Some Days It's Blood, Some Days It's Chocolate

Lots of Days It's Both!

A grisly murder scene, or the aftermath of confectionary?

The thing no one tells you about pastry school ahead of time is that it’s as much about laundry as it is about baking. For some insane reason, the French believe that chefs should wear clean white jackets, white aprons, and white hats. At the same time, they have turned 16 of us loose in a kitchen with a vague idea of what we’re doing, lots of sharp knives, and vats of chocolate. The two don’t mix well!

Most days I need a mid-day costume change in order to be even somewhat presentable, and we were only issued 3 jackets, 2 aprons, and 2 hats, which means I do laundry basically every day. And this is serious laundry! On Friday, eight of us went out to Korean barbecue, and I am not exaggerating when I say more than half of the conversation was about the various French stain fighting products on the market (for the record, the stuff in the pink bottle is absolutely the best).

Staying ahead of it

The laundry got an extra workout this week, as we started on choux pastry. Choux is a batter that’s cooked, mixed with egg, and then piped. When it bakes, it rises really high, gets crispy, and has big open spaces you can jam full of cream. It’s delicious, but it’s messy as heck.

We’ve made coffee cream to fill little nuns (the French think these look like nuns?) and gotten coffee all over ourselves.

We’ve made chocolate eclairs and gotten both chocolate pastry cream AND chocolate fondant all over ourselves.

And we’ve made Paris-Brests (made to commemorate a bicycle race, complete with choux innertube) and gotten praline mousseline all over ourselves.

My choux has been… ok. I am getting much better at piping, but I’m still not good at piping. Stern Chef told me that my fingers were too big to ever really be good at being delicate, but I could just make American-sized things. I know he meant it as shade, but I got a little patriotic boost.

Ending the week with confectionary and macarons!