Pastry School Day 1

I signed up for a pastry bootcamp course at the Culinary School of the Rockies. The course is five days long and we have a lot to cover each day. Chef Deb linked students together and we worked in pairs today. My partner was Larry. There are ten students in the class and Larry is the only man. He is in his 50′s or early 60′s and has been  in the restaurant business his entire life. In fact, he knew all of the terms and techniques we used in class today and is far too advanced to be taking this basic pastry class. I didn’t like how he would run ahead with the recipe before I had a chance to read the steps. Since he already knew how to do everything he was more of a dictator than a partner to me. I’m crossing my fingers that we can switch partners each day so I’m not stuck with the know-it-all for the entire week. Enough about Larry and on to the yumminess!

We started out by making two types of pie crusts. Pate Brisee is the basic pastry dough. We didn’t get a chance to use this today so it is wrapped up in the fridge for tomorrow. We also made Pate Sucree which is a sweet pastry dough and it is almost like a shortbread cookie. It is very crumbly when rolled out and had to be put in the pie dish in pieces and then squished back together. We used Pate Sucree in our fruit tart.

Once the crust was done we made Pate a Choux which is a fancy way of saying Cream Puff Pastry (hey I’m not French). We piped the pastry dough through a tube onto parchment paper and baked it in the oven. Here is what came out!

While the cream puffs were baking we made the Creme Patissiere (fancy for Pastry Cream). It is pretty much a more delicious version of Jell-O pudding. Sorry Bill Cosby, da puddin’ from da class was better than yours! This pudding has two purposes- we filled the fruit tart crust with it before layering fruit on top, and we will use it again tomorrow to fill the cream puffs.

Here is the fruit tart! Pate Sucree crust filled with pudding and some yummy fruit sliced on top. I did all of the fruit slicing and arranging. See how purdy it looks?

The best part about this class are the magical clean-up fairies. Whenever I set a dirty dish aside, a fairy swoops in to clean it and returns it to the proper shelf in the kitchen. I checked Target but they don’t have any clean-up fairies on clearance right now.