This is a hand blown sugar sculpture filled with the aromatics of an herb. The post about this demonstration is here.
I am finally too tired to do a thorough re-cap.
The panel I was on was great. I said a lot of things, some of them rebellious. Yes, I know you're surprised. Bill Yosses was on the panel and my favorite quote from him was,
"I think too many of us are serving our diners our experiments. We need to test out some of our creations on our colleagues first."
Lunch was exquisite. Gorgeous on every level that the senses could experience. Sensual, supple, aromatic, spicy, visually varied in color and hue, texturally eclectic, sweet and salty. Extremely satisfying. Created by the chefs at Devi.
Then we broke off into 5 teams and came up with 4 desserts:
1. Frozen, 2. A Cake Like Item, 3. Fruit, 4. A Dessert of Your Choice.
Our team had a lot of fun throwing ideas out, being sassy, and wrapping it up in time. Then we went into the palatial estate of the CIA Greystone kitchens and got to work. Each team broke up into smaller groups and took on one of the 4 desserts. The kitchen was stiflingly hot, expansive and vast, busy like a hive on cherry blossom day. I tried to take some photos and talk to chefs on other teams, tasting this and peering at that.
Tomorrow we do a little more prep (@ 5 hours of prep, start to finish, in total) and then each team presents.
Tonight we were 15 at Ad Hoc. A loud group, rambunctious and silly, it's good they only had room for us in the crook of the dining room's elbow! We were all insanely happy to be eating beef. And it was damn good.
Bonsoir.
Emily Luchetti sponsored by Perfect Puree of Napa Valley. If you don't know this woman, let me tell you. She's tough. No nonsense. Well spoken. Strong. Clear voiced. And she is someone who was baking when I started, 15 years ago. To still be a pastry chef, working in a restaurant kitchen, writing books, designing menus, training staff, and going to conferences, appears to be a rarity these days. She was my inspiration in the beginning, and she still is today.
Next: Of Pies, Crisps, Pudding Cakes, and More: Re-Imagining American Comfort Desserts, circa 2007. Emily Luchetti, Gale Gand and Leslie Mackie.
What does comfort mean to you and how have you changed comfort?
We have a glossary. Some included: Pandowdy, Crumble, Cobbler, Brown Betty, Buckle, Grunt.
"Cobblers were meant to look like a cobblestone street. The Slump/Grunt is unattractive, a pale dessert. Maybe you'll want to update this. It has to be steamed." GG
"I've always used shortening in our pie doughs. But now we're using a palm fruit fat. It bakes a little differently, but it's not hydrogenated. People tend to like the individual tarts/little pies.They like this." LM
"We serve an individual lemon meringue pie and people seem to love to have their own." GG
Leslie Mackie is showing a steamed pudding. [Remember when I wrote about those?]
Gale and Emily are talking about their grandmothers.
"The only thing my grandmother made was martinis." We laugh heartily.
"These have a great texture. A very sensual texture in fact." LM
Gale is thanking the Batterberry's and CIA. "I say to people I'm going to a pastry retreat. People ask me what that is and I say, 'You know, that's when we go and hob nob with our fellow pastry wizards.' " GG
"Look up this book. the Emperors of Chocolate." EL
We are all giddily eating. Everyone is terrifically happy. Like children, all of us. I can taste the craft, the love, the experience, the knowledge. The nod.
"The animal crackers box has a string on it because they were originally designed to be Christmas ornaments. A little known fact, Oreos are made with Black Cocoa. It's getting a bit of a revival. Does anyone use it?" GG
"Super alkalized is how its produced. Or stripped of its chocolate flavor," Micky of Guittard tells us.
There is a tiny tart that is an ode to the Snickers bar. I have to curse here, please excuse me. It is ridiculously fucking delicious. Can you say goddamn?
Now there's a little bit of n argument/discussion about how the chocolate chip cookie was created.
The chocolate steamed pudding is lovely. Delicious, texturally intriguing, soft but not like a baked custard. Think layer cake meets warm brownies meets warm chocolate cake. Strong chocolate perfume. Like when someone walks in the room and you know it before seeing them.
We're talking about the trans fats in Girl Scout cookies. Yes, it's still in there, although they say it's not. Something about how it's slightly below the legal limit so they can get away with it.
P.S. the translation for biscotti, by the way, is cookies. IT DOES NOT MEAN TWICE BAKED. They are baked twice or three times for extended shelf life.
And I'm giving props to Mallomars and Goo Goo bars. On the mike, yo.
This has been an exciting session!
Pastry 2010: Adapting Latin Flavors, From Brazil and Peru to Cuba. David Guas. A Handsome, thick fellow with a spontaneous humour, perfect for a demo at CIA where the technical aspects aren't always seamless. But there is a camera hiding in the ceiling and screens dot the ceiling, so there are a lot of ways to look at the demo.
David has been a friendly, out going, engaging person for me at the conference. We sat next to each other at Redd the first night. He is the executive pastry chef at 4 restaurants in Washington DC. Deep voiced and soul-patched, he's a down to earth fellow from New Orleans.
He's making an egg yolk rich dough, putting it through a pasta machine to get it really thin. So thin you can see your fingers through it. Pinched to hold the same caramel found Alfajores.
Now there's a yucca "doughnut" made with queso fresca. Nicaraguan.
He's talking too fast to know how to spell the names of the
desserts. But they're delicious, strong on the canela (cinnamon, but
not the powdered cinnamon flavor.) side, sweet, heavy with caramel,
texturally intriguing.
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Next: Our Dessert Heritage as Inspiration, Part II: Tasting History with Stephen Schmidt. This would be a difficult presentation to encapsulate. I'll tell you a little about the room.
Surbhi Sahni sits to my right. Bright eyed, and pretty like a girl, Surbhi is earnest and humble. She's recording, on video-cam, much of the conference. Scott Peacock on my left. Scott and I are brethren. He's brought his own Mariages Freres tea. During the day he asks a few times for a tea pot filled to the rim with the hottest water any one can find. On the side he requests heavy cream. Then we carry these things around.
David Guas sits to Surbhi's right. He sits in a short sleeved, seersucker chefs coat. Hmmmm. We discussed this piece of clothing last evening. Many chefs fetishize their whites. We wear only a few pieces in our uniform, so we get picky about them. Working in the subtropics of swampy Washington DC, breathability is an issue.
Some people have sat next to the same people, in the same chairs, in every presentation. I've tried to move around, changing my perspective, my sitting partners. No time to be shy here. We are an intimate group, with previous alliances apparent. But, wonderfully, there is an openness. And few, if any, are conceited to the point of unfriendliness. We are here because we are open to sharing.
Last night, at dinner, there was a discussion begun about one of the presentations. We are a tough crowd, in a way, and some of the chefs felt that a presentation was disrespectful to pastry making as a highly technical art form. There are a number of European trained pastry chefs here. They work in America, but allegiances sway towards their highly technical training.
I don't have an answer for where we got to on that discussion, but I was happy these thoughts came to the surface aloud. In America we have a hard time with sticking to tradition. Perhaps because we are a new country. Perhaps because we were rebellious young. [I am currently watching the History Of New York, a PBS series.]
More on this another time. Your thoughts?
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Points of interest in this presentation:
Blanc Mange as it was in the 10th century. "All dessert are Arabian in their origins." An early American "wine sauce" made with molasses, rose water nutmeg, butter, and flour. Indian Pudding. Calves' Foot Jelly.
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I'm on a panel today, so I'll need to take a break from live blogging.
Thanks for reading!