The question of time as a factor in the value of a food product was reflected upon in two different ways today.

In class we finished making puff pastry and used it to make more fruit tarts.  I made one with pistachio frangipane and apricots:

Puff Pastry involves a couple of different stages.  First you create the sticky flour and water dough called détrempe.  Then you pound out some butter to soften it, and shape it into a brick; this is called beurrage.  You evenly wrap the beurrage in the détrempe and roll the lot out into a wide sheet that consists of a thin layer of butter between two layers of dough.  You fold it up and roll it repeatedly, resting between roll-and-folds.  Eventually you have a hundred layers and presto you can use it for turnovers, beef wellington, cheezy poof sticks, whatever.

OR. You buy frozen puff pastry, because it has a better consistency than what you can put out, because it is cheaper when you factor the labor that goes into all that rolling, and because in my opinion this is an area of cooking where the hands-on love doesn’t actually add anything.

After class a few of us took advantage of the cool, overcast afternoon and shorter lines, and had lunch at the Shake Shack.  The Shackburger is very tasty indeed, made with great meat and griddled with a nicely salted crust.  The special sauce is well balanced.  And I don’t mind waiting in line.   

But at the end of the day it isn’t the best burger in the city.  The real charm of the Shake Shack is that it facilitates a civilized pint of beer in a lovely and lively park, rarely a legal option.   It is the atmosphere that makes the 45 minute investment in your burger worth it.  The mix of office drones, mommies, tourists, hotties, hobos and that one crazy Tarzan-looking dude stalking around shirtless looking like he’s just committed a felony makes Madison Park one of my favorite people watching locales in Manhattan, and being able to wash it down with Brooklyn Lager is the real treat.

Today we began the two-day production that is the making of Pâte Feuilletée (puff pastry).  (I’ll post a step-by-step of this tomorrow when there is something nice to look at at the end of the making-and-baking.) (Yawn.)

We also practiced making parchment paper cornets, which we then filled with melted chocolate so that we could practice cake writing script.  No letters today, only decorative squiggles, ala OK’s, below:

I’m not going to revert to that little wiseass who pestered her 4th grade teacher with enough “what’s the point?” attitude that he threw a chair at her.  I’m not going to  suggest that I will not need to know how to make fancy chocolate squiggles on cakes even though it feels silly to spend an hour on a Thursday morning tracing them out.  With maturity comes wisdom, and wisdom is knowing that you just can’t forsee when you might need to impress a potential suitor with a well-decorated cake.  Cooking school may put me on a path to my MRS degree, after all. 

We began our Pastry module on Monday.  So far it is perfectly pleasant - our Chef Instructor is a calm man of vast experience, a former commercial bakery owner, and a patient teacher.  Desserts don’t really get me revved up, but Pastry is the most overtly scientific part of the culinary world and I like food science, so I think the mod will go quickly.

We made three kinds of dough yesterday:

• Pâte Brissé(”broken paste”), a shortcrust dough with largeish lumps of butter that melt away to give you a super-flaky crust, used for sweet or savory dishes
• Pâte Sucré (”sweetened paste”), with granulated bits of butter and a good deal of sugar for a tender tart crust 
• Pâte Sablée (”sanded paste”), a heavy dough enriched with lots of egg that can be used for crusts or as a simple cookie base.

Today we used the Pâtes Brissé and Sucré to make tarts.  We blind baked the Brissé, which means that we parcooked it with crust weights so that it would be crisp and thin for an uncooked filling.  We also made individual tartlets with the Sucré.

We had a variety of fillings - both fresh fruit and the stuff that we poached on Monday, pastry cream ( used to fill e.g. éclairs - I find it sort of yucky, but people love that stuff), and frangipane, a thick, delicious, rich almond paste.  We all got to experiment with varying results but OK and I managed to make very mammarific tarts, indeed.  My raspberries look like strawberries and my pineapple looks as though it is a canned ring - I went crazy stuffing slivers of it in between some perfectly decorative wedges because the cream peeping out below the fruit creeped me.  As a result, my tart has a decidedly Betty Crocker 1957 feel to it. 

Behold the boobs:

When my train of thought came to a complete seizure due to the odor of bacterial decay on the corner of 14th and Union Square East, I knew summer in the city had arrived. 

I celebrated the annual Blessing of the Air Conditoner (or “airca” as my Russo-Honduran classmate calls it) last night by inviting cook crush over to Old Stove HQ for lambrusco and salami.  The report:  cook crush is still a giddifying dreamboat, “Zucchi” Lambrusco di Sorbara has a raspberry aroma and a nice dryness, and Fra’ Mani Handcrafted Salumi are really tasty.  Created by former Chez Panisse chef Paul Bertolli, Fra’ Mani uses happy pigs to make great meats, available at Whole Foods and online.  In particular the salty, peppery Toscana was a hit when washed down with the fizzy red wine.  I could not be happier about the building momentum behind artisanal sausage-making.

Two entertaining activities from this weekend.

First, Saturday was spent at Gateway National Recreation Center, a spit of land in NJ with clean surf, a view of the skyline and ferry accessibility with only a 45 minute trip from downtown.  It is an inactive, WWII-era Army base with military activity stretching back to the Civil War; there is a museum and an admiral’s row up against the Atlantic (see picture below) in addition to the natural splendor of hiking trails and bird habitats. 

I love ferries.  If I could take a ferry to work I would be thrilled.  I have ferried on 3 continents.  Taking the ferry to the beach elevates what is usually the least pleasurable part of a beach trip - the travel - into memorable and breezy endcaps.  I recommend that you invest in the ferry and one Heineken tall boy on the return trip at least once this summer.

Sticking with the beach theme, when I met my pal for brunch on Sunday (so decadent to be able to go to brunch instead of serving brunch), I opted to try Five Points’ bloody made with clam juice and absolute citron.  The call it a “Hampton Breeze”; I’ll drink it anyway. 

I’ve suspected for a while that I am mature enough to enjoy some clamato; my initital opinion - gross - was formed in high school when someone’s grandparents served it to me - although I gagged it down.  Now I realize that it wasn’t the clam juice that was wrong, it was the lack of bloody mary spices.  Unspiced tomato juice - let alone unspiced tomato and clam juice - is a recipe for sweatermouth and nothing to serve to a teenager.  Properly gussied up with horseradish and its compatriots, however, clam juice lends a subtle bracing tang to an otherwise mild bloody.

Five Points also has tasty homemade sausage patties, but the joint is pretty dear.  Save it for a special brunch occasion.

On Friday we had our practical exam, in which we each had to suprême a chicken breast, sauté it and make a pan sauce, prepare a potato in a fashion other than potato purée, and be ready to make a dish of one of about 10 possible vegetables - an Iron Chef x-factor.

The challenge about the veg was less how to cook it than how to use it to make the plate work as a whole unit. I was praying for artichokes as I had a snazzy potato-and-artichoke gratin I could make, but had developed some contingency ideas in case I got the dreaded haricot verts, because as Chef S. let us know, simplicity was NOT going to be held in high regard, and I really don’t think green beans need to be anything aside from simple.

I ended up with zucchini and had a moment of panic - so white! - followed by a fully realized side dish vision, all in a flash.  Zucchini pasta.  I took my zester - how I love my five holed zester - and scored it down the side of the zucchini, creating dark green strands that looked like spaghetti in pesto.  I tossed them with rendered pancetta and basil and placed them along side a potato cake filled with a carrot and black olive purée and my chicken with its fennel and orange pan sauce.  Chef S. liked the whole thing very much and seemed genuinely impressed with my vegetable innovation.

True or false:  Mozzarella cheese can be made from goat’s milk.

In this morning’s class we had our written exam for the end of this module.  It was multiple choice and True or False and covered Italy and Asia (the whole effing continent).

I hate T/F tests.  Ever since I was a kid I’ve found them oppressive.  There is a condition in which almost anything you can imagine can be true, and like an obsessive-compulsive kissing her shampoo bottle before leaving for work, I just can’t resist the pull of those possible realities.

So when I was asked whether mozz can be made from goat’s milk, I went through the following thought process:

What does “can” mean?  “Is it possible on a plastic basis?” ”Does it taste good?” “Is it traditional?”  You can make curds from goat’s milk.  Mozzarella is made from curds.  Might be too sharp tasting, though.  But you could cut it 50/50 with cow’s milk.  And the question isn’t about taste, it is about construction.  The most traditional mozzarella is made with water buffalo milk, right?  So it isn’t only cow’s milk from which mozzarella is made.  True.  I’m putting true.  You can totally make mozzarella out of goat’s milk. 

After we were all done with the exam I asked Chef S. whether the answer to the mozz question was true or false.  She snorted derisively and asked whether I had ever seen goat milk mozzarella.  When I said no, but that I hadn’t seen many things that were nonetheless truly real, she told me it was “impossible to make on a molecular level”. 

Well cheese on this, Chef, or maybe a slice of this. 

If only the glow of self-righteous indignation were as comforting as a big fat perfect score.

Oh yeah, we made sushi today, too. 

I’m working on a longer tangent about the universality of the starch-wrapped food and the sammie/dumpling/roll as a culinary mediator between the raw and the cooked ala the coyote and raven being the mythic mediator between living and dying, all inspired by today’s class, which is to say I’m trying like a fool with a hammer to find structuralist-shaped nails all over the place but in the mean time, I saw the very rare urban rainbow this afternoon and attempted to capture it for your delight.  It was as elusive as a leprechaun in being photographed.

I trailed this afternoon at Lupa (”She-Wolf”) , a Roman-style trattoria owned in part by Mario Batali, Food TV ham. 

Here was my thinking on checking it out:  Lupa does a ton of house-cured salumi, preserving a variety of meats and sausages.  It is a great Roman restaurant where I can learn some new techniques.  Lupa is big enough to afford exposure to a variety of food and possible employment opportunities but small enough that there will be interesting work for an intern. Working at a Batali restaurant would translate well should I make the move out of New York - as one of the Batali-Bastianich restaurants, Lupa is part of a recognizable brand.  

Although the integrity of the food was high, and the execution equally masterful, the environment in the kitchen was radically different from Blue Hill.  After working at Lupa for an afternoon, I’m confident that it would be a pleasant place to work.  No yelling but no stuffed shirts, either, and assurance from the sous chef that I could poke around inventory and costs and ordering, as well as cozy up to some cured meats.  Still, no high-minded reverence, no intellectualism and intensity.  I’m going to check out a couple of additional places to round out my decision, but at the end of the day it may come down to a choice between Lupa and Blue Hill.  It is the choice between a great state school  and an esoteric private college - the choice between UVM and Sarah Lawrence.  I’ve always chosen the fancy, obscure, faintly irrelevant in the past and I’ve always regretted not having a better foundation in the basics.  

Is this a chance to revisit regretted decisions from my past?

One of my most favorite foods any time of year (but especially in the sticky stankiness of summer) is the Vietnamese rice noodle salad, bun, served with grilled meat of any kind.  Today in class we made this refreshing vermicelli dish with grilled flank steak.  It is as easy as it looks - no hidden ingredients, no magical techniques.

To marinate your meat, whisk together 1 Tbsp sesame oil, 1 Tbsp fish sauce, 1 clove garlic, 1 Tbsp of minced lemongrass, 1Tbsp of sugar and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt and let an 8 (or more) oz steak sit in it for at least 30 minutes.  Grill the steak to your desired doneness and allow to rest.

Prepare the noodles by soaking in warm eater for 10 minutes and then submerging in boiling water for a minute or two.  When cool enough to handle, toss in canola oil.  Top noodles with a salad of lettuce, cucumber, carrot. mint, cilantro and peanuts.

Before putting the sliced steak on the salad, dress it with a mix of 1 tsp rice vinegar, 1 tsp sugar, 1/2 a carrot shredded, 1 thinly sliced chile, 1 crushed garlic clove, 1 Tbsp of lime juice and 2 Tbsp of fish sauce.

Alternately, be a lazy bum and support your local economy by paying a visit to my favorite cheap ‘n cheerful bun shop, Pho Bang, at Mott and Broome.  A whole bowl of bun with pork is less than a five spot.