Class 10/31/09 Pies and Laminated Dough Again

Finishing off the week, we continued with the same topics as yesterday.

Here is the cream pie with Swiss meringue from yesterday. Pretty. On an aside, that picture was taken with my phone since I forgot my camera, I'm impressed by how good it came out.

We still had a third of our danish dough, so we shaped and baked those off. They turned out pretty well though the bottoms of some burned a little. The ovens at school are so unreliable. They look pretty much the same as yesterday so I didn't bother taking pictures.

Another pie we made today was a lemon chiffon. This was a fairly difficult pie. It was also our first time using gelatin, which can be difficult, and I learned that first hand. For the most part, prep went fine. We made the custard like normal over a double boiler and added the gelatin which we previously bloomed. It took a long time for it to thicken to the right consistency since we were doing it by hand. Chef said that he'd use a hand mixer in professional production since that would incorporate the air so much more quickly. We finally made it pretty nice and then put it in the fridge to chill. That's where I failed, because that completely set the gelatin. So when I tried to fold in the beaten egg whites, it was just hardened clumps. I was able to incorporate it eventually by heating it back up over a double boiler, but I lost all the volume and fluffiness of the whipped egg whites, so we ended up with a dense cake, where it was supposed to be airy and puffy. The flavor didn't really suffer though so it's not bad, just the wrong consistency.

We also finished working our croissant dough and made those today. Like the danishes, the croissant dough is kinda tough to work, but in a different way. Even after a day of refrigeration, it didn't harden like the danish dough did so in one way it was easier to work with but in another way difficult because it was harder to keep its shape. Working with the butter was much harder too. It was a much smaller quantity than the danishes, so for one it was rolled a lot thinner making it hard to work with, and at that thickness it softened a lot faster, also making it more difficult. We were able to do our folds quicker though, we did a couple at a time instead of chilling the dough thirty minutes between each, so we were able to bake off the croissants today too. They came out beautifully.

I didn't have the best success with the pies this week but I am quite surprised how well the laminated doughs turned out. They were both fairly difficult to work with and both products came out exceptionally. But the pies do kinda bum me out, I don't like messing stuff up and only the fruit pies were decent, the custard ones not so much.