"Practice doesnt make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect."

            I’m starting to find what I was looking for in culinary school. This school is all about “technique.” They even have a student run restaurant called Technique. Anyways, I’m starting to figure out why at home my baking never came out perfect. No matter the recipe, or how closely I followed it, I never got what I expected from it. I did always have high expectations though.

            So I’ve had extreme baking fails and I’ve also felt decently proud about some of the stuff I’ve done. When I did happen to fail at baking something, I usually tried to Google it and find a solution, I never could. I also had no clue where to start or what to be looking for. I didn’t know if it were the recipe I used or if I wasn’t measuring right, maybe I missed an ingredient, who knows? So what I wanted to do was bake more, and experiment with different ingredients and take mental note of what I did and what I maybe could have done better the next time which is easier said than done. It’s hard to bake a lot at home, especially sweet stuff, I never want to eat it all so I love giving it away, but that gets expensive. So whenever I would bake there would be a big gap in between then and the last time I baked, months even. Because of how little I was able to bake I usually just ended up repeating the same mistakes. That will get you nowhere. Something my College English Professor used to always say, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”

             Now that I am going along in my courses I’ve started to realize the problems I’ve had were based on my mixing methods. I had no idea that when you bake a cookie, the end result of that cookie depends mostly on the way you mixed it. If you mix it too much, you’re going to get a flat cookie. You get a flat cookie by not letting the dough trap air in it. How do you trap air in your dough, you ask? Well let me tell you! Butter needs to be room temperature, mixing speed needs to be slow/medium, you need to mix eggs in slowly and one at a time, you should sift your flour and Do Not over mix. Also, only mix in your chips for a little bit, and at slow speed. Your chips can get beat up in the mixing bowl and turn your cookies a darker color than expected. So when you mix in your chips do it on slow speed just to add to the dough. After that you should use a spatula to fold the dough and distribute the chips more evenly throughout.

            So my cookies I made the other day turned out decent but they could be a little better, nothing is perfect and I am never extremely happy with whatever I bake. I always find something I don’t like. Anyways, those cookies I baked were good, they tasted great and compared to the rest of my class they looked decent, not the best but good. Today we did a practical chocolate chip cookie test. With no help by our neighbors we had to make cookies entirely by ourselves. They have to be perfect cookies. I don’t want to jinx it but my dough seemed perfect this time, way better than last. We have to wait until Tuesday to bake them though so I have to keep my hopes up for a few days. :/ I’ll tell you how they came out once I get the chance.

            I don’t have much to say today. Sorry I haven’t blogged in a bit. At first there was nothing to blog about and then finals week happened and I got too busy with studying. I’ve also been trying to keep a good sleep schedule going. So let me catch you up. This past week was the last week of two of my classes and I’m now onto the next one. Finals week started with a Safety and Sanitation final which was pretty easy, that was the only final for that class and I passed it. Culinary Foundations 1 had three finals. First was a kitchen product ID test in which Chef set out a bunch of different items on the tables and asked us to label them properly. I passed this test but I got a few wrong because I wasn’t specific enough when labeling them. We had a knife cut test. He asked us to cut red and green peppers into Julienne sticks, a cucumber had to be cut into Julienne and Batonnet sticks, an onion was to be cut into Macedone cubes and 3 tomatoes were cut into Brunoise cubes. At the end of this final our whole class combined all of our cuts and made some Gazpacho, a cold vegetarian soup. It tastes good with tortilla chips, mostly because it tastes like salsa. All you do is get together a bunch of fresh vegetables, a bit of tomato paste, some cayenne pepper a little bit of bread with red wine vinegar and then some cayenne pepper and salt, then you puree to finish. Put it in a nice bowl, throw a garnish on top, and drip some olive oil around to make it look nice. We also had to make mayonnaise without using a recipe for our final. There are two things I feel you need to remember when making mayonnaise, pour small amounts of oil (or fat) and mix FAST when doing so, and never forget the water. This final was kind of intimidating at first, mostly for me because I never got to see the demo in class; I was sent to go cut potatoes for our dish we were making that day. I got it though, and it turned out to be easier than I thought, your arm just gets tired. This test had two girls in my class crying (that I knew of). We also had a really big, stressful test to do this week. It was part of my Safety and Sanitation class, but it had nothing to do with my grade for the class. This test was to get our ServSafe Foodhandlers card. There are two versions of this test, one is just the basic foodhandler version and the other is for restaurant managers. We took the manager version. Chef has told us about students in the past that have failed this test. He said that he would have classes of about 30 students in which only maybe 7 passed. Since we were one of the last of his classes to take this test he also told us about all the other students failing it earlier in the week. To retake the basic version of this test is over $30, to retake the version we took, the manager version, is over $110. So we all sat in the LRC at the computers and took our test for what I think was 2 hours. I took my time, went through all the questions and went over them again. While doing this I was noticing all the people in my class around me getting up and walking out, I got to overhear each one of them telling the Chef they failed and need to schedule to retake it. So the more this happened the more I lost confidence. Then the Chef walked up and told me 20 minutes left, this is when I realized it was a timed test. So I quickly went over all my answers again and re-read all the confusing ones and hit the submit button. As soon as you hit that button it tells you whether or not you passed and I passed! Another thing that happened this week was that I finally got a pin for my lanyard. It’s from the Red Cross Blood Drive for helping out so much. So this week was a good one. Next blog is going to be about my new class, Introduction to Patisserie and Baking Techniques.