Brandon Jones
May 30 2018
Blog Post 5
Who knew folding bread dough was impossible. The way Chef Brendan demonstrated it, folding bread literally looked like making bread origami. You can’t underwork the dough or else there won’t be enough air in the dough for it to rise and if you overwork the dough, the whole thing collapses into a sad blob. Instead, you must work it perfectly, folding over the dough enough times in order to form a smooth ball of light puffy dough. If done well, you should be able to see air bubbles in the dough. But that’s not the end of it. After forming the perfect ball of dough, you have to carefully increase the tension of the dough, done by gently rubbing the ball of dough against the grain of a table until a cylindrical shape is achieved. Then tuck in the sides of the dough and place in a ready greased bread pan so that it can continue to rise for another hour or so. I had to repeat the entire process an additional nine times , ten in all, each day for the last week and a half. Valuable lesson to learn yet extremely annoying and frustrating. Lots of flour and raw dough sticking to your fingers. Glad to be done with it.
Anyway, I also got to do some other cool stuff. I worked on the garde manger station (cold appetizers and desserts) during dinner service with Chef Duron. We made three types of salads – a burratta salad with coined asparagus, asparagus spears, pickled chiles, and green goddess dressing; red oak salad with avocado crema, avocado, sunflower seeds, grilled chicken, snap peas, and pea greens; mixed salad with sherry vinaigrette and shaved parmesan cheese. Desserts consisted of espresso chocolate semifreddo (frozen chocolate mousse) with chili chocolate, a tuile wafer, and powdered sugar; rhubarb crostata with whipped cream; various ice creams; brioche donuts with hibiscus sugar and lemon curd; brownie Sunday with caramel. Overall, I learned the benefit of multitasking. To survive on the line, you have to work fast and smart. You have to plan ahead and prepare enough food so that you don’t run out during service, you have to know the menu well so that you don’t accidentally forget to add certain components of the dish (ie forgetting there is grilled chicken in the red oak salad – I did this a couple times) and you have to pay attention to the tickets. If they read “fire order”, they have to be made immediately and quickly but if they read “hold”, then you have to time the order to be ready in tandem with the other sections of the kitchen. In short, working on the line requires focus and vigilance at all times. And I loved every second of it. Hopefully tomorrow I will experience working on the pizza station and the pasta station again.