it has begun

hello all!  the excitement has begun.  i just got back from attending my first pastry school class and it was frigging fabulous!  the summer is going to be so incredibly amazing and i cannot wait to go back tomorrow night.

chef amy, the instructor for the course, is very nice and exceptionally funny, though i am betting that she has a pretty strong serious side hidden in there somewhere as well.  tonight though, she was friendly, informative, and very patient as we got started.  while it is said that pastry people have a tendency to be a little obsessive, she is not overly so and she is just scattered enough that her lecture style kept me focused and excited about the lesson.  

i fear that i am going to be labeled the science geek in our class because i have so thoroughly enjoyed reading about all of the cool food science stuff this week.  i even drew little cartoon glutenin and gliadin monsters in my notes.  (glutenin and gliadin are the proteins in flour that form gluten when activated with water and agitation)  i've been baking for years and everything has pretty much been trial and error.  after this i am going to be armed with the knowledge of how to perfect recipes without making a bagillion different versions of something.  for instance, did you know that you can prevent the formation of gluten by adding sugar to your dry ingredients?  it breaks up the protein bonds to inhibit too much gluten from forming!  how fun and cool is that?!  i know that most of you don't care anyhere near as much as i do, but suffice it to say that i am extremely happy with the amount of stuff i have learned already.

there are only 11 students in the class, which makes for a great learning environment and hopefully some great friendships as well.  i feel bad for rich because he is the only guy in a room FULL of girls, but he doesn't seem too concerned.  the others ladies in the class all seem really fun and have such a wide range of experience that i am going to learn a lot from them as well.  obviously most of us have been playing in the kitchen for quite a while and it was really fun to hear everyone's stories about how they came to be in the program and what they want to accomplish.   it is amazing to see how many people make such a serious career change to get into pastry.  we've got a nurse, an MRI tech, a social worker, and even chef amy has a BS in psychology that she put to use just about as much as i have mine.  

tonight we discussed the 6 main ingredients in the bake shop and their roles in the kitchen.  our main focus was flour and butter because we used them to make pie dough later on in the evening, but my brain is already expanding with new information.  i'm going to have to go over my notes about a thousand times to make everything stick, but at least this is interesting enough for me to stay motivated.  i'm not even really all that scared of the pace because everyone there is learning right along with me and we all want the same things out of the program.  i learned a really cool way to make pie dough tonight and i am super excited to bake it on saturday so that i can see how it turns out.  tomorrow we will start breaking into different groups and that is where the craziness will start because each group only completes a portion of the recipes for the day rather than all of them.  in order to be fully comfortable with everything that we are learning and will be tested on, i am going to have to do some serious amounts of cooking at home during the week.  

tomorrow we get to make a couple different types of dough and then saturday we get to do all of the fillings and stuff to go along with our pastry doughs!!!!  it is going to be seriously hard to not spend my whole summer eating nothing but pastry.  it may be time to start counting points again :)  

time to go read through some more recipes!