Well Preserved

My favorite rotation this summer was the Sandwiches one. The focus of the rotation is both to make sandwiches (some for student lunch, and some to sell in the Pastry Case) and to learn preserving techniques by canning jams and pickles and making fermented foods. As has been the norm for this quarter, most of our work was self-directed, though it was often driven by whatever fruits and vegetables had come to us from the farms after the Monday farm visits. I made some bread during the rotation (pain ordinaire, our standard white yeast bread, and Portugese sweet bread) but most of the time I made jams and pickles. I've done a lot of canning in my home kitchen, but it was fun learning to use the wonderful steam kettles at school, and to make some unusual preserves.



These are the steam kettles. The two kettles are attached to a base heating unit, with a dedicated water faucet for filling them. On preserving days, we fill the kettles with hot water in the morning, bring it to a boil, then turn down to simmer. At the end of the day, the water gets tipped into the drawers and the kettles are washed out and wiped down. The photo shows one of the kettles tipped over; the drawer below leads to a drain. The photo below shows the basket that's inside each kettle. It has handles to lift it out, but it's heavy (especially when loaded with quart jars) so most of the time we transfer jars to and from the kettle using a jar lifter.



My partner had not canned before and was very enthusiastic about it, so we made a lot of small (5-6 pint) batches of jam, including peach jam (in which we infused crushed peach kernels to add a mild bitter almond flavor), plum/apricot with rose water, and raspberry chocolate.



We also pickled four quarts of okra:



And made a big batch of peppery, savory pizza sauce, which will be used next quarter to sauce foccacia for sale in the Pastry Case:



The jam making even continued over to my next rotation (Celebration Cakes). We decided to make an almond/cherry cake and then discovered there was no cherry jam, so chef handed me a 5 lb bag of frozen pitted tart cherries, and I made jam on the fly for the cake (5 lb cherries, chopped in the food processor, 5 cups sugar, boiled down to jam consistency, then 2 tsp of almond extract stirred in). Delicious.

First Quarter Bottom Line

So, how much does it cost to go to baking school at Seattle Culinary Academy? Their website has a page showing estimated costs, but it appears to me that the list is most likely for Culinary students rather than pastry; for example, the tool kit costs are about double what I actually spent. Following is what I paid for first quarter:

Item	Amount
Tuition (17.5 credits)	1,465
Fees	290
Photocopied packets	18
ServSafe book and test fee	120
Prof Baking textbook	101
Chef's Kit	309
Uniforms (2)	217
GRAND TOTAL	$2,520

The chef's kit and uniforms should be one-time expenses, but based on this list I expect that the next four quarters will cost about $2,000 each. My guesstimate for total program cost (not including things like accident insurance, transportation and so on) is about $10,500. Far, far cheaper than the big-name culinary schools, which can cost more than $50,000, especially when you consider it's 15 months of education and results in a degree. See an enlightening comparison of culinary school costs here.

Since we're talking about the stuff I bought, here is a look at my school locker:



The top shelf holds aprons, caps, socks and extra dishwashing gloves. I have two sets of jacket & checkered trousers hanging up ready for next quarter. If you squint, you can see my name embroidered on the jacket. Below the uniforms you can see my fancy chef's kit. I tried a couple of carriers for my tools and didn't like any of them - mostly because they don't fit in this locker, which is exactly eleven inches wide. Right now I'm using a sturdy plastic restaurant food pan (a Cambro) which at least keeps things clean and fits in the locker. The bottom shelf holds my kitchen shoes (Klogs brand).

This Post Lacks Pastry

Now that I'm finished with first quarter, here is a retrospective on the classes that I hope might be useful to any future student (or anyone considering pastry school at Seattle Culinary). So if you're here for the pastry photos, you might want to skip this post! My original list of classes was:

BAK 101 Introduction to desserts & breads
BAK 111 Desserts/breads practicum
CUL 106 Culinary arts theory
CUL 151 Sustainable food practices
HOS 101 Customer service practicum
HOS 110 Principles of sanitation
MIC 102e Excel for culinary students

BAK 101 was three days a week from 7:30-8:50 on Tuesday and Thursday, and 7:30-8:20 on Wednesday. The text for this course is Gisslen's "Professional Baking". The class covered most of the text book. There is a lot of memorization of things like weights and measurements (how many grams in an ounce?), converting quantities (how many tablespoons in an ounce?), properties of ingredients and their composition (how is invert sugar made, and why use it?), and even recipes (what is the procedure for making creme anglaise?). There were three tests (quiz, midterm and final) that are both multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks. There is also a report on an ingredient (mine was on rambutan fruit) for which you must develop a power point document and present it to the class.

I liked the class but it crammed a lot of information into us very rapidly; I felt like I was sometimes just memorizing rather than understanding or seeing interconnections. On the other hand, much of the reading made more sense once I was applying the knowledge during a bakery rotation. I wish I'd had the text ahead of school to preview - I thought there was no text for the class because the book wasn't listed in the school's bookstore for the class, but apparently they often don't order these fat and expensive textbooks because students try to get used copies.

BAK 111 was the bake shop practicum, which I wrote about in a previous post. The rotations are four days a week, 9-1:30 on Wednesday and Friday, and 10-1:30 on Tuesday and Thursday. The last half hour every day is spent cleaning up the kitchens so they are spotless for the next day. Bake shop rotations overlap with HOS 101, which is the work we do in the Pastry Case, selling our products. The advantage of having a small class size for these rotations is that there were at most two of us on a rotation at one time, so we had more opportunity for hands-on baking and more individual attention. The downside is that we spent more time in the Pastry Case and the on-duty time there means missing bake shop work. My class had nine students, and I worked four days on rotation in the Case during the quarter.

I received very little feedback on my bake shop work (I haven't seen my final grade yet); I talked about this with Chef James (our "shepherd" chef) and he said there was not much expected of first quarter students in terms of quality of product. If a student is making the same mistakes repeatedly, or there is a problem with work ethic (like absenteeism) they are given a talking-to, but otherwise, no news is good news. My best advice to a new student would be: show up, pay attention, don't worry about being perfect, and never, ever stand around when there are dishes to be done.

CUL 106 meets twice a week for an hour, and provides a brief overview of the non-pastry side of cooking. This class is where I learned some beginning knife skills, how to hone a knife, and a couple of ways to cut up a chicken. There is again a lot of memorization (what is the difference between conduction and convection? At what temperature does protein coagulate?) and there were five quizzes. The quizzes were not very difficult - they covered only material from about 2 weeks, so were easy to study for.

CUL 151 (Sustainable food practices) met only once a week, from 7:30-8:20 on Fridays. I already had an interest in food politics and policy before starting school, so I found this class both interesting and a lot of fun. The instructor encouraged discussion in class; in two classes we watched the movie "Food, Inc." There was one midterm report, which was to pick a product and research its ingredients, labeling, company ownership, and sustainability (I wrote mine on Organic Valley's Grassmilk), and the final was take-home (half essay and half multiple choice).

HOS 110 was the course to prepare us to take the ServSafe Food Safety Test for Managers. This was definitely the hardest class and the one that required the most study and homework. We met in the classroom only once a week, with the rest of the class and most of the homework done online. This is the first quarter they've done online training, so there was somewhat of a guinea pig experience just getting the online system to work properly. There were a couple of chapters of reading every week, plus weekly quizzes, online discussion boards and extra readings and videos to watch.

The instructor was very strict and particular - we even had one section of our grade based on "professionalism" which included attendance, class participation, and remembering to bring your text to class each week. All my classroom courses required memorization but this class was by far the most intensive. I found an app called Quizlet very useful with all the memorization, by making flash cards, which I could even review on my phone whenever I had a free moment. To give you an idea of the scale of the memorization, my "summary" flash cards for the ServSafe test had almost 150 cards. This is definitely a course where you must not fall behind on the work. There was one fun project: to make a "Fact Sheet" intended for a "general public" audience, on a food safety topic of your choice. I wrote mine on home canning safety - I titled it "Delicious... Or Deadly?"

I had hoped that MIC 102e, Excel for Culinary, would teach us how to do neat things with Excel related to baking (like figuring baker's percentage, or quantity cooking) but it turned out to be just "Excel 101" and very boring. On the other hand, it's only one hour a week, and it was an easy A since as long as you show up and do the (very easy, brief) weekly assignment, you get 100%.

So that's it for first quarter. Much more homework and memorization than I expected, and most of the hands-on learning happens while producing goods for sale. I very much like that the work is practical and food isn't wasted, and that we get real-life professional kitchen experience. Without a doubt it is hard work and it's work under pressure to produce edible, beautiful baked goods. But then, that's what I'm going to baking school to learn.

Sweet & Savory Tarts

My last two-week rotation for first quarter was in Tarts. It was my only rotation with the French chef, and my only solo rotation (no partners). It was also my most relaxed, educational and fun rotation. I loved working by myself; even though I had to work hard to produce all the tarts on time, I liked being the only one responsible for the work and being in control of the schedule. My classmates had reported various levels of fear & trembling in working with the French chef (he is very particular about things being done The Correct Way and is not tolerant of errors that cause waste), but I got along very well with him and learned a lot. It might help that everything I made was edible, and I didn't spill, burn, drop or otherwise waste anything.

The first week of the rotation is sweet tarts, using a tart dough called Pâte Sucrée. This dough is made from pastry flour, granulated sugar, butter, egg yolks and cream, and it's about 25% sugar and 67% butter (in ratio to the total amount of flour). It's a very soft, sweet dough, almost like a cooky. It's mixed in a stand mixer with a paddle. The first day, I mixed the dough and put it in the fridge to chill, then made a batch of lemon curd. On the second day, I rolled out four 9 inch tarts (we don't use pie pans, but instead use tart rings on parchment-covered baking pans) and learned how to form the tarts - it's harder than you'd think with this dough because it is so rich and soft, and has to be handled gently. I filled these tarts with the lemon curd and put them in the fridge to chill.



The third day, I baked the lemon tarts and garnished them with thinly-sliced lemons that had been soaked 48 hours in a syrup made of 2:1 sugar:water. The lemons were left over from another student's cake project. Nothing is wasted in this bake shop! The fourth day, I rolled two tarts worth of dough using the sheeter, and mixed up a rich chocolate-orange filling. These got baked and cooled that day. The last day, I decorated the chocolate tarts by making chocolate ganache, and whipping half of it. I piped shell shapes around the edge of each tart, then poured the unwhipped ganache inside the ring of piped shells. Pretty! and very rich. I didn't make the white/dark chocolate decor - again it was some other student's chocolate practice work.

To finish up the week, I rolled the rest of the dough using the sheeter, and made a bunch (more than a dozen) of small 4 inch tarts, which I filled with the rest of the lemon curd, and decorated with orange slices and shards of white chocolate. The photo shows how the tarts are presented for sale in the pastry case.



The last week, I made a double batch of Pâte Brisée, which is more like classic American pie dough. Our recipe calls for pastry flour, butter, sugar, salt, whole eggs, and milk, and it is mixed completely by hand. The ratio of butter to flour is about 44% and sugar only 6%. It's also always rolled by hand - no sheeter. This double recipe ended up making enough dough for about 18 nine-inch tarts, though I ended up making only a dozen. I spent the second day doing a lot of prep work on vegetables for the various tarts, and ended making up three varieties: classic onion/ham, tomato/basil/roasted garlic (topped with roasted red bell pepper), and onion/mushroom cooked in a balsamic vinegar reduction. It was fun to get to do so much culinary prep work.



I learned how to roll and form the savory tarts. The dough is firmer than the sweet pastry and is a bit easier to work with. I also learned how to blind bake (pre-bake unfilled tarts) using pie beans (pinto beans, which we reuse multiple times). To blind bake, I cut parchment circles an inch or so larger than the tart ring, then put the paper in first, followed by beans. The parchment makes it easier to get the beans out after baking, and keeps the beans from making dents in the shell. This photo shows the tarts after baking:



Here is the onion/ham tart:



... and the tomato/basil tart:



... and the onion/mushroom one:



A fifth quarter student bought four of these, and I bought the other two. I was very pleased to hear from the 5th quarter student the next week that her guests loved the tarts. I loved them too, but OH they are rich - they are filled with a custard that is just heavy cream and eggs. Yummy, but a little piece goes a long way.

Playing catch-up, with Cakes and Chocolate

So, it's been a long time since my last post. Tuesday was my last day of classes, which I spent doing a thorough cleaning of the bakeshop kitchens, along with all my fellow pastry students. The cleaning was well-organized, but still took all of us (about 80 people) nearly three hours. Later Tuesday afternoon I took the ServSafe restaurant manager sanitation test, which I'll write more about in a future post. I have 10 days off until starting summer quarter on June 30th, and I'm going to spend part of my summer break trying to catch up on this blog. Starting with CAKE!



My fourth rotation was cakes, with Chef James, who is cheerful and relaxed, so it was a nice change from doughs. My notes tell me that we made five cakes, though I only managed to remember to take a photo of the one above. All the cakes that we made are American style cakes. The recipes are all from the photocopied packet of school recipes that I got at the beginning of the quarter. We made:

Ladyfinger batter, piped into ten inch rounds and baked, which we used as a layer in tiramisu cheesecake

Chocolate sponge cake and german chocolate cake filling, for the cake above (it's topped with shaved chocolate)

Chocolate Basque cake, which is cake batter layered with pastry cream before baking (very rich and dense)

Coffee cake

Espresso pound cake

I liked the espresso pound cake. The others were tasty but very rich, especially the tiramisu cheesecake.

On one of our Baking 101 class mornings, we went to the bake shop instead of the classroom, and practiced writing and making decorations with piped tempered chocolate. We learned to make piping bags out of parchment paper cones. It was very messy and fun.

A Week of Sheeting

This beast is a dough sheeter. It is basically a giant mechanical rolling pin. The white flat area works like a treadmill, and the straight silver handles at the front control the direction the treadmill runs. In the center of the machine is a roller that can be raised or lowered via the rounded silver handles. You put a block of dough on one side, and run it back and forth under the roller/presser, and it creates a beautifully even, flat sheet. I took this photo early in the morning, before the kitchen filled with busy bakers.

This week (and next week) my rotation is Doughs. I'm working with the Bread chef. As best I can tell, "Doughs" are yeasted or laminated doughs that are not bread; croissants, brioche, sweet rolls, and the like. I made three batches of dough early in the week: one plain sweet roll dough, one ditto with cardamom and grated orange peel, and one batch of pain au lait dough. The rest of the week I was making these doughs up into various sweet rolls. The basic technique was the same for all the products.

First step in bread-type dough making is always to prepare your mise en place: get all the ingredients measured and prepped, and gather any equipment you might need to use. All these doughs called for flour, eggs, liquid (milk or water), instant yeast and butter. I used instant "gold" yeast, which is a special kind of yeast that is "osmotolerant" - it can handle the high amount of sugar in sweet yeast doughs (although sugar is food for yeast, a large proportion of sugar can actually slow down growth for ordinary types of yeast).

Second step is to mix the dough. The sweet roll and pain au lait both require an intensive mix. The liquid, eggs, flour and yeast go into the stand mixer, where they get beaten (with a dough hook) for a few minutes at low speed until the dough comes together (all parts are incorporated into the dough), then the dough is beaten at high speed for five to seven minutes, until the dough "windows" (spreading a bit of dough with your fingers creates a thin window that doesn't break). Then the mixer is turned to medium speed, and bits of butter are fed in to be incorporated gradually.

Then the bulk fermenting stage: let the lovely soft yeasty dough sit out at room temperature for an hour, then let it rest overnight (at least) in the fridge, so the yeast can continue to grow slowly.

The rest of the week was building and baking product. For all the products, I used the same initial method: take half of a batch of dough (about 5 pounds), form it into a block (about 12 x 12 x 4 inches), and run it through the sheeter until it is 3/8 inches thick, at which point it is a sheet of dough about 5 feet by 2 feet.

I made several versions of sweet rolls. Cardamom-currant ones, where I'd spread cardamom-infused pastry cream very thinly on the dough, sprinkle currants all over, then roll up from the long side. Sticky rolls (brush the dough with melted butter, sprinkle cinnamon sugar, and roll up) and Cinnamon rolls (brush with butter, spread with brown sugar and cinnamon, and sprinkle on chopped walnuts before rolling). For all the rolls, I cut the long roll into several pieces and put them on parchment on a sheet pan, thence into the blast freezer for a half hour or so, to make them easier to slice.

I also made two pastries that were cut rather than rolled. The beauties below were made from the pain au lait dough, sheeted as usual, then cut into squares. Pistachio pastry cream piped diagonally, add a stick of dark chocolate (a.k.a. batard), fold the opposite points in. The other cut pastry was lemon cups: sheet the dough, cut circles, put them in a muffin pan to make little cups, then add lemon curd.

All of these pastries had a spell in the proof box before baking, and all got an egg wash (proportions are one whole egg plus one egg yolk) before baking. I did not get everything baked this week - some went into the freezer for the weekend and will get baked next week. The kitchens/chefs at school are very attentive to using up leftovers - very little goes to waste. I made one batch of pastry cream (the cardamom one) but the rest of the cream and lemon curd that I used were actually left over from someone else's projects.

I didn't burn anything this week except my arm (on the rotating / rack oven). I noticed that the senior students have varying quantities of these little burn scars on their forearms - they are something of a badge of honor (or clumsiness).

C is for Cookies

This week I'm on the Cookie rotation, and it's going far, far better than last week's Purgatory of Bread and Dish-washing. My partner (another 1st quarter student) and I have a worktable to ourselves, and report only to the chef instructor. The pace is more relaxed than in Breads; we've generally only been working on two products at one time instead of the four or five in the Bread rotation. We've even had 15 minutes for lunch each day! Today we made the cookies above (Jammers or Jammies) and the Florentines below.

The Jam cookies are made by rolling out and cutting scalloped circles of pâte sucrée (sweet rich tart dough), then making a soft almond paste dough and piping it around the edge of the cookie. The dough goes into the fridge for a while to firm up, then we spooned raspberry and apricot jam into the center and baked them.

As you can see, we also got to do some chocolate work today. We chopped a couple kinds of dark chocolate and tempered it by heating it over hot water (using a bain-marie improvised from a metal bowl and a saucepan). We piped chocolate drizzles on the jam cookies, and painted chocolate onto the flat side of the florentines using a small offset spatula.

Both of these cookies are very sweet, but tasty! And yes, we get to taste everything we make - it is considered good practice to cut up one item of each thing made for the chef, ourselves and fellow students to try. You want to find out you put in too much salt (or forgot it) before it goes downstairs to the pastry case.

Goof of the week (so far... it's only Wednesday after all) was that we mixed up a laborious dough for some tri-colored petits fours, put it in the oven and then forgot to take it out. It didn't burn, but it got very, very tough. We'll be trying again tomorrow. Also on the deck for tomorrow is to bake up some Cocoa-Espresso dough we made this afternoon. It's chilling in rolls in the fridge overnight.

BAK 111 - Pastry Practicum

The BAK-111 class is the core of the Pastry program for first quarter. This is the time we spend working hands-on in the school bake shop, making "product" (baked goods and desserts) for sale in the pastry case (The Buzz) downstairs, and in the two school restaurants. This was my first week in the kitchen, and it was a bit of a rough start.

The course is structured into five two-week segments. For each segment, we work on one type of product. Spring quarter is a week shorter than Fall and Winter, so our first segment is only one week. Each segment is called a "rotation." With our small class size, we have only one or two students in each rotation at a time, and if there are two of us, the partners also change each time, so we have a chance to work with different people. On Tuesday and Thursday we work 10-1:30, and on Wednesday and Friday it's 9-1:30. I'll give you my rotations as an example:

Week 1: Breads
Week 2/3: Cookies
Week 4/5: Doughs
Week 6/7: Cakes
Week 8/9: Tarts

I have a partner for the first four rotations, but am on my own for the last one. There are three chefs who teach the different rotations. This week I had Chef Don for Breads. I don't know if all the chefs run their rotations the same way. Chef Don had us work under three 2nd quarter students. The chef demonstrated some things to us directly, but he is supervising all the students (all 4 quarters, about 20 people) who are doing breads/doughs, so he doesn't have time to hold anyone's hand. The 2nd quarter students did not seem to have much more experience than we did. I think the schedule was accelerated due to the one week rotation; but maybe it's always that busy in breads.

I did a good bit of dough prepping and shaping: baguettes, naan, 3-braid challah, and different buns. I also scaled some doughs ("scaling" is mise en place, i.e. getting all the ingredients weighed or measured and the pans prepared) and learned to use two of the big mixers. I learned how to refresh the levain (sourdough starter in dough form) that is used perpetually in the school bread-making. And I helped frost some hot cross buns that we made Friday (seen above). We don't get walked through all the steps of making something - there are several types of product being made at the same time in different stages, and we filled in and worked on whatever needed to be done moment to moment.

I also spent a lot of time washing bowls and pans and scraping out and washing the big mixers - two of them have bowls that are permanently attached and they are a big job to clean, especially when someone has let the leftover dough harden in them. The 3rd/4th quarter students work independently and seem to do their own cleanup, but the 2nd quarter students just piled up used bowls and pans, and we 1st quarters got to clean them at the end of the day. I am looking forward to third quarter.

I liked watching the 3rd/4th quarter students who were working at benches near us. I learned a lot of little things from them, for example, how best to scrape out the 20 quart mixing bowls. They were very friendly and patient with us 1st quarter students. Several of them told us that in first quarter the bread rotation was the toughest, and that our other ones would be much more fun. Encouraging words!

I made only two major mistakes this week. One was to put some leftover focaccia toppings (I forgot to mention we make focaccia mini-pizzas each day) into the walk-in freezer instead of the walk-in COOLER (they are next door to each other). Not sure how I mistook a freezer for a fridge; I blame light-headedness due to no lunch (did I mention that we had no breaks except for one day, because we were so busy?). Also, I forgot that the baking racks that sit out next to the rack ovens are always supposed to be considered hot unless proven otherwise, and I put my hand on one without testing it first. I let go very quickly and did not get blistered, but I think I won't forget THAT again.

Two more things I learned this week: before each rotation, read the chapter(s) in the Professional Baking text that cover the type of product I'll be making, to help avoid making ignorant mistakes; and when talking to a chef, never argue, never explain, and never apologize. "Yes, Chef" is an excellent response to any criticism, correction or direction.

This week: on to COOKIES.

Hello, I'm Pastry

Last week was my first week of school. After all my preparations to be ready to start on the first day, it turned out that we spent most of the first week preparing to start. It was a bit frustrating at first (especially spending an hour of class time on the instructor reading the school standards to us), but once I realized that I was the only one in a hurry, I relaxed and was able to appreciate the time to get to know my fellow students, and to shop for my chef's kit.

The first day of the Baking 101 class included going over the list of equipment we each need to purchase. The photo above shows most of it; not seen is the knife bag that will contain most of these tools. Nice haul, eh? I got most of my equipment at Sur la Table, using a gift certificate that my wonderful, generous co-workers at my former gig at ABC Legal gave me as a going away present. I've promised to bring them pastry shop treats once we start baking at school. Last week, the school restaurants and bakeshop were still closed, but I think they will open this week.

There are nine of us in the Pastry program for first quarter, and about twice that number starting in Culinary. The school has both a full Culinary Arts program, and the Baking & Specialty Desserts one that I'm in. If you're in the full program, you are called Culinary, if in baking, you're called Pastry (as in "Are you Pastry?"). We had 10 in Pastry, but one dropped out - the only male. So, we are nine females. The other 8 women range in age from 19-28. One is an international student (from Taiwan). So far we are getting along very well; everyone is good humored and chatty.

We only overlap with Culinary in one class (sustainable food practices) and they were quite a contrast with our small, happy group - they looked pretty glum, and said they had been in the classrooms all week. We actually got some time in the kitchens, for an equipment usage safety check, an overview of where all the different bits of equipment live, and also for two demonstrations in which we got to participate a little bit: one on rolling tart dough and fitting it to different pans, and one on cutting parchment to make impromptu pastry bags.

I have a better sense now of what each class will contain, and I'll write another post about that soon. I also plan to write a post about our practicum (the practical work we do in the school's restaurants and pastry shop), and I will post a photo of the uniform soon - mine turned out to be both too big (yes, I tried on samples ahead of ordering - don't know what went wrong with that) and the material is stiff and scratch, and I'm hoping they will both shrink and soften up with washing. If there's anything else you're just dying to know about, let me know in the comments.

It's begun!