Bay Area pastry chefs just can't catch a break?

Tough times to be a pastry chef. Not only are patrons tightening their belt (and their budget) when it comes to fine dining and desserts, but this morning Michael Bauer kinda called you boring.

Part of the reason is that my expectations are low writes MB after admitting that he routinely gives restaurants with poor dessert choices 3 stars, giving GMs, head chefs and owners the impression that it doesn't matter who's making their pot de cremes and seasonal fruit galettes.

It's also challenging to review desserts, claims MB, because those darn restaurants could be bothered to send him a menu. Do they even give him the PC's name? From the blog:

When we call for menus each week for restaurants I'm reviewing, we have to specifically ask for a dessert menu, otherwise there's a 50-50 chance we won't get one. Even now we sometimes have to call again, which suggests that many restaurants aren't invested in the sweet course. That's probably the reason I see many unbalanced offerings: too many creamy puddings or too much chocolate, for example. I can't even estimate how many restaurants I've been to that have an ice cream component in every dessert.

This isn't the first time MB's complained about the sweet fare out here.

My suggestions for the Bauer? Well, I'd love to see him champion the desserts we DO have. Imagine if he were using his powers of suggestions to offer up examples of success rather than lambaste the options? Also, it seems like Bauer's talking to chefs about desserts but no one's talking to the diners. Chefs are picky. Chefs want to play with toys. Chefs have been making creme brulee for their entire damned career and probably want something new. True. I support all of that.

But let's flesh out the idea that Bay Area people aren't some bizarro boring-dessert lovers, shall we? I mean, Creme Brulee Cart man seems to be doing pretty well.

And let's take a second to think about the many fine bakeries in this city who do offer something a little more interesting. The continued success of places like Kara's Cupcakes proves that people will go out of their way to pay a little more money for an item that's organic and tasty (though they could use some new flavors!)

chocolate work has me up at night

when i am already tired. looking through my cookbooks for ideas, or possible answers to questions like why my hazelnut ganache broke today. or how to make a fruit flavored ganache that actually tastes like fruit. without setting it up with gelatin (and in that case is it still a ganache? what is it properly? trying to understand how, why, etc, remembering that sometimes chocolate breaks. and you can try it again. and you can put the pieces together. but in the meantime...fruit puree + ganache. nut paste + ganache. infusing a flavor into white ganache without having a carryover white chocolate taste, yet having it be stiff enough to set naturally. chocolate work is a headache. for me it isn't my favorite. but i would like to learn...if only to carry my own weight. i am given the opportunity to play around...but i do need the tools to get better, so what, who? who should i read? where should i search?

and how can you patent a fruit ganache?

What is a memory worth?

What is a holiday worth?

In time, in money, in labor, in goods. Who holds the power?

I just got home from work and I'm making a cake. A Ukranian torte to be exact, commissioned by a friend of a friend. This torte has a shortbread-like "crust" and three layers of filling--applesauce, apricot and chocolate. The dough I made this morning and am baking off. I'm in between batches right now, waiting for the cake pans to cool enough so that I can re-use them. The applesauce was started this morning and is continuing to simmer down on the stove. The chocolate layer is simple and will be made tonight if I've got the energy. Tomorrow the apricot layer will be made, and the whole thing will be assembled and frosted with whipped cream. The recipe is from Comfort Food for Breakups.

I wasn't sure what to charge for it, how much considering it was for a friend of a friend, but also the week before Thanksgiving. And my time is pretty precious this month. So I costed out the recipe and names a price--not as high as I wanted, but enough to ensure I'd clear some profit after the ingredients were bought, enough to hopefully be worth the time put into it in after- or before-work hours when I'd rather be sleeping or reading a book.

I've done some commissioned baking before. My first job was a wedding cake. Three months into culinary school. I flat out told one of the grooms I couldn't do a tiered cake (when he asked why, I explained because we hadn't gotten there in school yet). We discussed cake options and he went with a white sponge cake, soaked in rum, with strawberries and vanilla buttercream. His only specification was that I incorporate the color lavender into my decorated, so I made some lavender-colored white chocolate shards and decorated the main cake (there were 3 or 4) with fresh flowers. I even bought a 2-groom decoration for the top from the cake store. I didn't know how to properly re-cream buttercream then. Back in the day.


Then I did some Thanksgiving stuff last year. Caramel apple pie, pumpkin pie, cranberry cheesecake. That was super fun when the cutie pie ate one of the pies the night before and I had to give away my only spare pie!

When you bake for commission unless you have baked that thing a hundred times, there's an element of guesswork and surprise and having things break or not work out. That wedding cake, I used new cake pans and didn't spray them well enough to get the cake out, so one of the layers fell apart. I didn't have enough time or money to make another, so I was forced to patch out a couple layers. Non-bakers might be surprised to know exactly how much their food is sometimes handled. I stayed up till 2 am working on the cake. There may have been a blizzard, it being a cold New England winter, but I can't quite remember. I was working half the time on a table my roommate had built for me out of plywood. I went to bed without having finished the decoration, got up at six am, called in sick to my job, and was shortly thereafter greeted by my roommate who was making enchiladas and fried chicken for the wedding dinner. We shared the kitchen and I finished the cakes in enough time for him to take them over to their house. The grooms were drunks and fell asleep in bed while the guests, mostly catering people we'd worked with, got drunk and raved about how the cake was the best thing Ever. It took them a month to pay me, cause I thought it's be crass to make them worry about money on the day, and when they did they stiffed me ten bucks or so.

The shortbread's baked now and the applesauce is finished. I'm getting up early again to bust out the other layers before work so when I get home I can assemble the torte and send it off with the nice Ukranian folks.

Next week is Thanksgiving and I get daily phone calls discussing various details. But in the meantime I still have a full time job to do. I think, should I have charged them more for the cake? What is my sleep worth? Should I have charged them less, considering I know them? When you factor in my shopping time, and that fact that it's closing in on one a.m. and I should be sleeping, am I treating myself as well as I should be or am I selling the experience my hands hold for too little money, because I am used to the pay scale and workload of my industry?

It's fun. It's always fun. Watching something new unfold in the oven. Making applesauce for the second time in a month and noting how the color is different this time because if different apples used.

This is really funny, too:
I got a lesson today in how to tie my apron. My chef was like, C'mere. Take It Off. Now Put It Here--Or Here. I always thought my apron was flying all over the place cause I've got a potbelly and it just doesn't want to stay up, but apparently not. She and my sous chef laughed at me. When they asked me to turn around I refused. Yeah it was funny...and I was laughing...but it made me feel like such a kid.

cranking up the pie factory

Today was all about batch sizes. Breaking down the recipe that calls for a 20 qt. mixer into a fourth of its size to try it in the 5 qt. kitchen aid. Realizing a quart of base is not going to yield many pies and that you will be able to fit 2 quarts in the kitchen aid, though three would probably be a lil tight. Kind of like the cream cheese frosting at the cupcake shop...

I am making caramel pumpkin pie and whiskey pecan pie, both in sucree shells. Why? because sucree is the dough that will be provided to me off the farm, in 8" disposable shells. The recipes are historic (and no doubt, storied). When no one could find the farm's recipe for pumpkin pie we got the green light to use my predecessor's recipe for caramel pumpkin pie. I made it, gave some away for tasting, decided it was well meaning but boring and I certainly wouldn't take it out on a date, and tried some things to ramp it up. Better, but also going up on the size of batter in the mini tartlet shells caused them all to crack. Who would have thought an ounce could be so powerful? Today I baked them in the entremet (to use my new vocabulary word) and got nice shells. That said, it was a bitch squeezing the entremet back on prebaked shells, and definitely not for the faint of heart! And, the dough is *still* fragile beyond anyone's belief except for maybe those I gave tarts to who found lil packages of exploded good intention.

I realized it took an hour to prepare a batch that yields 24 mini tartlets, and 3 to 4 big ones (depending on which size I use). It takes so long because I've got to wait for my sugar to caramelize and then I've got to pour on all this cream (which should be infused, but the guys threw out the herbs I was drying and I just didn't feel like dealing with it today)

The whiskey pecan pie is much quicker and takes half an hour to throw together a batch of base but the process just might get you drunk. No joke. I tasted one of the dried cherries we'd been soaking in Jack Daniels and it was like a shot. Then I had to measure out my intoxicated peaches and cherries and those fumes were overpowering. And then I had to get 3 oz. of Jack for the batter, and then when I realized the entire process only yielded me 18 mini tartlets *and* didn't utilize all the space of the mixer, I made a 2 quart batch. And had to taste test the first. One square inch of pie=another shot.

I'd told my manager we needed 8 inch shells. How Am I Supposed To Know How Much Pie I Get From One Recipe If We're Not Baking Them in The Right Molds? I said during Thanksgiving meeting 2. And while she was not able to get me 8 inch shells from the farm she stopped at Safeway before work to get 4 shells and another giant bottle of Jack because I spent last week soaking 1 pound of peaches on 2c Jack and 3 pounds cherries in 6 c Jack...hence the dizzying effect of eating just one on a baker going off three hours sleep and little food.

We tasted the first batch of the whiskey pie together and after one bite my manager had a reaction that didn't entirely surprise me: This Is Not What He Made Last Year, she said.
More Fruit? More Whiskey? I asked. The recipe called for a paltry ounce of each dried fruit, which was like 6 cherries and a peach half. I hoped it was just a matter of punching up the goodies in the batter and not the recipe being entirely unlike the written recipe, and therefore lost.
Add More Stuff she declared, and she helped me dice pecans so we could get everything tossed in there to get me a batter that weight about 6 pounds and will bake one each of 7, 8, 9 in tarts and 12 perhaps minis.

So we are getting there for numbers and for quality control. Next up is timing, and how long to prebake the 8 inch shells for. Since they're made in deeper pie pans the filling takes longer to cook and getting the prebake to the same golden color as everything else means the edges will burn, which means I should probably go for anemic coloring on the prebake...Timing and product duration. Can I freeze the pumpkin filling? How long can it keep in the refrigerator?

I'll be stopping in midweek some time once I get the restaurant schedule (how lucky for me both jobs are in the same neighborhood) to test bake the product over the course of the week.

Today we were all getting in one another's way. I had mise all over the bakeshop for these pie projects and had other products cooling and my prep cook pal kept shoving it back over on my table where I'd just cleared space to fill shell. My manager kept summoning me over to try to make excel work on the computer. Secrets come out and surprises leave everyone curious and hesitant.

But there were some moments throughout the day of gratitude. Being grateful that my manager and I are on the same page concerning the Thanksgiving pie factory, that she does not want to burden me unfairly and wants foremost a good quality product delivered in a reliable timeline, and that these are exactly the things I want. That she remembered we were out of whiskey. That she found a way to get me 8 inch shells, because she understood I couldn't really be giving her accurate information without it. To my chef and my sous chef at the other job, because even though I think I would be preparing my mental mise in the same way were it not for the restaurant job, who can really say? When someone's forced patterns start to become yours in an automatic way it's hard to tell, and each time I found myself reaching for the pen holder on the left arm of my jacket hoping to find an offset there I felt somehow less alone.

A coworker and I at the restaurant were helping savory people prep party apps the other day. I was supposed to be minding the pastry station but was really just making cornets to have on hand and watching the garde manger person slowly begin to get in the weeds between the party stuff and the normal tickets. When she skittered off to the back for something I asked my coworker who was helping out with the party if we shouldn't prepare another platter of apps since there were about five lingering on a plate. I started punching flatbread circles and she got to work quenelling toppings. The cutter consigned to the job was a dented, dull pathetic lil thing and as I slammed into it with my hand I said somewhat plaintively to my coworker:

Chef Would Never Make Us Use Something Like This. And I held it out to her, so she could see.
Chef Would Never *Have* Something Like That, she countered.

And were we to even be doing something like that, we would find a way to do it more efficiently in the first place.

Sometimes it's nice to know what you have. In things or in people. What you can rely on them for. And then in turn what you owe them. I've been at FH long enough to know what I can expect to have (but the new job is still too new) but it's still great to feel backed by my manager, and like we're in accord. Fairly soon I hope to have an idea of the number of pies one person with another full time job can prepare in the off hours (what off hours, anyway? My boss just called and before asking me to run the errand she asked me to run, she was like You're Not Asleep? No {sigh}. I did not tell her that I'd just eaten dinner and spun my ice cream).

I'm looking forward to the rest of product testing. Though I am somewhat afraid of passing out due to some sort of secondhand drunkenness from that whiskey aroma. Hot damn.

Where, and how, did that recipe make its way to FH?

Lastly, per gratitude, today I saw the xmas order form and asked my manager what she was expecting xmas to entail, because (tho I didn't tell her this)I'm pretty sure it's going to be crazy with parties at the restaurant around that time. The menu items they'd listed were all farm products, same as the Thanksgiving stuff, or strange cakes my predecessor had been tasked with. Flipping through the large and disorganized binder I found strewn like lil gifts those recipes, should I need them. Generous and unexpected.

Sleepy. Working a double tomorrow. Road trip last night left me home at one am, dios mio.

the girls do it better than the boys

Bread, that is. Some lonely like cook wandered into our kitchen a couple days ago to use the big mixer, and I'm not sure what he did (or didn't do, more appropriately), but all of a sudden he was shoved aside and my boss was coddling his bread dough.

There was no salt, for one. So while she explained to him about the importance of salt, what salt's role is in dough, she finessed the right amounts of water and flour. He left. He didn't come back for a while, so she continued, taking the dough out of the mixer, kneading it into a bowl, whispering sweet nothings into its yeasty lil ear. One of the sous chefs came by and was like We're Supposed To Get It Like A Windowpane, Huh? That's What You're Doing?
Short answer, yeah.

As I was hastening to get my second pot of goodness on the stove, I saw how the sous chef was shaping the bread. I stopped. I've got about nine months of day to day bread experience-rolls, focaccia, cornbread, crackers, light wheat, potato bread, biscuits, pizza dough-on my resume. And he was treating the bread like he was a kid playing bouncy ball by himself and he had all day to shape those out-in-the-air lil rounds as if they weren't gonna get crusty. I planted myself next to the prep table, picked up a round of dough. Spun it in one hand, feeling the contours of the dough ride up against my fingers and tighten. Like A Baby's Bottom, my old boss used to say. It's a body memory.
Like This, I said. Feel This. Now Feel Yours. His were flabby. We loved this dough into existence for him and I was not gonna let him do the next step without giving him something to aim for. I barely had time for a mini explanation before my arms were overloaded with dairy and I was back to work.

There's this chiboust I've been making every day at the new job. Ostensibly it begins as a pastry cream, but all the body memories of pastry cream are stripped form it and the project's turned inside out. Yolks and flours, flavorings are whisked into hot milk and the entire thing is cooked on the stove, on extremely low heat.

But mostly it's being whisked like you're Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman is after you. Did You Break A Sweat? my boss asked the first time I made it. Well You're Not Whisking Hard Enough.

if you can talk you're not whisking hard enough
if you breath in-out you're not whisking hard enough
if you can think you're not whisking hard enough
if your muscles aren't straining burning, if your hands aren't calloused
you're not doing it right

One of the guys said if he had to make this every day he'd hate his job but I just shook my head and bent over my task. Each time I come to it I notice something new. Each fresh batch is a chance to whisk it better, to see how it reacts each time some level of starch or dairy is cooked out and the mixture thickens. To take it less seriously is to risk ruining it. I was trying to explain to a friend while biking home last night why it needed this level of care. That's Crazy was all he said. I've got boys shirking at the thought of whisking something with all your might for the better part of half an hour, but you know? You figure out what the purpose of movement is, what it really means to whisk something, what you bring to the kitchen and what kind of compromiser you are.

Each time you try to do it with all your heart.

Oh, and per the bread: there is no jest here. It's the sort of thing where if someone told you that you'd be in a kitchen where talented chefs were doing amazing things, and coaxing every molecule of yeast into its full potential, and everyone around you would be all flushed and happy and you couldn't wait to get to work every day, you'd laugh because you wouldn't think it could ever be true that you oculd be handed such gifts.

kitchen humor

I may not be the best assistant. But I do try. And I am careful to know what I have on hand. So last night when service was almost over and we were waiting for the last table to finish up, one of the sous chefs was practicing his quenelles, and leaning over to rinse the spoon in the sink between each try. I was cleaning my station and lent him my bain of piping hit water. With the Spoons in it.

The Silver Spoons. The You-Are-Good-As-Dead-If-These-Disappear Silver Spoons. I put the spoons in there before service and I knew there were four of them, amidst an assortment of plain spoons and paring knives. He tries to joke with me about losing them and I tell him it's all him. Who would my boss believe, me or him? The bain makes it back to me a short time later and I'm inspecting it and suddenly there are only two spoons. I ask the sous Where Are My Spoons? Where Did They Go?

He feigns innocence. I Need Those Spoons, I say. Otherwise You're Replacing Them. One is stashed in his chef coat and he gives that up easily enough, but then there are three spoons. He tells me I lost one, or that my coworker took one back to the station. There Were Four When I Gave It To You, I am insistent.

I am about to jump on him. Pummel, bite, try to wrestle six feet of man to the ground. But we're in an open kitchen and there are diners about. Still I know there's fury written all over my face.

I clean and wrap my stock. What am I going to say if the spoon doesn't turn up? Am I a hundred percent sure my coworker did not take the spoon? No, but I can't leave the station.

The last desserts are fired, and when I am cleaning up my station I see there are once again four Silver Spoons in the bain. I am saved.

It's only on the way home that I remember what Anthony Bourdain has to say about situations like this...too late, but I need to remember it for next time, how to react to the special brand of kitchen humor.

Work today was like banging my head against a wall. My electricity kept shorting, so I'd be whipping whites and then...no power. Trying to boil milk for pastry cream and it would short out twice. Everything took about three times as long as it should have. My manager sent my coworker to buy a new power strip, but the cord was too short and of course, no extension cord. But it all got done, if ever so slowly. My manager wants me to do a rice pudding, which is just one more thing to go on the burner amidst the pastry cream, poaching Hosui and Warren pears, making custard base...

you know, I don't think I've actually ever *eaten* rice pudding before {aside from the risotto tart filling}. Nevermind made any.

how i got my new job and other stories

It's all starting to come full circle. It rained today in San Francisco. At FH, we've still got the gamut of summer pastries but the winter staples are starting to trickle in...pear frangipane instead of peach. Get your stone fruit while you can. Today at the market I bought quince from Farmer Dan with the two apple trees, Black Missions figs from Knoll and dry-farmed tomatoes from Ella Bella, and was given an onion by my coworker. The last two are getting turned into tomato sauce tonight. The quince, I'm not sure yet and the figs are just for eating out of hand.

Last night I went to Chow, where the waiters are just all so cute. It helped that we were starved after a day of eating only desserts, but my wood-oven spinach and cheese lasagna was yummy, and then I polished off my friend's mashed potatoes as well. We split and analyzed dessert: a ginger cake with whipped cream and pumpkin ice cream. The ice cream was appealingly orange but not properly pumpkin, the cake was dry, the caramel made it slightly better.

I have such an uneasy relationship with writing and cooking. One is always being done at the expense of the other. I told my friend last night that the day I opened up my secret shop would be the day I was never going to write a book. It Doesn't Need To Be That Way, he told me. Sure, I'm getting lifetimes of great material and I've already used some of it. Sure, I'll one day be too old to cook. I Would Love To Go On Book Tour In Like, Three Months, I told him (an impossibility for sure). Y'Know, Just Take A Break From Work.

Would You Give Up Cooking In Three Months? he asked. And Never Go Back To It?
I sighed. I pouted. His question was an impossibility it seemed. Something laughable and off the map. No, I said.

You know you're in it when you come home from working your sixth day in a row and cook dinner and make sorbet. You know you're in it when you read cookbooks for fun, and when you order more than one dessert after dinner. When you get up before dawn and everyone asks you how you do it, and you don't know how you do it, but you don't even complain about it anymore really. It is what it is. When you let kitchen words seep into everyday life and suddenly you want to yell Behind at all those slow walkers. When another burn on your arm is just that: another. When you agree to spend your one day off helping your boss plate desserts. When the farmers at the market know your name, give you the good stuff, when you know their names.

I have a new job. This means I'm now working six days a week, since I still have the old job. Details? Not tonight. Tonight I want to tell you about how my job offer came to me.

Last month I was in Marin working as a prep cook. I was at George Lucas's ranch. I was dealing with meat and cutting up vegetables and pretending I knew how to make sauce. I worked with these two guys who started campaigning for me to get a job there. The head chef was filling in until the current pastry chef could find a replacement for her position and move across the hill to the other ranch. Maybe I said on day one. On day two I started getting the specifics: when would I work, what would I do. It was tempting to work making muffins in the middle of Marin County for Mister Star Wars and his people. Even though I *still* have not seen Star Wars. It would have been Monday through Friday but I would have had to get up every day at 430, and quit FH. We were still all just talking--which is usually nowhere near getting a kitchen job--when I got the phone call. Let Me Think About It. I'm Working Right Now is what I said. The rest of the afternoon I floated around plating food, breaking down the barbecue, busting out dishes, having the guys urge me again to please apply, thinking all the while about the new thing that had come my way.

When I got back to the city I called back, said yes, and quit my job the next day. I'm still in that post-relationship phase with the cupcakery. I miss certain of my coworkers. Occasionally I miss the cupcakes. I don't miss the screaming, the tension, the back and forth, the one who lied. I sort of want to visit but only at certain times. I want to hear the news. I wish them all well, certainly, and I didn't really get to say goodbye since my boss basically gave me most of my last week off. The weight of it all is still on me. While I worked there sometimes I'd wake up in the morning and my hands would be frozen. Clenched open. I'd force them to move and think about what I was doing to my body with all the piping and with only eating cupcakes and perhaps a carrot during an eight hour shift (and I didn't even pipe that much).

The new job is new and exciting. I get the feeling it's all ready to burst right open. It's giving me all this writing energy.

But I got sidetracked and what I wanted to say was how it's nice to have people to talk to. Especially when you can't stop talking--and you get going on a half hour digression from the original question so that by the time you think you might be done you're still so far away form the original point so you've got to talk your way back. So you walk around some, eat a horrid cookie, resist telling the cookie-seller that you know it's underbaked because you're a pair of bakers, dammit. Then you've walked everywhere and you're still not done talking so you go up to Bernal Heights. You point out the landmarks in the city below, map its geography. You stay up past the hour when you should reasonably be in bed and then you get up in cold darkness, bike to work, stand in the rain and buy quince and tomatoes and muscle through the exhaustion because what else is there to do.

My flash fiction is up here. The editor says "the piece sure does have atmosphere." Tell me what you think about the ending.

Oh, & hell yeah. Baseball. Postseason. Do you know what I"m talking about?

as of yesterday I am no longer a cupcake-maker

This is by choice, first off.

I have been angsty lately; this much is obvious.

What I hope is and has been less obvious is this: I have been looking for a new job for the last month or so, ever since one really bad day at work.

For much of that time it was just waiting on one job that I desperately wanted. Actually, it wasn't desperate. I felt fairly confident I would get the position, since I had good references who knew the boss, a lot of experience in the position's requirements, and an abnormal amount of interest in taking the position. But I didn't get the job for various reasons.

After this the angst set in. I realized the junction at which I've arrived: find someone good to work under, while I am still new to my own positions of power, and learn as much as possible from one really strong individual, or else continue taking positions where I call the shots but only learn as I go, from my own mistakes and efforts. What to do. What to do when you feel as I do the decision's been made for you by finances. When you work in this field for some time, your experience demands compensation even if you aren't asking for it per se. At that point the fear set in that I was no longer hireable by a really good chef for reasons that had only to do with money.

All the while, of course, I've been working my fifty hour work weeks and spending my free time in trails. I had my first restaurant trail since March (and they ended up not hiring anyone, but giving their current assistant more hours, though they say they may call me to beg for help when holiday madness descends) and started missing in a physical way (and not an intellectual way, as I always have) restaurant kitchens. That kitchen I trailed in, it was stocked with all the best toys.

So now that I have quit I am going home for a week. Frolicking around SF this weekend with my friend who should be touching down in Oakland very soon. Then going back to Boston, getting to NYC for a day, coming back here and, well, we'll see.


Still working at FH, by the way. Thinking about a brown sugar spice cake with diced poached pears, but then I won't be around for a couple of weeks so nothing new happening yet. What to do with the bread pudding when peaches are gone, hmmm. As they will be soon.

In the profusion of something continuously new, like the parade of stone fruits this summer, you forget how there will be an end. I bought peaches today for another crisp because I hear they'll soon be through. I also bought the most amazing Asian pears, because I understand now that when I like something I have to get it. I've missed too many amazing fruits thinking they'd just be there next week. These Asian pears, they're called Hosui and they taste like vanilla and brandy. Like a long conversation with a good friend. Like how I cried today when I got my farmer-friend on the phone and realized I will see her in NYC in two weeks time.

I still have not told you about the prep cookery, but I'll just say this for now: learning to work the large grill on the fly in ninety degree heat without burning mountains of delicate asparagus spears. Being begged to apply for a job there. Being totally respected by the chefs even though I was an impostor in the savory side of things.


It's challenging to say yes to the things you know are right for you when it means saying no to money and you struggle with having so little of it. It's hard to say yes with your whole heart and sometimes it takes a little while to be ready to say it. To do it.

Some of you know how long I've been looking for something more aptly suited to my interests. I'll wash up in a kitchen soon enough and I tell you this one thing:

It will have a range. Not a hot plate that plugs into the wall.

The piece of advice that comes most often to mind is something I read somewhere, and I wish I remember where, and it more or less reads as followed:

When you are overwhelmed {in a kitchen}...in the weeds, as we say...the best thing to do is not rush hastily into some task but take a moment to clean your workspace. When your space is free of clutter and wiped clean, you can really get to work. It's a strategy I used many times at Sonsie when a cluster of desserts-to-be-plated interrupted my mise, and something I try to do in the chaos that is the Saturday market scene in the hot, postage-stamp-sized, my-stove-plugs-into-the-wall kitchen.

{I've recently started missing professional ranges}

I've never had a problem with drive. I've always been after something (much less often someone). I came fairly early to the obvious art of writing and less early to the immediate pleasures and discipline of cooking. I admit to floundering for a while during culinary school (but can it really be called floundering if you're finishing a Masters program, taking 20 hours a week of culinary class and holding down a kitchen job three days a week with someone who either a)didn't want any help anyway or b)didn't want to be there himself anyway?). These last six months I've been acting on the impulse that suddenly made sense, the lens through which everything I'd always pursued was refracted. So what if it meant moving to California? People tend not to believe me when I tell them the things I was looking for in kitchen work were not really going on in Boston and I'm not sure why this is.

{on a super small scale, yes, they were. but on a hey-i-can-afford-a-pastry-assistant scale, nah.}

So here I am and have been and will be and my focus is closing in and it feels great. It feels wonderful. It makes me think that I can still surprise myself. The question now-and there are many questions now-is how to get the rest of the tools I need.

I would like to work with someone who is fast and who doesn't stop working on making things better. I would like to work with someone who appreciates bread and other yeasty things. I would like to work with someone who knows more than I do. I would like to work in a rush of cooks who are digging and digging for something interesting to do. I would like to work with a dough sheeter and a fancy range and industrial sized ice cream makers or maybe tiny and efficient Paco Jets. I would like to play with toys. I would like to work the line. I would like to commit reckless acts of butchery both sweet and savory. I would like to work...

but then I work, already

all
the
time.

or so it feels.

I am trying to be patient and know that they way to the information I desire will manifest itself and it may not (is not, has not been) the way that is easy or first apparent.

It is odd I do think that my position at FH has only closed one door to me, being the door that brought me out here, but it is an entryway into so many more interesting things.

And in the spirit of getting-to-play-with-stone-fruit,

I am trying to recall a cake. We made it early on in culinary school, before the basics had really set in. The cake had apricots and peaches but I'm improving it with nectarines. Cheffy called it a clafoutis cake, but it wasn't a proper clafoutis. Nevertheless it was creamy and moist. Like pound cake or brioche soaked in cream, that tender. {but I am not trying to make pain perdu}. I shared it with an ex-friend. I have the recipe, but I tried to recreate it and ended up with inedible disks. I'm going to try it again tomorrow morning on the off-chance I left something out. It is an almond flour cake {though I of course have to make my own almond flour, nonetheless, that shouldn't matter}. It lacks something significant...eggs? No...butter {or oil}. Almond flour, sugar, eggs + yolks, cornstarch, cream, fruit. I've gone through my cookbook library but there isn't anything comparable. How do you search for the-creamiest-cake-ever? I'll google it and keep you updated. And this is also what I need to learn: how to recreate memories in food.

Food is a damn manipulative medium. I've thought all along the writers were the real hucksters but the food artists are guilty of equally great shams.

I do miss restaurants, I do. So much. What puzzles me is why per se. I tend to be a creature of instinct more so than others, so maybe the why is not important.

Of the things I want, what do I get to get? And are they the right things to want? Will the conversations I think I need to have get me answers? What am I still supposed to do with all the information I have, because it really isn't currency if it's a secret? Why are all bakers so gossipy? Who googles me and misspells my name? Why have I been wanting a FOH job lately even at some cheesy tourist hole to bankroll some of thing knowledge-searching? Who are the fellow bodies of this industry and what do they want? Why do I let my anxieties override what my hands know?

Thing is, everyone's weird in a kitchen. We're pasty and sun-deprived, up too early or up too late. If I were still in Boston I'd be {well, probably working somewhere specific with a pastry chef I remember liking a lot, that is, if nothing better had happened along} faced with a rough job market and a much harder shot at getting any of those questions answered. That is if I'd even figured out as much as I have since last November.

The last year has been a string of hot pursuits. Finding a FT job(August). Realizing I needed to move 3000 miles (November). Handing in a quite good short story manuscript for the master's thesis (December). Finding a way to get out here (January). Giving notice and moving (February-March). Getting a job out here (March) or two (May). Landing a dog-friendly yet affordable SF apartment (June). Understanding what will one day be (July). Is August going to be coming full circle or am I, as always, anxious to overanalyze?

In life as in writing I'm always impatient to evolve and it's a fault I have a difficult time tempering.

Considering making a summer trifle with the leftovers of the sponge cake in the freezer at FH and some yummy verbena-spiked peach-berry compote.

What I meant to say and perhaps have not said is yes, the list, the things that are so many and varied I am in the weeds: it's time to take the first step and clean off the table.

the joys of home baking

Are there better things to do than come home from your 48 hour work week, take your dog grocery shopping, and pick blackberries from your backyard? I think not. I've got perhaps 2 cups of ripe berries, which means tomorrow I get to make cornmeal dough from the Chez Panisse Fruit book and do tartlettes. I'll even give them to the writers on Wednesday if they turn out well...I've still got last week's pie kicking around and that Clover half and half the fridge is really just an excuse to make more custards since the peach leaf custards from last week didn't turn out so well. I took the proportions and infusion instructions from the peach leaf parfait and used them for creme brulees and the resulting custard is so bitter only my Persian mananger at Frog Hollow would like it :( (but the panna cottas and peach leaf syrup were flavored perfectly. hmph.)

The peach leaf custard itself, though (courtesy of David Lebovitz rather than Cheffy for the small batch size), is so smooth and sexy and eggy-perfect despite only needing 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven and not the 50 minutes the recipe suggests.

My old boss would be nodding gruffly and pleased to see me covering my custards tightly with foil and making sure they don't curdle. I'm pleased, but I want edible, sweet custard...ginger-lemon, perhaps, or plain vanilla bean with blackberries?

The roommate requested the chocolate cherry tart I was never than pleased with for her birthday present. She said she tried to think of all the things she'd had she'd liked the best recently and came up with that. I shrugged and asked pastry chef questions pertaining to which version she liked best, how she felt about the winey taste of Scharffen Berger 70% (she wants me to mix some with the E. Guittard 62% kicking around the house), discussed how I have to candy my sale bin cherries from last week's Berkeley Bowl trip. Still got my Blenheims which ideally I'll roast and think about how I want to roast my apricots for the vanilla babycakes (butter, pepper, honey, nada mas?). I'm very VERY happy I'm making vanilla cakes because I adore that recipe. And look forward to snacking. I'm happy to make her the chocolate cherry cake...but I wish I liked it better.

Cupcake craziness over for another week. Sometimes it gets daunting, looking at all those cupcakes. Thinking about all those cupcakes. I'll make 30 L of batter, or bake two Cambros and frantically make more. De-pan in quick 2x2 succession. The boss liked my piping technique this morning--I'm happy.

Dinner now. Mushrooms, zucchini, onion and roma tomatoes sauteed with pasta. Got them all at Mi Ranchito for a dollar. Soon, I'll get to go to the Thursday night FB market...but no mas Mi Ranchito. Add it to the things to miss about the East Bay.

Sometimes the recipe finds you and sometimes you find it...

I never liked bread pudding except for the Figs' version, until I tried the brown butter bread pudding at Oleana, because Maura made me. She always persisted in asking me how I knew I didn't like something, and most of the time she succeeded in changing my mind.

She gave me that recipe and any other I cared to take, and I took many. And now that I know how it works, and why I like it, I've brought it here in adapted form. Vanilla custard bread pudding with cherries and peaches. The Acme pain de mie performs well. It's got the lightness characteristic of Maura's BP, but a summery taste. It's mellow but addictive, and if you don't like bread pudding, well, you should come try it.

I used to know the Sonsie recipe for chocolate bread pudding. Their hallmark. You'd see ads for Sonsie in the local papers and they'd feature the bread pudding with chocolate drizzle. Whose recipe was that? Chef Bill's? Not Michael's. The bread was Biba's biga. I once knew how many quarts of cream and cups of milk to how much chocolate. I finally mastered that recipe, but I never liked it, so I didn't try to take it with me. I knew it wouldn't have meant anything.

I made shortcakes today. Emily Luchetti's recipe. I don't like the farm's version, which uses hard-cooked egg yolks (just for texture? or is there some other purpose), and yields grainy, crumbly biscuits short on taste. I do enjoy using the farm's cream scones as shortcake biscuits, however. Tomorrow I'll bake them, and evaluate.

I'm on a quest now with the chocolate cherry cake. When I first started this job, I was working with a lot of David Lebovitz recipes, because he was someone my boss and I both admired, and because I wanted to start out small. Figure out what stock we had, what had been done before, ease into the role of being in charge so if things didn't go well, it wasn't entirely my idea (yeah, that's why I'm reluctant to actually call myself the pastry chef, see. And what I discovered in working with a bunch of recipes from Ripe For Dessertand a couple from Room For Dessert was that I found David's ideas to be really inspiring and accessible. It's sort of like reading an author's oeuvre. As I recently discovered, though Mary Gaitskill has some devastatingly brilliant short stories, she can't sustain a novel-length narrative and the two I've read seem to have the same plot (codependent relationship between two women, one ugly and one sexy)... But I was never satisfied with the results of my recipes...Bread Pudding with Pears, Cherries and Chocolate (custard too watery). Orange Poppyseed Cookies (good but got tired of them). Orbit Cake. (that was good). Chocolate Cherry Cakes (Pack a punch, too dense, fudgy, liquidy, but tasty). Finanicers (not as good as Cheffy's). Upside Down Cakes (strange texture). So today I went off-roading, freestyling on the cherry cakes that sold so well last week and that I do like, in principle. I took a basic flourless chocolate cake recipe from epicurious (if I remember the Sonsie proportions I would've done that, but oh well) and folded in some candied cherries and cherry syrup. The end result is, after banging around SF in my bag all day and making it home to Fruitvale, we got a crumbly cake that tasted good, though the cherries were more tough to chew this time around). Better, yes. My recipe, not yet.

Sometimes it finds you. The bread pudding from Oleana. If you ask me to, I'll make you another sort of bread pudding, but it won't be what I want to do at all. My manager told me the other day I could make bread pudding but I'd have to make a fruit sauce to go with it. ?That was how the farm served theirs. I'm not doing thatI said. I'm very particular about my bread pudding.

Learning from others, and learning from myself. It's always o much easier when someone else can show you the way. Let you in on their way, their secrets. But unless you've tried what you can find out there, unless you've gone to the sources you know and trust, how do you really know what you like, and how can you effect change when it is required?

perfection is so rare

...but it's really what we're all after, isn't it?

My pear sorbet turned out amazing! Tasting the syrup, I was really worried about the anise flavor. It smelled bad. It tasted bad-way too sweet. I didn't want to churn it. Then I cut away the cores, churned the pears in my new Vita Mix blender (so hardcore! thanks to the roommates), peered at the mixture that looked suspiciously like baby food, glopped it into my adored Cuisinart maker, and hoped for the best.

It tasted like cream. And, in the frozne mixture, the worrisome anise faded into the background, and the weird fruitiness of the wine from the poaching syrup went away. This was a sorbet with bite. A sorbet to whip your ass. No graininess, crunchiness, just a grit on your tongue from the pear, to remind you of what you're eating. The roommate and I were both astonished that no dairy products were used. I just went out to eat more of it, and I can't pick out the individual flavors. Just a honeyed, almost caramel note on my tongue. Perfection. My first reaction was to stash the syrup so I can acquire more pears and make more, as if I'd created something dificult and rare when after all it's just pears, vanilla, spices and sugar.

I'd put the anise in the syrup in the first place, because I'm trying to understand the flavor. When good friends of mine are fanatic about a flavor, I like to try to get what draws them to it. I find it difficult to think about and analyze taste. The words slip away--so maybe I am, in fact, a very BAD food writer--and I'm left with abstract like cold/warm/minty/bitter/hot. Do I understand anise better? No, not yet. Do I understand sorbet, my pastry nemesis better? Reluctantly, no. How does poaching the pears impart enough sugar to the mixture? Isn't it too thick? However this is a step in my becoming more knowledgeable, I think I'll just eat the sorbet first and ask my questions later. And, as for Thomas Keller, I'll let this make up for the horrible dehydrated pepper blinis I sufffered through for the sake of TFL and savory cooking.

I can feel the weather changing but let's enjoy spring

cherry pitting time
Originally uploaded by the_jade_greene.

All of a sudden there are cherries everywhere. Last week brought the first flush of Al's cherries to market, and this week, as I was lazily thinking of ways to fix my polenta cake and wondering if I really wanted to do anything with cherries other than eat them raw, the cherries just started piling up. This morning, a 6 qt. pan slowly molding. By the end of the day, thirteen pounds more. I made a small batch of Cheffy's clafoutis base and used up scant handfuls making cherry financiers.

I have always though it funny when those big-shot savory chefs (like Tom Colicchio, in "think like a chef," among scores of others) discuss eating and cooking seasonally. Inevitably they mention the anticipation and excitement of spring's first blush(oh, ramps are coming! we've got the first snap peas!), which means something quite different on the east coast than in California no matter how locally you're sourcing your food. Maybe it was jealousy, or maybe just the pastry chef's suspicion of the ego of the rest of the kitchen world (so often it's their haughtiness that reconciles us to the background, and it's the rare chef who appreciates adequately her patissier). This Frog Hollow gig has always been intriguing because the one stated goal of the job was to use the fruit, and so I would be forced to rely on what the market brings in each week. With citrus and rhubarb there hasn't been much, but now we're talking maybe peaches next week and I'm already feeling the pressure of cherry season, the excitement of something new so tasty and the real urge to present it at its best.

My boss, Becky, came by today. She watched me scoop financiers and wash strawberries. According to my supervisor she was also going to work with me for a while, but this didn't happen. She seems content to let me do whatever, but I know she knows this fruit, as a baker, better than I ever will, and she used to work at Oliveto. She's got skills. When she tells me how to cook down the cherries in syrup to preserve them, I can sense the knowledge differential and I'd like to see sometime what she would teach me if she got into the kitchen.

This Thursday is the Cherry Festival! Free cherry granita at Frog Hollow and who knows what-all else. I really do love the Ferry Building.


Last night I had pasta with fiddleheads and garlic in a white wine butter reduction. It was good. Fiddleheads remind me of cold, almost wintry upstate New York weather, the day Jes and I went driving and got the maple syrup. I tried to epxlain fiddleheads to my french friend but apparently there's no translation. So I found pictures, which only left her completely flummoxed as to why I would eat plant buds, but not bacon.


Pigs are salty, I said, in reply. What I mean by that is that bacon is salty, but I have no memory of what pork as meat tastes like. I ate tuna tonight, for the first time. Shocking, I am.

I feel like a person again now that I've got my zaatar

(it's true)

Today after apartment hunting I went to Samirami's, a Middle Eastern food store in the Mission. My supply of zaatar from Sevan had run out and I'd been without for weeks. At first I was doubtful...I'd found spices, but no zaatar. Then I spotted giant pound-sized bags of zaatar. Boulette's sells it for $2.25 per oz. but this was 5 bucks for a giant plastic tub of zaatar! And then, oh joy, I saw a bulk spice section with three kinds of zaatar (Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian)...this I hoped would be the freshest. So I filled two bags with some Palestinian and some Lebanese (I think the Sevan stuff was Jordanian). I did not let myself get sumac (it's trendy now though, I think) but I did ask the man behind the counter for mastic. And, to give him credit, he didn't seem surprised that a whitegirl wanted mastic. That sent me back over to the other side of the store for rosewater for Claudia Roden's gum mastic ice cream (I bet my new Vitamix blender can be used in lieu of robotcoupe). I looked for mulberries for ice cream, but no luck. My Persian supervisor at Frog Hollow *did* say she'd bring me a cup of mulberries (we had to negotiate the amount I wanted into a small enough amount she could spare it).

Rosewater/mastic ice cream...a taste memory. I am sure there's an Oleana-ish restaurant here in SF, and sometimes it's the memory of taste (the warm not cool mint flavor, the everpresent rose slightly oily in aftertaste, the milkiness), and sometimes it's in the memory of small and deliberate perfection. Here, I'm not in a community of people who serve food made with love on plates shipped from Turkey in suitcases. Here I'm in a community of baker-girls with boyfriends, career-change chefs whose restaurant experience is much more limited than mine. I bruise my hips on walk-in doors, decorate cupcakes, daydream about clafoutis and brunoised rhubarb and baby fennel. I feel like a person now I've got my zaatar, and I will let you know which kind I prefer. But I would like some people to talk about food with, for real,and I've been nostalgic for restaurants lately. Even for the gloomy darkness of Sonsie upstairs, getting coffee and looking out the windows on Newbury Street too early in the morning for foot traffic, whittling away time making 40 shots of espresso for ice cream and dreaming of California. Although there was no conversation at Sonsie, no dialogue about production and menu change and how to be better at what we do.

I'm not frustrated with work (really I'm just overworked, and pulling doubles the next two days). Just lonely for someone who can help me fix my polenta cakes, and who understands my zaatar longing, and whose taste buds are more refined than mine. Which is nothing new.

know your grains

Well, it's a start.

Polenta is ground corn. Semolina comes from durum flour. Semolina and polenta can be prepared similarly; both can be cooked down with liquids into a polenta-like mush.

At sonsie, the sous chefs always made polenta with semolina flour. And I'm pretty sure it was only semolina flour they used.

It doesn't surprise me that my school textbook has no entry in the index for either semolina or polenta. Poliane, Fernand Point, poly-whatever compounds. The learning curve continues, but now it really is time for bed, and some Rodney Strong wine I scored from the function last night. And well-needed sleep.

don't fuck with my mise!

strawberry shortcakes
Originally uploaded by the_jade_greene.

I should be going to sleep soon, but it's really nice to have energy. Especially since I almost fell asleep this evening when I got home from work, and almost burned my teriyaki chicken (rescued just in time to still be tender, mostly, and have REALLY crispy skin). I've been working like a dog since Friday.

I used to not really understand very well the teamwork aspect of professional kitchens, because where I've been the pastry person is always alone and usually taking up someone else's counter or oven space
(insert memories of Sonsie brunches and fighting over the oven for bacon versus focaccia).

During the Saturday market the girls would get low on pastries and forget to ask me to bake more, then come to me as I was cutting fruit for fruit tarts, whipping vanilla cream for shortcakes, etc. and demand seventy pastries be egg washed and baked. I'd do it immediately, push my project to the side, get my table dirty, clean, go back to my mise, be interrupted again, and not be able to bake off the new pastries because there was no oven space. It could all be avoided by proper planning. But please, don't fuck with my mise. It makes for a very long day.

However, it's very nice to be able to pop some shortcake in your mouth in the middle of a long day. I was feeling very frustrated on Saturday that it's my job to make yummy things for other people but not part of my job description to eat them. I was feeling like I needed food=love to get some energy to wash away the frustration, and get back to busting out pastries. It worked very well. It's hard to take a moment to eat or take a real break when you have enough work to keep you occupied. It saddens me that food workers don't get to feed themselves properly, but I go all day without eating too.

Saturday night was a catered wedding at Tilden, with a Masse's wedding cake. Two layers of chocolate raspberry and one of passionfruit. I demanded and got some of each. The passionfruit one was good, better than I was expecting. Better than the Tartine passionfruit coconut cake I got to try today since one of the girls at the cupcakery bought one for us all to try (must be nice to be rich, eh?)Tartine's was all about the overly large shredded coconut on the outside, and not skinning the underside of the cake, which is something that bothers me if you're going to be presenting cakes. Masse's was nicely trimmed. From the texture of the cake I was afraid it was going to be dry, but it wasn't. There was passionfruit bavarian and curd, or curd lightened mousse, or something. The caterer wasn't quite sure. There was also wine and Hennessey's cognac to take home, and quite drunken bridesmaids.

Then up this morning to get to the cupcakery by 8 (tomorrow as well). It was a big production day and I didn't leave the back room at all. Just busted through batches of chocolate and vanilla frosting, chocolate batter, cream cheese frosting. The funny thing about being the new girl is you do things like made a 4x batch of frosting and put it all in the large Hobart and then when your butter's good and creamed and you're adding the sugar (my first experience with American buttercream) the other bakers get around to telling you no one's ever done a batch that large in that mixer before. It's not cockiness when I pull it off and it's fine, and I get to cross it off the production list, and everyone's stoked that we saved some time, but rather a quiet happiness for something done efficiently.

The Sonsie days really are behind me. They've been on my mind lately, possibly because I know that for right now I'm not going to be working in any restaurant kitchens. Lifting large Hobart bowls that I'm not strong enough to maneuver (but trying to do it anyway) recalls the daily battle with the pizza dough, or the vanilla pound cake. It's interesting now that I'm also in a creative position. I'm on a big herbal kick right now. Scented creams, infusions, berries and spice. I get tired of making things week after week and have considered doing away with the strawberry lavender tart (just after it's developed a following, ah!). it's my duty now to think about flavors and components. When making the polenta cake, I found myself thinking of texture/crunch/creamy/sweet, which was a nice step from "I miss that semolina cake, maybe I'll make one with blackberries since we have them on hand." But there's still so much more I need to understand.

the learning curve gets rough

Today, while making rhubarb-blood orange upside down cakes and brown butter financiers--I've finally worked out how much sugar I like in them, and they're just so cute I really want everyone to eat them, oh, financier, I used to think you were boring! for shame--I tried to figure out my semolina cake.

The semolina cake was about the only thing I really liked on the Sonsie menu (grand marnier mousse cake and mocha ice cream aside). The semolina cake was on the summer menu when I came to Sonsie, with blueberries and buttermilk panna cotta and blueberry coulis. It was a nicely plated dessert (plating wasn't my boss's strong suit, and his plates most often resembled strange lunar landscapes with holes, and I'm nor sure what that says about his pastry process in general). It made sense. But cooking the cake in 9" pans led, most of the time that I was present, to a mushy mess on a cake circle. I ruined multiple semolina cakes. Michael ruined a few as well, or at least tore out the middle or the side. No matter how hard we sprayed the pan, semolina guts everywhere. The semolina cake re-appaeared on the winter menu with tangerine panna cotta, blood orange sorbet and orange slices on top. The citrusy mess that didn't plate well, with an always-grainy sorbet, soft cake, and hard, unpleasant supremes of orange on top. I enjoyed the cake, but not that way.

I thought of it again yesterday while puzzling over what to make now at Frog Hollow while I wait for the produce to kick in. What to do with my strawberries, blood oranges and rhubarb besides the things I've been doing, and how to use off the rest of the tub of blackberries? (Forgot to make muffins again, damn!). I thought semolina cake with blackberries. But then this morning, I was washing off the rhubarb and cutting it, and I thought I'd rather make a rhubarb sauce, but I didn't really know how to do that, and in the back of my mind I'd been thinking over the crunchy, sweet rhubarb I'd had with my mango sorbet at Frisson, and how that had been the chance illustration of Maura's comments on how rhubarb and mango suit each other well. So I thought I'd candy my own rhubarb, and looking out the window at the spot where Capay usually sets up their stand I thought of Mariana and the baby fennel, and I wanted fennel whose texture was so similar to rhubarb, but I had to settle for anise seeds. Anise-infused cream, to be whipped and set on top of semolina cakes, garnished with candied rhubarb.

But then...I dig out the tub labeled polenta and spices. I've maybe made polenta once, from a log bought in the grocery store. I've seen the Sonsie crew make polenta a bunch with my semolina flour. I dug out a bag of what looked like cracked corn, and neither semolina flour nor the polenta I'd seen in stores. It very well may have been cornmeal or some sort. It came in a bag, tied with a grocery store twist tie. I was stuck; I'd mised everything else and I didn't want my very carefully brunoised, then candied rhubarb to go to waste. So I dug in, boiled the milk and vanilla, added the sugar and polenta, and stirred, and stirred, and thought of the polenta musing in Bill Bryson's Heat. It thickened, but not enough. Not as much as the semolina cake batter I'd whisk like I was teaching it a goddammed lesson, until the thing trembled away from the sides of the pan in a neat, uniform flutter. Not like I knew it needed to if I wanted to avoid the explosion in the pan. But I also had to get to job #2. So I boiled it away for a while, shocked it in the fridge (bad chef, no ice bath), got my whites sort-of-stiff-peak, and went with it. In the oven, when it's black it's done.

Mini muffins puffed up with the pride of having risen, with a nice resilient golden crackle in top greeted me in fifteen minutes. Not like the wilted, shameful semolina texture. I tested them, called them done, watched them fall a little. And then the test. I prayed for them to be good, and they indeed were. Whatever was in the bag. The Frog Hollow manager, who'd been eyeing me all suspiciously while I puttered while beseeching me to make candied lemon peel dipped in chocolate, came to appraise them. ("Chocolate and lemon's in right now," I told her. "I KNOW!" she sniffled. "It's not new, it's always been in in my culture." "Well YOUR CULTURE's in right now," I replied. We both rolled our eyes)

What's thaaat? she asked.
I told her they were okay, I'd been nervous, try a piece. She popped it in her mouth.
She liked it.
I told her what I was going to serve it with, and how they weren't quite how I wanted them, but it was nice to pass the test and go on with my day to work at the cupcake place. I would like to eat polenta/semolina cake with anise cream and candied rhubarb. Maybe next week if I do it again. But more than that, I'd like to understand how to get what I want from the polenta, or the semolina, or the cornmeal. How to react to the unexpected. And what do I do, do I ask my baker friends? The girls at the cupcakery had no experience cooking with semolina. Do I ask the pastry girls? It's possible Chelsea or Kimberly would know. Ask Cheffy, who'd probably ask me what I wanted mussing with semolina anyway? Call Maura, one early Cambridge morning? Puzzling my way out of the box, I think, starts with understanding my original recipe, and how the semolina adds texture and structure. But possibly it doesn't start there at all.

I have a new job

...So why is it that everyone in SF starts looking for pastry people now?

I've never been solicited for a job before, but today I got the following email from the folks over at the Slanted Door:

Hi. I received your resume a while ago and I am looking for a pastry cook again. I belive you already have a job but If you are interested, please contact me.

Thank you.

_____ ________
_________@slanteddoor.com

And, not so very long ago when I was in the height of my then-fruitless desire to come out to San Francisco, I posted here about my longing, and how Slanted Door was hiring and I'd sent them my resume...and about three weeks before that I was all atwitter becase Boulette's and Frog Hollow were hiring, and wrote the following:

anyway, not only is Frog Hollow hiring right now, but Boulettes Larder is hiring a pastry chef as well, and though I am no doubt both too poor to get out there and unqualified for the second position, I am jealous. To work in the Fery Building adn spend every afternoon in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, reminiscing about the Berkeley days and who I used to be...and to write...and to eat, and be in such bounty.

And now here I am. On the day I got my new job, I also got chased out of Boulette's Larder by Lori Regis. Hounded from the second I walked in the door. The question is why...I have a few guesses but I'm not going to post them here yet. I'm going to go back another time, in my Boston hat (so she knows the Regis I know better is Susan), and see what happens.

Work was intense today. If I don't get to mise properly on Friday, Saturdays are always crazy, and if they run out of everything and I have to bake off five items at once nevermind that I'm in the middle of slicing fruit for fruit tarts and I've got shortbread to assemble, it's very challenging to not get in the weeds. And I feel pressured to get my nice things out there early, so they can sell.

My new job is at Kara's Cupcakes, an all cupcake bakery in the Marina. The'yre opening a second location next week at Gihrardelli Square so they just basically doubled their baking staff. The kitchen is small, and the walls are pink, but they've got this cute map showing where their lcoally-sourced products come from, and they've got the best cream cheese frosting I've tasted here in SF, a city obsessed with cream cheese frosting, and I'm looking forward to being chill and piping icing, mixing batter, having the sort of experience I was cheated out of having to have at Miette.

I have to stop and remind myself that not very long ago, I ached to be out here doing what I'm doing, and now I'm doing it. And writing a lot. And getting my first experience being creatively in charge. When people tell me (without knowing I make them, per se) how they LOVE the strawberry lavender tarts, it's such a nice feeling. Food is love. And you have to be generous; you have to give it away. So when it upsets me to be treated roughly, I know there are so many crazies and egos in this business, and I know where I stand and where I come from. I've paid a lot of dues and I'll pay them still, but I'm going to be generous in this business and I'm going to one day do things perfectly.

Tomorrow's Day #1 at Kara's.

puff pastry magic

palmiers at last

Tonight I had to make quick puff pastry, since I promised a french friend a mille feuille. Ugh, puff pastry. Of course I have not made it since culinary school, but the 6 turns, the rolling out the dough...my arms ached at the memory. However, a french meal and all I have to provide are pastry cream and puff...so not a bad bargain.

I find Cheffy's quick puff pastry recipe, head to the store, dawdle, realize I have to FREEZE the butter in chunks, do so. By the time I start it's 7:30 and my head's off in the clouds because of the GQ article on the Ferry Building. Which is funny, and over the top. Not only does the FB "enlighten," "enthrall," "nourish" san franciscans, it also "[is] a testing ground for a radically different way of dining." Read your May GQ and see, I kid you not. More on the FB later. So, head in the clouds, I throw my ingredients in the kitchen aid and go back to check the recipe because I feel like it's weird there's no sugar in the puff. Dash back to the other room when I hear the sounds of the paddle thwacking the dough around.

I'm glad I've become attuned to those sounds. Milk about to boil. Dough coming together. The sort of sounds that are not sounds at all to those who don't cook and I mean professionally.

first turn, cold butter

Rescue the dough, begin to roll it out with huge holes of butter since that's what the recipe says and I know it will work. After two or three turns the butter's been worked in.

I love the feel of dough. It's so sexy. How it goes from being cold and riddled with butter holes to how the butter gets mixed in, the dough calls out for flour, more flour, the dough tells you what it needs if you know how to listen to it, if your hands know how to read it right.

third turn, no butter

"


Six turns. No wait, Five. But I've turned the oven on to 400 for the puff, only I'm supposed to drop it down to 350, and I don't know what the purpose is, what the heat does, and Cheffy's recipe tells me I don't need to rest the dough before using but David Lebovitz's (which I'm checking for the baking time) does say to rest it and I'm breathing out through my nose in short little bursts, heaving my body onto the silky dough, trying to roll it thinner, wider, better, wielding the edges of my french rolling pin to get it rectangular, working the edges out, making it nice. Losing my mind with the heat.

Five turns, and before the last fold I cut a large swatch to save for palmiers.

Sixth turn, bake off, freeze a good quantity of the puff.

Roll out the palmier dough one last time in sugar. Cut palmiers, dainty Maura-sized ones. Freeze some and bake six, so that there will be a breakfast surprise for the roommates.

Food is desire. Food is love. Food is exhausting yourself for others. When you haven't eaten or slept properly. When you yourself live on scraps of staff meal, dumpstered vegetables, cheese quesadillas with a splash of lime because you've exhausted the salsa, the zaatar, the avocado.

In insatiable, Gael Greene expresses wonder that anyone could term a food item better than sex. But the night of profiteroles, eating Claudia Fleming's salted caramel ice cream straight from the machine, before freezing, we both said sex was irrelevant.

Two hours start to finish and I have palmiers to eat nad bake off later, puff to bake later and puff for my napoleon, and flour all over my pants and righteous body exhaustion.

But the FB, the Ferry Building. I knew from the Chow discussion it was coming, but I didn't expect to see my boss in the teaser when I opened it up. Or the pastries I bake off at five am. I really wouldn't have thought Frog Hollow would be such a feature of the article--maybe because it's next to Boulette's Larder and everyone loved Boulette's. Miette is reduced to a tiny picture and a mention of its macarons. Probably the only thing worth getting except for the graham crackers which I liked. I wonder what Meg and Caitlin are thinking of their poor placement. Recchiuti and Scharffen Berger aren't mentioned at all, really.

I had lunch at Out the Door today. Five Spice chicken with vermicelli. It was good, fresh. The vegetables tasted fresh. The meat was moist, spiced but not too spicy. It was good. Clean. Though my favorite Vietnamese food still is from Poughkeepsie, which is bizarre, who would have thought that my first exposure to red chicken, lemongrass chicken, vietnamese curry tofu and so on, would be so irreplacable.

The FB, do you think it's a temple of food, as Richman claims? I do. I love the Ferry Building. I love coming at it from all angles of the city, how it calls you down Market. I love how people come together, tourists or local, how the FB makes the happy. I love using the second floor restrooms and spying on people. I love my job. I love watching the red-haired chef open up Boulette's in the morning, that I'm not the only one working at dawn. I love the Bay Bridge view. Sunrises.

My life changed in one day and that day began at the Ferry Building, in fact with breakfast from Frog Hollow, and when I was so sick of Sonsie , in my deepest longings all I wanted to do was come here, work with organic bakers, hang out in the FB, and figure out my relationship to food. And here I am. I'm just not used to sharing my temple.

citrus sorbets

aaah,a tip, from the archives of Shuna Lydon's blog I just can't seem to stop reading even though it's growing late.

It is best to eat citrus sorbets soon after they are churned. They tend to freeze rock-solid.

{If you find that this is true, "temper" your sorbet in your refrigerator for about 20 minutes or as long as it takes to come to desired temperature.}

On a similar note, I noticed my strawberry ice milk was also better/softer after about ten minutes of sitting out. When initially removed from the freezer, I could barely scoop it but ten minutes later the iciness was mostly gone and it had a rather creamy mouthfeel after all.

I made a second batch of ice milk tonight that had been doctored with 3T peppermint schnapps and, when mostly frozen, chopped thin mint cookies. Pissed off after the strawberry experiment I figured the extra sugar would help it freezer better. We'll taste the results tomorrow.

I'm going for Vietnamese food in Oakland tomorrow night, for someone's birthday party. I have to be in Berkeley tomorrow afternoon--maybe I'll stop by Sweet Adeline's or the Berkeley bowl or somewhere I probably won't get back to once I move to SF.

I really like Shuna's blog, and I really hope that she writes me back and that I can help with one of her cooking classes. I feel like I'm always struggling to learn more or better but I don't have other people I can bring that dialogue back to. Not even the pastry girls, really. Sometimes, sure, but not really. In culinary school I wasn't caring about the whys of what I was doing so much, so I think they'd be really surprised at me...if they knew I got Food Arts and ate at all the best restaurants I could (not) afford to go to, and arranged unpaid stages with amazing chefs and relocated my whole life for food, if they knew I made lists and try to really understand the thing (cardamom. sorbet base. dough.), well, do they do the same thing? I don't know.