Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Of Frustrations and Flowerpots

Aside from the wedding for 120-odd Lebkuchen-loving guests, this week was a pretty quiet one at Bullwinkle Ranch, so I had some time to play. And I remembered my camera!

But first...

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that the interns get to work with me for a couple weeks. My first minion was Delilah, the southern girl who was very anxious about baking but, by the end of our time together, seemed to really warm to it.

My current henchcook is a guy I’ll call Ghostdog (yes, after the underappreciated Forest Whitaker character). He’s very cute, and smart, and quiet, and decent, an ex-military dude who served in Iraq and grew up on a farm but has been working in restaurants for most of his life. And I like him (no, not that way... I like him as a person, and as a henchcook).

But wow, this has been a frustrating week.

He knows his way around the kitchen. He has a good work ethic. He is a bright guy with a particular interest in the chemistry behind cooking.

But sadly, Ghostdog suffers from Honorephobia (ON-a-ray-FO-bi-a).

That’s the term I’ve just coined to explain the condition I have witnessed among many, if not most, cooks. In some, it presents as a mild anxiety, such as my fave line cooks Jerry and Keanu (named for their respective resemblances to Jerry Cantrell and Keanu Reeves), who wander past my station frequently, looking for (and getting) scraps, declaring their love for me and my pastry wizardry (I know they want me only for my brownies), and then... pausing a moment to watch me pipe or knead or whatever I’m doing, saying nervously “I could never do that. I don’t have the patience.”

In others, such as Delilah, Honorephobia is a moderately debilitating but treatable anxiety disorder where the simple act of removing a cheesecake from its springform pan causes trembling and audible wincing.

Poor Ghostdog has full-blown, severe Honorephobia, symptoms of which include a complete loss of basic knife skills and common sense. I asked him to supreme oranges for my cardamom and roasted orange creme brulee that sold out (hell yeah!) and he gave me a pint of segments full of membranes and pith. When he was making a batch of cookie dough for the third time, having improperly mixed the first batch and erroneously scaled the second, I peeked in the bowl and asked if that was all the sugar.

“Yep,” he said, re-reading the recipe aloud.

“Is that really six cups of brown sugar?” I prodded.

Ghostdog looked in the bowl for a long moment. “Uh, no. I guess I forgot five cups. Good catch.”

Good catch?!

Thing is, I know he’s not doing it intentionally. I know he’s not trying to sabotage our damn cookie dough or make some kind of statement about working as the Pastry Pirate’s lackey for a fortnight. Just like I know he knows how to supreme a freakin' orange (he has excellent knife skills when cooking). It’s the Honorephobia. When many cooks I’ve met have to do anything baking or pastry related, they freeze. They lose half their IQ points. Their hands shake, they sweat. They make ice cream but forget the cream, or confuse the salt with the sugar.

I’ll set aside the why of it, because I don’t understand that (I mean, when Chef asked me to do the salad course or whip up some bernaise sauce, I did. Nothing in the kitchen is rocket science.). But what I do know is that, as the sole pastry person here at the ranch, I need to figure out how to deal with Honorephobes*.

(*St. Honore is the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs. Naming the condition after him just felt right.)

With Delilah, a nurturing, “hey I made mistakes too, but eventually I got it right” big sister approach worked, but Ghostdog’s more severe case bedevils me. I tried the big sister approach. I tried the demanding “do it again until it’s right” chef strategy. I tried the scowl-and-silent treatment. I even tried to be a therapist (actual words: “so, when you started making the dough, how did you feel? What was going through your head?”). Nothing seems to work.

It bugs me because if he were one of those swaggering grill jockeys or simply a moron, I could just write him off, but he seems to be a good guy with talent (at least in cooking) and an interest in learning.

It’s vexing, terribly vexing. I’m terribly vexed.

On a lighter note, here are some photos of what I’ve been up to the past few days:

In addition to our signature petit fours with the ranch’s brand piped on it, rumballs, shortbread and chocolate-covered dried apricots, this weekend I added mini-flowerpots (below) to our after-dinner treat selection. Why? Because I can, dammit! Bwaa ha ha ha ha!



For a sense of scale, it’s 1.5" tall and yes, I got them to stand on their own. It’s a simple matter of cake batter, pate a glacer and Frangelico, some of which went into the cakes.

I mentioned Delilah earlier, and for her dessert, she did a cheesecake that turned into something of a disaster.

(For the time I have them, I make the interns create a plated dessert over the course of a week that we put on the menu as a special. I tell them “I’ll be the midwife, but you’ve got to do the pushing,” because I personally find the most challenging part of creating a dessert to be reigning in my ideas and narrowing down the flavor profile, the neat techniques I could use and what the dessert is really supposed to be, in a Platonic ideal kinda way, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious. I want them to have the same experience of figuring out what fits together and what should be left off the plate, because any monkey can make a mousse. It’s how you flavor the mousse and what you put with it that separates the good from the ugly.)

It’s a long story behind Delilah’s cheesecake, but let’s just say that, at the end of the day, she’d made two five-inch tall, enormo cheesecakes with a thick chocolate poundcake base but utterly no flavor. She wound up glazing one with raspberries and selling some of it, but the second was sitting naked in the freezer.

Monday afternoon, Fredo, who now runs the more casual restaurant onsite, asked Ghostdog to do a dessert of the day. Under the weather physically and worn down mentally by his Honorephobia, he told me he’d really rather not. So I offered to do it.

I didn’t have a lot of time, but I did have that big ass frozen, tasteless cheesecake.

It was round, but I cut it into 2.5x2.5x5 towers, poked vertical holes in it with a chopstick and piped in soft caramel, then glazed it with chocolate and drizzled more caramel on top. A little caramel on the plate with some candied hazelnuts and voila... recycled cheesecake gets an extreme makeover.



The angle doesn’t quite show it’s Tower of Power-like quality, but judging from the lustful looks I got carrying it to the restaurant, it’s gonna be popular. I’m just glad I was able to do something with JumboCake instead of letting it sit in the freezer.

On a related note, I really want a cheesecake on the fancy-pants restaurant menu, but since Chef and I still have not had our meeting about silicone molds he will buy me, I’m at a severe equipment disadvantage. I tried baking a rose-and-orange blossom cheesecake I came up with (yes, shades of my infamous kenefeh obsession!) using a pistachio crust in little square forms the cooks use for risotto. It souffled and collapsed ridiculously (damn altitude!) and the butter in the crust leaked out from the bottom.

Sigh.

Round two was more successful... I call it “Pistachio and Orange Blossom Cheesecake Napoleon with Rose Sorbet and Saffron Gelee.” Why? Because I can:



I left it in the freezer for Chef, who’s been on vacation the past few days, to sample.

He got some Meyer lemons in last week and told me to do something with them, so it seemed the right time to make a dessert I’ve been thinking of for a while... My Darling Lemon-Thyme. Ha! Ha ha ha!

It’s Meyer Lemon panna cotta, thyme custard, lemon reduction and a few dots of raspberry sauce for color. In my original “vision” it started out as a tart, but I think those mini-flowerpots put me over the edge and I went a little cute-crazy. Wheeeeee!



Originally I wanted a bottom layer of pecan joconde (a thin, nut-based cake), and decided to put a candied pecan on top to bring the flavor profile together, but when it came time to assemble the thing, the joconde didn’t seem to fit, so I scraped it off. But I left the candied pecan. It doesn’t fit, and I should practice what I preach and reign myself in, but gosh it’s so cute!

I don’t know if either will make the menu, but it was nice to have time to play around with a couple ideas I had in my head.

And finally... we got another foot of snow Monday, though to be honest I don’t even notice it anymore. What’s more white on top of white, anyway? But I did take a little longer driving home because it was so damn beautiful. The photo doesn’t do it justice, but low clouds just above me were backlit pink and lavender against the dark and ominous snow clouds moving in. Again.


3 comments:

Rosie said...

The Darling Lemon-Thyme would cause a sensation as a hat, for a day at the races. It's adorable on the plate - but I'd love to make a colossal full-sized version to perch atop someone's head!

I'm sorry, it's late and I'm getting silly.

Dr. Virago said...

Ha! I can totally see a Darling Lemon-Thyme hat at Ascot!

Anywho, your dealings with Honorephobia sound like my students and learning OE. "No, I'm just not good with languages," they often say. They've got huge mental blocks of fear about learning languages, so they take my OE class instead of Spanish or French or German for their foreign language requirement, only to find out -- eek! -- that despite its name, Old *English* is very foreign indeed. (It has cases! It sounds like German! Ack!)

It doesn't matter how smart the student has been in my other classes, OE often ends up their lowest grade.

I think what both fears -- fear of baking, fear of languages -- and also the fear of math all have in common is a fear of precision. In cooking, in literary studies, and in the humanities in general, there's more room for fudging things, for creative improv, for fixing things after the fact (and yes, for bullshit). Language learning may not be as precise as math and baking, but there are still -- the horror! -- wrong answers. And maybe that's it -- maybe it's a fear of being wrong?

It's a theory, anyway.

The Pastry Pirate said...

Hee hee! When I was plating it I thought it was so Dr. Suessian. I can totally see it as a hat for the Wahooville Annual Parade.

And DrV, I was thinking of you when I was trying to strategize how to help Ghostdog, or at least how to keep myself from screaming "YOU IDIOT!" He doesn't seem to be upset by his mistakes, so I don't think it's a fear of making them. I do think it's a psychological block, not so much of fear but of "differentness"... "I am a cook. This is not cooking, therefore I cannot do it."

I dunno. If I have to work with him again this week I may just scream "YOU IDIOT!" and see what happens.