth about what a server actually makes and that it is not necessarily all that much. What I mean is, I think so much animosity forms between the front & back due to the type of server who brags about pocketing $200 after a six hour shift, while the cooks have been sweating their nuts off since they came in at 2 and still have a couple more hours of cleanup to go, and will make about half that much. There is also sometimes...maybe a sense of entitlement or superiority that can be really off-putting. Everyone who works hard wants to be rewarded with something besides repetetive motion injuries for their efforts, and the suggestion by some that FOH are somehow more deserving than BOH, well we BOH are a sensitive bunch (beneath all of the alcohol, tattoos, and personality disorders) and don't like to be told that our work towards the same goal - successful restaurant, happy customers - is less important, less valuable. Why exactly is it that you (not you) are better than me? Because my talents are different? Let's try separate but equal and see how that feels. I think cooks and servers have both historically not gotten a lot of respect in the US, that is changing somewhat (probably more for chefs) now with celebrity chefs and the current cult of the restaurant. I really applaud Thomas Keller for instituting the service charge at his restaurants and trying to equalize the front and back, but we have a really long way to go and we probably do need to change the system so that we can all get along, customers don't feel railroaded, and nobody feels ripped off at the end of the day. But until we can get a new system figured out, I'd have to say I'm against both chasing down poor tippers AND skinny little ho's who get way overtipped based on flaunting a perky pair.

I do. And so do they. ← I think we are all aware that servers believe they should make cash hand over fist and not have to declare it to the IRS. Yes, plates are heavy, people can be jerks, some nights are totally dead and you get cut early. Every job in every industry is going to have its pluses and minuses. Each person needs to consider those in relation to the average pay and decide if it is worth it. Hard work unfortunately does not always pay better. FOH and BOH are two halves of a whole. Yes they are different skill sets but equally important to the success of the operation. True, a lot of dishwashers don't speak English fluently and a lot of cooks have personality disorders. And a lot of servers can't bake a genoise, make buttercream, filet a fish, brunoise a carrot, etc. A lot of servers know shockingly little about food (I guess if they were into food they'd be in the kitchen instead). True, some jobs just pay better and some skill sets are just worth more in the market. So what happens if bringing people their dinner and explaining what sauvignon blanc tastes like turns out to be not quite as valuable as originally hoped? If serving actually pays less than everyone seems to think or hope it should, maybe it is time for a few people to suck it up and accept reality, maybe consider a job change when jobs become available again. If you want $40k a year but are only making $25, what do you do? Do you look for another job, or stay in the one you have and cry about how much more you deserve? Doesn't everyone always want more? People at every income think they would be happier if they made more money, but when they make more, the happiness does not increase (maybe temporarily) and they want more again. It would be great if there were no working poor, if no body had to struggle. From what I hear, a lot of Americans are struggling right now, not just servers.

Katie, I appreciate your honesty. Understandably in these times you're probably going to have more bad nights than good nights, and that is hard. It is hard to not have a great income, it is hard to want to work but there is no business, hard when you are at the grocery store trying to find the cheapest food you possibly can and your old junker car just broke down again and you really don't have $600 to fix it. I spent entirely too much of my 20's living that way, and it really sucked, but in truth I was also irresponsible with my spending - when you make $9 an hour, you really can't afford to go out to dinner that often, a fact I was in denial about. But still, I understand the frustration of living paycheck to paycheck and having debt. But I think why people get so fired up over this, is that a lot of servers seem to think they 'deserve' to have a good night every night. They brag about how much they made on a busy Saturday and whine and moan on a slow Tuesday. Every night is not Saturday night, so each person has to decide for his or herself if the average wage ends up being worth it. If people think they should be averaging $20 an hour but in truth they only average $14, they need to examine whether they still want to do that job for that wage, instead of demanding that now everyone has to tip 25% instead of 15. Like someone said above, servers tend to resist the service charges when restaurants try to implement them, choosing instead to take the gamble. If serving was truly a hellacious, underpaid job, there would be unions, organizations, strikes, etc. But it seems to work for a lot of people, at least in good times. Now that we are in bad times, pretty much everyone is struggling or know someone who is, not just servers and restaurants. Talk to someone in Detroit who lost their job after 30 years at GM and whose 401K is shot and doesn't have a whole lot of job options at the age of 50. Talk to a car salesman who works on commission and used to sell 50 cars a month but now sells 6. You sound very capable and like (in better times) you could easily get a job at a place with a higher check average and make more money. You say you love your job and there must be reasons why you have stayed there instead of moving to a more expensive place. Maybe it's a convenient location, the owners are friendly and flexible, you have creative input, whatever, we all make choices based on what is important to us. At the end of the day, is it worth it? We all have to take ownership of the choices we make.

I generally try to stay out of tipping threads but I have a question for Katie and other servers. I don't want to pry, but you keep disputing Jackal's math without giving your own numbers. So, how much do you take home on a good night? On a bad night? What does that work out to as an hourly income (including your $2.83 wage paid by the restaurant)? Sure, sometimes you have a long slow shift, sometimes you have a short busy shift. What is the range? What is the average? If there was no tipping at all, illegal, a banned practice, and servers were paid hourly, how much should a server at various places be paid as an hourly rate....at IHOP? At the neighborhood bistro? At the special occasion steak house? At the five star destination restaurant? For diners, what do you think a fair hourly wage would be based on the level of service you prefer? 10? 15? 20? 25? more? For servers, what hourly wage would make doing the job still worth doing, whether you love it or not? 10? 15? 20? 25? more? The cooks are probably paid around 10 to 15 an hour DOE, and I don't see any reason why servers should expect more than that. It takes both sides to make a restaurant successful. If everyone in the whole restaurant can make more, that would be fabulous. Right now, in many states, servers rely on the customer to provide most of their income. Is it happening and people just want more, or is it not happening to the degree that people want to chase down the customer and demand more? If servers are getting less than $10 to 15 an hour (or whatever a similarly experienced cook at that particular restaurant makes) averaged over the year, then they have a valid argument about everyone tipping better. Sure the chef, sous chef, and pastry chef are all probably salaried, but when you break it down into hours worked and overtime not earned, those salaries start looking pretty pathetic. Katie, you can do that math when you get a management position. The sous chef at a nice place might make $50k if he's lucky, but working 70 hours a week, it's the same hourly rate as the line cooks, or less. There is a trade off for everything.

But would the heath dept consider it potentially hazardous over the months that it takes to dry & get the water content down that low? In the beginning, it is fresh meat with a little salt and stuff, I can picture them not understanding the concept that in a year it will be really delicious and totally safe prosciutto, it just looks like raw meat hanging in the storeroom for now.

Here are a few of my current favorites: Sourdough crackers - don't recall where I got this 1 c sourdough starter 1/4 c olive oil about 1/2 c AP flour (depending on how stiff your starter is) 1/2 tsp salt 1/4 tsp baking soda Combine to make a stiff dough, rest at least 15 minutes, roll thin, transfer dough to a sheet pan, brush with more olive oil and sprinkle with salt, prick all over with a fork and cut shapes, bake @ 350F until golden brown. They do puff up a little from bubbles in the dough, but they are nice and crisp and good flavor. Keep about a week. Sesame Soy Crackers - a bastardization of a Charlie Trotter recipe - super easy, thin and fragile this is the 'batter' type recipe I mentioned upthread, I tried it and liked it, even made a gluten free version with rice and corn flours. The original uses all wine and paprika (no sesame/soy), but I wanted a few different versions, and I get yelled at if I use too much expensive imported wine 135 g AP flour (1 cup) 1/2 tsp black pepper 40 g (about 2 TB + 2 tsp) butter, melted 2 TB soy sauce 1/4 c white wine 1/4 c water 1 TB black sesame seeds 2 TB white sesame seeds Mix flour and pepper. Whisk wet ingredients, then stir into dry. Batter will be a little thin, thinner than tuile paste, should be easily spreadable. Add water or wine if needed. Oil two half sheet pans generously, then spread the batter in a thin even layer - small offset icing spatula is good for this. Sprinkle with mixed sesame seeds and bake at 350F until golden. Sometimes they stick to the pan, but when they don't they are really nice and light, suitable for inhaling. These don't keep well. Multigrain Crackers 150 g AP flour (about 1 c + 1 TB) 50 g buckwheat flour (scant 1/3 c) 50 g rye flour (scant 1/3 c) 1 TB black onion seed 1-1/2 tsp cumin seed 2 tsp sugar 1/2 tsp salt 1/4 tsp baking soda 80 g cold butter (3 oz/6TB) 1/2 c yogurt or buttermilk Mix dry, cut in butter until crumbly, add yogurt to make the dough, chill before rolling. Roll dough, brush with olive oil & sprinkle with salt, cut shapes, bake at 325F until golden. Keep about a week. Good with cheese, if you don't have black onion seed I'm sure you could substitute something else or just leave it out. Enjoy! Andrea

If they're what I think they are, then they will deform even with just really hot water. ← There is a way to use them, but it's some trouble. Put some water in a cookie sheet and put the mold into the water. The water should not over run the mold. Put the cookie sheet into the freezer until the mold is frozen into it. Then use it with the hot syrup. It works! (I tried it once.) ← That sounds like more trouble than it would be worth. What type of plastic are lollipop molds made out of?

So if you put a pain au chocolat sign they think it's going to hurt?

People..why can't we smack them all over the head with a 2 x 4? I had a partner in restaurant I worked for tell me my desserts were 'too fancy', that people didn't want the trio of small creme brulees (a great seller, btw), they just wanted one big one. Luckily one of the other partners was on my side, said desserts should be a little bit fancy. True, sometimes simple and rustic hits the spot for a lot of people, but this is kind of disturbing. Why would people think you had a big pile of fake croissants mixed in with the other pastry? Why are people afraid of fancy? it doesn't seem like it is a money issue, if the croissants are similarly priced with other pastry and if they sell when they are more 'rustic'. Is it some sort of guilt, like they don't think they deserve a perfect pastry? Is it less indulgent if the same $ is spent on something less pretty?