Week 10 - Project Bagel Launches
Over the weekend we had somewhat spontaneously decided that we were going to assign ourselves the side project of making bagels so early Monday morning the journey began. The Americans among us were all desperately craving bagels while the Irish natives claimed that bagels are not even that good. This of course merely spoke to the quality of bagels available in the Emerald Isle. This is the great human rights travesty of our time.
Gabby found this great sourdough bagel recipe from Max Blachman-Gentile aka formerly of Tartine Bakery so you know it was going to be good. We figured we all had our sourdough starters in the bread shed, so it would be a match made in heaven. The recipe is a 24 hour process so I will spoil the results - they were amazing. Even the bagel skeptics in the room agreed they were incredibly delicious. Picture evidence below:
In actual assigned-practical-kitchen-time, as opposed to bagel side projects, on Monday I made hot smoked salmon with dripped labneh and watercress oil, bread and butter pudding, and a vanilla bean ice cream. Making labneh was much simpler than I expected it to be and it feels impressive to say you made a homemade cheese when really all you do is let the liquid drip out of yogurt. Also, for the Americans out there, bread and butter pudding is essentially french toast casserole. I forgot to take a picture of it, so instead you can enjoy a picture of one of our instructors filleting a fish, and Nicola with her pasta dough.
My memory for Tuesday is literally a black hole. I have no idea what I made in the kitchen. The excitement for our bagel results has overshadowed whatever I accomplished in the kitchen that day and I have no accompanying picture on my phone to jog my memory. I sincerely apologize to my dear readers for this lack of oversight. Screenshot of iPhone note apology coming soon.
Wednesday morning we had a sushi demonstration from an Irish-Turkish chef who had never lived, worked, or even visited Japan. Sorry to be a brat, but color me unimpressed. It did make me miss ordering takeout on a near weekly basis at home, though. This post was brought to you by Uber-eats. In the afternoon we had our final wine lecture. Not sure how much I retained from these lectures, but hopefully enough to sound impressive to waiters when navigating a wine list moving forward. In my defense my memory isn’t at its strongest when you are sampling five wines on a weekday afternoon.
Thursday was Thanksgiving back in America and so I made the traditional pilgrim meal of spicy haddock and squid cakes with Thai dipping sauce and pickle arjard. I also made a loaf of sourdough bread which I was quite pleased by despite the fact that it was quite triangular. My opinion on sourdough bread is famously complicated - I love it, but I hate the American social media trad wives who have essentially weaponized sourdough bread as some kind of righteous, pious act of motherly martyrdom. I could literally write a pHD thesis on this. That being said, sourdough bread can slap.
On Friday morning before kitchen time, my friends and I finished our second round of Project Bagel - this time with only middling success. Partly because we tripled the recipe and didn’t give the dough enough resting and proving time, but mostly because we did not sieve the wholemeal flour and so the moisture absorption was off. That being said, the bagels were still edible, especially once toasted. The important thing was that lessons were learned and Project Bagel will continue to fight another day.
After bagels, I finished a caramel ice cream I had started on Thursday, made brandy snap baskets, seared tuna with a roasted red pepper salsa, and a gateau pithivier. For my american friends, gateau pithivier is the same thing as King’s Cake associated with mardi gras. This was one of those mornings in the kitchen it felt like I accomplished four million things, which is satisfying, but also means you do not take a single breath for four hours straight. A minor trade off!
The large morning menu also made me feel less guilty for skipping the afternoon demonstration in favor of leaving on a trip to Dingle. But more on that in the next post!