The Good Rabbi's Blog

Part of my curriculum is to go through the training to be a pastry chef (they train me in pretty much all facets of the kitchen). This class was simultaneously a lot of fun, and the most frustrating experience I've had in my culinary career (including my stint as a sous-chef at a DC restaurant). I've always enjoyed working with my hands, whether it was on my car, my computer, my bike, or random home improvement projects I've done over the years. I do have fairly large hands, though, so I've never been very good at the real delicate work that I've had to do. Also, coming from an IT background, my caffeine intake certainly did not help matters.

In this class, I was tasked with doing everything from butter cookies to chiffon cakes to tartlettes, to pizza, and that's not including the myriad of breads that I learned. All of this in a room that was a nice comfortable 487 degrees. Do you have any idea what it's like to work on intricate chocolate sculptures when the room's thermostat is set to london broil? This is the real frustrating part of the class.

The fun part was that with all my experience as a savoury cook, where I can tweak recipes on the fly, with baking and pastry everything is extremely exact. In your average sauce, if you add to much salt, you can correct for that. If you add too much baking soda to a bread, it's inedible. That fact is both somewhat refreshing, and somewhat heartbreaking when things don't turn out the way they're supposed to. This is all before the "operator error" is considered (a perfect example of that is the gargantuan coffee cake I named Goliath that yours truly put into one big pan instead of the two smaller ones that the recipe called for, which led me to stay for three hours past my class's end, and into the next class to finish the cooking. The cake turned out great, it was just HUGE. The recipe will be forthcoming).

I also got to exercise my creativity a lot in this class. Our assignment would be to make (for example) a baked custard dessert. What kind, and what flavour would be up to me, as long as it was a baked custard. One of my final projects for this class was a lavender crème brulée that turned out phenomenally (I had considered using rose water, as I do in many of my middle-eastern pastries, but I decided to try something different).

I did get one thing from this class that I'm very happy about: recipes. Lots of them. From Cinnamon Rolls to ice creams and sorbets, to Italian breads, I have a bunch of them, and I'll be posting some of them soon (especially the one for Goliath, as that was mighty tasty). What did surprise me about this course, however, was how little I ate. I guess my sweet tooth isn't what it used to be, and that's fine by me...