Competition Week 2

The second week of competition class and I’m still here. This week was a whirl wind of stress as our group prepared for the run-through we were doing of our Escoffier’s classical dish on-top of practicing pastry and nailing down the dessert that we’d be doing for competition. It was a busy week I’m not going to lie. We had to finalize our plating designs, our recipe conversions and delegate what needed to be done and who was going to do it. Again I say stressful. Although this week made me anxious and nervous to the point I wanted to pull out my own hair I have to admit that I was actually enjoyed every minute of it. The rush of adrenaline rushing through your body as the time ticks down and the sense of urgency pushing and motivating you forwards. It was great.
Monday we had practiced for our individual pastry skill which was actually fun and exciting granted I still need to practice more even if everything seemed okay. During the pastry skills portion I actually found a faster way of leveling out your pastry cream. All you need to do is tap the pan that it’s in and it’ll all fall evenly. That way you don’t need to fiddle around with a rubber spatula and the sides are clean. The next time I make pastry cream I need to make sure that I regulate the heat on my pastry cream or else it’ll over cook and have an almost curdled texture and that I have enough ice on the bottom so it’ll cool it down faster. For my segmented orange I need to practice more because my orange segments looked squared almost and fell apart somewhat. I also need to practice rolling out my pie dough evenly.
Tuesday we were suppose to have Chef Brown come in and demonstrate the dessert we’d be doing for competition but due to scheduling conflicts it was moved to Wednesday instead so went spent most of the day preparing our brown stock and white bullion for the run-through on Thursday. Then we practiced the deconstruction of the chicken. It took us almost a good three hours and almost 25 chickens till we finally came up with how to take the tendons out from the chicken. The best way to do it was to French the drumstick then sever the tendons connected to the end of the drumstick. From there you expose the tendons in one general area and pull them out with either your fish tweezers or pliers. We found that pliers actually worked better because of the teeth gripped better.
Wednesday was all about the dessert so it was one of my favorite days of class. Chef Brown came down and demonstrated how to prepare the Lilikoi parfait garnished with a hippenmasse palm tree, spice marinated orange segments, and a fried ginger stuffed lychee. Everything seemed easy enough because it was similar to something that we did in Pâtissière class. So I wasn’t too worried about it. The only thing that bothered me was make the hippenmasse palm trees because hippenmasse can be a very versatile medium but when it spread that thin it can be very difficult to handle because it’s so thin and fragile. I thought the concept and design was interesting and after looking at the finished product it looked very similar to the Consolidated Theater logo, which was funny because I work for them.
Thursday held the most stress because we literally jam packed the day with two intense cooking sessions. The first half of class we went over and practice make the plated dessert which wasn’t too bad the most humbling moment was whipping the cream. I accidently over whipped it and was so embarrassed so it wasn’t a good way to start off. But after that everything went well the only problem that every group had was that the parfait wasn’t freezing completely so it made an almost mess while plating the dessert. The good thing about today was that chef created a plum sauce that went perfect with the entire dessert. There a just need to be a few adjustments and the dessert is pretty much set.

The second half of the Thursday cooking session was our run-through of our classical dish. This was a pain butt as we everyone was scrambling around trying to figure out how they’d cook their dishes with only a limited about of stove space. Literally only four stove burners and only three table top burners. I was in charge of making the sausage and sautéing the chicken. The sausage wasn’t a difficult task just a time consuming one because it took me a while to figure out the cookie press that I brought in. Eventually I got it and was ready to move on to the chicken. Cooking the chicken was a challenge everyone was crowding around the stove that it made it difficult to cook on it. So I sautéed only half the chicken thinking we were only portioning out two plate, once again another of my mistakes. So thanks to my group I was able to get the second half of the chicken on and finish that. As we were plating there was a little structural problem as we plated but we adapted the plating and made it as close as possible to the draw. In the end we finished out dish and it looked amazing. After we tried and critiqued each other dishes we decided that the sweet potato croquette would be our starch and the Brussels sprouts and glazed tourneed carrots would be out two vegetables. After finishing this dish and the critiques were in I literally felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders. Again this whole week was stressful but the good kind of stress and I really enjoyed it.