Coquelicot Sunday

Cue music...Punjabi MC's "Mundiyan To Bach Ke" (Jay-Z remix, natch!)

An early finish on Friday afternoon meant an opportunity to head somewhere different for lunch other than the school canteen. After boulangerie, a fellow classmate and I made the trek up to Gare du Nord and from there, walked up to Le Quartier Indien for a spot of Indian grub. The destination was Muniyandi Vilas, a no-frills restaurant at the end of rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, at the La Chapelle end. We were more lucky than I was last Saturday and snagged a table straight away, the dining room is not big and was full all the time we were there. I plumped for a vegetarian thali with some piping hot paratha, my classmate went for the full Indian experience and managed to polish off a samosa, a masala dosa AND a full non-vegetarian thali! Delicious food at rock bottom prices, will be coming back to sample their fine-looking biryani.

After lunch, we decided to head back to Pain du Sucre which fortunately, was open this time and picked up some sugary goodies (well, more sugary goodies for my classmate as he'd already bought and ate some gulab jamun on the way there!). I bought a "Tentation" - a raspberry tart filled with almond, pistachio and citron cream with a layer of raspberry coulis and a couple of macaroons (mint and chocolate, salt caramel). To be honest, wasn't bowled over by the raspberry tart, the filling was too dry and was a disappointment compared to the classic crème patissier version I had at lunch at Allard a few years back. The macaroons though were pretty good, nice flavours with a moreish chewy consistency.

Asian craving of the week was Vietnamese bun, which I managed to get at Thuy Long, a small Vietnamese cafe down the road from school. It did the job but I won't be going back, not a big fan of having my food microwaved.... especially when I'm paying for it.  

Buy of the week was a tie between Pierre Hermé's Ispahan croissant  at 2 yoyos (Tip: his shop on rue de Vaugirard is much nicer with no queues of adoring tourists either!) and Tang Gourmet's roast duck, can't argue for half a bird for around 7 yoyos, yum! :)

JPO

The school opened its doors to the general public this weekend for its annual "Journée Porte Ouverte (JPO)", also known as open day, which meant we had a few extra visitors for boulangerie on Friday, as well as having to turn up to school on Saturday for a half day.

Boulangerie was a lot of fun as usual; as well as learning to make traditional French baguettes, chef allowed us to make other breads as a bonus since it was open day. Some of my classmates opted to make savoury favourites such as olive bread and chorizo bread. I was the only one to attempt a sweet bread, a HK favourite, 菠蘿包 (pineapple bun). I was a little nervous about making it since it was my first time and I'd never watched Mum when she used to make them. However, they turned out pretty well and got some nice compliments about how pretty they looked, smelled and tasted, woohoo! :)

Our class decided to split into 2 for Saturday open day with 5 of us coming for the morning and the 2nd 5 doing the afternoon shift. I had plumped for the morning which meant another early start (my ly-in on Sunday is going to be well-earned!) - it was OK as we were kept busy, finishing off our Mont Blanc, making Flan Parisien and then making marzipan roses.

After we finished, I went for a quick stroll around the rest of the school and also popped into the Anglo Cuisine class. It was really interesting as their chef had allowed them to make a dish from their own country so there was a global spread laid out for visitors, including frikandellen (Dutch deep fried veal meatballs), American BBQ (think it was pulled pork), shrimp tacos from Mexico, 5-vegetable sushi from Japan and a very inventive and delicious oxtail reduction  on a rice cracker from Venezuela (inspired by "sopa de rabo"). All of the food was really delicious, as the empty plates will testify!  

ESCF - Week 5

Week 5 has been the most varied to date in terms of making different pastries - over the past few days, we have made babas, barquettes aux marrons, brioche, millefeuille, and polonaises. As usual, there were new techniques and lessons to be learned along the way:

Chef: You need to soak your babas more....

10 minutes later,

Chef: Don't soak your brioche so much otherwise you destroy it...

Lesson learnt - all things need different levels of soaking, char!!!

We were given the chance to improve our palette knife skills when making barquettes aux marrons and polonaises. Unfortunately, I think I am pretty far away from being the "queen of palette knife work" - we were working with the same dastardly fondant as for éclairs which I'm pretty sure is cursed at this point! Polonaises was all about mastering spreading enough meringue around your brioche tower so that it looks like a uniform cylinder...all fine and dandy if your underlying tower was cylindrical in the first place but not so easy when its closer in shape to a cone!

The good news this was that my brioche and millefeuille turned out pretty well so was happy about that! One of the recipes for our millefeuille was from  Pierre Hermé, who would've thought that raspberry and pastis would be such a good combination, stroke of genius :)

The other piece of news this week was experiencing our first "restaurant service" - the school has its own restaurant on-site, which members of the general public can pay and come for a meal. It also serves as the perfect training ground for all the school's budding cuisinières and patissiers and for us to experience restaurant service first-hand. We were doing a double shift for Wednesday dinner and Thursday lunch, which meant starting prep work on Wednesday afternoon through to finishing service late on Wednesday night, then coming in early on Thursday morning to prepare and serve lunch - a bit of a marathon session, especially if you add in 6:30am start on Friday for breadmaking and an extra few hours on Saturday for the school's open day, 加油!! The class was split into pairs or small groups to do different tasks for service and I was assigned to "pre-dessert", which was to be a mini "mont-blanc". Assembling this mere mouthful proved to be a little fiddly but I think it turned out pretty well and all in all, service was less hectic than I had imagined (had been expecting something out of "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares"). I even had time to help out with making some chocolate truffles for petit fours. Handy tip - cocoa butter is great moisturiser for your hands :) Alas, that didn't manage to prevent my first cut in the kitchen - no biggie as it was more a nick from a rogue breadknife but still needed a sexy blue plaster plus dubious looking "raincoat" ;)

Angelina

Since we finished up at school "early" today, a couple of classmates and I decided to head to Pain de Sucre, on the recommendation of another fellow student. As luck would have it, the patisserie is closed on Tuesdays which was a bummer (felt particularly sorry for one of our party as this was the 2nd time he's paid a visit and found the place closed, 3rd time lucky!!).

As we were in the surrounding area, we decided to head up to a Parisian establishment, Angelina for a spot of cake and tea. The good news is that there wasn't much of a queue when we rocked up. The bad news was that arriving that late in the day meant that there was a restricted choice of cakes, was a bit peeved about this cos you would think if they are open until 7pm, there would be close to a full range available until then? We eventually plumped for a trio of Mont Blanc (a speciality), Paris-New York (twist on a classic, Paris-Brest) and Tartes aux Hosards? (forgot the name of the last cake but it was a lovely mini fruit tart) to accompany our pots of tea, all very civilised!

The verdict? Cakes were quite tasty (have been informed that the head pastry chef at Angelina is ex-Pierre Hermé) and the service could've been a bit better, but then again, you have to bear in mind that we're in the middle of tourist trap Paris. The salon is very traditional and from a bygone era, but in my humble opinion, fails to trump Café Tortoni in BA or Pasteis de Belem in Lisbon for atmosphere.

Pho 14 - don't believe the hype!

My original plan had been to grab some groceries from Tang Frères and then a quick bite to eat next door at Tang Gourmet before heading to the cinema to catch the 2nd Mesrine film (very slow, more violence and Vinz looking fairly rotund, having piled on 20kgs for the role - am undecided about his performance). Unfortunately,  Tang Frères was shut on Monday (char!) so no groceries. Then I suddenly remembered that I was only down the road from Pho 14 so decided to go there for grub instead. I had walked past it a couple of weekends ago on a Sunday afternoon and was gobsmacked when I saw the queue snaking out the front door and onto the pavement, first thought was that it must be pretty amazing pho, right? Since I didn't really fancy queuing, I figured 5pm on a Monday afternoon was an OK time? I did get a table but the place was still maybe 80% full, impressive. The same could not be said about the pho, I'm afraid. Pho Mui is still my top choice, with a fuller flavoured stock, larger portions and marginally friendlier staff.

ESCF - 1 month on

I know I've said this before but boy, has the time really flown by here in Paris! 1 month on and all is still going well, here's just a list of thoughts for the month:

1. Yes, we have early starts and its sometime hard to drag myself out of bed towards the end of the week, but training to be a pastry chef is much more interesting, stimulating and exciting than being a City banker trying to endure the credit crunch (this thought usually wakes me straight up when I'm sitting on the metro on the way to school).
2. Try and keep an open mind. Make the most of this opportunity, try to soak up as much knowledge at school and have fun in Paris - as a close friend once told me, you only have one life....
3. Its OK to make mistakes, as long as you understand what went wrong (do not be afraid to collar chef in lab, you have to get the most out of the mini fortune you spent on the course!)
4. Its important to stay focussed in class and make sure that you understand the tasks that need to be done - at the end of the day, with the exception of family and loved ones, the only person you can really rely on is yourself.
5. Its nice to be nice :)