eggbeater

March, a month in review. Part 2

...continued from the day, weeks before ~

March 15
-- Eat At Bill's shows at The Hillside Club. I organize a small East Bay contingent, many of us meet at Poulet and walk over together. I buy the DVD it's so inspiring!

March 16
-- Dinner at Rubicon with DB for my birthday. We eat a great meal, 3 desserts, and then, unbelievably, we go to Delfina and eat 3 more desserts! In between we stop off at Citizen Cake to pick up a dessert menu and I show him what I made during my time there. Lucky for Dave someone gives him a few sandwich cookies.

March 17
-- Ari's bday at Pauline's Pizza. (Did you know that all the pizza dough at Pauline's is made without machines AT ALL?!)

March 18
-- Bonnie & Bart's open house. (If you have time to watch that "video" you'll see some very silly photographs {all taken by ourselves: Bart mounted a camera on a pole and attached a shutter trigger cord: brilliant!} of people you know and don't) Surprising everyone, I bring chicken salad. I come home to something on my doorstep: a little brown bag filled with Pinenut-Rosemary cookies.

March 19
-- Another Shuna birthday dinner at Pizzaiolo.

March 20
-- At @7 am I turn 39. The first person to wish me happy birthday via the internet is Mourad Lahlou. The second is my newly ex girlfriend. The irony is not lost on me. When I wake up it's raining.
-- I make a lovely fresh english muffin breakfast complete with Fatted Calf bacon and poached eggs for my first birthday gift and me: my friend Jess spends the whole day with me as a present. When the sky opens up to let out sunshine we go on a long walk ending up at Monterey market where she buys me gifts of fruit.
--Dinner at Oliveto commences at 8:30 pm. We are 6 people: An ex, a crush, a mentor, a new friend, someone I've known for 10 years. It surpasses the meal at A16, but only barely, by the dessert margin. When the last menu is set down I say something terrible about a dessert offered called Raisin Tart. It's mean and disdainful. DB is incredulous. He admonishes me saying, "I think you've just let out your inside voice." Luckily I am forced to eat my words. We all admit the Raisin Tart is exquisite. Tara says it's her favorite. Rule of Thumb for Pastry Chefs: if your dessert cannot be cut with merely a fork you've done something wrong. If you live in the Bay Area I beg of you to eat this woman's sweet things.

March 21
-- Pavlova goes live on Simply Recipes. I am the first guest author in its history!
-- At 6 pm I meet a chef for a second interview: a night we're set to eat dessert at 3-5 SF restaurants. We meet at Bar Tartine, his only request. The rest are up to me. (I post a long thorough report on Chowhound on March 27.) At 1 am he drops me off at my house. (We agree I'll miss the last BART in order to look at the restaurant's upcoming location.)

March 23
-- Amarama brings me my own personal private birthday cake!

March 24
-- 40th birthday party for Bryan, a fellow I dated almost 15 years ago. The highlight is a wall in his Oakland warehouse dedicated to photos of him dating back to childhood. The best are the Goth years. O yeah, love the hair and eyeliner. Some boys make the prettiest girls. (& some girls make the most handsome of boys.)

March 25
-- I teach a completely full (12 people) class on Custards. We cover pot de creme, pannacotta, and stove-top chocolate pudding. A local magazine sends a writer.
-- Another Shuna birthday dinner at Lalime's. Although it's veritably in my neighborhood, I've never been. Now I will go again.

March 28
--Shuna birthday dinner made for by Kat and Drew. It's one of the best meals ever made for my presence! It helps that the dogs are as good looking as the humans. With friends like this who needs restaurants? (P.S. Drew is the man behind the spice - sugar blend that makes the entire doughnut party blush and moan.)

March 29
-- Supper at Pizzeria Delfina with Joy and Fatemeh. Yes, another Shuna birthday gathering. Highlights: grilled baby artichokes, Delfina cured salami, asparagus with sieved egg and lemon oil, cannoli.

March 31
-- First Seder of Passover. I'm making young ginger pot de creme. (Have to keep them on their toes.)
-- Road trip with Kat down to Santa Cruz to hear Dave DJ. There's an ultimate frisbee tournament... just like the sailboat race I'm chalking it off as a strange and new experience. Very "rave" to dance outside. Except I'll be sober.

 

Looking over the ridge into April-- Don't forget it's Poetry Month!

March, a month in review. Part 1

March.
My birthday month.

This year, a month full of unexpected incidents.....

March 1:

-- I post about something naughty/nice: Making Doughnuts!
-- Put the finishing touches on my 5th Edible San Francisco article, Spring 2007. I've come full circle: my first article is Spring 2006, subject rhubarb. With very few hints I'm sure you can guess what this springs subject is.
-- Eat at Campton Place for DB's 35th birthday. I'm riding BART for over an hour because a 6. + earthquake tremors through the station right before I miss my train to SF.
-- Paul, an ex, turns 31.

March 2
-- The article is turned in. I go to Dave's 2nd night of bday celebrating. The night ends in dancing to hip hop at Luka's in Oakland.

March 3
-- The coffee maker and I break up. It is a smooth, but bittersweet farewell.
-- That night I go to A16 for the first time ever with Paul and his new boyfriend R. Paul used to work as a line cook with Nate Appelman, the chef, at (incidentally) Campton Place. (If you think the world is small just try being a cook in the town-like city of SF.) The meal is absolutely stunning. It's rare a chef as young as Nate can produce meals with as much soul as what's offered at A16. (It will not surprise me if on March 3 2007 I had one of the best dinners of the year.) Before our last courses arrive Nate asks me to critique the desserts. Much to my amazement he is honest in wanting my opinions and we have an in depth discussion. (He says afterward, "Thank you for some advice that would have normally cost me a lot of money.") It feels good to be in the presence of a chef who defers to my knowledge, and me to his. It's been a tough day, but my heart is full, settled, inspired, when midnight comes.
-- Nancy Skall of Middleton Gardens turns 77. She is the oldest farmer I know.  (*I call her to say I'll be  up there soon for a visit and fruit purchasing.)

March 4
-- I decide to teach a class on the subject of egg whites March 11. It's a bold move-- not everyone understands why they need to understand egg whites.

March 5
-- Eggbeater turns 2 years old! I take a big chance in how I write about it. (The narrative voice starts with "you," an assumptive position.) I get an amazing amount of comments. I am overwhelmed with warmth.

March 7
-- I meet up with a young woman, new baker, who is new to pastry making and the area. Again I'm reminded I have something to offer, even if I am not associated with one particular establishment. At the end of the night we make a plan for me to come into a bakeshop she's working in. We are going to work on a a recipe for croissants. I'm excited to go into a new kitchen, reacquainting myself with this complicated laminated dough. I walk home floating.

March 8
-- Gerry, my faraway husband, has a birthday. He texts me from Eastern Europe where he's eating borscht and pirogi and having illicit adventures with cute boys.

March 9
-- I introduce Kat to Ici.
-- I finally get to pick up a few copies of Edible San Francisco Winter 2007.

March 10
-- For some bizarre reason I wake up early and drive to the SF Marina District and watch DB in a sailboat race. (The photographs in this post come from that day.) Note to self: take binoculars next time. It's definitely an adventure. = Not something I've ever done or seen before. Luckily I befriend Peter Lyons, a friendly fellow who just happens to be a photographer of all things Marine and we chat for hours while he shoots and the sailboats go round and round on a course only they understand. I get sunburnt watching.
-- At night I go to see an Epic Art show: movies, readings, art, snacks, an intermission, people in wreaths. The subject is Odysseus. It seems a perfect way to start off a strange day that began with watching small sailboat racing.

March 11
-- I teach a class on the subject of egg whites. In the class people see and learn Pavlova, floating islands, light butter cake and marshmallow! An entire contingent of Sacramento food bloggers carpools down.
-- I start to change the colors on eggbeater.

March 12 & 13
-- The gals and I make croissants. I haven't laminated dough since working at Citizen Cake and the feel of

the live yeast, the kneading of the dough and the rolling, turning, resting and laminating bring me back to the happiness of those early pre-light mornings. More than anything there is the feel of the dough when it's been kneaded to the exact right point: it feels just like baby skin. Soft, silky, smooth. It's possible that there are no words to describe the sensations, the emotions bread making produce.

March 14

-- My birthday is 6 days away. Part 2 tomorrow.

Culinary School: Virtual Tours Without The Actual Cost

About 12 years ago I worked at a small but very fancy restaurant in NYC called Verbena. Barely visible from the street, one had to walk down slate stairs to get into the place. We were located on a street called Irving Place that even some New Yorkers couldn't find if asked. It's a four or five block stretch that starts at 14th street (where The Palladium used to stand) and ends at the uber private Gramercy Park.

Gramercy Park is not public. You need a key to get in, but your apartment has to FACE the park in order to be given a key. Yes, it is that private.

Verbena was housed in a tiny brownstone. The chef/owner was Diane Forley, a short, darkly beautiful woman with an appealing manner, sharp intellect and small, but iron fists. She knew what she did and did not want and she was never playing around.

My pastry chef was a woman named Jamie Krulewitz. Although she has long since left the profession, Jamie is the reason I was eventually called and offered a pastry sous chef position at The French Laundry out of the blue. The dessert station was slightly removed from the main kitchen but it was a narrow affair in which, if you turned around, you were basically standing on the other side. The department was three people strong. Pastry chef and two assistants. Diane had at one point been a pastry chef, so she had a lot to say in our department. Sometimes all of it in fact.

Verbena was the hottest kitchen I had ever worked in until, in fact, TFL. One day I watched our lead line cook, a man of much weight and aptitude, fall over from heat exhaustion. Passed out cold. Until the ambulance arrived he was impossible to move off the line and people had to cook over him to keep up with our brunch onslaught. Days later, when he came back to work, after being professionally hydrated by the hospital, he showed me the thermometer he kept pinned to his jacket for fast reads on meat he was cooking. It was reading air temp at about 165F. Butter was liquefying on the counter and no one could drink enough water to keep up.

I trained and worked alongside a pastry cook for some months at Verbena who had just recently graduated from Peter Kump's, a practical culinary school in East Harlem. (It is now named The Institute of Culinary Education.) What I liked about this fellow, we'll call him Jason, was he had the driest sense of humour. he would say things with absolutely no tone, almost under his breath, and I would burst out laughing.

One day he told me this story:

As is the case with all colleges, pulling false fire alarms was all the rage at Peter Kumps. If an alarm was pulled, as I had to do in my Upstate New York college, no matter the time of day or night, every student had to leave whatever they were doing and immediately exit the building. No matter the temperature, the weather, or what was burbling away on the stove or in the ovens. Even when everyone knew there was no fire.

One January morning an alarm went off. As Jason and all his fellow culinary school mates stood outside, in the snow and below freezing temperatures in their whites, waiting over an hour for the fire department to come and check everything out, Jason said,

"The CIA we are not."

Of course he was referring to The Culinary Institute of America, the most exorbitant, premier culinary school in the United States.

This is the story I thought of when I was asked to check out "Inside The CIA: Epicurious Spies On Four Chefs-In-Training At The Culinary Institute of America," the latest in a wash of reality show/youTube/vidblogging/culinary school romanticism/undercover chef secrets tv/dear-diary internet stories overwhelming our senses.

Do you think one day my industry will be less romanticized and we can have an inside view of interesting law firms and hair salons? Or how about books exposing the juicy, little known work-life secrets of software engineers and Linux System Administrators?

As Amy recently reported, these little videos can be quite charming, perhaps even addictive. (My favorite people are Erin and Jared.) I didn't always want to go to culinary school, but I always wanted to know why the CIA was so expensive. I've always wanted to take a look inside, but I rarely find myself in Poughkeepsie anymore.

The equipment alone tells its own story. I have never seen all of those machines in one kitchen in all of my 15 years cooking/baking professionally. Not to mention what these people are learning. Let's put it this way, unless you find yourself needing to get a job in a hotel, you may never be putting many of those recipes/techniques to work. But hey, someone's gotta learn that stuff right?

Also, if you find yourself perusing these "culinary student videos" you will find links to other, slightly more in depth and informative "Chef Videos." Amy and I both like the one where Thomas Keller walks us through the laboratory-clean and organized Per Se kitchen. It looks a lot like The French Laundry kitchen except it's not on the ground floor, there are no windows looking outside, it's about 10 times the size and there is a separate room, at varying temperatures, for just about every station! And you thought I was organized.

I might sound old school and snarky, but it's true that I have watched more than a few of these little culinary school videos. Out of all the culinary school students I have trained, ones from the CIA are at least knowledgeable, if not conceited. I always say a person has to enter a kitchen acting like they know a little more than they do: a balance of humility and cockiness is needed.

At the CIA they graduate their people with a lopsided version of this. But no worry, myself or someone else will even them out.

Heh.

baking contest: answers.

Many of you guessed correctly! Fabulous!

Croissant dough it is! And out of it we made pain au chocolat, sticky buns and plain croissants.

A few weeks ago I met a young woman who is new to baking and the Bay Area. After much chatting, advising, listening, laughing, she told me she was working in a bakeshop where she and some other bakers were making croissants, but they wanted to improve them.

So I went in on a Monday and a Tuesday and helped with the "Croissant Tutorial," as they had aptly named it. We followed the recipe from Nancy Silverton's Pastries From La Brea Bakery cookbook, and then miraculously, we hand sheeted the entire process!

Let me first say, for those of you who may not understand the weight of the last sentence---

laminated dough is rarely, if ever (besides making a tiny batch inside your own home) laminated ( =  rolled
out, turned, rolled out & rested times 4) without the use of a mechanical sheeter!!! Just ask any bakeshop/pastry chef.

It was a great learning process. From the kind of yeast we used, live, to the temperature of the liquid, milk near 70F, to the kind of sugar we fed the yeast with, brown, to the amount of time we let it knead on the 20 Quart Hobart, 7 minutes, to the consistency and water content of the butter we used, to the temperature of the bakeshop, to the protein content of the flour, to the temperature of the proof-box, to the amount of steam in the proof-box, to the time we allowed the shaped dough to to proof, to the kind of oven we used, to the color we baked them until, to the amount of sugar within the sticky buns, to the time we waited to eat the end results.

Good g-d! So many factors!

Laminated dough is no joke. One must understand the ins and outs of all these factors before coming up with an edible or

delicious end result. One must be thoroughly focused and dedicated to the dough and its process. And have the space for its production!

Some of you have asked me in the comments section about whether I mentor/tutor. I do, I am. It's an incredible learning experience for me as well. I get to infuse newbies with my excitement and inspiration and in turn I re-activate much of my own. It reminds me how much I know, what I've forgotten, where I'm rusty and re-connects me to my intuition.

For baking is as much body memory, craft, and alchemy as it is practice, studying, reading, eating, science and recipes.

We bake because we want to share. It's about the intention of tradition; the learning, the practicing, the announcing and, of course, the eating. We feed original body memories and create new ones.

Although no particular restaurant or establishment owns me at the moment, I still have the desire to give back, to share, to teach, to watch and learn with other bakers, especially new ones. In the end it can only help preserve a tradition, a craft I love. And keep me on my toes-- for this craft requires a lifelong of learning. Only to learn that one has more questions than what were answered in the first place.

Restaurant Plated Dessert Crawl: Bay Area

As stated, I have eaten a number of desserts recently. An exhaustive report has been written. My mouth's travels can be found at Chowhound.

Read my opinions there by clicking here.

Insider dish ~ highpoint: Oliveto, low point: Salt House.
New place on my map: Lalime's.

sweet & salt relish: Quirky. Kooky. Vegan. Passover.

eggbeater.

where else could you go for a recipe so unique you might run screaming? a recipe so strange, so bizarre, you wonder why you still visit? where else will you find cocoa nibs and preserved lemons in the same recipe?

this is not el bulli. or alinea. no, not wd50.

but I have something intriguingly intriguealicious for you.

just in time for Passover.

KQED has the offender, the 411.

Vanilla Beans: Pastry Tip #481

If you can afford to use vanilla beans in your sweet kitchen, here are some tips for making them last longer.

For infusing a liquid, or easier release of the sticky seeds inside, pop whole vanilla pod in the oven or toaster oven (300-400F) for the count of twenty or thirty seconds. Vanilla bean seeds are held together with an oily substance, so heating them up a little bit will help you to split the bean, extract the seedy interior, and begin the infusing process.

Split beans top to bottom, vertically, into two distinct halves. Lay on a flat surface and scrape interior out with a small sharp knife.

Knock the oily interior into the sugar you'll be putting in your infusion, cake, cookie, etc. "Smush" seeds into sugar with thumb, forefinger and middle finger. Sprinkle this sugar into chosen sweet thing.

If you knock those seeds into liquid for infusion directly they will stay in the clumps they feel comfortable in. Either all the vanilla bean seeds will remain in one place, or worse: when you "pass" liquid through a fine mesh sieve (as is the case for ice cream base (= creme anglaise), pastry cream, and many other custards, you will leave behind, in the sieve, much of the vanilla you hoped would get into the custards. If you smush the seeds into the sugar, you spread them apart and have better vanilla bean tasting results.

When you're done using the vanilla bean sheath, wipe it off and keep it in a warm dry place. When dry and brittle, grind with sugar in a sweet dedicated coffee grinder. Don't worry if you can't get it really fine, the whole vanilla bean is edible.

Try to buy vanilla beans that look dark and wrinkly. An overly wet/plump bean has been messed with along the way. Because some "middleman" are selling them by the pound they will do an illegal thing: plump them in water to make them heavier.

Keep vanilla beans in the refrigerator in an airless/tightly sealed ziploc plastic bag. You can freeze them but it's not necessary.

Think vanilla is too expensive? Consider this:

The vanilla bean is the fruit of one particular orchid. This orchid only thrives in rainforest's. Although vanilla is cultivated by humans, the technique for pollinating the flowers requires so light a hand that the flower doesn't suspect invasion. A long, very thin needle is precariously dipped into the long narrow channel of the orchid, and then it's quite a long process to wait for the plant to fruit.

The vanilla bean you're using has been fermented and dried, like coffee beans or cacao.

For more information please visit Patricia Rain, The Vanilla Queen's site. Buying vanilla from her insures you are buying sustainably grown vanilla beans. And that the people who did the hardest work reap the rewards of their meticulous patience.

If you live in the Bay Area you can buy beans in bulk direct from Pacific Gourmet. Or find a distributor in your area and go in a pound of beans with other bakers in your neighborhood. They last forever!

And you can get a lot of flavor out of one single bean if you take any of these hints...

birthday cake!

You know someone is very brave when they bake a birthday cake for a pastry chef.

I'm lucky if I'm not the one baking my own birthday cake.

After a number of years of making my own cake, or sending someone to a favorite bakery for a cake I know I'll like, my good friend Amarama made me a moist, lightly spiced, seasonal citrus flecked, freshly baked & frosted, fresh pretty flower ringed delicious birthday cake. For private showing and consumption. (next year she says she'll be ready for the public cake.)

Birthday cake.

Brought to me, in my house, by personal delivery, in a red cake safe!

How could I not love this woman?

baking contest: what are we making here?

hey-- no cheating!

1. Knife Skills Class 2. Baking Class: My April Schedule

**2007: For a current class schedule, click here.**

Finally some more classes to look forward to!

APRIL 2007
Two Classes:

SUNDAY APRIL 15   KNIFE SKILLS CLASS
1 -3:30 pm
North Berkeley
$65

Walk away from this class more comfortable with sharp knives, your knives, and looking for the knife that makes your time in the kitchen easier! The class is part lecture, demonstration and hands-on with personal instruction. I've taught this class innumerable times, for a review, check out this link on KQED.

SUNDAY APRIL 22    SEASONAL FRUIT DESSERTS
12:30-4 pm
North Berkeley
$100*

 

Arriving just in time for strawberries, rhubarb and possibly cherries, a few wonderful desserts in which to showcase these lovelies. The possibilities are endless... Fresh Fruit and Cornmeal Cake, Flaky Galettes, Pannacotta, Pavlova, Sorbet, Shortcake, Crepes, Light Vanilla Cake (just like Angel Food Cake, but made slightly richer with a splash of melted butter and vanilla bean seeds), Doughnuts, Cream Puffs, and maybe there's something you really want to learn... Let me know!

How To Sign Up:

To register for a class, pay by simply clicking on the Paypal link (located in the right hand column of Eggbeater). If you wish to send me a check, email me (Email link is in the upper left hand column of Eggbeater) and I will give you a snail mail address.

*There are 2 spots reserved for "assistant" positions, at half the cost, in the Baking Classes (not for the Knife Skills, sorry.) If you feel you qualify, please email me directly.

The Mailing List:

If you want to be a person who finds out about the subjects of my next class RIGHT AWAY, without having to traipse back here all the time, I keep a small mailing list and send out the announcement to those people first. Email me if you want to be placed on my own personal Shuna Lydon mailing list. This list is shared with no one, it exists solely in my email program, and it's for this purpose only, so you won't hear a peep out of me unless a class is on the horizon!

Come One, Come All. Come Hungry To Learn!

Pavlova Dessert & Guest Authoring at Simply Recipes!

** 2007 For a current calendar of my upcoming classes, click here. **

You might remember that in January I sold out of all my eggbeater t shirts. Although I had been selling them on my own for over a year, more than a few dozen remained. Well, they were in my tiny closet. Being mailed out one at a time through the post office.

Then one day I had a brilliant idea. I would ask Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes if she could help me move said merchandise. Simply Recipes has over one million visitors per month. (!!!!!!!!!) Almost unfathomable to the petite eggbeater. She agreed and within days all the handsome blue T's were spoken for.

We had a deal. (Although if you ask me I got the better half.) The deal was that I would be a guest blogger/author on Simply Recipes when she needed some baking content. It gets better. Then I told her I was teaching a class on egg whites, would she want to come and take pictures for said guest authoring/recipe?

Not only did Elise come to my egg whites class, she organized a carpool for a few other Sacramento food bloggers to come too!

Lucky for you, we are passing on the careful instruction of the Pavlova: a meringue dessert of elegant simplicity, a swirl of elaborate flourishing finesse, a crispy-on-the-outside-melty-voluptuousness-on-the -inside light and simple sweet.

"It’s no coincidence the late Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, for whom the Pavlova dessert was named, is said to have been ethereal, delicate and slightly controversial. Her namesake, this simple confection, is a straightforward enough list of ingredients, but the end result is all about touch, finesse. And it’s attracted more than a fair share of controversy." Read the rest at Simply Recipes...

Photo sets of the Egg Whites Class, Sunday March 11, 2007:

By Fernanda, Garrett, Elise.

forty minus one

Thirty nine. Like turning 12, once you become a teenager there's no looking back.

This year my bday is better than it was one year ago today. There have been a lot of dinners, desserts and more on the horizon. It's been a little easier to think about.

What's amazing about an anniversary is we know what we have done every year. Or that's the hope at any rate. I've enjoyed being in my thirties. I turned 30 while working at The French Laundry. By some miracle I was given the night off. Upon leaving the kitchen I went to Thomas to shake his hand, something we were required to do before leaving the kitchen after a shift, day or night.

Surprised I was leaving he said, "Off tonight?"
"Yes Chef," I replied, our hands still entwined.
"Do you have plans?"

"Yes, I will be dining at Chez Panisse for my birthday with my mother."
"How old?"
"Thirty."
And with this last reply, he squeezed my hand a little harder,

looked me dead in the eye with a rueful smile and said,

"Welcome."

                                                          Happy First Day of Spring