If you see me around town these days, odds are that I’ll be doing one of four things: running down to SoHo for school, hurrying home from school to take a pre-internship nap, rushing as fast as my feet can carry me to the Brooklyn restaurant where I’m a pastry intern (although, if you’re up at 5 AM and you’re not a baker, what the heck are you doing up so early?), or dragging myself home post shift. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Yeah, I’m tired, but I’m loving ever single minute of it. I’ve also been a slacker about blogging, even though I have probably a dozen new dishes to share. I’ll get better at time management on my new, glamourous schedule, but for now, I thought you might be interested in seeing a few of the things I’ve done in school, as told in pictures snapped on my camera phone.

Some of this stuff may look a bit unusual to you if you’re not French. My cooking school teaches cooking by employing classic French technique, which gives chefs the backbone for expanding upon all other cuisine. I sometimes get frustrated when I’m piping whipped cream onto the back of a puff pastry swan, because I’m not likely to ever make a puff pastry swan outside of school, until I stop and realize, wow, my piping is really improving, because making swans require four different types of piping that all need to be done in different ways.

Anyhow, the schedule is the only thing about this experience that I’m hating, but I’ll be back to diligently posting soon. Now, I’m late for school and gotta run to the Pastry I classroom,  where I’ll be rolling out sheets of 1,000 layer puff pastry all night!

There are two ways to roll out the dough between each folding of the dough when making viennoiserie. You can do it the old fashioned (read: time consuming way) by hand, or you can do it using a machine called a sheeter. A sheeter is a must have if you are planning to make croissants on a daily basis. It also is a near-necessity for truly perfect croissants because it gives you perfectly even rolled out dough (and butter), and it works fast, keeping things cold, which is important. I first discovered the sheeter in this video from The City Bakery, which shows you the whole process in mass production, if you are interested.





Using a sheeter makes a potentially hard part (rolling the dough, focusing on the temperatures) easy, and frees you up for concentrating on the really hard part: shaping. I’ve made croissants at least five times now in class, two big sheet pans at a time. I’ve also made raisin danish spirals with pastry cream and apricot cream cheese pinwheels, both, unfortunately, not pictured. All of these items are really hard to shape perfectly, although the chefs make it seem effortless.





Learning to make croissants became a fixation of mine, and I started using it as the opening argument in the ongoing internal debate: Halt Career to Go to Cooking School? Yes? No? It was one of those things that I would never be able to learn how to do well without the proper equipment. A very small bullet point in the “pros” column that was a catalyst for getting more serious about considering school a viable possibility.





And lo, I am not an expert, but these are pictures of croissants that I made, and I’m getting more happy with my technique each time I make them. It’s a skill I’ll take with me when I go looking for baking work after graduation from bread class next week. Exciting times!

There is one bread that I have committed completely to memory, and it’s an important one to know. Each day, no matter what other types of bread our class is learning to bake, it is our job to make baguettes for L’ecole, the school’s restaurant. And so, each day, we work in teams to complete these 14 steps, and each day we become a little better at making our baguettes than we were the day before.





This kind of repetition might seem boring to some, but to me there’s nothing more exciting than going over to the rack at the end of the day to retrieve my tagged baguette for a critique with our chef instructor.





I’m getting much better at shaping the baguettes (my first one was quite misshapen) but I’ve got some work to do on scoring them properly. It’s harder than it looks, but of course, I am determined.





You may notice that there is no recipe in this post. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to structure the blog while I’m in school, especially the first 8 weeks, which is continuous bread baking, which can get old. I’m considering a couple of different options, such as alternating post types (after all woman cannot live on bread alone – although Brian has tried since I’ve started bringing so much of it home) or perhaps blogging home adaptations of the recipes we make in class. Any suggestions, blogosphere? I know you’re out there! That’s what the comments box is for (hint, hint). Cheers!