Culinary Externship: Pastry at Prospect Restaurant
This week I worked the Pastry station at Prospect Restaurant, a fine-dining restaurant in San Francisco. I baked during the day and plated dishes during dinner service.
The pastry team is made up of some truly kind & wonderful humans led by Chef Rodney Cerdan and Sous-Chef Jennifer Choung. It’s quite interesting to note how the pastry team is almost completely separate from the culinary team with their own recipes, kitchen space, equipment, dinner station, prep sheets and so on.
I love how many fresh ingredients went into this Baked Apple & Ginger Tart. It’s such a great take on making a modern pastry dessert that highlights fresh produce.
- The Raspberry Sauce is a merlot wine infused with raspberries at 1:1 ratio and then reduced to consistency.
- There’s fresh Figs and Raspberries tossed in that sauce decorating the plate.
- Each tart is baked daily with brunoise-diced Apples.
- There’s a layer of grape jam on the bottom of each tart that’s a grape juice agar fluid gel.
- And the ginger goodness comes from a 1:20 ratio of freshly grated ginger in pastry cream.
Semifreddo is a classic dessert which is why I was so excited to see the unobtrusive “modernist” elements incorporated into this dish:
- The Huckleberry Jam is a fluid agar gel made from huckleberries and sugar. Agar fluid gels are any liquid stabalized with agar and then blended.
- The Sabayon is a classic sabayon made with port wine and vinegar but dispensed to order from a siphon.
- The broken up chips on top of the semifreddo is a cocoa-cardamom meringue. It’s a standard meringue containing cocoa powder & cardamom that’s dehydrated in a dehydrator and then broken up to pieces.
There’s supposed to be Burrata Ice Cream on that pile of cornflakes and I just adore that delicious ice-cream. It’s standard creme anglaise ice-cream base that’s blended with a 3:1 burrata cheese : cream mixture. I’m used to just adding vanilla to creme anglaise and make vanilla ice-cream, but you can literally just add meaningful amounts of blended cheeses. w00t.
I never really thought about it, but you can combine not just flavours into creme anglaise but also textures and other ingredients.
I really enjoyed that adorable “Grape Caviar” sitting in the twirled shaved pears for the Butterscotch & Pear Sundae. It’s surprising to know that these aren’t made with sodium alginate or anything that I’m used to thinking of as “modernist” spherification. It’s just grape juice with a bit of agar and gelatin that’s dropped into freezing cold oil. The oil is hydrophobic so it repeals and shapes the grape juice liquid into a sphere; and the agar and gelatin work stabilize it and keep that spherical shape.
The Lemon Sour Cream Pie is hands down my favourite dessert because of how beautifully it marries acidity, sweetness and simplicity. It’s probably the simplest of the restaurant’s desserts. It’s pie dough with great lemon filling and whipped creme fraiche on top.
The baked pie shell is coated in white chocolate to protect it from going soggy with the lemon curd filling. It’s just a thin layer of melted white chocolate applied with a brush.
The lemon curd filling is the truly delicious part of this dish. The curd base has cornstarch, milk, lemon juice, lemon zest and eggs yolks. Once the curd is ready it’s removed from the heat and almost equal weight of sour cream, white chocolate and butter is added. It’s then poured into white pie shells and cools overnight.
These ice-cream sandwiches are a great example of making one recipe and getting multiple portions out of it. One full recipe makes almost 150 individual pieces of ice-cream sandwiches.
The restaurant makes 6 (!) sheets of oatmeal sandwich that’s a simple mix butter, sugar, eggs, flour and oats. The sandwich sheet is cut into a half sheet, topped with chocolate ice-cream and then topped with another half sheet. That’s then cut into equal-sized triangles, dipped in melted chocolate, chilled and served on chocolate sauce. Each step is relatively simple and when done right makes 150 beautifully consistent portions.
The Raspberry Cheesecake is art. Surprisingly (to me) the the cheesecake itself isn’t baked in a circular pan and cut into triangles. The cheesecake is baked in a sheet pan that has a graham cracker base and a parchment collar. The large elongated rectangular cheese cake is then cut into rows and from there it’s cut to individual triangles.
The cheesecake is also not baked in a water-bath. It’s baked in the oven on 238°F for 40m and a cavalier #yolo approach.
Prospect hosts a lot of parties and almost every evening we need to plate dozens of each dessert at the same time. Plating one cheesecake takes about 1–2 minutes but plating twenty cheesecakes needs to take no more than 10 minutes. First, we lay down plates in rows & columns. Next we apply each element one column at a time and move to the next column. The more people we’ve got doing multiple elements in parallel the faster we’re done plating.
The pastry team also sends out complimentary little bites to VIP costumers after their meal. There’s biarritz chocolate biscuits, strawberry marshmallows, fennel-raspberry macarons, chocolate peanut butter bars, caramels and more.
BAR FOOD & LITTLE BITES
The pastry team also handles about half of the bar menu for the restaurant. There’s a good balance there since at 5:30PM no one is ordering dessert and everyone is ordering bar menu items. And as service continues that trend flips. There’s lots of beautiful intricate details in each of these little bites dishes:
- The Hummus is served with Seeded Olive Oil Crackers that’s a yeasted cracker dough with a lot of olive oil.
- Ice-cream are served with chocolate fudge cookies whereas sorbets are served with cocoa nibs gluten-free cookies.
- Caramel Popcorn is made as normal popcorn in a popcorn maker and then combined with caramel.
- The Burrata with Oven Roasted Tomatoes comes with a side of daily baked crostini.
There’s such beautiful little nuggets in each of these little bites that makes even a simple dish worthy of going into a restaurant.
Read more about my culinary adventures by reading about my previous week working at Prospect:
