Besides the massive amounts of bread we made this week, we also had our first exam, went on a field trip, watched ice sculpting, and went cosmic bowling. The test was hectic, mostly because it was completely unexpected, even for our chef... We had to create a classic and a modern tart, an ambassador cake, and a dozen eclairs in six hours. It was a bit stressful, we all had to share the kitchen aides and scales and one woman (who I can't imagine will continue to do pastry) actually had a break down because she was so stressed out. The world of pastry...

My ambassador cake - (pastry cream, genoise and strawberries) covered with green almond paste with improved chocolate writing

Yet another traditional apple tart
For our field trip we went to a village about 20 kilometers from Yssingeaux to visit a famous pastry shop and go wine tasting. The shop was beautiful and the wine was tasty. The wine store we went to sells amazing table wine out of huge vats in the back room for only a euro a bottle. After three tastings with the different groups from our school the owner was exceptionally giggly and started to give us huge glasses of wine straight from the vats.We headed back to the school for an ice sculpting competition between all of the chefs... apparently ice sculpture is a common skill amongst pastry chefs, again, who knew? What I found particularly hilarious was that the chain saw the chefs used was called the "Oregon" and was made in Salem. Other desserts created this week include:
The Saint Honore Moderne (choux pastry with mango cream in the center and a lemon glacage center, covered in macaroons... not my personal favorite

Chocolate tart with a dark chocolate ganache, almond cream center and rich sweetcrust, covered in molded pastry cream and pistachios

And my personal favorite... a cake I'm really proud of at least, a black forest cake, with a cherry coulie center. I brushed melted chocolate with red coloring, let it harden and cut it into shapes to decorate the cake. I dipped my cherry in glaze and even put a fleck of gold on the chocolate window... my advanced friends loved it and it was even chosen for the display case (Don't you love how modest I am?) This week was the first time that I really felt good about everything that I made. I can already feel my improvement.
Pastry people are my kind of people (perfectionists and hard working wackos who love to please others). Before coming here I had only toyed with the idea of pastry as a an actual profession, but its not something you can only sort of commit to. People that don't invest don't last and don't get jobs. You have to be really driven to make it in this industry and while I haven't decided that this is what I want to commit to definitively. I'm definitely loving it and can picture myself taking on pastry as a career. So we shall see...
P.S. Here are some photos of the village I'm living in. Although some of the students are going crazy because its so small, I love its narrow streets and bakeries.

The Bread of Life

Each week at the castle we have a visiting chef, a specialist in his field (bakers are always always men in France) each with a unique treat to teach us. This week we had the bread man. Chef Alain (said baker) has therefore brought us the art of the croissant, pain chocolat, and every French person's all time favorite, the baguette. We began our lesson with a brief history of French bread. Before giant mixers with huge dough hooks, people actually had to knead massive amounts of dough by hand or in this case by foot. Yes its true, the French love to step on their food - thus the creation of wine, cheese, and even bread. The laminated dough used to create a croissant, for example, should be exceptionally firm to the touch, the gluten web created by the flour and the yeast should be particularly strong so the many layers of dough rise instead of collapse. So in the early days the French stomped on the dough before shaping it. But due to these modern times of course, we used "la patron," or "the boss" of all mixers - basically just a giant kitchen aid. For all those home cooks who attempt to make croissants, this is one reason they never turn out perfectly right... next time try using your feet.
We began making croissants after the dough had been cooled in the freezer for a good 15 minutes. We used a special type of French butter that is higher in fat content then what you can buy in the store and thus much drier, more mailable, and less likely to melt. The dough and the butter must always remain cold so as to insure that the layers remain intact, thus after every fold made one should immediately put the dough back into the freezer. To soften the butter we beat it with a rolling pin, making it soft but not warm and then placed it inside a folded piece of parchment paper so that we could roll it out to a thin sheet. After this and the dough had cooled we brought the dough out and folded the butter into the dough, being careful to keep all of the butter contained within the dough. Back to the freezer and then repeated a number of times before finally rolled out into a large rectangle.
We used half of our dough to make pain chocolat and the other half for the croissants. The only difference between the two was that with the "chocolate bread" we rolled them with sticks of 55% cocoa chocolate instead of cutting them into triangles and rolling them into spirals. These goodies are then put into a proofer, a sort of humidity box that helps the dough rise at rapid speed. When the croissants and pain chocolat were finally put into the oven the many layers of butter evaporated all of their water content, pushing the layer above the butter up and thus creating a puff pastry. After only 4 folds we created about 1000 layers. Cool, huh?
The finished product was AMAZING! So tasty, so buttery and crisp, and completely created by yours truly. Good times.
The baguette is a French tradition, but was originally created in Vienna by the Austrians. But if you ever told a French person that you may be slapped, so maybe keep this one to yourself. To create a perfect baguette one has to constantly take the temperature of the dough and add ice water if its too hot. Yeast is very picky and the light and airy texture of a baguette is surprisingly difficult to achieve. For the perfect baguette you also have to have a speical deck oven, a particularly hot oven that creates steam. You bake them at 205 degrees celcius, about 400 degrees Fahrenheit and the steam insures that the crust rises and sets before hardening the inside of the bread, creating a lighter loaf.

One of the best parts of the school is that everything we make is served in the restaurant (unless its horribly disfigured in which case it usually just gets tossed). So for lunch today, alongside my lamb and Mediterranean veggies I had a hunk of my, fresh from the oven baguette. Yummy.

A day in the life

As has been requested, this is where I am living:
The "Castle" aka our school
"downtown" Yssingeaux.... more to come later.

And just for a taste of my days here... my schedule:
7h30 get up and shower
8h breakfast
8h30 run to the kitchens
9h lining dough for saint honore cake
9h30 macaroons
10h lemon cream for saint honore moderne
10h45 shape saint honore dough
11h45 choux pastry - pipe 4 crowns, 20 chouxs, 2 brest rings
12h pastry cream with praline
12h30 lunch where I eat way too much because i'm soo exhausted and starving (today we had carrot and tomato salad, fois gras, roast beef and peas and more carrots followed by homemade sorbet)
2h passion fruit cream
2h30 assemble the Paris Brest
3h30 garnish saint honore with creams
3h45 ice lemon cream disks and finish with macaroons
4h30 decorate the saint honore moderne with choux pastry balls and slices of lime
done with classes at 5 and down to the student kitchen to help Lorraine prepare a South African meal for ten of our closest pastry friends
7h30 eat said meal and drink some much needed wine
9h sit outside of the school and chit chat until the sun goes down (around 9h30-10h) and go to bed to read and pass out!
I didn't make these and but I can't load my camera, so you'll just have to imagine how mine look in comparison.
Saint-Honore Cake, we ade this classical version but also adapted a recipe with passion fruit and lemon cream.... yum yum
Paris Brest - mine surprisingly does look just like this. Praline cream in the center and choux pastry (a type of puff pastry) covered in almonds and icing sugar

To Provence we went!

(week one: White fondant eclairs and my first attempt at writing with chocolate)

So another week down and a whole slew of new creations made. My camera has been on the fritz for the past two weeks, so I've been using other peoples' until now, so get ready for picture overload. (just click on the smaller photos and they will be made large... Mom)

(week one: traditional pear and apple tarts)
The school has been experiencing a wee bit of drama these past two weeks, mostly based on their extreme lack of organization and just flat at not being ready for us. As my South African friend often says: "They couldn't hold a piss off in a brewery." The school, while old and well known, had fallen into a bit of decay until about a year ago when new management came in and renovated. The castle is now beautiful and a lot of new equipment has been bought for the kitchens, but the way they advertised this program to each student hugely varied. The expert executive pastry chefs were told this was a school only for professionals with loads of experience and I was told that being a beginner with no formal experience was totally cool too. Thus the problem. We (the beginners) were obviously at a much different level and expected a much different experience than some. So after a week of the already made chefs being forced to come way down to our levels, we had this very dramatic show down with the teachers and the program director. Nasty words were said, good points were brought up and finally things are starting to look better. Who knew that pastry school could be so hectic? So this week we were separated new into levels, I of course am in the very prestigious seven person beginner level, and new creations were made. (The spirals are puff pastry, a process of folding many lagers of dough over slices of butter, in a very cold environment so the butter, while mailable never melts. 400 grams of dough to 100 grams of butter...yummy.)











(This week was all about bread. Thus the brioche crown, kind of like a Kings Cake eaten before Lent. We also made brioche tete, spiraled buns with bavarian cream and sugared fruit, and brioche naneterre)
(Following two days of bread we moved onto strawberry tarts, red berry cakes and some decorations, some being raspberry conflis and almond paste roses)

The past three days have been one ridiculous thing after the other. We (Craig, Christos, Lorraine and I) rented a car and headed south... hoping to make it to Cannes. So on Friday night we shove into the back of one of the French translator's vans to go to this larger city which is 45 minutes away, to rent a car, and to eventually start driving south. So we get in the car and are really excited to see that there's a GPS, but no, this particular GPS was very special... in that it took us on quite possibly the longest route possible. So four or five hours later we arrive in Avignon, too tired to go any further south and in desperate need of a place to stay. We notice that the streets are pretty busy and that there are practically no parking spaces... we go into a hotel and ask if any rooms are available and the man straight up laughs at us. Apparently there is a festival celebrating the 700th anniversary of the Pope arriving in Avignon this weekend and for the next 50 km there are NO hotel rooms. It was already 11 pm at this point. So we drove around and around asking if any one had rooms or suggestions for where there might be rooms, but we slowly came to the conclusion that we were completely out of luck.

We proceeded to look as far south as Aix-en-Provence, just five minutes from the Mediterranean and a major city in Provence. So to Provence we went and in a Best Western we stayed. (who stays in a Best Western when they go to the South of France? Four idiot pastry chefs who were naive enough to think that on a weekend, during French holiday, in the South of France they would be able to spontaneously find accommodations). Luckily all we really needed by one in the morning (when we arrived) was a bed, which we successfully found.
The next morning we headed out into Aix-en-Provence, looked at a lovely and overpriced jewelery market, as well as a food market with the freshest of fresh goat cheeses and vegetables. After a coffee on the main boulevard, where we were literally serenaded by an accordion player, we hopped back into the car and headed into the hills of Provence. We stopped at this lovely winery, in quite possibly the most beautiful manor I've ever seen and ended up in the town of Bonnieux, where the Marquis de Sade's castle still stands and where Pierre Cardin currently lives. Think story book town built on the ridge of small mountain overlooking a gorgeous valley. Not too shabby.
We ended up staying just down the hill from this village in a country inn owned by a lighting designer for major French films. It was heaven, literally the most beautiful place I have ever stayed. There are only four rooms for rent and we took up two of them, so it was very private and even though none of us are in the least inclined to be so, very romantic. A lovely pool, a lovely garden, wonderful views and an awesome meal created from local ingredients completely made up for the previous nights misadventures. Today (Sunday) we woke up early, Lorraine and I went for a dip in the pool and had a breakfast of croissants and freshly squeezed orange juice before leaving the Provencal valley and heading back north to Avignon where we had a proper look around at one of the original homes of the Pope. The whole trip was a blast and looking back what I remember most is how much we laughed. Christos had no sense of direction despite being our only dirver and in the meantime Craig was fervently calling the GPS a stupid twat, while Lorraine and I rolled around in the back of the car trying to peform feats of car yoga to keep ourselves comfortable. Now I'm back at the castle in little Yssingeaux, totally exhausted, much lighter in the purse, and so thankful to be in France.

Once upon a time....

Once upon a time 33 pastry chefs lived in a castle and this is what they did: We started the weekend by having a birthday barbecue for one of the young, too handsome for his own good, French maintenance guys. This included making 50 sausages, 30 kebabs, and something like another 30 pieces of pork along with a gigantic vat of sangria. We stretched all of these little tables together in front of the castle to create one long family dinner. Pasta and salads were being passed down ten tables so everyone could dig in. It felt like something from a movie (Kate/Kris: think Stealing Beauty). Looking out at the tables in the morning, covered with wine bottles and meat bones was a site to see.
The next day the castle was slow to start moving, but luckily it was Saturday and the French take their weekends very seriously. Everything is closed! So in the afternoon we hopped into three of the Frenchys' cars... and set out for a haphazard adventure. Because no body really had a drivers license, Christos from Greece ended up driving this beaten up, sputtering, and prone to taking naps up large hills or at large intersections "car" with Lorraine from South Africa, Craig from the UK and I all along for the ride. We were the end of the caravan and inevitably became lost immediately. But luckily the French countryside was worth making circles in. I am just about ready to pick up and move over here. Goodness. Everyone is so NICE! And while practically no one speaks English, everyone is constantly trying to help us, including helping us find this little spot of river on the Loire. Which after an hour of searching, a number of expletives, and three break downs later, we eventually accomplished.

Sunday we clammerd into town for a little market and a special "buffet" of Yssingeaux specialties arranged for the motley crew of mostly deranged chefs living in Chateau Montbarnier. This included white wine, head cheese, little slices of pizza with local cheeses and mushrooms and some freshly squeezed orange juice... all at ten in the morning. Not to mention there was traditional music being played by some men who I was thankful didn't need medical assistance for the two hour welcoming ceremony as they'd probably been playing their accordions for the past 80 years. There were also some cute little old women creating lace and a few people even started to dance. It was a great morning, and all the food, even though not my first choice for the AM, was a ton of fun. We finished the morning off by buying beautiful little tarts and thick, strong coffee in the village square. Not bad for a Sunday I say.Classes have remained challenging, but also great. I've learned so much in the past week and a half its unbelievable. It'll be great in two months down the road to look back on all I've accomplished. The best thing about all of this is that everyone here has chosen pastry as their career. Not only do they love to create pastries and to consistently learn (which a pastry chef can always always do) but they've found ways to make this what they do day in and day out. And get paid! Maybe not a doctors salary, but a comfortable one and doing something you love despite the long hours and the challenges of a kitchen is a truly awesome thing. Obviously, I'm having a pretty good time. Until next time... love you all!

Week One: Insanity

One week down and seven to go. I already have this dual feeling of how could one week possibly already be over, but also this strange feeling that I've been here for over a month. Imagine: 33 rowdy, multi-national, very talented pastry chefs, working for 8 hours a day and then stuck in a castle in rural France for the rest of the night and all weekend. Crazy things tend to happen. Lots of wine is drunk and many many cigarettes are smoked. And everyone has this sort of chef-speak lingo that I'm slowly starting to understand. Its sort of like a psych project gone wrong. And its a ridiculous amount of fun. I am by far one of the least experienced students. Everyone but four of us has had at the very least a year of professional pastry school and some of my closest friends here are already executive pastry chefs in Greece and South Africa. So I have the added privlige of learning from top ranked French pastry chefs as well as this amazing and ridiculous group of foreigners. (Amassedeur Moderne - a genoise cake with bavarian cream and pear slices, covered in macaroons)

Classes are a challenge, I've come to realize how different a pastry has to be if its be sold in a shop than something just whipped up at home. The standards are very very high and its been a bit tricky rising to the challenge. But I'm learning an amazing amount and already after the first week I'm feeling more confident. I stayed two hours after class in the kitchen to practice writing my name and swirly borders in chocolate piping and they're still awful. The school, I have come to learn, is believed to be one of the best in France... so therefore the best in the world.

(My roommate Kristina from Canada and I sporting our kitchen whites and very stylish hats to boot)

Honestly I'm entirely beat from this past week and completely lack any and all motivation to create a witty post right now. So perhaps I'll update this more later, but for now, all is well in France!

(A modern pear tart with almond paste and sangria soaked pear slices... yeah I know I rock)

( A modern apple tart with almond paste and icing sugar)

Pre-Departure

I’m on my way to being a senior at Whitman College, but for the past couple of years I’ve been finding secret pleasure in making cakes and desserts for my friends at school. Its one of those alternate dreams, something I never thought I would actually pursue, but have always enjoyed doing. Who knew people could really bake and (eventually) be paid for doing it? So hardly back from my last overseas adventure, I’ve decided to hop a plane and sink my teeth into another escapade… literally.

For the next 8 weeks I’ll be a student at l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Pâtisserie (The National Superior School of Pastry) in Yssingeaux, France. With a group of 29 other students I’ll be joining the likes of a Mississippi rodeo princess, a Spanish playboy, a Mexico City clubber and a Greek fashionista in learning how to make entremets, petits gateaux, and soufflés in the Chateau Montbarnier.

So for the next two months and 300 hours of intensive baking, I’ve created this blog to chronicle the daily trials, tribulations, and hopefully moments of extreme joy of a pastry student in rural France. And who knows maybe this will be the beginning of a long education in the art of becoming a professional patissier. We shall see…