bibbotson

Many sites list the pads as "candy pads" which drove me nuts a year ago when I was looking for the same products. No one in the world knew what I was referring to when I used the word glassine, even showed some sales staff at packaging stores some I had gotten from commercial chocolate boxes and they didn't have a clue until I dropped glassine from my queries. Maybe there is another type or use for glassine out there that causes the confusion, I don't know. I don't have experience with any specific vendors as I didn't end up ordering anything, but I found a lot of sites selling candy pads, just google it. Good luck.

There are so many different brands of silicone pans, mats, etc. these days and I don't believe there is much consistency between them in terms of the types of silicone, what they were cured with, etc. I've never had taste issues with traditional silpats (whether from Demarle, or exopats from Matfer, etc.). However, my wife bought a set of ice-cube trays made of silicone from Bed Bath and Beyond, and I can't drink anything these cubes end up in. A distinct chemical taste that I recognize as exactly the taste of water drunk from our cheap green plastic 5-and-dime waterguns when I was a kid. It seems the same feel and consistency of silicone as that showing up in pie plates, cake pans, etc. for low cost at mega-home stores.

L'Eveil des Sens (All The Pleasures of Flavor) by Phillippe Bertrand & Philippe Marand is available from JBPrince and CHIPS Books. Note that CHIPS has it available as the book & CDROM combo (same as JBPrince) but also the two sold separately (search around the CHIPS site to locate the separate listings).

Good luck, you won't regret this! I spent a decade relegating pastry to a hobby, afraid to make the transition to school and a career, afraid that my enjoyment and passion wouldn't survive the journey. My only regret? Not doing it sooner. In my program most students were straight out of high school, but there was still a range of ages. My best advice is to be humble and eager to learn and always be on time. Best of luck!!!!

His stuff is absolutely amazing, both to look at and to taste. I had the luck to visit his shoppes in Paris several times this summer, and sampled a number of his individual desserts and assortments of macarons. TOP ROW: macha, coffee, umé (a Japanese prune, if web translators are to be believed) SECOND ROW: lemon, chocolate, raspberry THIRD ROW: violet, strawberry, pistachio BOTTOM ROW: sesame, salted caramel and cinnamon peach Highly recommended if you're in Paris, and his shoppes are located near enough to Pierre Herme, Dalloyau and other sites to inspire an all-day pastry excursion (skip breakfast first).

One concern besides texture or flavor is health and sanitation. The base isn't going to be reheated or cooked in any way, so the cycle of thawing and refreezing strays into the gray zone for bacterial danger. It won't necessarily be bad, and you may have seen it done or will do it in the future many times without incident. But the risk is significant and food sanitation is all about pushing risk at each stage to its minimally achievable level. Here in New York, you'd certainly run afoul of the health inspector.

Chocolatier magazine had a mimosa truffle recipe in 1995 or 1996, which I made several times back then and was always received well. A bit soft for a truffle, but you could always enrobe it or fill a moulded shell with it. It was composed more or less of the ingredients the posts have been offering. I believe it was: heavy cream infused with orange zest, white chocolate, dash of champagne. I don't think there was much more, but it was a long time ago. The recipe called for rolling the truffle ball in a shortening/white chocolate mix, which along with the softness factor was why I stopped making it as often as the others in the article. Good luck!

Thank you, nathanm, your summary is beautiful! As another eG'er who suffered through Thermodynamics courses en route to a career in the kitchen, I can't stress enough that the key factors nathanm provided above is as detailed an understanding you need. They give you a sense of direction of how changing the setup (like moving to an oven with steam injection) should lead you to experiment with the temperature and time of your food. Any further specificity isn't worth it because it depends too much on the individual characteristics of the cut of food in the pan, the pan, the oven, the air humidity, etc. Its only worth running down that difficult-to-figure road in industrial setups where consistency is maintained among all those items, every time, hundreds of thousands of times. Great thread.

Eating after dinner? Tonight dessert was dinner Had an assortment of macarons from Sadaharu Aoki in Paris: TOP ROW: macha, coffee, umé (a Japanese prune, if web translators are to be believed) SECOND ROW: lemon, chocolate, raspberry THIRD ROW: violet, strawberry, pistachio BOTTOM ROW: sesame, salted caramel and cinnamon peach My favorites were the violet, pistachio and lemon macarons.

The Health Department might also have requirements about your workspace (ie, separated from home spaces, all counters raised off the floor, etc.). Here in New York they're far stricter than most places, but you'll definitely want to check them first as complying with their rules might require some (hopefully minor) expenses that you'll want to have in mind when you plan out spreadsheets, etc.

Thanks! Also on Long Island (but delivering to Manhattan) is Raeder's Wines & Liquors in Albertson. In New York I've since found Grand Wine & Liquor in Astoria, Queens.

I've been trying to find a liquor store in New York City that carries Passoa (passion-fruit liqueur) and was wondering if anyone knew of a place offhand? Thanks

I bought a Badger 250-2 today for spraying chocolate thinned with cocoa butter. At the art store I bought it from, however, all of the canned propellants contain some nasty-call-poison-control-if-ingested-type chemicals. I asked the fairly wise staff and they said they'd never heard of canned air being, well, just air. And they agreed they'd never use the canned propellants for anything related to human consumption. So, short of buying a compressor (which I can't afford at the moment), what suggestions does anyone have? Do you used canned propellant for pastry work? If so, what brand?

Potato starch can be included in a genoise recipe to create a finer crumb. Here in New York, one of the standard brands (I can't recall the name right now) of bread in supermarkets has had a potato bread for at least 10 years that is delicious. Yellow/golden in color. Question: I've seen separate references to "wheat starch" from (wheat) flour. I've been told that these are the same product, but am not sure. Anyone have any information?

I gravitate towards texts that have more than a killer recipe (or 10), but rather explain or enlighten in a way that expands my understanding or interest in the topic, that reveals the underlying machinery in an accessible and elegant way. I second the Bilheux series (the French texts John DePaula recommended). Along with Healy and Bugat's Mastering the Art of French Pastry I've found these the most systematic in the way they present doughs, batters, etc. Helped me immensely in mentally ordering the pastry component universe, which then helps you find wonderful substitutions. etc. Lisa Yockelson's Baking by Flavor , along with her various columns and articles over the years, are really great resources. For chocolate, Jean-Pierre Wybauw's Fine Chocolates, Great Experience, bar none. For bread, Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice presented simply, informatively and very visually a storehouse of knowledge. Try to read his Crust and Crumb, then Apprentice and you'll see that how information is presented can make all the difference.

This has been a good thread, as have all the similar ones I've read over the years. (As with "what shoes do you wear in the kitchen," this topic returns perennially.) As someone who has seen the whole gamut, from elite high schools to large public universities to the Ivy League and community college, let me offer the following: I am a career changer, and as someone who vacilated for nearly 10 years about whether to switch, whether transforming a hobby into a job would lead me to hate it, I would wholeheartedly do it again, and sooner, if I could. But certainly only make an informed switch -- read all the threads like this you can, read "The Making of a Pastry Chef," talk to working PCs, etc. It's not easy, but no career is. Buty if you have a sense of the difficulties, you're ahead of many students who only find out over time. There is no one perfect solution. The private programs at the ICE and FCI offer a good education, but their tradeoff is money for time. You finish quickly, which for students I've known from there was most important to them. My program -- I'm enrolled in the AAS Hospitality Management program at the New York City College of Technology -- takes longer and is a more general degree. But the entire degree costs 1/4 of that at FCI... the longer time is a drag, but it provides a longer "seasoning" time -- I've had time to work the James Beard Awards, the U.S. Pastry Competition, the Salon of Culinary Arts, help run a culinary workshop program, etc. My networking opportunities have been just as good as those of anyone from those other programs, and I've had time to develop a good professional development plan. I've met or worked with as many or more "big name" PCs as some people I know at those other programs. It's a function of your aims and ambitions, not the program you attend. But very important to note: If you attend FCI or many of the other more expensive programs, you need to understand that the Federal title those programs are under changes the amounts of aid available. I was supposed to start at FCI in 2001, and had to cancel because of the cost. The program was $24K(?) but only $4K was available in Federal loans. The rest was up to me, and private loans are a dicey proposition (I have some from my graduate school days, and they are rough). In contrast, my program at CityTech is fully-coverable under Federal aid. I'm taking loans, but other students cover their full tuition with grants. And when I graduate, these loans can be consolidated and fixed, unlike private loans. In bristling defense of community colleges: Hey, having been at nearly every type of school, I will attest that students with half-assed motivations and poor attitudes exist everywhere... as do brilliant underachievers, brilliant overachievers, students with a heart of gold and high hopes but poor preparation, working mothers who are talented but pressed on every side by competing demands, etc. The full range of types were there at my "gifted" high school, at my large public university for my first degree, my Ivy League graduate program, and now at my community college.

Assouline and Ting in Philadelphia seems to have the best prices on Valrhona I've seen (about $7.90/lb), although it's still to much for me.

I've found the best quality/price balance to be Cacao Noel.

I have the Lenôte Recettes Glacées book. It doesn't really touch on large batch production issues. Most of the book consists of recipes for entremets, vacherins, coupes, etc. It seems very useful, however, for some of its discussions of hygenie, tables on the sweetness properties of different sweeteners, and formulas on how to balance ice cream and sorbet recipes. As I haven't seen any other professional books on ice cream making, I can't comment on how these resources compare to similar books. - Brian