Week 3 at Le Cordon Bleu Dusit

Week 3 in pastry we continued with more sweet short pastry products. Chef prepped and baked lots of pastry shells, then went on to some tasty tarts.

First up, caramel & walnut tart, so simple & so good.

Next up, apricot tart which was ok(I am not an apricot fan!)

Then he made a strawberry tart, it looked beautiful & tasted great. What I liked was that he used strawberry glaze to finish the tart, that means even before you take a bite of the tart, the aroma of strawberry is upon you.

After the strawberry tart, a raspberry tart. Very nice….

Last for the demo was a fruit tart, Chef did two versions. The elaborate one above, then the more rustic one that we had to make for our practical.

Above is the fruit tart I made during the practical session packed away in my school lunchbox. It didn’t last long when I got home, I polished it off quite quickly. The trinity of fruit, pastry cream & sweet pastry was too hard to resist…..

Later on during the week, we looked at puff pastry. Making puff pastry by hand is “fun”, ok not really. After we made the puff, we made palmiers.

After palmiers we made paille, which are like puff pastry sandwich with jam filling. Very nice, the raspberry seed jam the school buys is amazing.

Chef showed us how to make vol au vent’s, pretty old school.

He also showed us how to make apple tart tartin the long way, in this method, the apples are pre-cooked in the caramel before baking.

We also made some apple turnovers (chausson aux pommes), they were lovely too good to share with anyone… lol!

At the same time during cuisine we also started looking at doughs.

We started with short pastry(pate brisee), chef demonstrated quiche lorraine & wild mushroom quiche both made with pate brisee. For practicals we did the quiche lorraine(bacon & gruyere cheese), though I wish we did the wild mushroom one instead.

Next up was puff pastry, during practical we made puff pastry. We used the puff pastry to make the dish above(chef’s plate), the dish is poached egg with cream leeks, sauteed bell peppers & albufera sauce. Chef showed us a really foolproof way of making soft poached eggs, all that is required is lightly simmering water & some vinegar.

We also learnt how to make omelets, the one one above is filled with candied onions.

To end the week, we did a roast chicken & vegetables jardinieres(french for veg cut like a stick).

That was week 3, 7 more to go…