Job Update and Burgerlets

If you remember from a month or so ago, I left Jean-Georges and decided to pursue stagiaire positions at several restaurants before Lisa and I head back to Seattle. I started my first stage last week at Del Posto with their very talented pastry chef, Nicole Kaplan. I feel like this kitchen is good fit for me and I’m looking forward to spending six weeks with them. As for my next stage… I’m not sure yet. I need to go out and trail at some more restaurants to figure out where I might want to spend some more time.

Speaking of time, I have had a bit more of that on my hands this past month. Some of that extra time has been funneled into cooking at home more often. One dinner in particular was a very big success. Lisa just couldn’t stop talking about it (and I’m pretty pleased with the results as well). I stopped by the butcher shop, one of the few left in the city, and picked up a mixture of ground beef and pork to use for hamburgers. This is something I’ve discovered recently and I really never plan to go back to just plain beef burgers. The addition of the pork really makes a difference.

Since Lisa will only eat burgers on actual buns (not sliced bread), I either had to go to the grocery store and buy the buns or make them myself. Since I had the time, I decided to make my own buttermilk buns. The buns turned out a little smaller than I anticipated, not quite full-size but not quite “slider” size either. This is why I decided to call them Burgerlets instead of burgers or sliders.

The toppings for the burgers were goat cheese, carmalized onions, tomato “jam”, fig jam, mayo, and lettuce. I slowly carmelized the onions and then finished them off with some red wine. We didn’t have any slicing tomatoes, just little assorted cherry tomatoes. I decided to make a jam out of them, however I didn’t want to have to cook the tomatoes down and lose that fresh tomato taste. So instead I chopped up the tomatoes, put them in a strainer, salted them, and let the juices drain off. I then thickened the tomato juice using xanthan gum and added it back to the tomato solids. This created a tomato “jam” that was thick enough to stay put in the burger but still had the fresh tomato flavor. The fig jam I had made a few days earlier as a way to save some black mission figs that were almost expired. Actually, they had just started to mold but the great part about making a jam is that you boil it and kill off the little bit of mold that started to grow. I learned that trick at JG where we would save all the mushy and slightly moldy berries to be boiled down and made into sorbet. Here’s a picture of the final product.

And a shot of the sweet potato fries as they cooled after the initial blanching.

My First Wedding Cake

First, here is the photo that I was given by the bride as a basis for my design. She said that she liked the leaves with the names but did not like the tree on top. Luckily, she said that I had fairly free reign to be creative with the final outcome.

And here are some photos of the wedding cake that I made for my cousin in Colorado.

Their wedding had an outdoors theme and their colors were brown and green. The only gumpaste decorations are the small leaves around the edge of the top tier. The leaves with the names written on them are from a local honeysuckle bush and the flowers at the base were picked in the meadow where the ceremony was held. It was a lemon cake with a raspberry preserve and lemon curd filling. I also made a sheet cake for the occasion – carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.

I covered the tiered cakes in fondant just a couple hours before we got on the plane to fly to Colorado. I wrapped the cakes tightly in plastic wrap, surrounded them with bubble wrap, and packed them in boxes with packing peanuts. After we arrived I unwrapped the cakes to find that the fondant had absorbed moisture from the cake and was completely soft and deformed. I’m guessing that because the cakes were wrapped tightly in plastic it trapped the moisture instead of letting it dissipate like it normally would. Luckily I had brought extra fondant with me and was able to pull off the old stuff and re-cover the cakes. I wasn’t able to get quite as smooth of a crumb coat as before so there were some bumps and defects. However, with the leaves on the side I were able to hid the majority of the problems.

It was also my first experience with high altitude baking. I was at 8,000 feet and had to bake the carrot cakes. I looked up the guidelines for adjusting recipes for altitude and baked a small test cake first. The cake came out almost exactly how I wanted it, I just needed to adjust the chemical leavener a little more and also reduce the sugar a bit more. I made those adjustments without baking another test cake, but I was confident I’d get the results I was looking for. Luckily, I was right and the cakes came out beautifully. Both the lemon cake and the carrot cakes were big hits.

If you would like to see the rest of the wedding photos, they can be found here.