Advanced Restaurant Desserts Weeks 2 & 3

Advanced Restaurant Desserts Weeks 2 & 3: Deconstructing
Last week, we made 5 classic desserts: Chocolate Cake, Lemon Meringue Tart, Apple Cobbler, Creme Brulee, and Cheesecake. This week, we deconstructed the desserts and prepped the components to be plated in Week 3.
My partner and I did the components for the Cheesecake. Cheesecake is made up of the cream cheese filling and graham cracker crust. Based on these, we decided to make Cream Cheese Mousseline, Graham Cracker Semifreddo, Almond Phyllo Ring, and Cherry Sauce.
We made the Mousseline and the Semifreddo and placed them in the freezer. I only got the picture of the Phyllo Ring--they were a bit difficult, since they stuck to the ring mold after being baked. We had to blow torch them to melt the sugar and get them unstuck.

Then we plated our components in Week 3.

Triple Chocolate Cake (with white, milk, and dark chocolate): Chocolate ice cream, chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, chocolate panna cotta, chocolate crumble, and white chocolate plaque.

Lemon Meringue Tart: No, that's not a PVC pipe. It's baked Meringue Ring, Frozen Lemon Curd, Shortbread Crumble, and Raspberry Sauce

Caramel Apple Cobbler: Shortbread Crumble, Caramel ice cream, Apple & Raisin Compote, Poached Apple, and Apple soup

Chocolate Creme Brulee: Cubed Chocolate Creme Brulee, Peanutbutter Crumble, and Strawberry Paper

Deconstructed Cheesecake: Cream Cheese Mousseline, Almond Phyllo Ring, Graham Cracker Semifreddo, and Cherry Sauce

They were all interesting, innovative way to plate desserts...not to mention delicious! I like how our instructor emphasizes taste as well as the presentation. It's the first impression that draws diners in, but it's ultimately the taste that keeps them coming back again and again.

Advanced Restaurant Desserts Weeks 1

School stared! I'm taking Advanced Restaurant Desserts and Speech & Communication. The latter is one general ed class that none of the classes from my previous education covered...so alas, I need to learn how to speak in public. According to the statistics, far more people would choose death over public speaking, so this is an important class I guess :P

In Advanced Restaurant Desserts, we'll be really learning how to plate--there will be a lot of techniques and tricks involved. Sugar work, chocolate work, molecular gastronomy, deconstructing, etc...

Chef did a demo on spun sugar. The instructor in my Intro to Pastry class did the demo using the handle on the pizza paddle and took up a 7' by 7' space doing it, but the instructor in this class used spoons and did it on the table. Much easier alternative.

We split into pairs and made the desserts: Chocolate Cake, Apple Cobbler, Lemon Meringue Tart, Creme Brulee, and Cheesecake.

They are all classical desserts that have been served in pretty much every restaurant across the nation since their invention. Today, they are still being served in chain restaurants, but have definitely morphed/evolved into something much more sophisticated in fine dining establishments. By deconstructing them into their components and enhancing each of them, desserts have been modernized and took on an avant garde form.

Chef had us make these because in order to deconstruct, we need to know what the components we are working with. For example, the Lemon Meringue Tart has 3 components: the crust, the lemon filling, and the meringue. In the weeks to follow, we'll be deconstructing the desserts, prepping one week and then plating it the next week. For Week 2, we'll be prepping for the deconstructed version of these classical desserts.

The New Year's Party

Almost forgot about the New Year's Party we had at our house!

We made the Osechi (traditional Japanese New Year's feast, served in a laquered box... a very strange concept from American viewpoint. A feast that can fit into a 12"x12"x12" box??) and Ozouni, a clear soup with veggies and mochi.

Iridori: shiitake, taro roots, carrots, burdock root, konnyaku, and chicken braised in dashi.

Kombu-maki: kombu/kelp-wrapped salmon braised in dashi

Clockwise from top left: Namasu (daikon & carrot slaw), date-maki (Japanese rolled omelet), and kinton (creamed chestnut & sweet yam)

...And this was our "dessert": Various condiments for freshly-made mochi. Sweet adzuki paste, black sesame, and kinako.

Winter Break

This is how I spent the remaining winter break...

Fed up with the amount of ingredients that were being wasted at the Naked Fish restaurant, I've been asking the line cooks and sushi chefs to please save some the clippings and "scraps". It's a Japanese thing to utilize every part of an ingredient, so absolutely nothing gets wasted. One of the "scraps" being tossed out was the daikon leaves. The cooks/sushi chefs would snap off a pile of them and down the garbage can they'll go. Oh, the horror.... in Japan, the leaves are pickled, so processed into furikake, the rice toppings. So that's what I did.

The leaves are stripped from the stems--they need to be blanched first to remove the bitterness.

After seasoning the blanched leaves with salt, sugar, and dashi powder, they are dried thoroughly in a pan until dry and crumbly.

I mixed in sesame seeds. Chock full of vitamins and completely natural.

The stems are also blanched and turned into goma-ae, kind of like a black sesame tahini dressing/marinade.

There are plenty of other "scrap" ingredients that get thrown out, that I will maybe mention later...

It's been a while since we went out to eat, so my parents and I went on a culinary exploration to the Cafe Bistro at the Nordstroms. I've seen their menu before, and it seemed interesting. We went for the dessert, of course, for educational purpose.

We ordered the Triple Berry Shortcake and the Vanilla Bean Creme Brulee.

Both desserts tasted good...well, I would say mediocre. Definitely nothing special about them...other then their size. Oh my gracious. The creme brulee was big enough for two people, and the shortcake was about the size of a Big Mac. We finished the creme brulee, but we had to take the shortcake home. We never finished it. Sorry, our taste buds are too honest sometimes.

There was another bakery that we wanted to try, called Creme de Bakery. They had pan dulce-type of bread, pork buns, and a surprising varieties of cakes--mocha, tiramisu, strawberry, etc. I picked green tea flavor and the chestnut flavor. The cashier lady said that they're mousse cakes, basically layer cakes with mousse-type filling.

The green tea one had adzuki beans in it. The chestnut had bits of chesnuts. Their taste? ...Ick. The mousse part was very light, not heavy at all--and the amount of gelatin was almost too much. It was on the borderline of being a bavarian cream instead. The green tea flavor was very subtle, but the chestnut flavor was pretty much absent. The sponge cake was also very light and airy, but tasteless. As a matter of fact, it was so light it almost tasted artificial--as if no human hands have been involved in the making of this cake. The only positive thing about these was that they were both light enough that we didn't feel weighed down. We won't be going back there.

At work, here's the latest dessert I've come up with: The "Naked" Asian Pear Tart.

Flaky puff pastry, wine-poached asian pears, caramel sauce, raspberry sauce, and vanilla gelato. Served warm. After the asian pear season, we'll start using available seasonal fruits.

And with the upcoming Valentine's Day, a chocolate dessert I came up with: Molten Chocolate Fish/Taiyaki.

Served with vanilla or green tea gelato, fruits, and raspberry sauce. I love that melted chocolate just oozing out from the fish/taiyaki belly...

Merry belated Christmas and Happy New Year!!

In my last post, I was ranting and raving about my final....yes, how the judges claimed the presentation to be "too bland" and "too old-fashioned" and whatnot. Never mind that everyone in my class thought my dessert tasted delicious. Well....so I was thinking about ways to present my dessert in a "modern" fashion. One way to do that is to deconstruct it--present the elements of the dessert separately on the plate. My dessert consisted of a shortbread, chocolate ganache, orange mascarpone mousse, orange segments, French buttercream, and caramel sauce.

...So here it is. The Deconstructed Orange-Milk Chocolate Tart. Clockwise from top left: orange segments, orange-mascarpone mousse, chocolate tart, and a saucer of caramel sauce and buttercream. When I presented this to my parents, their first comment was, "How are we supposed to eat this??"

Good question. I wasn't sure either. Deconstructed desserts are supposed to be enjoyed by first nibbling on the individual elements, then reconstruct them to eat them all together, or however way the customer wants to. When they finished eating, they said, that it tasted great, but didn't feel like they ate a dessert.

I honestly don't see the point in deconstructing a dessert; what's the point of breaking it all down only to have it built back together again? Another thing that deconstructing does is that it robs the desserts of their magic. This is my explanation:

Everything else on the menu is designed to satisfy physical hunger; people order entrees because they're hungry. Desserts, on the other hand, are eaten when people are (most of the time) already full, if not satiated. Why? Because desserts satisfy the mental, psychological hunger--you know, like those times when we indulge in sweets when stressed out. That's what gives the desserts their almost magical properties. By breaking it all down and exposing every individual elements, deconstruction strips the desserts of their power. While I do agree that deconstruction is a fun, innovative way to present desserts, I doubt the trend will last long.

And then, it was time for Christmas. Boy the time flies. My family, being the minimalist, bought a 2'~3' baby tree and decorated that, instead of lugging that huge artificial tree that we've been using since we immigrated to U.S. twenty-some years ago.

I gave my Mom a gardening book for Christmas, with guides on how to plant in the climates of the Rocky Mountain region. For Dad, I made him a Contemporary Buche de Noel.

Coffee sponge cake, Vanilla buttercream filling, and Coffee Mousse frosting--with Chocolate glaze. This is before decorating.

Decorated with coffee-chocolate candies.

And here it is, in all its glory, with almond brittle "antlers" for that modern look. It was rich, but delicious. This was actually half of the cake. I gave away the other half to our family friends, who gladly took the cake to their family get-together.

Then before I knew it, the New Years arrived. The day before, the sous chef at my work got into a HUGE fight with the sushi chef, who promptly fired her on the spot. With three line cooks, two of them being newly hired (and while experienced in European cuisines, no experience with Japanese cuisines), both our sous chef and executive chef gone, things will definitely get interesting at work.

But to start off the new year, I made a Double Chocolate Taiyaki...

Chocolate taiyaki with chocolate filling. A possible dessert option at Naked Fish, perhaps?