Hitting a (French) Roadblock

So it’s happened. My body has given up on France. After finally settling on a (temporary) visa fix and”getting used” to manic hours, a constant language barrier, and unbelievable levels of stress I thought I was finally in the clear to take a breath. At least for a couple of weeks. But alas, my previously strong, I-would-say-toned-but-the-French-say-chubby body disagreed and now I am on bedrest for a whole week, maybe 2. It all started with a little button on my left side which manifested into a huge infection and ended with me in surgery at the Georges Pompidou Hospital in Paris. Without a carte vitale. If you dont know, that’s basically French health insurance.

It’s a mess. I have nurses come everyday to change my bandages and from the talk I hear, it’ll take at least a full extra week to heal. At first, in the hospital (as sort of a joke) I almost felt like I was at a spa. Finally a break from work and 24/7 IVs to stop dehydration? Its almost a cook’s dream! Then i realized …probably only a joke people who work in kitchens understand. Also not that funny- as someone who doesn’t work in a kitchen pointed out to me. 

Anyway, the past few months working my first post in a well-regarded French restaurant has taught me a few things. I don’t know if it’s working in a tiny place where each person holds so much responsability or if it’s just being in a foreign (often times racist) environment, or if it’s both combined with a fun bundle of fatigue and stress but this is hard. Yea, duh everyone knows working in a kitchen is hard, but “you just gotta tough it out!” No. I thought I was pretty tough, resilient at the least. Tons of others would probably say the same about me. But what no one told me was “hey, maybe this isn’t the job for you.” Which may have been good to hear. Not to say this career isn’t for me but all this time in bed has made me realise that what started maybe as an amazing opportunity and experience is now just making me break out in infections. Point is, maybe it’s time to throw in the proverbial, French towel and maybe that is ok. Plus if one more French guy asks me if I am at a party because I was hired to be there as a “masseuse” based on the logic that  I’m Asian, I am leaving this country and never coming back. Anyway, not giving up yet but have decided I will give up before my body actually gives out and crumbles to the floor.

Job Offer!

Most people already know but guess what? I was offered a job at my stage! Actually I was offered a job at the 2nd restaurant owned by the same chef. Not a Michelin star restaurant but still really nice food.

I just finished my first week and I’ve been thrown in full force – The old patissier left – Saturday was her last day. So I trained with her from Wednesday to Saturday and starting tomorrow, I’m on my own. Yikes. It’s a bit extreme – I’m going from stagiaire to pastry chef… In charge of ordering, all the mis-en-place etc. Sort of freaking out. Not to mention I’m exhausted, dehydrated, undernourished etc. But in a really exciting way. The most exhausting part was the stress of trying to get a visa and a new apartment before the new year – no easy feat in France. But today I had 2 major breakthroughs! I have a potential apartment lined up and I think my visa will be ok – at least for 4 months. I’ll worry again when the 4 months are up.

Now I’m celebrating my visa victory by eating rice and listening to Christmas music – I can’t wait to go home in a few weeks!

Life Update!

So I don’t know how many people I’ve told but I’ve officially extended my cuisine stage for an extra 2 months! I will be staying in Paris working at Ze Kitchen Galerie until the Christmas season and thereafter will be heading home. Just trying to work out my visa extension now too – argh.

Although I loved my pastry stage and I learned a lot, after 2 months I was ready to move on to my cuisine stage. At Ze Kitchen, I feel as though I’m not quite ready to leave. After all, in the long run, 2 months is nothing! And better to keep reaping the benefits of this amazing opportunity while I can.

Plating for 12 (They let me plate these by myself and they didn’t change anything on the plate!):

12  Entrées de dégustation (Appetizers off of the Chef’s tasting menu)

Maigre (Meagre or shade-fish in English) marinated à la minute with cucumber, pickled onions, chilean guava, ginger confit, radish, herbs and a mango condiment.

 

 

In other good news, I got a potential job offer starting in May in Boston! It will be a brand new restaurant aiming for Michelin stars. Apparently the Michelin guide will just start expanding their search for star-worthy American restaurants past NYC, Napa Valley, and Chicago in 2014. Big news for the American restaurant scene! Everything is still in the works, so the job is not 100% in stone yet but it’s a start. And it gives me hope that I will one day eventually be able to move out of my parents’ home on a more permanent basis. Fingers crossed.

Cuisine Stage

3 weeks into my cuisine stage now! I am working in a 1-star Michelin restaurant called Ze Kitchen Galerie and so far it’s been a great experience. I’ve worked with quite a few ingredients I’ve never seen before (fresh almonds, whole pigs, etc.) and it’s been really interesting. Everyone I work with is young and passionate about the food they are creating – which is sadly not always the case in restaurants.

Generally I work in the prep kitchen in the basement and now let me work with the garde-manger station (making cold appetizers/ salads etc) for service. The garde-manger station is right next to the pastry chef so I help out plating some desserts as well! I LOVE working with the desserts. The restaurant is a fusion restaurant of Asian and French cuisines so the desserts are things like coconut soup or wasabi-white chocolate ice cream with condiments of miso-caramel and creme de noisettes. Delicious!

All the flavors used are super fresh; a lot of lemongrass, ginger, and galanga. We use a sous-vide machine for almost everything which makes it possible to do things like cook wagyu beef at a constant temperature of 60 degrees C (140 F) for 36 hours. I tasted a piece once and even though it was the most tender piece of meat I’ve ever eaten, I just kept chewing it because I wanted to keep the flavor in my mouth forever.

The plating is all incredibly artistic and delicate. It  was just about impossible for me to do in the beginning but I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’m still much slower than the real chefs, I can do about 1 plate in the time it takes them to do 3… But I’ve had a couple of plates go out and the executive chef, Chef William told me “tres jolie!” Which felt pretty cool.

Here are some pictures!

Fresh Almonds!

The almond is gently cracked open with a knife or a rolling pin to release the inner meat.

That inner almond meat is then peeled and can be eaten raw! Delicious!

Bird’s eye chili peppers

One of my first successful “pretty” plates – Salmon “mi-fume” dressed with heirloom tomatoes, green beans, nectarine slices, pickled onions, fresh almonds, and various herbs.

Another plate – steak tartare with lotus root chips, eggplant chip, wasabina leaves, herbs and a trio of condiments: red pepper, chorizo, and wasabi.

End of Pastry Stage!

Finished my pastry stage!

All in all, I would say it was a great experience. I struggled with the French quite a bit which obviously annoyed the chef on some occasions and I had a few whoopsie moments like the time I dropped a cake on the floor… But I learned a ton!

I feel like I actually improved pastry skills and I got to sample a lot of delicious sweets. People talked about the “Stage diet” – where everyone loses a ton of weight from the hours and stress of working as a stagiaire. Let me tell you, it does NOT exist for pastry stages. All you do is eat macarons! Except for the days you’re eating brioche, chocolate, ice cream or cookies. Marscapone cream? I ate about half a pound every time we made it – which was every day.

Here are some of the things I did!

 

Madeleines and Financiers: One of my responsibilities were to pipe and bake the madeleine and financiers cookies every day.

Madeleines!

Some days were set aside to make chocolate bonbons:

Chocolate Day!

So much chocolate…

How I feel when we have chocolate days.

Confiserie/Jam Days:

 

Jam Jarring: Marmelade à l’orange

Baking Brioche – Most heavenly smell in the world.

Best days ever = Brioche days!

And every Saturday we had a “Gateau du Samedi”, changing weekly based on whatever we got from the market~

St Honoré aux abricots

Tarte à la pêche!

Brioche, orange marmelade, griottes, all covered with Italian meringue and hazelnut shortbread.

Tart with Fromage Blanc

Macaron Base with Raspberry Confiserie, roasted abricots and topped with biscuit.

Tarte Citron (Lemon!)

With the MOF chef himself.

The whole team! (Almost, minus 2)

Pastry Girls

Les Stagiaires!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My pastry stage!

I’m now halfway through my 2nd week working as a stagiaire (intern) in a boutique pastry shop in a little town outside of Paris.

The store is named after its’ owner: Nicolas Bernardé, who is a Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF for short). The MOF competition is a competition for finding the best craftsmen of France and is held every 4 years. It’s a huge accomplishment! I’m not positive but I’m guessing this means that I work for a man who is essentially the Olympic Gold Medalist of Pastries from the 2004 MOF competition.

 

It’s been an interesting experience so far – working for a patisserie is completely different from working in a restaurant. First of all, I have regular hours. REGULAR HOURS. I haven’t had that in about…forever. Secondly, the tasks are organized in a completely different way. In pastries I feel like I am hopping around the kitchen doing different things for 10 minutes at a time then switching tasks again. For instance, I’ll arrive at work and I’ll pipe out a tray of financiers – 10 minutes. Then I’ll pipe out 4 trays of Madeleines – 10 minutes. Then I’ll clean, wipe down tables – 5 minutes. Then I’ll help measure ingredients for a cake – 15 minutes. Then I’ll package chocolates for 20 minutes. Etc. Etc.

I never really settle into a task which I don’t like. At the moment I feel like I still prefer the cuisine kitchen. But we’ll see when I’m running around like a headless chicken at my second stage in a restaurant. Maybe I won’t be able to give up regular hours after all.

I don’t really have too many pictures because I actually don’t know if I’m allowed to take them or not… But the cake you see above is a raspberry and apricot tart with marscapone cream!

If you want more pictures, you can look at his facebook page or on his website!

nicolas-bernarde.com/

LCB Graduation and beginning of stages!

DONE DONE DONE!

I passed both superior level pastry and cuisine and am now French-State Certified as a Cuisinier and a Commis Patissier.

My sugar exam went off without a hitch. It wasn’t the best but it didn’t break – the colors came out well AND it didn’t break. That merits a double mention.

Final Sugar Exam

The final cuisine exam went really well until the end. The whole thing was going smoothly until about 15 minutes before I started plating when I burnt my tray of tuiles which were going to be the required crispy element of my entree verrines.
I had time to re-make them but it threw me off and I ended up being late in my plating. Because every minute you are late in presenting equals 2% off of your exam grade, to say I was stressed out would be an understatement. I was having a panic attack. Shaky hands, shallow breathing, ready to burst into tears at any second kind of panic attack. Luckily the chef saw me and came over to help me finish plating and to tell me to chill out. I ended up being 4 minutes late (VERY bad) but the chef came to tell me directly afterwards that I had done a really good plate and the judges really liked most everything I did. Actually he first told me I failed – then when I started tearing up in front of him, he told me he was joking. SO funny. Haha.

…This guy

Being that it was so late going down already, I didn’t waste any time taking pictures. But! Here are the pictures from the last atelier before the exam which was a practice with the same ingredients as the final exam.

My Verrine!
Layer 1: A Rillete of smoked trout with fresh farmer’s cheese, dill and parsley.
Layer 2: A puree of green peas.
Layer 3: A white asparagus veloute made with potatoes, fennel, and a home-made turbot fumet.
Top Decoration: Blanched and mandolined white asparagus curls, blanched peas, and dill tuiles.

My main dish:
Pan-fried turbot filet on a bed of spinach topped with fried turbot fins.
Glazed pink radishes and baby fennel.
A tomato millefeuille layered with concasser tomatoes, yellow tomato custard royale, and langoustine mousseline.
2 sauces to accompany: a passion fruit beurre blanc and a reduced langoustine jus.

The 2nd plating of the same dish.

For the exam I did the verrine the exact same way. But the chef had given me a couple of corrections on the main dish and there were 1 or 2 things I wanted to change myself. For the atelier,  we only had to plate 2 dishes. The exam-4. Meaning we had to stretch the same amount of ingredients for the double the outcome. We were each given only 4 langoustines so I had to make the steamed mousseline layer of the tomato millefeuille thinner. The chef also suggested that I top the millefeuille with a sheet of crispy brik-pastry and an herb salad to add both texture and color.

Here was the outcome!

My final exam dish. We each had to plate 3 round dishes for the school’s guest judges who came in to grade the exams. The 4th plate was this square plate that everyone plated so the chef could tell you what went well and what went poorly. I was the first group to go so even though I finished at noon, I didn’t get to hear my critique until 7:30 that night. Hence the herb salad looks sad, the millefeuille limp, and the sauce dried out. But C’est la vie! If I had finished on time, I would have had time to take a picture while it was still nice.

 

In other big news, I graduated! The ceremony was at the Paris Westin at the Place Vendome. The best part was the cocktail party with an open bar after the actual graduation part. Actually no. The best part was enjoying the open bar while I wore a medal and a toque.

My biggest diploma to date.

All 3 diplomas! Grande Diplome, Cuisine, Pastry.

Plus my sister was here to enjoy the free champagne with me 🙂

 

The biggest news? I finally got my stage/internship info!
As of today, I will officially be starting as a stagiaire for MOF Chef Nicolas Bernardé next week. Then after a month long vacation in August (hey, it’s France!) I will (tentatively) be starting a stage with Chef William Ledeuil at Ze Kitchen Galerie in Paris. Wish me luck!

 

End of the Road at LCB!

I had my last demo today! No more classes – just exams. My cuisine exam is tomorrow morning and the pastry sugar exam on Saturday in the afternoon. Really nervous! We’ve had 3 more sugar practices since the last sculpture you saw. One was just a 3 hour pulled sugar practical and the other 2 were the actual sugar ateliers lasting 6 hours each.

The sugar exam will be 5 hours and fingers crossed it goes well. They will be doing a stress test on our sculptures and if our sculptures break.. well I don’t really want to think about that.

I have my sculpture mostly planned – I haven’t changed the concept much, just the colors and the number of flowers and elements I am adding.

Close to what I will make for my final. Hopefully!

The cuisine exam will be just like the ateliers we’ve been having. Only difference is we only have 4 hours instead of 5 and we have to plate 4 dishes instead of 2! Yikes. Oh, and instead of a plated entree, we have to make verrines which are basically little shot-glass appetizers. Timing is really the only thing I’m really worried about. We had 1 atelier with the same recipe list as the final so at least we got to practice our ideas.

I forgot my camera at school so I can’t post the pictures but I will after the exams are done!

As a part of our final grade, we also had to make a dossier, a paper overview of what our exam dishes will be. The whole thing had to be written in French so I’m hoping my high school level grammar was enough for a decent grade. I’m a little worried but I had a ton of fun drawing little cartoons and gluing card stock together anyway.

It’s almost over!

My Verrine!

My main dish: Pan-fried filet of Turbot on a bed of spinach and garnished with tempura-fried turbot fins. A tomato millefeuille layered with langoustine mousseline and a yellow tomato royal custard. Glazed baby Fennel and pink radishes. Accompanied by2 sauces: a langoustine fumet reduced to a glaze and a passion-fruit honey beurre blanc.

If my exam goes 1/2 as well as my drawing of a langoustine, I will be happy.

Send me positive energy for my exams please! :0)

Sugar #2!!!

I’ve found my new hobby. Pulling sugar! It’s a ton of fun – the practical was really relaxing too. The class lasted 6 hours and you just stand there working with colorful sugar! The first 2 hours were dedicated to the poured sugar which I explained in the last post. The next few hours were for pulling.

Watching the chef work, I was really impressed he worked with his bare hands but the sugar work wasn’t actually as hot as I thought it was going to be. Obviously I did wear 1 pair of gloves though, with my baby-chef hands. No burns, though I did cut myself somehow…

Final Product of sugar atelier 2!

Close-up of the flower and the vines.

 

The chef liked my flower and the vines but he wants me change the color of my poured sugar base – too much green. Hopefully next time will go even better!

 

 

Start of Sugar!

The time has come! The very last segment of superior level pastry: sugar work. Just 3 more weeks and I’m done with the Grande Diplome Program at Le Cordon Bleu Paris (fingers crossed). We had our first sugar sculpture demonstration at the end of last week. The chef showed us 2 different techniques, poured and pulled sugar. In our first practical we only made the poured sugar sculpture base. Basically you cook sugar with water to 155 degrees Celsius and pour it into oiled, stainless steel molds.

Pulled sugar is a bit more complicated. The sugar is cooked to 165 degrees and poured onto a silicone sheet. As it cools a bit, the sugar is worked over itself to facilitate even cooling. As the sugar continues to cool, it is pulled out and folded over itself again and again. This process incorporates air and humidity into the sugar which turns into a crystallization of some sort, creating a satin-like look to the sugar. Our demonstration chef has been making sugar sculptures for decades now and he pulled his sugar with bare hands! We haven’t had a chance to pull sugar yet so I don’t know how it feels but I’m pretty sure touching molten sugar with bare skin is a bad idea… Students, with our baby-like tender hands, are encouraged to by latex gloves and first-aid blister tape to wear in practicals.

Chef’s Sugar Sculpture

 

The pulled sugar rose, leaves, and ribbons.

For our practical, as I mentioned before, we only did poured sugar. It’s actually not too hard but being the first practical I did run into a couple of problems. The first problem was that my first, main block cracked because I waited too long to un-mold the center square. I was able to glue it back together by melting the sugar down but in the end, it broke again. With my leftover blue sugar, I was planning to try a second one but I forgot it on the stove while I was pouring my orange sugar and I ended up with a disgusting dark brown/black burnt caramel which I just had to throw away. Considering my piece broke 2 times though, I think the end result was ok!

Obviously broken and not perfect but I’m happy with it! I figured out what went wrong and what I will change for the next class.

Sad broken pieces.

 

Wish me luck for next time!