The second week was the chocolate module, or the start of it
at least!
Monday was a busy day, we started off in the morning with a
demo on chocolates and confectionary. The chef made three different types; a
chocolate spice log, a nougat and a chocolate ginger slab ganache. As per
usual, I stuck around at the end to help eat a few extra leftovers…they’d only
be thrown in the bin, I was fulfilling my moral obligation to avoid food waste!
Immediately following this we started our first workshops of the term. They are
back-to-back lessons (usually two), so 6 hours, to get larger volumes or more
complex dishes completed. In this case, we had 4 lessons to make a hoard of
chocolates – two back-to-back on Monday and then the remaining two on Tuesday.
As we got to the class we unpacked and then were put into groups of 3/4, and
given a list of 6/7 chocolates to make. Two items from 3 different categories –
confectionary, slab ganaches and moulded chocolates. My group had to make the following; coffee
truffles, framboise (raspberry) truffles, spiced logs, passion fruit ganache,
mango & coconut jelly and peanut brittle.
It was really hard to choose a favourite from the ones we made, I really liked the spiced logs, peanut brittle and the coffee truffles and especially the mango and coconut jelly! I was also really proud of how the framboise truffles came out, the time and care taken to polish the moulds well and temper the chocolate properly meant they came out with ease and looked very shiny - an improvement from when we did something similar in Intermediate term!
These first two lessons were about getting things made in
advance so we were ready to finish the chocolates in the next two lessons. There
was a lot of chocolate tempering, I was polishing moulds and flooding them with
chocolate to create the shells ready for the ganache fillings, ganaches had to
be made, chocolate needed piping, among other things – it was quite the
production line. As a group we didn’t perhaps work at cohesively as we could
have done, something that I’m pleased to say we acknowledged and rectified very
quickly ready for the next day.
On Tuesday we had the third and forth workshops. My group
finished quite early (thanks to far improved communication and planning!), so
we cleaned down, got our chocolates presented and marked and then helped the
other teams out. We all seemed to work well as a class, and the mass of
chocolates we’d produced at the end looked great. At the end of the lesson we
shared all of the chocolates out, the problem is, the more we filled our boxes
the more the trays seemed to increase with chocolates, it was a never ending supply!
And regrettably by the end of the lessons I’d nibbled on offcuts and spare ones
that hadn’t quite been dipped perfectly throughout (which I shouldn’t admit to
given we aren’t supposed to eat in the kitchens – naughty!), so I felt quite
sick and couldn’t eat any more. Evidently you can have too much of a good
thing, disappointingly. By the end of the workshops we’d produced god knows how
many trays containing a lot of the following;
- Caramel Mou,
- Nougat de Montélimar (nougat),
- Cassis pate de fruits (blackcurrant jelly),
- Spiced log (piped logs of spiced chocolate ganache, covered in milk chocolate and sat on marzipan),
- Tea infused slab ganache,
- Coconut truffles,
- Lemon truffles,
- Orange truffles,
- Coffee truffles,
- Banana truffles,
- Praline truffles,
- Raspberry truffles,
- Passion fruit truffles,
- Spiked rum truffles,
- Lemon batter logs,
- Orange batter logs,
- Gianguya,
- Blackcurrant slab ganache,
- Passion fruit ganache,
- Mango and Coconut Jelly,
- Chocolate and nut nougat de Montélimar (Chocolate nougat),
- Passion fruit marshmallow,
- Peanut brittle,
- Salt caramels, and last but by no means least;
- Honeycomb/cinder toffee.
Not quite all of them, but an idea of what they looked like!
The chefs were great in both double lessons and gave us all
some really nice feedback. It’s very encouraging to see how far we’ve all come
and what we’re producing now. You don’t realise it, going through the process,
until the chef points it out and compliments you on it. It was a real
confidence boost! I’m very proud of the mass of chocolates we all made as the
group. A personal victory this week is that I’ve managed to get my chocolate
piping really fine – something that I’m hoping to refine further with the
chocolate box next week.
Wednesday was an early start for a lecture on food costings.
The groups have been split in two a bit this term, usually we’d all gather
together for the lectures, however groups A & B, and C & D have most of
the lectures separate from each other this term. We’d been warned by the other
groups about it being a bit boring, as they’d had the lecture earlier in the
week. However I must admit that I found it eye opening and interesting. It was
on food costing and the importance of it in making a profit. Given that I want
to start my own business at the end of this, it was one of the more useful
lectures we’ve had!
Our research project is on Brillat-Savarin, a French lawyer
and gastronome, and the effects he’s had on the world of food. I got the book
he wrote over the weekend and have been making a good dent in it during the
week. I’m quite a slow reader though and there is a shed load of other studying
to do, so it’s a bit ambitious to try and get through the whole thing in the
next week or two (I want the essay out of the way asap), however good progress
was made this week! I can at least start drafting a bit of the essay this
weekend!
This week was a good week, despite all the extra work, I’m
really starting to enjoy the Superior term. At the same time the realisation is
starting to hit that this is all going to be ending in a few weeks time. I’m
trying to put that at the back of my mind and enjoy every second of the
remaining weeks though!
It was a tiring few lessons, but we did an amazing job, very proud of what we produced! I think there were even some more out of shot! Never seen so many chocolates!
No comments:
Post a Comment