Everyone jumped at my suggestion to meet at the Farmers Market yesterday to begin our final class of the season. These are students who signed onto classes two nights a week, plus one full day a month in order complete the equivalent of the 8-week, full time Diploma course in a year.
The class and the group have taken shape nicely. The fact that they don’t feel like they must get everything in a day makes the tone of the learning different. They’ve allowed themselves the luxury of time, and as a result are getting more out of each session. At the end of the eight weeks they have changed noticeably; they’re more self confident, because they’re more focused on skill development, more comfortable about the pursuit of flavor. They have time to remember, and practice, so they are more accomplished.
As soon as we got to the market, found our way to the coffee cart and started our tour, we came across a stand with small displays of a variety of things. I noticed kohlrabi and could tell it was perfect. When I looked down the table and saw raspberries, I remembered Madeleine Kamman teaching us how to prepare a salad with those elements. We were off.
We found tiny potatoes, the size of marbles, and in a variety of colors, and took those. We drifted like kids in a candy store, selecting fresh basil, parsley vibrant with life. Three small red cabbages made me think at once of blueberries to garnish the cabbages, but I can never buy just enough blueberries to garnish a dish. I always need enough to make a pie; I’m from New England.
We discovered apricots with a sign that said “Do not squeeze.” I had recently come across a recipe for Paris-Brest, a dessert made from a ring of pate a chou, the pastry used to make éclairs. This version of the dessert, from Pastry Chef Mary Copeland, in Colorado, called for coffee pastry cream, studded with dry apricots. I mentioned this idea to the students and they were all over it.
The apricots on display had beautiful blush from pink to deep red. I said to the woman behind the counter, “There is a professional squeeze, but since you don’t allow squeezing, I’m going to have to rely on you to know if the fruit are perfect.” Without hesitation she said “I don’t eat fruit.” Normally I would have walked, but I knew I was in the presence of perfect fruit, so I picked slowly, exercising that gentle professional squeeze to determine that I was getting what I wanted.
It’s almost cause for celebration when you have a good year for apricots. It doesn’t automatically follow that all years are good for these fruit. When everything comes together, the ripeness that isn’t mealy, the blush of color that belies tart sweetness. I’m a sucker. I know this is an apricot year. Despite the fact that I told myself I wouldn’t do any canning this summer, I know I’m making apricot jam.
When we returned to the kitchen to organize ourselves to cook, I talked through the preparation of the cream puffs. We made individual ones and it took three tries to finally get them properly baked. The first ones looked golden, but collapsed as soon as they came out of the oven. When we looked at the second batch still in the oven, I said “No,’ and the student preparing them said ‘Yes.” “Where are you looking,” I asked her. “The top,” she answered. I told her to look at the bottom because the top had been brushed with egg, so the color she was seeing was deceiving her. The bottoms were pale and underdone. We lost batch number two. Finally with the third batch, we got good color, almost to the point of being over-done. The students had a great discussion about the realization that when something doesn’t come out you may have time to do it over. We cracked the cream puffs open to release any steam inside, and set them on a wire rack.
She prepared a classic pastry cream, stabilized with a tiny amount of gelatin to keep any water in suspension, and elevated it with whipped egg whites before flavoring with coffee and finishing with a little whipped cream. She stuck her finger in the finished cream, tasted it and announced “I want to take a bath in this.”
We poached the apricots, a procedure that seemed as delicate as brain surgery. The fruit are dropped into boiling water only long enough to lift the skins. If they start to cook, the flavor goes acidic, so there’s a only little window. The first batch was missed because a conversation was allowed priority over poaching. “You aren’t cooking if you’re not at the stove,” I said. The student turned as pink as the apricot. When you poach fruit, you stay with them, and I stayed with her, making her lift fruit from the water every 20 seconds until we could feel the skin slip. She got the rest of them perfect.
When it came time to assemble the final dessert, we took a hollow cream puff, spooned a layer of coffee cream, topped it with both apricot and puree, topped that with more coffee cream before finishing with whipped cream. We put the top crust onto the finished cream puff, now filled to bursting, set it onto a plate and dusted with powdered sugar. The silence of the observers could be clinically described as ‘awe.’ They were thrilled to prepare the remaining cream puffs, two per person.
We ate, commented, and felt ourselves to be remarkably blessed to be the only people on earth eating these delightful desserts today. One student remembered that her mother made something like them when she was growing up. I went back for the pot of apricot puree and put it on the table, added some to my cream puffs. The others immediately followed suit.
I told them how when I served them at my restaurant in San Francisco, I took special delight in the sound the spoon made as it went through the crisp crust of the cream puff. I knew it was a sound heard almost nowhere on earth where cream puffs come ready made. It was only here, where the cream puffs were filled to order, that you’d experience that sound, flavor, and pleasure. They understood completely. Lesson accomplished.
Subscribe to RSS Feed