POACHED PEACH AND LEMON ICE CREAM

Tonight we get tested again, this time on lessons 10 through 18 from our Level One textbooks and recipes. We're meant to focus on marmites, doughs, chicken preparation and vinaigrette. And we must really be into the summer menu as the dessert we'll be making in pastry tonight is a simple minced fruit with ice cream.

More after class...

DISH: Poached Peach With Raspberries, Lemon Verbena Ice Cream (Lyon), Peche Pochee Et Framboises, Glace A La Verveine

For the Ice Cream

Boil one liter of milk, remove from heat and add 100 G roughly chopped Lemon Verbena leaves and infuse for several hours. Whisk 16 egg yolks with 250 G sugar until pale yellow. Boil milk againand temper egg-sugar mixture with it. Cook custard slightly but don't allow eggs to curdle then strain it through a fine cninois and set over ice.

Finely mince 40 G Verbena leaves and when custard cools, add it and juice from one lemon. Process custard in the ice cream machine and place the ice cream in the freezer until service.

For the Peaches

Mondez four peaches and poach them until tender in a sumple syrup made from 500 G of sugar and 500 ML of water.

Assembly

Put a portion of ice cream at the bottom of a wide coupe. Cut a peach in two and place a peach half on top of the ice cream. Surround with some raspberries and spoon about two tablespoons of coulis over everything. Garnish with a verbena sprig.

BREAKDOWN: Wow, what an unmitigated disaster. About 15 minutes after I left the house for school it started to rain, no not rain--pour. It's the kind of rain I love, just not when I'm carrying several electronic devices. The umbreller-fellers hadn't come out from wherever they hide and if I waited around under an awning I was going to be late for class so I bought a copy of The Times and a copy of The Sun, pulled out the Dining sections of each, stashed them safely in my bag and used the rest of them to cover my head as I rushed the rest of the 10 minute walk in a torrential downpour. By the time I arrived at school I was soaked but still managed to sweat, my white t-shirt some bad version of a chef in a wet t-shirt contest (forget that I've gained 10 pounds since I started classes please).

So I arrived on time but my clothes would be soaked after class, the pastry freezers were on the fritz, our pastry chef was as a result in a horrible mood and worst of all my digital camera wouldn't turn on. The prospect of continuing to blog about food without it is...well, I might as well quit writing without it so if it doesn't work tomorrow I'm going to be out another few hundred dollars, something I can't afford right now. But you're not here to listen to me cry about my finances let's just say that there are no pictures of tonights' dessert (though we're probably all the better for it) and get back to class.

The freezers, on the fritz, the dish...LEMON-VERBENA ICE CREAM. Did I mention the freezers were on the fritz. The freezers were on the fritz. There was no air-conditioning in pastry and could you believe it but the freezers were on the fritz. That's pretty much like death right there and it put our chef in a foul, foul mood. We ammended the recipe per Chef's instructions, 1 L milk and 1 L cream, 200 G of lemon verbena insteadh of 140G, 8-10 yolks instead of 16, and a touch of green food coloring. For the raspberry coulis, 1-2 pints of raspberry, sugar, juice from one lemon, simmered on the stove top until it breaks down and masticates but is still runny.

Chef also suggested mint leaves brushed with egg white and dipped in confectioner's sugar for garnish.

The ice cream was being processed in the machine ahead of the time he gave us as our goal, 7:30 p.m. but still we were told we were wasting time. No, Chef said, we shouldn't use the working freezers in Level II, for some reason no one thinks to use salt in the ice bath to cool the creme anglaise quicker so that we can set it (salt brings down the temperature of the ice), no we shouldn't do the Tuesday or Thursday recipes (or the others we brought like the recipe for Boca Negra Chocolate Chipotle Cake I brought) even though we have time but instead we should do some turns of Pate Feuilletee, pastry filled with cold butter which because the freezers aren't working is pretty much melted, even though it's melting as we touch it, ruining them immediately, yes he's sure we should go ahead anyway, and no we should stop because it's obviously not working. Getting the picture?

Then one of our group over-poached the peaches but because they were told to keep them on the stove by Chef, we get reamed and have to repeat the peach poaching and to boot two hours later, the ice cream hasn't set in the one freezer that is working, the service freezer. That's right, peaches with gloop. Then the sugar baskets won't come off of the ladles, who knows why. Melted sugar, 600 G, with water, a pinch of cream of tartar and then about 50 G of corn syrup added on the heat once the sugar and water have melted, then heated to 162F and strung over a large, oiled ladle.

After struggling for a half hour with the sugar baskets I gave up but one of our group, Tim perservered. He sprayed a lot of Pam on the ladles, drizzled the sugar into the basket shape, dipped the ladle entirely in a bowl of cold water and presto, the baskets slipped off. Nice job on Tim, seriously. We had baskets for service to cover up our desserts which I tasted at the end, ugh, what a disaster. Ideally, the basket should have been open and at the bottom of the bowl not trying to hide what was underneath.

The ice cream, even it it hadn't been gloop wasn't terribly tasty. It smelled like a bad creamed spinach ice cream, like an herb-dirt-cream. It needed sugar, lots of it. I'm not sold that the changes made it any better either. Perhaps the more yolks would have made it more creamy and help it set more, and it needed less verbena and more...anything. It needed to be put out of its misery really but instead we sent it out into the restaurant. It was embarassing. The lesson today was pardon me but, fuck that. If you know the Chef is telling you to do something that isn't going to work, don't do it. Do things the way you know they need to be done. The ice cream should have stayed in the machine for another five minutes and it should have been put in the Level Two freezer to set in a salted ice-water bath and checked frequently.

Just fyi, in case you don't know, as I didn't, lemon verbena isn't actually lemon-- according to Wikipedia it is, "is a deciduous perennial shrub native to Peru, Artentina and Chile, and was brought to Europe by the Spanish in the 17th century. It grows to a height of 1 to 3 metres and exudes a powerful lemony scent."

I'm not sold that even if the freezers had been working that this would be an appealing dessert. I wouldn't make it again independently, though we'll have another shot at it down the road. The three positives...100 on my stocks test, whohoo! The vegetable station made a cool dish, coconut crusted tofu with peach chutney and cataloupe soup. And hey, the best thing about cooking is we get to go back at it again on Friday when we can do things much, much better.