Art of Cooking - J-Term 2023

Day 7: The Duality of Pastry One Group's Finished Spinach Quiche One Group's Finished Fruit Tart Today began with a brief gathering before we split into groups and Advanced headed off to the Bissonnet Campus. As we all filed into the kitchen, Chef Jessica began to explain that the process of making dough for Quiche and Fruit Tart is very delicate. Because of this every group started by fully reading through the entire recipe a couple of times, and preparing for a busy day. Talulah and Mackenzie making custard The first thing we all began working on in the kitchen was the cream for our fruit tarts. It had to sit in a bath of ice water before use for quite a long time, so we got right to it. Every group had some difficulty with boiling ingredients down for the custard. My group did not have a sufficiently powerful cooktop so the dairy ingredients just slowly started to separate. As for the other two groups, theirs cooked too quickly which caused it to burn. Once Chef Jessica help

 Fried Rice: Art of Cooking day 4 (Intermediate group) 1/9/2023 (Final image of Chicken Fried Rice)     Today in Art of Cooking, we made Fried Rice with a side drink of Boba to go along with it. Today's recipe was concise and straightforward, only taking little to no time to prep the veggies and eggs, to then make the fried rice.  Although today's recipe may have been very simple, for someone who isn't very experienced in cooking like myself there can still be a lot to learn. One of the things that my group struggled with was the right amount of Soy Sauce to add to the rice to get a perfectly rich taste. We at first put too little Soy Sauce and couldn't taste it very well then put too much that it was way too overpowering. We ended up restarting and with the help of Chef Jessica she taught us a trick to finding the perfect amount of Soy Sauce to your liking is to take a small portion of the rice that's cooking and add Soy Sauce to that until you like how it tastes,

  Cupcakes - Intermediate group We started the day off by splitting into three groups for our three cupcakes: humming bird, strawberry, and chocolate. Since we only had one set of pans we had to take turns making the cake. while the first group was making the cake, the rest of us were working on the frosting. We had buttercream frosting and cream cheese frosting. We started off by collecting all of our ingrediants and then began to make the frosting in the mixers.  This is Tori cleaning as he's baking This is Imaar, Carson, and Mateo working with Chef Jessica to make their frosting Getting our ingredients laid out once the group was finished making their batter, they began scooping onto the pan and put them in the oven for 20 minutes. While their cakes where in the oven, the rest of us began to collect the ingrediants fro our batter. once we had our ingrediants, we began to mix the batter. we made sure to be cleaning our statioss as we were baking. Once our batter was done, the oth

Advanced Pizza Day! (Day 6)   On day 6 of Art Of Cooking, we made pizzas from scratch. Our pizzas had a variety of toppings and themes. Everyone made two pizzas for themselves, the most popular combination people had were one savory and one sweet pizza. We started making the pizza by making the dough first     Kilali and Nuria mixing flour     so that it could rise while we prepared our toppings. To make the dough we first bloomed the yeast in warm water, while mixing together flour and salt in another bowl. After the yeast was ready we mixed in olive oil, and slowly added it to the flour and salt mixture, creating a shaggy dough. We then kneaded the dough to form a smooth ball. That ball was cut into 8 pieces, meaning we could make 8 pizzas per group. Once the dough was cut, we allowed it to ride for an hour and a half. While the dough was rising, we tackled the next time consuming part of our pizzas, the     Talulah kneading dough        caramelized onions. To make the onions we firs

Sweet Sweet Macaroons Day 5 - Advanced Cooking Group - Blog by Aiden C Day 5 of the Art Of Cooking J-Term kicked off for the advanced cooking group with a far more cautious-than-normal attitude. Today we were making Macaroons, a dish made of a delicate cookie sandwich filled with a flavored ganache. Macaroons, unlike other dishes, have a property that makes them quite different to make. Not only does the dish require very specific mixing amounts to make sure the egg whites come out correctly, but we also wouldn’t be able to know if we had done everything correctly until a step near then end, when it was far too late to go back. With this in mind along with detailed instructions from our recipe books and from Chef Jessica, we got started.               Isa Sifting Powdered Sugar              Our first step was to choose what flavors we wanted to go with, and our group chose to make chocolate-raspberry macaroons. Macaroons have two major parts, the meringue cookies and the ganache filli