As I promised yesterday, I was ambitious tonight and took on a two-layer Coconut Cake from page 69 of Martha’s All-American section.
Instead of just going on and on about how delicious this cake is (and it sure is!) I wanted to talk a little about the art and science of working with pastries. Some people think that if you graduated from a top culinary school you know everything about pastry, but culinary arts and pastry arts are two different things and two different programs. The truth is that most non-pastry chefs hate working with pastry with a passion! That’s because it’s considered an exact science that inhibits creativity. At the school I attended, all students are required to learn a little bit of pastry, which inspired a lot of grumbling from my fellow classmates.
I’ve actually enjoyed woking with pastry since I was a child. I grew up with an Italian grandmother who would spend hours in the kitchen making wonderful cookies and cakes, especially around Christmas time. I had a particular fondness for cookies and I would give them as gifts to my co-workers for the holidays, much to their delight. However, pastry instructors didn’t like me at all! I think I came off as laid back to them, a trait they despise. Now you can ask Jeff if I was laid back and casual about culinary school … he’d bring up the sleepless nights, and the occasion that I bought 15 chickens so I could time myself butchering them until I finally fell to the floor weeping, all the cuts and burns I endured, the wrenched neck muscles from lugging around 50 lbs vats of stock. No, I was hardly laid back about making it through that program! But the school I attended was the culinary equivilant of training to be a world class Olympic swimmer when all I could do was flap my arms around wildly and keep from drowning. To pastry chefs, this came off as not being serious, and pastry chefs are deadly serious people. I was dead serious as well in that I paid a fortune to be there and I wasn’t going to let anyone, be it the young hot shots in my class or the chef instructors, roll right over me. The irony of my nasty relationships with the pastry instructors is that I actually enjoyed the art of pastry far more than most of the students they adored.
So what’s the difference between our grandmothers and professional pastry chefs? The finished products are almost always heavenly, so I would say that’s something they have in common. The main difference is that a pastry chef works in an environment where if certain elements aren’t just so, your dessert is doomed and that breeds a certain tension and a mystique around precision. Your grandmother didn’t bake for a profit driven restaurant so she did it out of pure joy for making something special for her family. Her results might not be as beautiful to look at as a dessert at a Michelin starred restaurant, but they just might have tasted even better!
Whenever I work with Martha’s cakes and pies, I follow the recipe exactly as it appears in the book. As you know if you’ve been following the project, I don’t always do that with savory dishes. That’s because even in home cooking, working with pastry, especially those you’ve never done before, requires the discipline to try to replicate the recipe if you want the best results. This coconut cake took a lot more eggs than I’m used to working with in a cake, the results rendered a cake that was dreamy and lighter than air. That doesn’t make it any less creative than going off and doing your own thing, it only means you’re channeling your creativity in a different way.
Martha Stewart is an amazing pastry chef, and quite honestly, based on her television shows alone, I’ve learned more about the art of working with it than I ever did in culinary school because it’s easier to learn from a person who’s smiling at you than one who is sneering at you and calling you stupid. This project is turning me into a real expert at pastry and I couldn’t be more grateful for that!
