Sugar High

Some people are  excited about pastry week. I’m cautious. I love to eat pastry, but I know absolutely nothing about pastry other than it tastes really good.

The basics about being a good chef, as I learned last week, is take everyday ingredients and elevate them. How does one elevate flour to a higher level? Pile it on ten pounds of butter. Now if you were a culinarian you would be laughing your face off. Key ingredients this week- flour, butter, sugar and if you can’t enough butter into it you may use cream (butter’s pale cousin with a little less fat content). Sugar is available in all sorts of forms so that people don’t even see it coming. That leaves poor flour.  I have no sympathy for flour it spends its days wrapped around and blended in sugar and butter. Flour realizes that it’s not the most popular kid in junior high school, so flours invites all the cool kids over like butter, chocolate and the sugar triplets.

Here’s what happens when you play with these things.

Don’t Let the Fruit Fool You

Really Good for Breakfast

Can be Used as a Palate Cleanser

Started the next day loathing sweets saying I never do that again and then came the next day. It started out quietly and somewhat low calorie with the slicing of fruits and I think butter wasn’t mentioned until mid morning. Then with military precision and over 25 individual ingredients, this platter had to be tested before anybody went home.  I was hoping for good old fashion detention like in high school. I have almost become fearful of the french word gustation, which has come to mean you should eat this and it doesn’t matter if it hurts. Check out the word gustation in your french english dictionary because I think that I’ve loosely translated it.

A Buffet to End the Day

These glass are ab.out 3 inches tall and contain about 1000 calories per inch. But it’s ok there is fruit on some of them. Nothing to worry abut, you can always have you prescription for Lipitor increased.

There are many classic desserts in France and you don’t mess with the classics. Our pastry chef did give us the talk the other day. It’s something best done between mentor and mentee in the privacy of a classroom, where the large convection ovens drown out the awkward  conversation and hide the shock of the true. He actually said Italian  meringue is better than French meringue. It’s true. Why because Italian meringue has a preboiled simple syrup made from about ten pounds of sugar. Wait until this hits the internet.

Here’s another ordinary day in pastry.

Can you Identify all of These Classics?