If You Can't Be The Best, Be The Fastest
The training wheels are off at pastry school. While Week One felt intense, with most of Week Two behind us (and a nice day off to celebrate Bastille Day), it’s clear we didn’t know anything in Week One. We doubled up sessions this week - two-hour video demonstrations at home followed by three-hour bake in the morning, three-hour in-person demonstration followed by another three-hour bake. And then all of it again the next day! We have all mostly become butter at this point, and it’s magnificent.
After starting the week off with tarts, we got into laminated pastries at the end of the week. Laminated pastries are extremely my shit - give me some cold butter and a rolling pin and I’m a happy man. We made apple turnovers (literally “apple shoes” in French, a pithiviers cake, pictured above, which is a feuilletine cake with almond cream filling, and mille-feuille Napoleons.
Because laminated pastries are my jam, this week was also the first time I really started to feel like I belong here. I stand out from the group in lots of ways. I’m the only white man in the 60-person pastry class, and one of two men in my smaller 16 person group. I’m one of two people older than 30. I’m a full head and a half taller than anyone in my class. I look more like I’m chaperoning their field trip than that I’m their classmate, I’m sure, but baking in my comfort zone this week helped me focus a lot less on that.
You don’t spend twenty years working on political campaigns without being a hyper-competitive monster who probably shouldn’t be allowed in polite society, and I am extremely competitive. I’m used to being the best baker I know, but the thing about pastry school is that everyone here is the best baker they know. And the reality is, a lot of them are better than I am. The level of precision they can bring to the details of their work blows my mind.
Where I can kick all their butts, though, is speed. One of our chef instructors, who is the nicest and the best looking (think early 2000’s Anderson Cooper, but a pastry chef with a French accent) asked me if I’d worked in a kitchen before and was shocked when I told him I hadn’t. We’re graded on five criteria every class, one of which is efficiency, and I’ve totally broken the grading curve there. I can’t get more than 3 out of 5 for precision in executing the recipe, but it’s 5s across the board for efficiency. It absolutely shouldn’t matter to me at all, but it feels good. If you can’t be the best, be the fastest.
APPLE SHOES
Efficiency trumps. If you can have a perfect bake, but hold up everything and everyone because you are slow then the bake is not the best.