Well, it is already the third week of our class's externship! It is crazy how time flies! My third week starts today because I work Wednesdays thru Saturdays. Anyway, I am doing my externship at Oishii Boston. It is an extremely nice sushi place in Boston. I have heard it is the best place for sushi in Boston. (I wouldn't know cause I hate sushi...) My first week Robert Downey Jr. called in and made a reservation...he ended up not showing but still. Ha! But apparently famous people come in all the time. Like, last week Guy Fieri from Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives came in!
Anyway, the first two weeks went well. They were very very exhausting but for the most part enjoyable. So, I work from 1:00 to 10:00 PM, which don't seem like bad hours right? Well, they aren't except for once you factor in travelling time. You see, there is nowhere to park in Boston unless you want to pay $12 a day. So I decided to get a bus/train pass. If I lived right by a T station life wouldn't be so bad...but I don't. The only thing that takes me out of Watertown is the bus. Busses are slow, unreliable, and don't run as often as trains. So to get to work I can take the express bus which takes about 45 minutes including the time it takes me to walk from the stop to Oishii. Getting home is much more painful. I walk to the nearest T station, then hop on the T to Harvard Square station, then catch the bus to Watertown, then walk home. All of that takes me about an hour and a half...so I end up getting home around 11:30. It is frustrating I waste so much valuable time travelling, but I guess I can just look at it as an adventure. : )
So, working at a restaurant is fun. There are things I like about it and things I don't. Like, a pro is that I don't have to wake up at like 1 in the morning to bake. A con is that I have to hang around during business hours to plate desserts when customers order them. So my usual day goes like this: I go in at 1 and help bake and prepare desserts or if there isn't a lot of prep for that day I will help with some random culinary tasks. So far I have learned how to fill and fold pork dumplings, roll crab cakes, make some sort of fig paste roll, and deep fat fry crab. I have also helped peel and core cucumbers and wrap raw fish. Some of the baking/pastry tasks that I have helped do so far are:
-Make chocolate truffles. This involves cleaning the molds, tempering the chocolate, coating them, filling them, then covering them.
-Make coconut spheres. This is one of the desserts on our menu. What I have to help with is rolling a balloon filled with the coconut milk mixture around in a bowl of liquid nitrogen so it freezes into a sphere. It is pretty awesome! My hands get suuuuper cold though and I have burned myself a few times accidentally.
-Make black sesame seed ice cream bon bons. So a bon bon is technically a filled chocolate, usually with something other than ganache. This is another dessert on our menu. So I have to coat a silicone mold with tempered chocolate let it set, then fill it with the ice cream, freeze it, then cover it with chocolate.
-Make chocolate bowls for the bon bon dessert. To do this we blow up balloons and dip them into chocolate then set them onto a sheet pan that we've frozen with liquid nitrogen. This sets the chocolate super fast. Once the chocolate is set we just pop the balloons and you have a nice little chocolate dish.
-Make green tea layer cake. This is another dessert on the menu and is absolutely delicious! It is basically 35 crepes (square) layered on top of each other with green tea crème chantilly in between. I enjoy making this one. It takes a while but it is fun.
-Make chocolate spirals. I haven't done this on my own yet, but I do know how. They only do this every so often because they make a lot at a time. But I watched my boss, Chef Ting, do it the first week and I learned a new, more efficient, way of doing it which is exciting. I can't wait to try it! You basically spread out a sheet of tempered chocolate and when it's almost set you cut it into strips, put it between parchment paper, and roll it up. Once it's frozen you break them apart. So nifty!
-Make sugar spirals. These go on top of the coconut sphere for plating. I watched a guy at work do them this last week. You just caramelized sugar and use a spoon to swirl it onto the marble. It was fun to watch him get them done so fast though because when we did this at school we used piping bags, which is really inefficient and more dangerous. Course, if you want to be able to draw a design you have to use a bag instead of a spoon.
-Make mini black sesame seed cookies. These are absolutely delish and so cute. We basically just put dough in a mini half-sphere silicone mold and bake them. But I have helped do this a few times. These are for the free desserts at Oishii. So, when the customer doesn't order a dessert but ordered a lot of food or was a pleasure to work with their waitress/waiter will make them up a plate of free mini desserts. The plate includes mini crème puffs with green tea crème chantilly, raspberries, black sesame seed cookies, and orange chocolate truffles. I will have to get a pic of one this week because they are super cute.
-Mold yubari ice melon. This is another dessert menu item. It is basically pureed yubari melon that we put into a giant half-sphere mold, freeze, cover in white chocolate, then cut. I helped out with this this past week.
All of the tasks that have to be done for each plated dessert are only done once or twice a week. So, we only do certain preparations on certain days. Once we are finished preparing things for the day that is basically it. Then we hang around until somebody orders a dessert. So like I said, I usually help prepare stuff when I arrive at 1 until about 3 or 3:30. At that time the restaurant closes for lunch until 5:30. So I take a break...which is really really long. Then at 5:30 I go back into the kitchen and wait for people to order desserts! I basically sit there in suspense until I see someone drop a yellow ticket on our baking table...then I get to plate! I love plating. I love when there is a huge dessert order and we have to whip them up really fast and still make them look pretty. It gets stressful but is a fun challenge!
Yeah, so as you may gather, I have a lot of down-time at work. I get a lot of reading done, which is nice. haha...but that is probably the only thing I dislike about my externship...well, besides the fact that the kitchen always smells like fish. : / I have read Life of Pi so far and am working on The Great Gatsby right now. The first week my boss did give me a special task, which was to make green tea macaroons. This was fun because it took up a lot of my down-time the first week, which was nice. He wanted me to make them until we got them right. It took me five times to get the almost perfect macaroon. Once we got one we liked we practiced different ways to fill them with ice cream. Scooping the ice cream didn't work so well because it melted out of shape before it had the time to refreeze hard in the freezer. Spreading the ice cream and using cookie cutters to cut out circles didn't work for the same reason. The winner method was to put softened ice cream into our silicone bon bon molds and put them in the deep freeze. They pop right out of the mold and are as hard as rocks so they don't melt when you sandwich them with the macaroons. So, now that we have a good method for the filling and a good macaroon recipe we are going to create some more flavors. This week I will be testing out ginger, coconut, red bean, vanilla, and chocolate macaroons. My boss wants to add this to the dessert menu...a plate of 6 ice cream-filled macaroons. So, that is my project. I will also be working with isomalt this week for a seascape themed dessert.
Alright, now here are some pics!
Green tea macaroons: batch 1.
I think the recipe had too little sugar in the egg whites, the oven temperature was too low, and I didn't let them sit on the tabletop long enough before baking.
Green tea macaroons: batch 2.
I used the same recipe but the oven temperature was too high this time.
Green tea macaroons: batch 3.
This time my boss wanted me to try putting them in the fridge before baking them. It didn't help.
Green tea macaroons: batch 4.
This actually came from our winner recipe, but they were baked before the over was properly preheated so they didn't turn out.
Same batch as above, baked at the correct temperature. Finally success!!! : ) See that nice smooth top and foot around the base?
Green tea macaroons: batch 5.
Same winner recipe I just sifted some green tea powder on the top this time to add some color to them.
This is plated red bean ice cream. That is one of the chocolate swirls I was talking about earlier.
This is the green tea layered cake with rum-raisin sauce, chocolate sauce, and a white chocolate swirl.
This is the yubari ice melon with berry sauce of some sort, fresh fruit, chocolate swirls, gold leafing (my kind of plating haha), and mint leaves.
This is green tea tirimasu with chocolate swirls, a raspberry, and mint leaves.
This is the coconut sphere! Isn't it awesome. Underneath is a scoop of some kind of ice cream/sherbet and blackberries. Then we punch a hole in the top and fill the sphere with a bit of coffee whipped cream then add chocolate sauce, a sugar swirl, a raspberry, and mint leaves to the top.
This is red bean creme brulee with red bean ice cream and fresh fruit.
A variety of our desserts plated. : )
What our area looks like when we're making the coconut spheres! So fun! : )
The after-effects of liquid nitrogen...the towel was completely frozen in that shape! ha!
The dreaded/loved black sesame bon bon dessert. This is the coolest dessert but the biggest pain to make. I have made it twice so far, once last week and once the first week. It is the black sesame bon bon I told you about earlier with a chocolate bowl on top filled with a scoop of black sesame ice cream. Then you take a cookie cutter dipped in hot caramelized sugar and set it around the dessert but then you must carefully pull it up as you blow on it to cool it as you stretch it. It ends up looking like cellophane and when you go to eat it it basically shatters! On each end is black sesame seed honey sauce and blueberries.
Rough day for the boss! : )
Seriously though, we couldn't resist snapping a pic because this was so cute. He sat down one day, took off his shoes, and ended up falling asleep right next to the ice machine (the only semi-cool place in the whole kitchen that day)!
Ok so I forgot to add a few pictures that I had wanted to on the last post I did...so I am adding them now! : )
So here are a few pics of my cake in progress. I think it is fun to see what things look like before they are finished!
Just look at the golden mess on that table...that two tables were where Tim was working! haha...I thought it was awesome how much edible gold spray paint was everywhere.
Tim's finished product. Like I said before, me and him basically spent two weeks from morning to night together in the practice kitchen.
Hahaha...had to add this pic that my friend Freddy so kindly snapped of me after taunting me into eating a slice of cheesecake. : )
Me and my cake!
I couldn't remember if I had added any pictures of all my friends yet and so I wanted to. They are really what made school extra enjoyable!!! : )
Hilda, me, and Casey on valentines day with our roses from Tim.
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Me and Kristine
Me, Hilder, and Jaquana...looking like we are drunk off bourbon. : P
Some of my favorite friends! Amy, Caitlynn, and Mackenzie (mack-daddy)!
Me and Hilda! (a.k.a. Hilder)
The best class Chef G has ever had! : )
Me, Hilder, Jess, Artlete, and Jaquana
My first production group! : ) Me, Sarah, and Jess
Me and Chef G : ) : ) : )
I don't know if I have written about Chef G's favorite quote but whenever we ask a question...like can we do it this way or can we use this instead of that he says "It's America, you can do whatever you want." Sometimes this got extremely frustrating! Anyway, I made him this magnet for to put in his gift basket the class gave him and he put it on the lid of his toolbox for all to see. : )
