Going Down In Flames

In addition to the Chef’s Table tastings we do every several weeks with other students, the baking and pastry externs at the hotel have to do a final tasting, alone, for the grand poobah executive chef (known hereafter as Poobah), the executive pastry chef, whom I’ll call Chef Olmos (because he reminds me of actor Edward James Olmos with his quiet, introverted intensity) and the executive pastry sous chef, the Frenchman of a Thousand Moods, whom I’ll call Chef Lumiere, because his outrageous accent reminds me of the candlestick in Disney’s "Beauty and the Beast."

About a month ago, I started thinking about what I was going to do. I had a couple ideas, but then I realized that I hadn’t done anything with chocolate, not even as a garnish, for my previous tastings. I don’t particularly like chocolate, I don’t really like working with it and, quite frankly, I’m a little afraid of it. There are so many things that can go wrong.

As my favorite chef at school said of it: "Chocolate is like a wild stallion. It will do what it wants with you."

I hate being afraid of anything, so I decided that for my final tasting I was going to take the bull by the horns or the wild stallion by the ears or whatever metaphor applies ... I was going to do an all-chocolate tasting. And I thought, if I go down in flames, so be it.

Then I thought, "going down in flames" ... what an excellent theme.

And it turned out to be a prophetic one, too.

I didn’t have much time to test things out or prep, just half an hour here or there in the last week while working PM production, when the sous chef in charge would say go ahead, do your own thing for a bit. I had ideas, but no time to really refine them, so I winged it. I did a couple test batches of panna cotta at home, then went on instinct baking off a cake very, very loosely based on a Charlie Trotter recipe I found (I ripped off his idea of using carrot puree to make it moister).

I did come in early last Sunday to spend an hour with Boy Wonder, the pastry chef in the fancy-pantsiesed of restaurants, on whom I have posted before. We had been emailing back and forth and he offered to show me how he did molded chocolates. He is such a great teacher; after an hour of chocolate work with him I felt I could actually pull it off.

Friday was my day off, but I spent five hours in the bakery anyway, as it was my only block of time to get things done before the big day. Chef Lumiere saw me (he had my tasting moved from Friday to Saturday so I wouldn’t have to come in on my day off) and stormed over.

"[Pirate]! This is your day off!" he exclaimed.

"I’m not really here," I replied, trying the ol’ Jedi mind trick.

"Aha! Then I will not shake your hand because I cannot see you! You are invisible!" he said, chuckling in his tres French way as he walked off.

Well, Saturday was supposed to be Chef Lumiere’s day off, yet when I arrived at 10 a.m., four hours before my 2-10 p.m. shift (and before my 12:30 p.m. tasting), there he was. I said "Chef! You’re here on your day off!’

"No! You do not see me! I am invisible!" he replied and turned away.

I love that French nutball.

I don’t know if he came in to be at my tasting (I doubt it) or to deal with some paperwork or personnel issues (far more likely), but the beauty of it was, because he was there, I won’t have to do a second tasting on Tuesday just for him, which had been part of the plan.

So, I am down to the wire plating everything at 12:15. I had a last-minute crisis... my Swiss meringue was flopping about in a nasty way, so I scrapped it and instead of topping my chocolate mousse dome with meringue that was to be spiked and torched to look like flames, I went with framing it with fresh cut strawberries instead. Lame, I know, but I felt it went with the visual "down in flames" theme.


I was really, really happy with my chocolates appearance-wise. Shiny, very thin shells and only a few had a couple air bubbles. I had painted the molds with cocoa butter, too (first time ever), and was ok with the results. Not chocolatier quality, but screw it, I think they were damn good for a first-ever attempt.

I had a last-minute attack plating my panna cotta, going a little crazy with the dried hibiscus before grabbing another one and starting from scratch with a more minimalist, classy approach. See below for the comparison photo of overkill and understatement.


I was super happy with my volcano cake, too. All in all, I felt good about things. Le menu:


Extra chocolates are in the background. In foreground, clockwise from top, my Devil’s Food and Ancho Chile cake with Carrot Caramel and Honey-Ancho Tuile, the last minute crisis milk chocolate mousse dome with strawberries and tamarind sauce, the best of my chocolates (the white is a lime and Limoncello white chocolate and the dark is a Port Wine and dark chocolate). And finally, my white chocolate and saffron panna cotta with rosewater, mango and hibiscus.

Chef Poobah was not there at the appointed time of 12:30 p.m. He was not there five nor ten minutes later. I casually walked past his office and saw him working on the computer, oblivious. I mentioned this to Chef Lumiere, who hunted him down (not that hard, since he was, after all, at his computer... I think he forgot, since his assistant, who tells him what to do, was not in on a Saturday) and brought him over as I was trying to revive the desserts which, by then, had gone cold or warm or generally wilty.

Poobah didn’t seem to want to be there. I explained my concept, the whole being afraid of chocolate but taking the wild stallion by the horns and going down in flames if need be, and he sighed wearily. He scraped off the fresh strawberries on my mousse and stuck his spoon into it without enthusiasm. No comment. He bit into the white chocolate truffle and put the bitten remaining half back on the plate. No comment. He tried a corner of my volcano cake. No comment. He shoved aside the hibiscus garnish of my panna cotta and took a small spoonful.

"Ugh!"

I thought he was going to spit it out.

"That’s wrong. That’s just... funky," he muttered, shaking his head and throwing out his plastic tasting spoon as if it were no longer fit for use with food.

Chef Lumiere and Chef Olmos followed silently in his wake, tasting small bits politely but saying nothing.

Finally, Chef Lumiere turned to me and asked "what gave you zee idea to pair saffron with zee white chocolat?" in the same tone that, say, an ER doctor might ask a newly admitted patient "what gave you the idea to trim your nose hairs with a weedwhacker?"

I wanted to say "what gave you rocket scientists the idea to taste a white chocolate dish immediately after a very strong dark chocolate dish, you numbskulls?! Do you go home and guzzle a bottle of merlot before cracking open the Riesling? I think not!"

Instead, I smiled and said "It was an experiment."

"Ah, well, zat is one experiment you probably should not repeat," Chef Lumiere said, chuckling. "But I admire you for working with something you were afraid of-"

"You better not be afraid of chocolate, it’s what you’re going to be doing 95% of the time!" snapped Chef Poobah.

I wanted to say "who woke you up by peeing on your head this morning, jackass?" but instead I smiled and nodded, adding "That was the whole point of doing this," with the "jackass" merely implied.

(As a sidenote, if I respect a chef, I have no problem taking crap from him or her. But if it's a chef I don't respect, it is so hard for me to keep my mouth shut and not give as good as I'm getting. I know this will be a problem for me, so I'm trying to get it under control.)

Chef Olmos, ever the quietly supportive one, turned to Poobah and said "she has been such a hard worker, and has so much enthusiasm." Later, after it was all over, he ate more of the chocolates and complimented me on the thinness of the shell and the lime-Limoncello flavor (the port wine one didn’t work out so well. When I took a sample up to Boy Wonder, he suggested next time reducing the port and steeping it with spices before adding it to the ganache, which would have given it a lot more flavor). Chef Olmos is a guy who has won international chocolate competitions, and Boy Wonder is effortlessly perfect in every aspect of pastry, so their comments had a lot more weight with me than those of Poobah (I mean, really... who tries a white chocolate after a dark chocolate? Was he raised by wolves or something?)

I think my ego might have taken a bashing had I not seen what happened at the tasting of the student here before me. I was only about six weeks into my externship when the other student did a really striking, competition-style presentation with a showpiece and a cake and everything, all perfect, for his final tasting.

Chef Poobah grimaced, actually threw the guy’s sugar garnish across the table as if in disgust and poked at his entrement with a look normally seen on the faces of men visiting their proctologists. I don’t know if Poobah sees these final tastings as his Gordon Ramsay moment or if he happened to be in a bad mood or what, but quite frankly, going in I wasn’t expecting him to be positive, so I wasn’t disappointed.

In fact, I was crazily exhilarated. I honestly didn’t care what Poobah thought, because I knew he wouldn’t like it. I was excited that Chefs Olmos and Lumiere had found positive things to say, and, quite frankly, I was thrilled with the way my chocolates and the volcano cake turned out.

The culinary chef who leads our Chef’s Tables also attended the tasting, though he stayed in the background and didn’t taste anything until the other chefs had dispersed and I was left to clean up.

We tasted the panna cotta together. I was worried that maybe it had gone bad or something in the 48 hours since I’d made and frozen it, but it tasted fine to me. I mentioned that to him and he said "everyone has different tastes, don’t worry about it." Later, when one of the sous chefs whom I really like asked how it went and I told him disastrously, he shook his head and said "[Poobah] needs to open his mind." (Poobah is notorious for hating anything that is not plain vanilla or milk chocolate or some other standard dessert flavor. Even though I knew this, not for a moment did I think of creating a tasting to please him. I have a whole career ahead of me of seeking to please people. This was my moment to go a little crazy with the saffron and the ancho.)

So, to sum up: screw Poobah. I learned a lot, I pulled it off with little time and recovered from the last minute meringue crisis, and dammit, I think it was pretty good. I deserve credit for daring to ride the wild stallion.