Laminated dough, to say the least, is a heck of a lot of work. I already spoke yesterday on the effort involved in the prep. We did the lock-in and two turns yesterday. Today we did one more turn and then let it chill some more. Then finally we were able to begin work with it. The chef gave a demo on a bunch of different shaping methods, there's a heck of a lot of ways and you can pretty much do whatever you want. We also had a lot of different fillings. Yesterday a couple groups prepared almond paste and cream cheese filling and there was extra blueberry and cherry filling from yesterday's pies. In addition we made a cinnamon sugar mix. So after filling and rolling about 2/3 of our 5 pounds or so of pastry dough, we egg washed them, proofed them, egg washed them again, then could finally bake them. They took quite a while to bake because they needed a very deep brown color. In the meantime, we still had even more work to do for the Danishes. I had to prepare apricot glaze, which is a bulk item, sorta like thick jelly, that I heated up and thinned out with water. Meanwhile we also heated up fondant till it was soft, then diluted that and let it cool. When the danishes were done baking, we glazed them and drizzled the fondant and finally had some finished product. They turned out beautifully, to say the least. I didn't taste any, not my kinda thing, but the chef said they were excellent, perfect. So I'm satisfied. Hell of a lotta work though for a few pastries. But we did end up with four half-sheet pans of them and still 1/3 of the dough in the fridge. I understand why the chef said we should make that full recipe, they're quite popular.
We also baked off two pie crusts that we prepared yesterday. These are for cream filling pies so they had to be fully baked as opposed to par-baked. I was surprised how long they took to bake. I didn't really think an empty pie crust was photo-worthy.
One of those pie crusts though we used for a cream pie. Like the danish pastries, this had a decent amount of work and parts. We had to bake the first pie dough. In the meantime we had to prepare the custard filling. It's pretty simple. Milk and some sugar and heavy cream's brought to a boil, then tempered with a mix of more sugar and egg yolks and cornstarch. It's brought back to a boil then removed from heat and butter's stirred in. Once the pie dough finished baking, the custard went right in and we chilled it. To top the pie we needed to make a meringue. I, as an idiot, did the wrong recipe and first made a common (French) meringue. So I had to scrap that because we needed Swiss meringue, which involves some cooking over heat then whipping. When that finished, I piped it onto the pie and we torched it. It looked pretty nice but we were already past the end of class so we just tossed it in the fridge. I'll get a picture tomorrow.
We made a batch of dinner rolls for practice for the midterm. I didn't get a picture but they turned out much better than last time.
We unfortunately didn't even get to do the lock-in for our croissants. I guess we'll do the lock-in and all the folds tomorrow and then freeze them for next week. As I said, this stuff takes too much effort.
Tomorrow should be easier. We don't have as many recipes but we're also going to be practicing for next week's midterm. No problems though, I can do all the items easy. Biscuits, blueberry muffins, dinner rolls. No problem.
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