Breakfast

When you work in the food industry, you are most likely to have hours that are off from the general working population. It stinks sometimes (like if your friends are going out, while you are heading off to work on a Saturday night.) But, there are advantages to it, like catching breakfast somewhere without the weekend crowds.

Brian, my hubby, was given a recommendation for a breakfast spot: Chester's on Walnut Street in North Berkeley. I am always up to try something new. Brian and I are a little different in that sense. He is more the type to go to a specific restaurant for a specific dish. As for me, I like to try new things, which explains why it takes me so long to figure out my order. But I think since we've been married, we have switched a little bit. Brian is now a little more adventureous, and I sometimes have found myself getting the same order at certain restaurants.

I love breakfast foods, though. And, I am a serious cereal junkie. As a kid, I used to eat it out of the box like a bag of chips. If I could, I'd eat breakfast all day, even though it may not be the best in terms of a balanced diet. I ordered the Salmon Platter at Chester's: smoked salmon and cream cheese on a toasted bagel. Red onions and capers are essential to a good lox bagel. It has to be red onion.

Brian doesn't care for smoked salmon, but I grew up on it. In fact, I remember my dad had caught a salmon once. He borrowed a smoker from a friend and decided to smoke his own salmon. I watched him set up this white box with racks in it; it reminded me of a bee hive. Fourteen hours later, we had these fillets of salmon, which he wrapped in foil and then froze. So we had a constant supply of smoked salmon for a while. We would take out a defrosted hunk of smoked salmon and mix it with cream cheese and spread on crackers or sourdough bread. But, my younger sister, would just take the whole thing and eat it. I would find her sitting at the dining table, eyes fixated on the television, digging into a piece of salmon. I think if anyone loved smoked salmon the most in our family, it was my sister. One day, however, she got a stomachache and we figured that it may have been from all that fish that she ate. She couldn't eat it for a while, even though it hasn't changed her palate for lox on bagel. I think that it is one of the few things that we have in common: having a piece of smoked salmon on a bagel with cream cheese, red onions, and capers. It has to be red onions.

Indispensable Pastry Tools: Silcone Mat

I never used silicone mats (Silpats) before culinary school.

But, they are one of the must-have items for the pastry kitchen.

I used to work at Williams-Sonoma, Inc. and first noticed them on the shelf in the baking section. These mats usually come in two sizes: for full sheet pans and for half sheet pans. But, it never really dawned upon me as to how useful these mats are. I thought they were excessive since nonstick cookie sheets and foil seemed to do the job.

I really had no clue what I was missing out on.

One of the first things that I noticed about these silicone mats was just how easy it was to remove the cookies after baking. I could leave them on the Silpats to cool and work on other things on my production list. While before with my nonstick pan, I often had to loosen the cookies with a spatula and then let it continue cooling.

Another thing that I notice was that you can easily reuse them again as soon as the Silpats cool. While with parchment paper or foil, they eventually wore out. At work, we have more than one silicone mat, so I can use them one after the other as needed.

At home, I have one half sheet pan and one half sheet Silpat. I also have a nonstick baking sheet, which I line with parchment paper when I bake. In using both during large baking projects, I have noticed that the bottoms of the cookies bake on the nonstick pan have a tendency to be a little darker than the ones on the Silpat. The material silicone is heat resistant so the cookies aren’t sitting directly on a scorching metal surface, preventing them from darkening too quickly.

Besides mats, you can find silicone muffin tins and other molds. You can also find silicone spatulas at your local specialty cookware store.

Silicone mats range from $20 to $40, depending on the size, and can withstand temperatures up to 480 degrees Fahrenheit. For proper care, all silicone items should only be hand-washed.

"Taste everything."
That was what the first head chef that I worked for told me. I was new to the industry, fresh out of culinary school. And, I was the only pastry cook in the kitchen. Also, I was the only woman, besides my boss. I entered this world of hot kitchens, fiery stoves, and ticketing machines at the height of the holiday season. I was excited to start my new job. I dreamed about working as a pastry chef at a high end restaurant. But within the first weeks of my new career, I found myself wide-eyed and with a mind full of doubt, wondering if this was what I signed up for.
Burning cookies (which I have never done before), getting yelled at by my boss, and waking up at 4am to get ready for work were all things that were completely new to me. I found myself questioning my skills as my boss would ask " Did you learn anything at all from the school?"
I found myself wishing to be swallowed up by the earth when I had to be at the restaurant for 14 hours. But despite all the challenges that I faced, deep down, I did not want to give this up. I did not take this leap of faith and go through months of culinary school to give up before the end my first year.
So I pushed and endured. I endured the erratic work hours, the continual corrections from the head chef, and the doubt. And three years later, I am glad that I did. I have learned so much about pastry and about my character working in the pastry kitchen. And I am really glad for all the support: from my husband, my friends, and my family. I am even grateful for those times that my boss yelled at me because she pushed me hard so that I would know how to work in the kitchen. I've always enjoyed baking and pastry. But, a big part of the picture has been the experience and the character that I built along the way. And I have started this blog to shed some light into the lives of us who work behind the line, away from the trendy dining rooms or welcoming store fronts, for those of us who strive for perfection in taste, and for those of us who do it because we love it.