Day 4: Sugar

Friday was a bit different, because we had our first field trip. When we got to the school we didn't have to change into our kitchen whites, which was a nice change. Each pastry student paired up with two culinary students for the morning. I showed my partners the different granola everyone made and explained the process. In turn, they taught me how to make an omelet. Here is a picture of me observing @sfcooking's Instagram:http://instagram.com/p/skbswqj9bl/?modal=true

http://www.greenleafsf.com/about

After breakfast we went to GreenLeaf, a produce distributor in San Francisco. They are both ASCO certified and USDA organic. They focus on trying to reduce their carbon footprint, so they also deliver dairy products, nuts, and bread. GreenLeaf invented what is known as the "toy box." It's where different colors of the same product are packaged together.

Toybox Cherry Tomatoes

When we got back we had "lunch," which was really just a butter sampling on baguettes, with goat cheese to cleanse the palate. I forgot to take a picture of all the different kinds of butter (we tried about eight kinds). If you haven't tried goat's milk butter, you should try it ASAP; it will change your life.

Mis en place for cooking sugar

After lunch we had a lecture about sugar. We talked about how it is made and the various different kinds. We then tried cooking sugar for the first time. Cooking sugar is difficult for a variety of reasons. First of all sugar is extremely unstable when it dissolves, so it always wants to go back into a crystallized form. You have to be really careful that there aren't any undissolved sugar crystals on the sides of the pot or on any of the utensils you're using, otherwise everything will just start to crystallized again. The thing that I found most difficult was that once you hit a certain temperature it goes through the different stages extremely quickly (and you have to keep in mind that the syrup will continue to heat up once you turn the heat off because the pot it still hot). We brought the sugar through all of the different stages: thread, soft-ball, firm-ball, hard-ball, soft-crack, hard-crack, and caramelizing (clear-liquid stage to brown-liquid stage), and, finally, burnt sugar. 

Photo Credit: http://www.nestlette.com/2013/02/sweet-sugar-candymaking/

The concentration of sugar increases with each stage, because water is boiled out of the mixture. We were advised to always use a thermometer, but to know what each stage looked like in the pot. The speed of the bubbles slows as the amount of water decreases. 

I will leave you with this photo of some caramel that ended up looking like Texas: