Sushi 5 - Some Kinds of Rolls

Today I'm going to talk about a few kinds of rolls made in the sushi bar. I unfortunately never had the chance to make any of these nor do I have photos of them. These special rolls required a higher skill level than I possessed to make them.

First, I want to mention the spider roll which is very interesting because it has a whole, deep-fried crab inside of it. It also has tobiko (flying fish roe), cucumber sticks, and avocado inside.
Another special roll is the crazy tuna roll. I like this one, though it's quite a spicy one. It's a shrimp tempura roll with spicy tuna on top, at which point a piece of plastic is laid on top, rerolled, and then cut into five pieces. Then, tempura flakes are liberally sprinkled on top along with more spicy and chilli sauce. After this, it's arranged on the serving platter in somewhat of a 'U' shape which is a very elegant presentation as well as providing a perfect place to put the greens, ginger, and wasabi.
The next roll I will mention is called the volcano roll. It has tuna, fluke, and salmon on the inside. What makes it interesting is that unlike every other roll we make, the volcano roll is shaped into a triangle. This is a bit reminiscent of what my partner and I did for our Garde Manger final. Ours did not come out as well, however. Oh, and the other reason this roll is called a volcano roll is due to the drop of chilli sauce poured onto each of this eight piece roll.
The last roll I'm going to talk about is the ninja roll. It's a rather special roll as well. First, the nori is put lengthwise. Tuna, avocado, and crab meat sticks are placed at the bottom. A piece of rice is smeared on at the top to act as something of a glue. Then it's rolled and has two broccoli crowns stuck into both ends before being sent downstairs to be deep-fried. This roll also has scallions and smelt roe. Once it's deep-fried, it's cut into nine pieces. Also, tempura flakes and chilli sauce are added. Normally, it's then garnished with daikon radish shreds, red cabbage, seaweed salad, and ginger, wasabi, and greens, of course.

This is only a short list of all of the rolls that were done on a somewhat daily basis. I think it's just amazing the ability to remember all of the different items, what's in them, and how to plate them. That must come with practice, I imagine.

Pastry 5

So today I'm going to share a few photos of some of the items I've been making at the bakery, followed by some thoughts I've had about my performance.

 The items are, in order: Lemon Blueberry Muffins, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Chocolate Macademia Cookies, Chocolate Chocolate Cookies, Gluten-free Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Almond-Anise Biscotti.

As for my thoughts, I just can't help feeling concerned about my organization. That was a goal of mine over my internships but I honestly don't feel like I've improved much in that area at all.
I'm having serious trouble remembering what I've done and how I did it. It seems like I can't even remember enough of it to write notes, or I feel like I'll remember what I've done and then don't. This applies no matter how many times I do something. Which is manageable when a plan is in place and there's someone there to help me. However, if I'm to excel and not merely output some product, I need to figure a way around my blocks. I imagine that my first step is to just force myself to write down the procedures I take and how recipes look at different stages so that I can refer to them later.
Also, I need to keep track of what is needed in the shop's case so that when orders come in I can judge how much of what we need to make to meet quota.
Finally, I should keep track of all of our products' decorations so that I can do that too. Maybe drawing sketches or at least taking photos would be a good idea for the future.

Pastry 4

Today at the bakery it was still a lot of the same old stuff.

I baked a lot of cupcakes, some muffins, and cookies today. Unfortunately, I had a bit of trouble with baking off some of the items. The lemon-blueberry muffins, for example, were put in the oven a total of three times before they were finally deemed complete. As I seem to recall, this happened last time too. They wound up tasting delicious and baked through in the end, at least.
The gluten-free banana cupcakes also seemed off today, and were in the oven twice, but eventually their quality was satisfactory for sale, but I want to make them better the next time I make them.

I just seem to have this weird issue with determining when baked goods are thoroughly baked.

Due to various circumstances, the bakery was short some workers today though, which made things difficult and more hectic than normal. Even the cashier of the shop was helping out. Hopefully things will improve in the future. This makes it all the more surprisingly that we all finished earlier than usual today.

Tomorrow I'm off from the bakery and intend to make cocoa apple cupcakes with peanut butter frosting and a chocolate drizzle at home. I had been thinking about how it's always been popular to eat apple slices with peanut butter even though the peanut butter never seems to stick to the apple. Seems like a good, sweet solution to me! Also I have around five pounds of apples for some reason and need to do something with them...

Post 4 - Sushi

So, I wanted to show off what my work station at the sushi bar looked like. I worked on the right table and my chef Jack worked on the left. In the larger photo, you can see the bucket where the sushi rice was kept. The ginger and wasabi were between us, and we could see most of the restaurant from where we worked. The only thing not visible was the bar.

In the smaller photo were my tools of the trade. Of course, gloves were needed for sanitation and for keeping the rice from sticking to my hands. The knife was a special sushi knife loaned to me. Oddly enough, my chef choose to use a vegetable knife for cutting his rolls. Also pictured is the plastic wrapped bamboo mat.

Finally, we had our white clothes used to wipe down the work surface. When working with sushi, it's very important to have a damp work surface otherwise the nori or rice would stick to the board and snag when trying to cut it. The only exception would be if you had to cut a sheet of nori in half for when people ordered smaller roll sizes. Unless you do it on a dry surface it won't cut right and will snag and rip.

Pastry 3

The bakery is getting busier! Recently the owner has been putting more effort into advertisement and the bakery has been covered by several news stations. Here's a video of the Papa Ganache's owner talking about the bakery a bit: http://videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2011/07/lisa_at_papa_ganache_keyport.html
I was not there that day~
We're also trying to branch out and put our products in more places. For example, tomorrow there will be a big event where we were contracted to send $1000 worth of merchandise to the site. No, $1000 isn't a typo! Five of us, including Derrick, worked on all of the goodies for that today.
So many tarts crisps, muffins and other things I couldn't even keep track of were made today as well. It made me realize that one really needs to keep organized both physically and in their mind in order to handle high volume. Even as the intern I felt a bit overwhelmed and was glad that I wasn't in charge. There's no way I could have pulled it off as well as Sue, Jordan, and the newest hired baker, Jessica.

Also, I've come to accept my position as the resident cookie person and am still producing a high volume of cookies. The other day I made six batches of cookies in one day and scooped about five hundred cookies. It's cookie madness, I swear. Today we experimented with a somewhat new idea of just baking off the chocolate chip cookie dough sans chocolate chips. I wasn't there to see the result but I'm sure they'll be amazing.

We're also going to start shipping orders online and our new website is in the works last I heard. I'm actually really looking forward to that.

Pastry 2

I am really enjoying my time at the bakery. Baking is just incredibly fun to me so that even if I'm exhausted at the end of the day I'm still not complaining. Working at the bakery has also increased the time I bake outside of work. Within the past week alone I've made carrot cake cupcakes and peanut-butter banana chocolate cupcakes at home (next up - oreo cream cupcakes)! I'm really not sure why I want to work at a bakery baking for however many odd hours and then coming home and baking some more...but I do!

My chef, Sue, has told me some important considerations about vegan baking. She feels that a lot of the time, many vegan recipes are created by people who are primarily vegans with no culinary/pastry backgrounds. She's noticed that a lot of the time, vegan recipes will have ingredients that aren't really required. From this, I've gathered that my non-vegan knowledge will be essential if I were to continue making vegan goods or making my own vegan baking recipes. Baking is very much a science and it's important to truly know the purposes of ingredients before you go substituting them.

It's also nice to see what replacements are available. For eggs, you could just use egg replacer, but for structure considerations things like applesauce or bananas can be substituted. Our "butter" is non-hydrogenated oils and is extremely similar looking to shortening, but a bit yellower and even softer than butter. Sugar, by the way, is not typically vegan. The pure white color comes from being bleaches with animal bone char. I have no idea why that bleaching is done but there you go. Our sugar is an off-white color but otherwise functions the same way and I don't think it affects the flavor at all (at least not negatively).

That's all for now~ I look forward to work again tomorrow!

Battle Scars - Pastry 1

Finally secure with an internship at a vegan bakery, I can start my journey into becoming a professional baker! Not the exact type of work I was hoping to do, but as long as I'm having fun and learning in a bakeshop, I'm as happy as a clam.
So I've put a few days in at the bakery so far and it's been just lovely! Everyone's quite nice, the recipes are understandable,and the goods are delicious!

It's a very small bakery but I'm used to working in confined locations so it doesn't bother me too much. Things are nicely labeled and organized which I most definitely appreciate. I'm getting the hang of where most things can be found, and if I don't know, I can just ask.

For a long time now, I've worried about working in a professional environment of my dream career. Messing up here would be such an incredible blow to my self esteem. Luckily, I'm actually pretty happy with what I've been doing so far. I've made a ton of cookies, some doughs, and cupcakes. Everything's been turning out pretty well. Also, though I know it has more to do with the weather than my own skills, the extremely temperamental chocolate chip cookie recipe has been producing very high yields when I've been making it!
I am seeing times when I could have been more productive, though. I need to start looking ahead more so that a ton of work doesn't pile on at once. I'm sure I'll learn though.

Oh, and why do I have the title of this post as "Battle Scars?" Quite simple really. My long-time fear of burning myself on an oven has finally been realized. I have two lovely burn marks on my right hand and wrist. Awesome. I guess that this is just part of the territory for a (clumsy) baker, haha~
I'm actually really looking forward to going back again, though.

Post 3 - Sushi

Well, I finally got my internship for baking. I start my first day at a vegan bakery tomorrow. Posts will follow shortly afterwards.

Hours-wise, I'm halfway done with my sushi externship. Honestly, this experience has become horrible. I can't ask for help because then I lose responsibilities and I can't make mistakes because then I get yelled at.
I'm trying my absolute best to do a good, respectable job so I can just get through this and move on to better places of employment. I feel quite frustrated and don't know how to improve the situation.

One thing I have done was helping to make the sushi vinegar. We make it in big batches and use as needed. We combine the rice wine vinegar with some seasonings before stirring in a lot of sugar, letting it sit, and stirring again. The end taste should be salty sugar. That I expected, but we also added some other strange things like a nori sheet and lemon wedges.

Another thing I tried about a week about was making sashimi for the first type, which is a raw fish (or whatever the topping is) atop a small portion of rice. It's much harder than it looks to do. It begins with having the fish laid out on your palm and placing the rolled rice onto it. It's shaped with your fingers while they're in somewhat of a claw position. You can then flip it into that hand so that it can be transferred back right side up. After that, it just must be shaped until it looks good. I'm still getting the hang of it.

Post 2 - Sushi

I'm now slowly becoming more accustomed to working with sushi. Gradually I'm learning all of the normal procedures for how to do things around here and I'm making more kinds of rolls.
Although what we do varies day to day, my general routine is as follows:

1. Make mixture for spicy tuna rolls.
2. Make rolls for our regular catering order; I make 2 spicy tuna, 2 spicy tuna w/ avocado, 2 California, 1 Alaskan.
3. Go downstairs (kitchen is in basement) for more supplies
4. Prep more ingredients for sushi, including cucumbers, avocado, daikon radish (garnish), lettuce (garnish), parsley (garnish), shrimp, baked tuna, spicy crab meat mix, and some other things.
5. Separate fish (tuna) from connective tissue for more spicy tuna mix as well, which is fun but messy!
6. About now is the lunch rush so I usually do some rolls about now, depending on what people order.
7. After that we clean up, get any other supplies we need, finish prepping the cucumbers, and finally break.
8. Of course, if any orders come in we'll do them.
As well, periodically throughout the day we need to make more rice of course!

Today, something I did for the first time was make the rice all by myself. Usually Jack is with me but today I was able to do in on my own. It came out good! It is rather simple though. Just needed to get the rice, put it in a strainer in a mesh cloth, rinse it, and put it in our rice cooker with water and set it to cook. One thing to note is that unlike everyday long-grain rice, sushi/short-grain rice doesn't need double the amount of water. For 6 cups of rice, we use 6 1/4 C water. Also, sushi rice is INCREDIBLY sticky though. I didn't think to wet the cloth that we place over the rice to help keep the rice warm and the rice stuck to it like crazy.

Also, today at home I actually decided to make some California rolls! I just can't get enough, I suppose. It was a lot more difficult than it usually it at work unfortunately, but the rolls still came out pretty alright regardless.

Also, I finished up a cake I was working on tonight so I'll include that because...why not? It's el Pastel de Tres Velas~~ and it has real candles in the cake "candles" because I thought it'd be clever. It's my first real foray into turning the realm of cakes into fine art. It's just some cliche idea of the candles representing the stages of life.

But yeah, out for now. Got an interview tomorrow! Hope it goes well!

Post 1 - Sushi

I've completed my first, extremely short week at my sushi bar internship. Due to Memorial Day weekend, my hours have been reduced. Regardless, it's been a fun experience so far!
The actual bar where I work is very tiny. I work with my sushi chef mentor, Jack. My new coworkers are very kind and friendly despite the language barriers that exist and I'm happy to be able to have this experience.
Because I have almost no previous experience working with sushi, except for my brief stint with it in Garde Manger class, I can't do the more complex rolls yet. However, one of my goals for the externship is to work up to that point. Mostly I work on Spicy Tuna rolls, which are inside out rolls (rice on the outside) because they are very simple with only one filling (spicy tuna mix). Today I was offered the chance to do something called a Christmas roll as well as a regular Tuna roll because my dad came into buy them, so it'd be okay if they didn't look perfect. Which they didn't, heh. However, still proud of what I did do.
I'm glad to work alongside Jack because he watches me and reminds me of what I'm doing wrong and to watch my mise en place. When working with sushi, it's important to have all of your ingredients at the ready, always keep your knife perfectly clean and dry (and faced in a way so that you aren't accidentally cut).
Some other important things I get reminded of as I'm working goes beyond making the sushi. When plating them on trays or on plates it's important to remember to make it look good. When I work the style is to place the sushi diagonally usually, garnishing with lettuce and parsley, along with ginger and wasabi. I need to be conscious of making the garnishes angled vertically so that it's more aesthetically pleasing.
I've also made the sushi rice, which we tend to make in 6-8 C batches in a rice cooker. We make the sushi rice downstairs in the kitchen, which is essentially in the basement. It's also where all of the storage rooms are. After cooking, which takes 40-50 minutes, we place it into a big, wooden flat bowl and mix it with the premixed sushi vinegar-sugar mixture. It's hard to stir it around with the giant spoon, but I guess that's just part of the job! Muscles, here I come!
Now, here's a bunch of pictures taken by my dad:

The Tuna Roll I Made

The Christmas Roll I Made...half eaten

I'm Smiling Cause I'm Happy!

Rolling Some Rolls!

Cutting the Christmas Roll

and...Cutting the Tuna Roll Diagonally Somehow