Serj

I grew up in Europe, where people leave their eggs out all the time, permanently. From what I understand, however, egg suppliers in America are required to wash the eggs before sending them to the supermarkets, which ruins the egg's natural protective layer. From my experience so far professionally, eggs and milk aren't left out overnight at room temperature, for safety reasons. However, butter is and egg whites can be, if they are cracked and out of the shell, as long as the ambient temperature is less than 54 degrees F, as they have a protective enzyme in them. I agree in general that we need to be thinking a lot about food safety, but I also think people over react a lot, when it comes to home baking. How many mass-outbreaks of e-coli have you heard of from people leaving pasteurized products out in a clean home kitchen over night? I think most of the problems come in chronically dirty kitchens or way earlier in the food production process, ie food not being pasteurized properly. Also, the acid in our stomachs kill almost every bacteria that gets put in them. Our bodies can handle a lot without getting us sick!

I got my supplies at Home Depot for about $5. I got a pre-cut polycarbonate sheet and some approx. 1/2 inch plastic weatherstripping for about 25 cents a foot. I just stick the 4 pieces of weatherstripping to an acetate sheet with tempered chocolate and the acetate sheet to the polycarbonate board with a damp towel (not in that order!). It doesn't move at all. And for some reason I prefer working with plastic over metal. Must be trauma from having to wash the metal frames for the Wybauw course. =)

So now that I got my "what I learned in 2007" post out of the way, I can organize my thoughts for this year... So far in '08, I have started to work on new breads at my new baking job. I am making French Bread with fermented dough like I learned at school. I started a sourdough culture at work. I guess I want to keep practicing, keep improving, and keep learning as much as I can about bread. I want to start making chocolates at home more seriously. This is the worst thing about my new job. No chocolate! I want to get an airbrush and play with cocoa butter. I am inspired by all the people I've been reading about who have been opening their own business. A lot of bakeries/coffee shops have been opening up in Chicago the last couple of years as well. I want to start thinking more seriously about that, for sometime unspecified time in the future. I have so many ideas!! In terms of work, something I worked on a lot last year that I want to keep doing is working on my organization and cleanliness. It's so easy to get disorganized when things get busy. That's something that has become really important to me. Other than that, as I said earlier, I just want to keep learning as much as I can, by keeping my eyes and ears open. I want to become the best baker in Chicago. =) Maybe one day.

Ditto on better late than never... 2007 was a super fun year for me. I guess most monumentally I made my first egullet post! =) I went to the French Pastry School, where I learned at least 10,000 things. Along the same lines as so many other people, I fell in love with chocolate. I got my first molds. I got a bunch of other tools. I learned how to temper as if it was second nature. I got to work on my molded chocolates & dip lots of truffles. Through school, I got to meet JP Wybauw. I got to meet all the egulleters who were at that course. I got see Laurent le Daniel, Nicholas Lodge & Jeffrey Hammelman in action. I fell in love with bread baking. I kept my own sourdough culture alive. For a couple of months this summer, I got the chance to work as the cook at Camp Natoma, a small summer camp for children on the Central Coast of California. That gave me the chance to grow tremendously. I planned and executed three meals plus a snack every day for up to 100 campers and 25 staff. When I got back to Chicago, I got a new job, working in the pastry department at the University Club of Chicago, a busy hoity toity (in a good way of course!) private members' club. Right at the end of the year I took over as the baker there. What a great year! A lot of fun!

I am in the process of moving into a baker's position at my new job. At my old job, we shaped all of the bread by hand. The new job involves much higher volume - and the chef wants small rolls. The current baker (who is retiring tomorrow) uses an electric dough divider/rounder (Dutchess Model JN) to shape the bread. How will shaping small rolls using the machine (which I believe is set to the 1 oz setting) - affect the qualities of the bread that you look for when baking an artisan loaf? I have a few recipes that I want to eventually try, that when I have made in loaf form, result in a nice, open crumb. Should I be expecting the little rolls to have similar qualities, albeit on a smaller scale, as the loaves would, or should I expect to compromise on the crumb a little and just make sure the taste is there? On a related note: with the recipes that I am being taught now- as the rolls come out of the machine, the ones on the outside of the divider need to be shaped again by hand - they are coming out not completely rounded. Should this be happening or should the rolls be coming out fully rounded and equal? Thanks for any input!

In his continuing ed class at the French Pastry School earlier in the year, Laurent le Daniel gave the case for mixing doughs in the robot coupe - you get the same number of revolutions in a much smaller amount of time. Granted he was talking about tart dough and not bread dough, but I think it's essentially the same principle. He said as the blade heats up, gluten will start to develop (so obviously with tart dough you want to stop mixing before this point). I would never try making bread dough this way at work, but at home sometimes I think it would be nice to have a quick way to just make blah bread. Sometimes when you go to a restaurant, the bread can be delicious and addictive - but by technical artisan standards it's crap. And as a disclaimer I hate hovis/wondabread style bread! And I live in a big city with several good bakeries, including one 2 blocks away. Anyways, thanks for the info about the technique, it'll be fun to try. Never know when it'll come in handy!

I had to crack/separate 10 flats of eggs the other day. I found I couldn't stick to one method of separating the eggs - I got extremely bored, so I alternated between eggshell to eggshell, straining through my hands, and picking the yolks out of the white. With gloves on of course. Fun times.

I like to use a Hyde Super Guide, which is some kind of painting decorating tool. I find you get more control than using the dry wall knife/chocolate scraper, because it's easier to use 2 hands... Hyde Super Guide

Congrats... Watching the Pithivier rise evenly and without leakage (the chefs called it "Pithivier TV") for the first time was one of my best moments at culinary school. Luckily it happened on my first exam! =)

When this happened to me at school it was because when I was cutting the side of the pithivier, to make the rounded parts of the edge, I was cutting too close to the center, where the almond paste was. I just pulled out my notes - to put the almond paste down, we piped it with a 1/2" pastry tip, leaving at LEAST 3-4cm clearance between the edge of the almond paste and the innermost tips of the border. Incidently, they insisted we seal the two layers with water, not eggwash - and freeze it for 4-5 minutes (although that was 4-5 minutes in the blast freezer, probably 1/2 hour in the regular freezer), and then refrigerate it until ready to bake. Just sharing my experience! =)

You can make "molding chocolate" by blitzing regular, chopped chocolate in a food processor until it's well... moldable. Just keep processing until it gets there (takes a little while). If molded into clumps, I reckon it would look like coal! Worth a try, even if it doesn't work out- you still have chopped chocolate which you can melt down and use for brownies or something. Disclaimer: I don't have a food processor at home, but I have done it on a couple of really old industrial strength Robot Coupes at work - don't see why it wouldnt work though.

One time at school, the chef told the entire class he'd bake our French Meringue for us. They all turned out cracked like this. He told us what happened was he turned the oven temperature up to try and speed things up. He told us it is important to bake French meringue at 200˚F for several hours (often we would leave them overnight), rather than 225-250˚ for a shorter time. Could that have something to do with it?

If I remember right you want to fill the jars while everything is still above 60˚C and vacuum seal them immediately.

At school we sterilized jars by putting them with their lids in a 215˚F oven for an hour or so. We were filling them with hot jam, which obviously woudn't melt like nutella, but it's nice to have they dry the whole time.

I have substituted corn syrup for glucose syrup in these recipes with no problems at all. --> But it just occurred to me that invert sugar = trimoline. Oops! So never mind!

I think the dipping looks good too. I was in paris for a couple of weeks this summer and was checking a lot of stuff out. Turns out even the famous french patissiers who hand dip their chocolates don't manage to get it done like it's been done by machine. To me it's that thing if you only manage to fulfill 75% of your own expectations, you are still far exceeding those of the customer...

This is slightly off topic but still kinda interesting... something I have seen done is when somebody messed up the lamination on thir croissant dough with butter sticking through the dough (opposite problem - because of the ambient heat the butter got way too soft too quickly), they rolled a very thin layer of detrempe and laid it over the rolled out dough before making a fold, guaranteeing that there is an additional layer of dough between blobs of butter. I thought it was a pretty cool emergency fix it!

No I just waited for the sugar to cool down a little before i rolled it around the pin. It came right off. But I worked so fast that I ended up wasting a lot of the sugar. I also only did a miniscule batch... it's probably a lot easier with a whole recipe. That's the great thing about sugar though, tomorrow I can melt it back down and try again!

Okay, so i haven't posted in a couple of months and it's been a hot summer's day in Chicago so I figured what better to do than play with sugar. I tried out the honeycomb thing and this is what I came up with: I don't care for molasses so I just left that out of the recipe and I don't have any pump contraptions so i just used the barrel of a bic pen. I also don't have a heat lamp... without it I don't think I could get the holes any smaller. Of course it all melted together when I cut it with a hot knife but oh well. I can just call it rustic! Okay someone else try! Serj.

So yesterday I cooked off another batch but somehow managed to burn some of the diary so there were black specks all over the place when I casted it. I cooked it to 122C and the consistency was good. I did another batch today to 122C and was a little more careful with the whisking (trying to evaporate liquid ASAP) and it came out PERFECT! Thanks for the comments guys.

I assisted at the Wybauw class and have sat in on or sneaked into a few other of the classes at the French Pastry School. From what I can tell, I think all of the guest chef classes are worth it, granted I havent paid for any! To me it's obviously less about these guys sharing their recipes - it's more about seeing the way they do things, albeit their hand movements, a piece of equipment they use, or such, that makes it worth it. As they say at school, these are the kinds of things that will help you retire earlier. Plus, it seems there's always a better/more efficient way of doing things. The other thing that has been really valuable to me is seeing how these guys respond to problems/mistakes. Something always invariably goes wrong in each class, and nobody ever stresses about anything. And they are always super organized. Obviously I'm no industry big-shot but that's just my little tidbit for why I love trying to weasel my way into these classes after I'm done with school

Yeah it is a lot of ingredients... that's the way the FPS rolls... they are pretty good though, soft or not. When I said they get wrapped, the casted caramel just gets wrapped in plastic wrap to prevent any skin from forming. A lot of people in my class seem to be having issues with varying degrees of softness. I imagine it has something to do with differences in thermometers - I calibrated mine and it seems to be accurate. I know that it doesnt take a lot of degrees more to turn soft caramel into hard caramel, so I guess it's just about finding the middle ground...

I have a question about caramels for you guys. I had a little bit of beginners luck with them last week - they came out beautifully. I have tried to reproduce twice this week again and they are coming out too soft. The recipe I am using is (school's recipe): 225g sucrose 33.8g glucose 15.8g sorbitol 135g butter 0.5g lecithin 225g heavy cream (warm) 0.5g baking soda 2.5g vanilla bean 1g salt So they said at school that you want to cook the sucrose/glucose/sorbitol on a low heat until the white foam on the caramel reaches the outside of the pot. Then add the rest of the ingredients and crank up the heat to max and whisk like crazy until it gets to 120 degrees C. Then let it cool for 30 seconds before casting. The caramel is wrapped in plastic as soon as it comes down in temperature and is let set overnight in a low humidity chocolate cooler. So the thing is it's really humid here in Chicago right now. The first time it was soft I went to 120, the second time I went to 121. Am I safe to go to 122 degrees or is there something else wrong with the method that is causing them to be soft? I feel like at times egulleters are often a little more practical than the chefs at school! Wish I could type without erorrs (joke).

That's exactly what we were taught to do at school.

So in the name of science (and just feeling like doing something goofy) and since I had unusual methods of tempering on my mind last night I heated some couverture to 50 and threw it in the kitchenaid mixer with the paddle on a low speed until it got down to 29 degrees, then added warm, untempered chocolate to bring it back to 31. I figured the three important steps are time, temperature and movement and that should satisfy all three steps right? Well it didn't work - it took forever (I had time to clean my apartment, including scrubbing the bathroom down). After the paddling the chocolate looked a bit thicker in the bowl so at first I was excited, but no. Maybe too much time and movement??