Pastry Chef School: Chocolate Dessert, Strawberry-Cheesecake Dessert, Peach-Buttermilk Dessert, Baguettes
“I’m dishing out plate puns”
This week in pastry school we made multiple components for desserts and then plated a chocolate dessert, Buttermilk & Peaches Panna Cotta dessert, a Strawberry-Cheesecake dessert, and Melon-Sour cream dessert.
We also went on a field trip to Central Milling and baked baguettes with award winning bread bakers.
This Chocolate Dessert had multiple chocolate components all working together.
- Chocolate Pot de Creme: This was an anglaise+gelatin emulsified with dark chocolate and left to setup refrigerated. Because we tilted the glass overnight the pot de creme setup has that beautiful curve.
- Brown Butter Anglaise: That’s an anglaise that had brown butter mixed in with the milk early on. It had a really rich nutty flavour.
- Chocolate “Soil” crumble: A crumble made with almond flour and cocoa powder that’s super fine and looks like dirt.
- Caramelized White Chocolate snow: Caramelize white chocolate by baking it on a silpat in 250°F for 1h while folding & combining every 15m. It’s then combined with maltodextrin to make snow.
- Drageed cocoa puffs. Just cocoa puffs enrobed in chocolate.
This Buttermilk Panna Cotta & Peaches dessert worked beautifully across all components:
- Buttermilk Panna Cotta: Like a panna cotta, but with buttermilk. I love that you can see the vanilla seeds in it.
- A mix of peaches and nectarines cut into small chunks
- Yogurt Streusel: Streusel made with yogurt powder, melted white chocolate and cornstarch. It had this beautiful tangy taste that complimented the buttermilk from the panna cotta and the acid from the stone fruits.
- Microwave Cake: Combine in an immersion blender: ground almond flour, poppy seeds, egg whites, egg yolks, sugar and flour, immersion blender. Place mixture in an NO2 siphon, fill disposable cups one third of the way up, and microwave until baked (30–45s depending on size). Finally using scissors cut away the disposable cup, let the cake cool and before serving tear it into small pieces.
This Cheesecake and Strawberries dessert looks and tastes great. Here’s what’s in it:
- “Soft Cheesecake”: It’s a pipeable cheesecake made by paddling together goat cheese, cream cheese, sugar and a few other ingredients and folding in whipped cream. It’s then left refrigerate d to setup and piped.
- Strawberry Sauce: Strawberry placed in a seran wrapped baine marie for 20–30m to extract their liquid which was then thickened with sugar and pectin.
- Strawberry Compote: Strawberries roasted in 200°F for 30m covered in brown sugar+pectin and then combined with strawberry puree and lemon juice.
- Violet Meringue: French meringue dehydrated on acetate sheets with violet sugar on the bottom and then sprinkled with violet sugar on top.
- Strawberry bubbles: the usual, strawberry puree with sodium chloride in an alginate bath.
- Crumbled graham cracker
This Vanilla Fontainebleau was my favourite dessert. It’s simple, understated and feels very light.
- Fontainebleau: Whipped creme fraiche, yogurt, sugar and vanilla folded with french meringue. The mixture is then left to drain refrigerated overnight in cheesecloth in muffin tins with holes on the bottom.
- Compressed Melons: melon cubes compressed in simple syrup w/ lemon verbena leafs and sauternes dessert wine.
- crushed Puff Pastry: puff pastry baked and then crushed.
- Champagne Granita: syrup with chamgpane balanced to 19° brix, frozen and scraped.
This week we had a field trip to Central Milling to meet up with award winning bread baker Nicky Guisto. Together we talked about flour, different fermentation techniques, competitive bread baking and we baked three different types of baguettes to illustrate those points.
The three different types of doughs we made were:
- Traditional french baguette with a Poolish that’s been fermenting for 18h.
- 100% Whole Wheat Baguette with a Levain build that’s been fermenting for 18h from the bakery’s starter.
- Cold Bulk Ferment baguette where the entire direct dough was mixed the night before and left to ferment overnight in refrigeration and then pulled to room temp the morning after.
Really interesting was seeing two bread-baking competition champions shape baguettes so differently then what I’m used to. Nicky shapes baguettes by folding them on themselves and extending by pushing out at the same time, and finish off with by using the heel of his hand to seal the seam together. Also Nicky rolls out baguettes by rolling up & down in opposite direction and not using jazz-hands.
Whereas Craig Ponsford shapes breads as seen in the video on the side.
This Whole Wheat Baguette was made from 100% whole wheat flour and was probably the only time I’ve had a Whole Wheat production that tasted great and had the right texture. For my taste Whole Wheat baked good tend to taste unpalatable, have a cardboardy texture and a super-tight crumb.
This dough had a really interesting hydration technique that gave it a great texture. To mix this dough we combine the levain, flour, salt, and then only add 85% of the total water. Once the dough reaches “short” development (8–10m in since it’s a 14% gluten flour) we slow trickle all the remaining water in small portions.
We spent a good amount of time shaping Decorative Baguettes. All the baguettes were floured on top before decorating them to give extra contrast after baking. Here’s each technique used to make these decorative baguettes going left-to-right in the photo above:
- Epis (wheat stalks): With a pair of scissors cut at a sharp angle every 1cm and place on alternating sides. Don’t touch the table with scissors.
- Triple 8: Using a bench scraper press down the middle of a baguette and make 3 gaps. Pull those apart. Make alternating baby epis on one side, and score the opposite side.
- Moustache: Make a one-sided epi, and to finish off realign the base with a ruler
- “S”: Make alternating direction epis placed on top of each other, and X score the center.
Read more about my pastry adventures by reading about last week’s laminated doughs:
