Day One on a Ranch in Montana

I use to work here in Walla Walla, Washington:

(That's my old chef David in front of the display case)

But now I work here:

In Emigrant, Montana, just above Yellowstone National Park in Paradise Valley. And it is, without being ridiculously corny, Paradise with a capital P. Deep valleys and impossibly high peaks, the Yellowstone River, living in a town completely comprised of one Old Saloon, a stable store and post office, and the unbelievable number of horses everywhere really makes a girl feel like she’s in the West.

I arrived yesterday afternoon to find over a foot of snow! Although my car barely made it up the mountain, I made it at last! My long awaited move to Montana has finally come and with it all the nerves and excitement of so much change. Already what has hit me the most is how isolated I am. Satellite internet leaves me with ten minutes a night to send out e-mails and there is no phone reception here because we are at 6,000 feet and completely surrounded by gorgeous mountains. The ranch is on bare bones staff because its still Spring Season and we only have 35 guests this next week. So it is quiet, very quiet, and the snow only amplifies this effect. Its fantastic to get away, but it will definitely take some getting use to.

My cabin has turned out to be the upstairs of the staff lodge on what’s called the “Back 40.” While the allure of a little cabin all to myself was wonderful, having a huge room, with a king size bed, two dressers, three chairs, and a full closet right above the indoor bathrooms is hard to beat. I lucked out. I went to bed at nine last night, one because there was very little to do after dinner… although I did go sledding, and two because I had to start work bright and early at 5:30 am. Luckily my curtains are room darkening, so the fact that nightfall isn’t until 9:30 wasn’t a problem.

Everyone I have met has been great, definitely a very out going staff. The kitchen crew is great, the chef runs a tight ship, which is mad intimidating, but there is more laughter than anything. The wranglers are fun and very serious about their horses, full western getup all the time, big hats, wranglers, boots, the whole shebang. Celebrity guest of the week is Mrs. Hilton, of the Hilton family… she seems like a pretty nice lady and has already offered to buy all the kitchen staff drinks. So woohoo to that!

The food is amazing! We have all of the staff meals in this little side room off of the kitchen and it’s all very homey and tasty. Today in the kitchen was excellent, but I’m still exhausted. It’s been awhile sense I’ve had to be on my feet and moving for 8 hours. We started the morning making muffins and scones for breakfast, cookies for lunch, crescent rolls brushed with butter and parsley, Russian cream with an orange berry sauce and rolled wafer cookies for the plated dessert and a raspberry mousse cake for tomorrow night. With only 35 guests this week the kitchen was a pretty leisurely place to be, plus I was working with my hysterical and wonderful boss Pam, but after graduation we are on full gear and I’m working alone most days! Yikes! This job should be an adventure!

Chocolate, Churches, and Charlottes

I'm already half way done with my course, and yet, find it hard to believe that I still have four more weeks at the Chateau. Last week our visiting chef was all about chocolate, which inevitably meant that I went home with a tooth ache and chocolate all around my mouth everyday of class. They say you only need to "taste" what you make, but how can one turn down praline truffles and earl grey ganache? Any sane person cannot. Job done. Bring on the stomach ache. Chocolate is a very specialized area of pastry, in fact, its a separate entity entirely. Chocolatiers must be like magicians, because merely tempering chocolate to have the right glossy sheen is a pain staking process (unless you have a 67,000 dollar chocolate crystalizer like the school). First you have to heat up the chocolate to melt the fats, then cool it to link the first of five molecules, you then procecced to slightly reheat the chocolate to link all five molecules, and voila you have tempered chocolate. Of course these temperatures vary by brand, amount of cocoa, milk poweder and about 20 thousand other things, and this is only the most basic of skills when it comes to chocolate. I also found chocolate to be unbelievably messy. I came out of class looking like I had used my white chefs jacket as a mop and dragged it all over the chocolate lab due to the incredible about of stains I incurred. Again, however, people that actually know what they're doing with chocolate don't really seem to have this problem. And like many things in the pastry world, wow! is chocolate expensive, a large bag of valrhona chocolate (super fancy French company and what we use at school) costs about 90 euros. Another great example is how a kilo of vanilla beans (roughly two pounds) costs 300 euros. no joke. And we use these things like, no big deal, through a vanilla bean in, practice chocolate writing, yadda yadda.

The desserts of the week included a passion fruit charlotte: a ring of lady fingers surrounding a passion fruit coulis and a vanilla pastry cream, topped with fresh fruits, glazed, and surrounded by coconut.

We also had the opportunity to play with caramel a bit, here's my first attempt at a caramel cage. They say practice makes perfect... Caramel is a lot of fun to use and really easy to make, sugar and water baby.

This is a galette, also called a pithiver. Once again using a flaky pastry dough (layers of butter and dough, etc) filled with an almond cream. We dipped our decorations in caramel and icing sugar.

This is the first step of my baked alaska, something they call Norwegian omelette. My friend that lives in Norway has never seen something like this, however. So two layers of genoise cake (sponge cake) filled with homemade strawberry/vanilla ice cream. Covered in (see below) meringue covered in icing sugar and then put in the oven or blow torched to make a crisp shell. Seems a bit silly I know, but this was so tasty that it now ranks high on my list of favorites.

On a side note, I've started to run again, finally overcoming the stupid torn muscle in my calf and trying to once again get into shape. Running has taken me some pretty interesting places, including the Carmel mountains with a view of the Mediterranean and now here in France through farmlands and tree lined streets. Although it does seem a bit ridiculous to be listening to Rihanna and T.I. when I'm running past a flock of sheep and their old man shepherd wearing a beret.

This past weekend we once again rented a car and attempted to remove ourselves from the isolated village of Yssingeaux. First we headed to Le Puy en Velay, a city only 20-30 minutes away and a fantastic get away from all of the stresses of the castle. We stepped out of the car and it finally felt (maybe for the first time) like I was in France. Le Puy looks how one expects old France to look, narrow cobbled stone streets and tall multi-colored town houses with shutters covered in ivy. Additionally, Le Puy is the home to the oldest church in France, located on top of a giant rock in the middle of the city (you geo majors would have loads to tell me about this formation I'm sure).

(The fantastic foursome: Christos, Lorraine, Craig and yours truly)
Also wonderful about Le Puy is the presence of a night life, where we proceeded to watch a Cuban concert and pretend like we know how to dance the Mamba and the Salsa.

We also ended up spending a day in Lyon, the second largest city in France and the gastronomic capital. Great city, very similar looking to Paris, but much more relaxed, highly recommended.

Here is a shop in Lyon where one of our friends works, people in this country are gaga for macaroons. I knew that they were popular here, but they are sold EVERYWHERE and are not cheap. Thats all for now, but love you all at home!

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.