Croissant Making Class

Yesterday was my lucky day. It might be argued that EVERYDAY is my lucky day since I am living in Paris at the moment. But yesterday was an especially fortunate day for me and my pastry loving self because I was able to take a baking class, the focus of which was croissant making. This class was actually not my first foray into croissant making; I took a week-long course at the Cambridge Culinary Institute in Massachusetts several years ago. And though that class was taught by an amazing French pastry chef, the quantities of dough we made were insanely enormous, and it was difficult to transfer the knowledge to a modest home kitchen such as my own. That class was geared towards people looking to open their own bakeshop, or to work as a pastry chef for a restaurant--or perhaps those who have many, many extremely hungry friends stopping by for brunch every Sunday morning. I really loved that course, but I have to say that yesterday's class really outshone it--for a few reasons. For one thing, taking croissant making while in Paris is just such a wonderfully apt and cliche-leaning circumstance. As you may have noted from my last blog (the topic of which was Paris in the springtime), cliches are really enjoying a moment in my life. So it was great to add this little number to my arsenol. For another thing, we made MUCH smaller quantities of dough. While it is impossible to make croissants for only, say two people, it is still much for reasonable to be making 25 croissants at a time rather than to be making 250. For me anyway--you might be one of those people who have scads of really hungy friends popping by all the time. And thirdly, my teacher yesterday was AWESOME. So the class was at this cooking school located in the 18th arrondissement. As a point of reference, Amelie lived in the 18th. Once off the metro near the school, I walked up a hill and saw Sacre Coeur looming like a gorgeous cupcake of a basilica up above me, the sun was shining brilliantly, and I knew I was about to get seriously involved with a lot of butter. This situation was really the perfect way to start any day. The ideal scene was slightly marred by the fact that I arrived a little trop tot for the class, and thus the school had not yet opened. While waiting, I had to share a bench with a sleeping bum and his several empty cans of beer. But so high were my spirits that even that unsavory scene did not dampen them. So the school is called Cookin' with Class (www.cooknwithclass.com) and they also have courses where you go to a market with a chef to pick out local ingredients with which you will cook that day, a wine and cheese pairing class, bread making, and macaroon making. They may have one or two more, but not many. And I definitely liked that they did not have a list of 7000 options. It made me think that by offering just a few courses, they were likely really great at those offerings. And if the baking/croissant making class was any indication of the caliber, I would say my assumption was correct. So my teacher's name was Pino, and he is this really great French/Italian guy who lived in New York for a while too. He had the French devotion to refinement and high quality mixed with the Italian love for food and fun, and then on top of that, there was a dash of salty New Yorker as well. He was really technical and precise, while also being fun and encouraging. Best of all, he was neither overbearing nor impatient. This description might sound like a "normal" one for a good teacher. But I have taken a lot of cooking classes, and I have been screamed at by teachers, or else shoved aside when attempting to do something which the teacher immediately decides is the "wrong" way to approach it, and thus has to take over. Chefs are perfectionists, after all. The worst classes are when you are assigned different tasks, so you leave with no concept of how the whole dish was actually made. Like when you are left to shred cheese for 30 minutes and when the mushroom risotto appears at the end you have no idea how it came to be--though you are now really well acquanted with the common cheese grater (as if you weren't before). I really do not like leaving a class where I just "learned" something, and the first question I ask myself when standing in my own kitchen (probably clutching the cheese grater) is: "Umm, how on earth was that even made?" Here, we got to do eveyrthing. Even though the process is really precise and you have to be really careful to not overhandle the dough, and getting the butter to distribute all through is sort of difficult, he actually allowed us to do it without freaking out about our inevitable imperfections. And he was funny too. Best of all, he provided this butter lover with some seriously essential information. For one thing, there are a lot of boulangeries all over Paris where they do not use real butter. They instead use margarine (the NERVE!) or vegtable shortening in an effort to keep costs down. This revelation explains why I have had to shun certain bakeries because I felt their butter was sub-par. Turns out they were not using butter. I do not think you can fully appreciate how gypped I feel by this news. Had I any foot to stand on, or any coherent French to speak with, I might stage a coup. The good news is the he provided me with the names of some places where I will surely get the "real deal." He also gave some wonderful resto recommendations, and was just a wealth of knowledge in general. Not only did I learn (or re-learn, I guess) croissant making, but I finally understand how to use vanilla beans. Also how to preserve them; you soak the buggers in rum. After 10 days, the rum becomes actual vanilla extract and then you can squeeze the bean stalks like a tube of toothpatse to get out any remaining vanilla beans. I must say, the Food Network NEVER taught me that. So we made croissants, pain au chocolat, raison rolls, and two types of the most amazing brioche I have ever tasted. One was white chocolate and walnut, the other was dark chocolate and scattered with Cointreau-soaked rasins. This brioche was seriously out of control; a gastronomic phenomenon that I will remember until my dying day. Seriously, I think I could never eat again and I would feel satisfied knowing I ate the most yummy thing out there. But that would just be silly of me--who wants to be hungry all the time? So I will just say that yesterday was my lucky day and leave it at that.