Under the Table (16 page)

Choux
dough must be shaped and baked while it is still warm, so we lost no time loading up a couple of pastry bags with the warm mixture and began piping little blobs onto the waiting sheet pans. Ben and I each began to pipe our circles on different ends of the pan, and when we met in the middle, we realized we had a problem. We hadn't coordinated the size before we began, and now half the
choux
were about an inch big, and half were almost three inches! Another communication snafu.

Regardless, we put the first pan in the oven and began on the second pan, this time agreeing to make the
choux
about an inch big, hoping that this compromise was the right size. We had used up all the dough and were tidying up our station while the
choux
puffed up and turned golden brown in the oven when we received our second visit from Chef Pierre. He definitely had a more laissez-faire style than Chef Jean—
he
would have been at our shoulders the whole time, gently correcting and critiquing as each step was accomplished. Half the morning had gone by, we had completed most of our dish, and we still hadn't gotten any feedback from Chef. Interesting. Maybe we were doing everything right. Yes, and maybe the pork terrines prepared by the garde-manger students could fly.

Sure enough, when Chef looked in on the
choux
rising merrily in the convection oven, he barked out the traditional French exclamation of disgust.
“Merde!”
he spat, and turned on us, the short brown hair peeking out from his tall chef 's toque seeming to bristle like a dog's before it attacks.

“Who piped those?” Chef barked. Somehow, I knew it would be all my fault. “They are too big and too small. How did you manage to do that? Not one of those is the correct size! Do it again, and
come get me when you are ready to pipe and I will show you how to do it correctly.”

Okay. Fine. Hopefully, the third time would be the charm for cream puffs. We began all over again. This time it was my turn to make the dough. As I stirred the melting butter and water, adding the flour in a great dusty cloud, I was suddenly taken back to a long-ago summer afternoon in Virginia. To combat the late-summer doldrums of school vacation, my mother plopped my recalcitrant, bored, eight-year-old self down in front of her extensive cookbook collection. If I was quiet as a mouse while the grown-ups rested during the heat of the afternoon under the soothing swoosh of the ceiling fan, I could choose a recipe from the many books to make with her for the evening's dessert. I spent the afternoon reverently paging through the hundreds of cookbooks, many of them beginning to crumble with age and the inevitable mildew of humid Virginia summers, spotted with grease, spider-webbed with notes in an old-fashioned cursive—the only remnants of long-ago cooks in my family whom I would never know, whose names would be remembered only on the flyleaves of these much-thumbed volumes.

Despite the appeal of these volumes, with the exotic smell of great age wafting from every yellowed page, and with their mystical names of recipes, like Hoppin' John, Yum Yum Pie, and Hummingbird Cake, I found myself drawn to the severe line drawings and exotic ingredients of Julia Child's
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
Volumes I and II. I was entranced by the luscious depiction of
pâté en croûte,
shivered at the cold-blooded descriptions of how to debone a chicken, and practiced the elegant motions of fluting mushroom caps with a paring knife stealthily purloined from a kitchen drawer.

I chose her recipe for
croquembouche
—a towering confection made from many piped
choux
filled with whipped cream and stacked in a large pyramid, glued together with caramel and dusted with confectioners' sugar. Knowing the mortally sticky nature of caramel
on a thunderstorm afternoon in August, my mother suggested a slight alteration to my vision. We made one enormous cream puff—a giant ring of
choux
dough that we baked in the oven, split, filled with vanilla ice cream, and topped with a bittersweet chocolate sauce made in a tiny battered yellow enamel pot with a tin of sweetened condensed milk and big blocks of unsweetened chocolate from the pantry.

We ate it on the porch, after dinner, while we watched a great, gray-black storm tumble down the steep slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains to settle, with great drumrolls of thunder, in the woods, on the dusty cornfields, and in our little garden. The rain still pounded our copper roof when Eben and I were sent up to bed, and for the first time, as I snuggled into the cool sheets and smelled the wet, fertile smell of the drenched fields drifting in through the window screens, I felt the deep satisfaction of creating something that my family enjoyed. I included Julia Child in my childish prayers, and felt the first scratchy inclinations of my life's passion.

 

In no time, it seemed, I had finished mixing the
choux
dough and we once again had a warm batch in the pastry bags and ready to go. We sent Junior off to find Chef Pierre, so that we could get these in the oven—suddenly, it was almost eleven o'clock. The
choux
would need a half hour in the oven to bake and another half hour to cool. We would have to have the desserts plated and on the chefs' table at 12:24 precisely, and we were running out of time.

Chef Pierre came bursting in, flexing his wrists and making piping motions with his hands, warming up for the demonstration. He grabbed the bag from Ben's grasp and began churning out absolutely perfect little orbs of dough at a lightning speed. “Watch and learn,” he said over his shoulder, piping out several perfect little
choux
without even looking. Was that a teeny tiny grin on his face? Nah, couldn't be. Distinguished chef-instructors didn't grin. In no time at all, he had cranked out an entire tray of
choux
and slammed them
into the oven. He made one more on a new sheet pan as an example and then let us try our hands at it once again. None of ours looked quite as good as his, but we were definitely getting better.

At last the
choux
were baked and drying in the gentle heat on top of the ovens. Without this “dry time” any steam still trapped inside the
choux
would condense back into water again and instead of possessing ethereal lightness, the interior would be a chewy, soggy mess. While they dried, we made chocolate sauce, really just equal parts heavy cream and semisweet chocolate heated together; and
crème Chantilly,
whipped cream. Whipped cream was always to be made by hand, with a large balloon whisk over a bowl of ice. This way, we students would learn precisely when the cream had reached the peak of fluffy lightness before it became overwhipped and formed tiny granules of butter.

Though it took merely seconds to make, we always grumbled at this process—we all knew how to make whipped cream! But Chef was immovable on this point, and eventually showed us why. While the whipped cream he made in a standing mixer was perfectly adequate, somehow it lacked the delicate lightness of the hand-whipped version. Forget using those neat stainless steel canisters with the cartridges of nitrous oxide to make instant whipped cream. Those had been outlawed by the school years ago—the students were stealing the gas cartridges and huffing them in the walk-in refrigerator. The parting words from Chef Jean as we stood over my caramel wafted back to me: good things are worth the time put into them, and sometimes perfection can't be rushed.

But it was already 12:22, and Chef was waving his arms frantically at us from the other end of the kitchen, summoning us and our trays of dessert into the dining room for service. Tucker moved with lightning speed, and while I frantically sawed open
choux,
he filled them with the vanilla-spiked whipped cream. Ben plated them and added the perfect dusting of confectioners' sugar to their tops, and Junior filled the little silver serving pots with rich, dark, hot chocolate
sauce. We ran through the big kitchen, trays held high overhead, and dashed through the swinging doors and into the dining room. Covered with sweat, confectioners' sugar, and trails of chocolate sauce, we didn't present quite the polished façade I was hoping for, but it was 12:24 on the nose as we began to clear away the salad plates and replace them with our cream puffs. We'd made it.

As we returned to the kitchen, depositing the empty dessert plates, silverware, water goblets, and accrued detritus with the dishwashers, I couldn't help but feel flushed with triumph. While our first effort in the Level 2 kitchen had not gone without a hitch, at least it
had
gone. Chef Pierre was actually grinning when he saw us, exhausted by our efforts, collecting our well-earned lunch from our compatriots running the family meal.

“Not bad,” he said. “But wait until tomorrow. You will have to make two desserts for the chefs from now on.”

Two desserts?
I almost impaled myself on my knife.

Spiced Choux with Calvados Ice Cream, Apple Compote, and Caramel Sauce

For the Calvados ice cream:

8 egg yolks

2 cups granulated sugar

2 cups whole milk

2 cups heavy cream

1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1½ teaspoons vanilla paste

½ cup best-quality Calvados

For the
choux:

4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter

½ cup water

¾ cup all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

Pinch of salt

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Pinch of ground cloves

Pinch of ground cardamom

3 or 4 eggs

For the egg wash:

1 egg yolk

1 tablespoon heavy cream

Pinch of salt

For the apple compote:

4 apples (see Notes)

¼ cup water

½ cup light brown sugar, or a bit more or less (see Notes)

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

¹
/
₈
teaspoon ground cardamom

For the caramel sauce:

1 cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons Calvados

½ cup heavy cream

 

Confectioners' sugar, for garnish

1. To make the ice cream: In a bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar until the mixture is a very pale yellow.
   
2. Heat the milk and cream in a large pot over low heat. Stir in the vanilla extract and paste and the Calvados. Once the mixture begins to steam, remove it from the heat.
   
3. Temper the yolks and sugar with the hot cream and milk. Add the tempered mixture back to the milk and heat gently, stirring with a wooden spoon, until the temperature reaches 180°F. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a stainless steel bowl placed in an ice water bath. Chill.
   
4. Follow the directions for your ice cream machine. Once the mixture has been spun, remove it from the machine, pack into a covered container, and freeze to firm and ripen for a few hours.
   
5. To make the
   choux:
   Preheat the oven to 400°F. Cover a sheet pan with parchment paper.
   
6. In a small saucepan over medium heat, bring the butter and the water to a boil. Add the flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom all at once. Stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until the mixture is well combined. Continue to stir over medium heat until the mixture is smooth and dry.
   
7. Remove from the heat and quickly stir in 1 egg, making certain to incorporate it before the egg cooks. Continue to add eggs one at a time until the texture is correct—a paste should form, but it should not be too firm. A finger drawn through the mixture should leave a deep furrow that slowly fills in.
   
8. To make the egg wash: In a small bowl, whisk the yolk with the cream and salt.
   
9. Using a piping bag or two spoons, pipe (or scoop) about a tablespoon of dough into small circles on the sheet pan. Brush with egg wash and bake until golden brown and dry, about 20 minutes. Turn off the oven, crack the door open, and leave to dry for another 15 to 20 minutes.
   
10. To make the apple compote: While the
    choux
    are baking and drying, peel, core, and dice the apples. In a small pot over low heat, combine the apples, water, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom. Cook slowly until the apples are completely cooked through and broken down. The time will vary from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on what sort of apples are being used. The water should be completely evaporated, and the compote very thick. Keep warm until needed.
    
11. To make the caramel sauce: In a medium saucepan, stir together the sugar and Calvados. Add enough water to make the sugar the consistency of wet sand. Cook over high heat, wiping down the sides of the pan occasionally with a pastry brush and some fresh water, until the mixture comes to a dark golden brown. Remove from the heat.
    
12. Immediately add the cream all at once. Be careful! The mixture will bubble up violently and spit hot caramel. Stand back! Stir briskly with a long-handled wooden spoon until the caramel has dissolved into
    the cream and a thick, sticky sauce has formed. Keep warm until needed.
    
13. To assemble: Split open the
    choux
    puffs and remove any spongy filling that may remain inside. Spoon some of the ice cream into the
    choux
    and replace their caps. Place a spoonful of the apple compote in the center of a plate and arrange three
    choux
    around it. Sprinkle lightly with confectioners' sugar. Drizzle caramel sauce liberally over all.
    

NOTES: A variety of apples is best here for a more complex flavor. I like to use a nice assortment of tart and sweet varieties. At least one should be a tart variety such as a Granny Smith.

The amount of sugar will depend on the sort of apples being used.

 

Makes enough for 4, with plenty of leftovers for breakfast!

A
fter our first few days cooking in our new level, Junior, Tucker, Ben, and I quickly realized that we would need better equipment if we were going to survive the jungle of the Level 2 classroom. Our knives and the kitchen implements the school provided us on the first day of class were still in great shape; they just weren't quite adequate for the new tasks that we were being faced with. The basic equipment found in all commercial kitchens, like pots, strainers, sauté pans, and Robot Coupes (think food processor on steroids), now served as integral parts of our
batterie de cuisine
. But we Level 2 students shared all of this equipment with the students from Level 3 and Level 4. More senior students always had priority—if someone needed that Robot Coupe and it was full of your pea puree, you'd better empty it out, clean it, and have it on that student's workstation pronto, or the wrath of the chef-instructor would come crashing down on your head and on Chef Pierre's. Chef had made it very clear that he did not enjoy being reprimanded by his colleagues for his students' bad behavior, and woe betide the student who caused such a ruckus.

While none of us thought we really needed a full-scale standing Hobart mixer like the pair that churned away in the pastry kitchen—they are totally gorgeous, but weigh about as much as a fully loaded SUV—we all agreed that there were a few items that we needed to add to our arsenal, and as soon as possible. We decided to take a field trip to the Bowery. Only a few blocks from the back entrance to the school, the Bowery has long been famous for its restaurant supply stores. When a restaurant folds, as more than half do
every year in New York City, the Bowery is where most of the tables, chairs, refrigerators, stoves, pots, pans, mixers, and even spoons go to retire.

Like a French market, each vendor on the street sold only one or two specialties. There was a cluster of stores selling only front-of-house paraphernalia, everything from napkin dispensers and silverware to bar stools and hostess stations. Several more sold only industrial mixers, even larger than the ones in school—the huge machines seemed to loom out of the dark interiors like prehistoric monoliths, a culinary Stonehenge. Delivery trucks unloaded enormous refrigerators and stoves that still had parts of the walls they were attached to trailing from them.

None of us really needed a rotisserie oven or an almost-new deli case, tempting as all that stainless steel was, so we decided to concentrate on the smaller stores. Dented stockpots shared dusty shelves with extra faucet handles, giant fry baskets, and the occasional pan, whose burned-out bottom had seen better days. In a locked case at the back of one store were a few huge cleavers and what looked like a chain saw—I couldn't imagine what purpose that had served in the kitchen. There were sieves, spoons, and squareboys, all things we needed in class, but none of us had room for this equipment in our tiny lockers at school, and I couldn't imagine showing up to tutor with a big conical sieve under my arm, or riding in a crowded subway car with a ten-gallon stockpot wedged between my knees.

A beautiful set of old-fashioned scales sat in one corner, but even secondhand they were out of my price range. While it was fun to look at all the wonderful culinary toys for sale, it was also difficult. All of us were on student budgets, with tuition, rent, and bills to cope with. Tucker and Junior were roommates in the school's dorm out on Roosevelt Island, and often took home leftovers from the school lunch for their dinner. Ben, a native New Yorker and the son of hardworking first-generation Korean émigrés, still lived with his family in the Bronx to save on rent. I was lucky—Michael and
I agreed that while I was in chef school, he would handle the rent and I would handle the food bills. It was good training in more ways than one. School had taught me how to get more out of the raw materials I was buying, such as breaking down a whole chicken and using the meat in three different preparations—even using the liver to make rustic pâté, and the bones for stock. I had also learned to turn vegetable scraps into lovely soups and soufflés. In class, nothing was wasted, and I was quickly putting this lesson to use in my own life. The classes we had on calculating food costs and pricing had also come in handy, and I found I was quickly honing my mental math skills with the help of the grocery store's sale circular. None of us was going hungry, but we weren't exactly rolling in dough. The green kind, that is.

We decided that each of us would spend some of our hard-earned money on one piece of equipment that we could share. Tucker and Ben found a box full of unusual cooking utensils, some of which looked more like surgeons' tools than something used to make dinner. Ben was hefting a giant pair of tweezers, while Tucker made appreciative noises at a smallish double strainer. Both were useful pieces of kitchen gadgetry that we would use often in class. I, on the other hand, was smitten by a line of deli slicers gracing a window display. Ranging in size from a civilian toaster to an army jeep, they promised to reduce everything from pineapples to pig thighs to translucently thin slices. Like a mandoline equipped with a circular saw, these pieces of weaponry were made to slice your hand off. And like a bad boyfriend you just can't seem to get out of your system, I thrilled at the danger of it.

“I really, really need one of these,” I said to Tucker, as I stroked a brushed aluminum handle.

Tucker, the voice of culinary reason, gently pried my hand loose from the slicing plate and firmly steered me away from certain mutilation and back toward the more useful, if slightly more mundane, utensils. At this point, Junior was careening around the store,
banging on a stockpot with a metal spoon. We had to buy something and get out of there before Junior broke something, or before I bought something ridiculous. Ben bought his giant tweezers, Tucker a strainer and a stockpot for his personal use. So far, I was empty-handed.

We made several more stops as we wandered uptown toward Houston Street, but we still hadn't been able to locate a good electronic scale, or any more wooden spoons to replenish the ones we had been issued on the first day of class. With proper care and handling, a wooden spoon can last for years and years. My mother's wooden spoons were old friends of mine, and had populated her kitchen for as long as I could remember. My wooden spoon, on the other hand, had been through a hard few months and was ready for retirement. Once I left it too close to the high flame beneath a simmering stockpot and once I let it get way too close to the blades in the blender. My battered spoon looked more like a piece of kindling than something to cook with. Chef Pierre had recently inspected all our equipment and found my battered spoon to be cause for alarm.

“Darling. What have you been doing to that poor spoon? It is black! You can't make food with this thing! It is
dégueulasse
. Disgusting!”

He pitched my spoon into the closest garbage can and ordered me to find a replacement. Once his back was turned, I rescued the poor thing from its grave among the potato peelings and tomato seeds and stowed it away in my toolbox. My spoon may have been unsightly, and possibly unsanitary, but it had already seen me through a lot in the trenches of cooking school and it didn't deserve its unceremonious end in the trash. But I hadn't managed to replace it yet, and it was becoming a critical situation. We used our wooden spoons for everything in the kitchen, from stirring soup to sautéing vegetables to slapping each other on the rear end. I couldn't keep borrowing Junior's spoon forever. Eventually, he would realize I had it. Also, at the end of this level we would be taking our midterm
exams, and we had already been warned that borrowing equipment was not allowed. We would be on our own with only the chef 's jacket on our backs and the utensils in our toolbox.

Still, I had no luck at the stores on the Bowery. Tucker and Ben seemed to be snapping up the most useful and exotic tools, and Junior and I lagged behind, ogling impractical bits of machinery and getting in the way. We were at the end of the road, literally. The Bowery dumped a ceaseless stream of cars onto Houston Street, and we stood on the sidewalk for a moment, blinking in the late-afternoon light as heat waves rolled off the tarmac and the hoods of passing taxis. I still hadn't gotten a new spoon, and we were still missing some critically important equipment. The prospect of tomorrow's work loomed up before us—yet another day spent waiting in line to use the school's old and inaccurate scales, or frantically searching for a clean strainer, all the while listening to Chef Pierre telling us
“Vite, vite!”
was not appealing. By unspoken agreement we turned left and headed back downtown to regroup at Toad Hall. Surely something useful would occur to us after a couple of pitchers of beer.

There we met almost half our class, nursing beers and in similar states of dissatisfaction. We were only a few weeks into our time in Level 2, but already it felt as if we had been at chef school for years. We had all settled into a comfortable routine, shuttling back and forth to and from school, our jobs, and our regular table here at Toad. We had all learned a lot during Level 1, and we were continuing to expand our knowledge and expertise rapidly in the high-pressure environment of Level 2. But we had reached an awkward teenage stage of our development as chefs, eager to try new things, break some rules, and stun and impress the chefs at lunch with dazzling culinary exploits. This was heresy, of course. We were having a hard enough time pleasing the chefs with our efforts with the curriculum recipes.

Every day, we threw ourselves into preparing the recipes we
had chosen from the curriculum. Every single person in class was focused on making the very best seared salmon, green salad, or chocolate roulade that the chef-instructors had ever tasted. Every day, every single one of us waited with fingers crossed and bated breath to hear the meal critiques from the chefs' table. Every single day, we were disappointed. Our very best efforts were never good enough—the comments weren't always all bad, but no dish received good reviews from all the chefs. If the crust of the lemon tart was a good texture and baked well, then the lemon filling was bland or the candied lemon peel garnish was bitter. The veal stew might have a good flavor, but the presentation looked like a piece of
merde de chien.
The niçoise salad might be gorgeous to look at, but the boiled eggs were ever-so-slightly overdone. On and on it went, an endless torrent of criticism that swamped our classroom in invective.

I wasn't sure how much longer we could go on. Yes, we were certainly better cooks than we had been when we started out in Level 1. The recipes were no longer intimidating lists of unfamiliar ingredients, measured out in the bizarre shorthand of the metric system (we could now easily eyeball 10 grams of fresh chervil, or 35 milliliters of vanilla paste), and the French vocabulary of the kitchen was now our own familiar vernacular (“
Blanchir
me six yolks with 250 grams of sugar!” or “I need some
ciseléd
shallots for the
poulet
pronto!”). But we were no closer to being Chefs with a capital “C,” the well-known gods of the Food Network and best-selling cookbooks, churning out original recipes to the “oohs” and “aahs” of a studio audience—we couldn't even make the chef-instructors happy with a simple cream puff.