Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Last week started where the previous week finished, with a bevvy of tarts. For any newcomers, don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a tale of my sordid weekends in San Francisco’s brothels, but rather the pastry variety. And what a way to start.
Using the left over Pâte à Foncer and the vanilla Sucree, as well as a chocolate version made for us by our instructor, Juliette, we made a trio of tasty treats. The first was a Pear Bourdaloue. A rectangular tart filled with frangipane, jam and topped with artfully sliced pears. Right up my ‘rue’. Next, using the chocolate sucree, a salted caramel tart. Quite a lengthy process this one, as it involved making a salted caramel with which we lined the base, a chocolate ganache which formed the bulk of the filling, all topped off with ‘black glaze’, which contrary to it’s name isn’t a new tone from Dulux, but a silky chocolate flavoured glaze which gives the finished tart a shop ready sheen.
The final tart of the trio was a creamy passion fruit tart, which had a tasty curd like filling similar to a tarte au citron, topped (slightly un-necessarily in my opinion) with blow-torched Swiss meringue, to give a nicely burnished effect. Or at least that’s the theory. For most of us, this was the first time we had used a piping bag to finish a desert, and there were some mixed results. My effort (not pictured) wasn’t too bad, but lets just say Pierre Hermé hasn’t been knocking down my door to offer me a job.
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Tags: Blow Torch, Caramel, Chantilly, Choux, Cookies, Cream, Creamy, Eclairs, Frangipane, Gateaux Saint Honoré, meringue, Muffins, Paris Brest, passion Fruit, Pastry, Peanut Butter, Pear Bourdaloue, Praline, Salted Caramel, Tart
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Sweet Stuff, Travel | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
A week or so ago on a rare, but none the less slightly grey and grim San Francisco Saturday, we headed to an area of the city called Sunset. It’s a part of town bordered by Ocean Beach (the local break for a lot of SF surfers) and the Pacific Highway that on paper has a lot going for it, but seems to have become a bit neglected, a bit like a faded British seaside town.
We’d read that the area is on the up again following a small cluster of new(ish) and interesting places opening up down there, one of which is a cafe / restaurant called Outerlands. I’d first heard about Outerlands from a Tartine Bread video that features the owner, David Muller. David had met Chad Robertson through a love of surfing, and Chad taught David how to make the bread that he now serves at the cafe.
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Tags: Black Butte Porter, Borage, Bread, Brocoli, Chad Robertson, Cheese Sandwich, David Muller, Grilled Cheese, Outerlands, Potato, San Francisco, Soup, Sunset, Surfing, Tartine
Posted in Lunch, Opinion, Reviews, Travel | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
Bit of a funny week last week. We returned to college on Tuesday after the long 4th July weekend, and everyone seemed a bit lacking in vim and vigour. Think maybe there’s a bit of course fatigue going down. It’s been a pretty full on ten weeks, so it’s not surprising, and it was also our last week of Viennoiserie before we move on to pastry.
We started the week week working on more croissants, continuing our lamination education. It was great to get a few more batches under our belts. Getting more used to the sheeters, tidying up our lamination techniques, and working on our shaping. As part of this, we also made a couple of batches of croissants using some more exotic flours.
Firstly, a teff variation using 60% teff flour pre-cooked into a rubbery porridge which we made into traditional shapes and pain au chocolat. And also a dough made using a buckwheat poolish. As noted here before, I’m not a huge fan of teff, but the croissants actually tasted pretty good, better in fact than the pain au chocolat variation, which is odd. To my palate, the buckwheat didn’t offer a great deal, although the danish-like shapes we filled with a mix of mashed potato, goats cheese and spring onions did taste pretty damn good.
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Tags: Buckwheat, Coupe Du Monde De La Patisserie, Course, Croissasnt, Danish pastry, Lamination, Pan Au Chocolat, Pan D'oro, San Franciso, SFBI, Sheeter, Sticky Buns, Teff, Viennoiserie
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 1 Comment »
Sunday, July 10th, 2011
Since arriving in San Fran, we’ve heard quite a few people say that In-N-Out burger are the cream of the crop when it comes fast food. In-N-Out are the originators of the ‘drive-thru’ phenomenon, having opened the first one ever in 1948, and as a result most of their outlets tend to be in not very handy locations to those without cars like us. So when we passed one on the way home from Tahoe last weekend, we seized the day.
When we got in there, the first thing that struck us was the size of the menu. They only really have 6 things on offer. Three kinds of burgers, fries, shakes and soft drinks. That’s it. It’s pretty refreshing to have such a limited choice, and must have been a pretty bold decision for a country like the US where people are used to having things their way.
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Tags: Beef, Bun, Burger, Diner, Drive In, Fries, In-N-Out, Lettuce, Meatwagon, Restaurant, Tomato, Vanilla Shake
Posted in Dinner, Lunch, Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 4 Comments »
Friday, July 8th, 2011
Croissants and Danish Pastries are the new baguettes. FACT. We made a shed load of them last week as we finally got stuck into laminated doughs.
Laminating doughs with butter is one of the key skills of Viennoiserie, and it can be pretty tricky. Get it right and you end up with beautiful, flaky, buttery pastry. Win. Get it wrong and you can end up with greasy products or a clogged up sheeter. Lose.
As before, the doughs are yeasted and mixed in a very similar way, but the new techniques came into play after the initial proof. One of the most important things with lamination is to keep everything cold. You want your butter and dough to be almost frozen with a ‘plastic’ like consistency. This enables you to sheet the dough thin and ‘lock in’ the butter over a series of folds creating alternating layers of pastry and fat.
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Tags: Almond, Beton, Bienenstitch, Brea Claws, Butter, Croissants, Danish pastry, Diplomat Cream, Filling, Koign-amann, Lamination, Lock In, Lunettes, Pain Au Chocolat, Roll In, Viennoiserie
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 5 Comments »
Thursday, June 30th, 2011
A couple of weeks ago it was East 17, and now blam! I’m hitting you with an Ultravox reference. High brow shizzle I think you’ll agree. And why did up this 80s relic? Because last week we started the Viennoiserie section of our course.
Viennoiserie is the name given to all kinds of yeasted, enriched doughs. From croissants, to Danish pastries, sticky buns to brioche, we’re talking about doughs enriched with sugar, eggs, milk and butter. Lots of butter. I’ve never seen so much of the stuff than in the past week.
We’re going to be getting in to lamination next week, the technique for making croissants amongst other things, but the breads we made last week were mixed in a similar way to what we’ve become familiar with, even if the formulas were in some cases a lot more complicated.
We started off the week slowly, making a range of products based around brioche and sweet roll doughs. With most of these we had to adjust our mixing to incorporate the sugar and butter after the dough had developed in strength in the mixer. The reason for this is that both inhibit the development of gluten, and if added at the beginning you end up mixing for bloody ages and your dough comes off the mixer too warm, which in turn effects fermentation. Best avoided in other words.
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Tags: Bakewell tart, Bostock, Brioche, Buns, Butter, Columba Di Pasqua, Croissants, Danish, Dough, Enriched, Gibassier, Hot Cross Buns, Kugelhopf, Pain au lait, Pan D'oro, Pannetone, Roll, Sticky, Sticky Buns, Stollen, Sugar, Sweet, Viennoiserie
Posted in Reviews, Sweet Stuff, Travel, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 25th, 2011
Last week bought with it mixed feelings. It was our last week of studying ‘pure’ bread. This week we’ve moved on to Viennoiserie, and whilst I am totally relishing the fresh challenges and new techniques we’re getting to experience dealing with enriched doughs, I’ve got to confess, I’m missing the bread ‘lab’ quite a bit.
The week was basically a review of all the techniques and baking concepts we’d covered over the past couple of months, and started where we began with baguettes. It was really good to revisit our French friends, as it helped cement a bunch of stuff that wasn’t really glued down. I guess in those first few weeks there was so much information flooding into my brain that I couldn’t really grasp hold of it all, and with baguettes being one of the most challenging breads, there was a lot to remember.
So we did a good day of mixing, shaping, rolling, scoring and baking the buggers, and I was relieved that aside from a few howlers here and there, I was pretty happy with how they turned out. For me, in many ways the scoring is the trickiest thing. You need to get the angle and depth of the cuts just right to get that spring and the famous baguette ears. I changed my technique after a bit more of an in-depth critique of my first batch, which improved results, but I’ve still got a lot of practicing to do.
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Tags: Baguette, Bread, Flat Bread, Gluten Free, Hand Mix, lavash, Miche, Naan, Pitta, Pizza, Poilaine, review, San Francisco, SFBI, Sourdough, Viennoiserie, Week, Wood Fired Oven
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | No Comments »
Saturday, June 18th, 2011
I got back from class today to find a nice surprise gift from the wife, a copy of the brand spanking new food quarterly, Lucky Peach.
Created by Momofuku’s David Chang (Monofuku means lucky peach in Japanese), Lucky Peach was initially going to be a TV show and then iPad app, but after a chance encounter with the ever hip crew at Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s, it became a magazine.
The launch issue is loosely themed around ramen, which is unsurprising given Chang’s culinary roots (he cut his teeth in Tokyo), and this celebration of one of Japan’s national dishes at a time when the country is in such turmoil seems somehow apt.
Anyway, I’ve not really got stuck into it properly yet, but my first impressions are that it looks very promising. A highly suitable replacement for Fire & Knives which I can’t seem to find out here.
Right, now I need to go and find me a bowl of soupy noodles. Sayonara.
Tags: Dave Eggers, David Chang, Fire & Knives, Food, Japanese, Lucky Peach, Magazine, McSweeney's, Momofuku, Publishing, Quarterly, Ramen
Posted in Opinion, Reading, Reviews | No Comments »
