Oh Man.
Macaroons. Macaroons. Macaroons. Guess what I've been doing!
There is a visiting Chef from French Canada in the school for a couple weeks and he was nice enough to do a demo for our class this morning. Aside from the near impossible, thick French accent the man speaks with, talking with him as been very informative. He demoed 3 different flavors of bite size macaroons today. His technique is totally different from our teacher, which is weird. For example, Macaroons have a body relatively reliant on fluffed egg whites, and chef stressed the need to keep as much body from the egg whites as possible. Not Monsieur Chef! He just beat that stuff together like nothing I've ever seen! It was pretty funny.
The other hilarity about Monsieur Chef is that he stresses, constantly, the the way to make the money. He doesn't some much talk about "This is how to make yourself a good pastry chef" he talks about "This is how to make the bucks." Which, isn't all bad. It's good to know what people are looking for, which (by the way) is experience across the world. You name a country, this guy has been to it. It's impressive.


Anyway! So, Macaroons. Very light and fluffy. Mostly egg white with sugar. Awesome, as most things are, when chocolate is involved. We have to make an almond macaroon for our final this Friday. I seem to suck at getting them to the correct size. I try so hard to make them circular, that I completely missed the whole, Petit Four size idea (2 bites). They are way to small. Sigh. Anyway. These things are cheap and easy, good thing to remember, cause people still charge a bundle for them!