After what felt like the busiest week of my life, I finally got a full 9 hours of sleep last night and feel like a brand new person. Yesterday I volunteered at the New York Culinary Experience, an event that the French Culinary Institute and New York magazine put on where amateur cooks can buy (very expensive) tickets to take classes with some of Manhattan's best chefs. Since it was held at the French Culinary Institute, students were encouraged to volunteer to work in the classrooms and help the chefs. Although I regretted having to be there at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, it was definitely worth it to see all of the chefs who were there and what they were cooking. I worked in a kitchen with Bill Telepan, who owns a restaurant called Telepan in New York that focuses on using the best available fresh and local ingredients, and with Ben Pollinger, the head chef at Oceana Restaurant in Times Square. But I was also able to walk around and see some of the other chefs who were teaching classes, like Marcus Samuelsson, David Bouley and Morimoto. Here are some pictures I took:

David Bouley

Morimoto

Marcus Samuelsson

One of the things that I really love about the culinary world is that the people who are "famous" are very tangible. You don't have to be a VIP to go into one of their restaurants and meet the chef. As a student, it's amazing to have experiences like this, where you are able to actually see first hand the work that these well-known chefs do. Most of the work I did yesterday was just cleaning, prepping the kitchens and running out for whatever the chefs needed, but it was still a really exciting experience and I'm looking forward to next weekend when I'm volunteering at the NYC Wine and Food Festival with Chef George Mendes of Aldea.

In class on Friday we cooked tarts, an apple tart, a pear tart and a quiche lorraine:

Apple Tart

Pear tart with an almond cream

Our Quiche Lorraine started to fall apart because the crust was too thin so I didn't take a picture of it. But the other two turned out pretty well. We did the apple tarts individually, using dough that we made a few days ago that had been refrigerated for a few days. Because it was so hot in the kitchen, we had to move really quickly so that the buttery dough wouldn't melt and break. I successfully rolled out my sweet tart dough for the apple tart and the savory dough, called pate brissee for the quiche lorraine while Martin tried unsuccessfully to roll out the sweet tart dough, pate sucre, for his apple tart and for the pear tart. The dough fell apart several times and overmelted so we had to keep it in the fridge for a few more hours until it was slightly manageable. After chef gave us a demo on how to properly arrange the thinly sliced apples on our tart, (slice them very thin then arrange them so you can only see the outside of the apple, not the inside core part), Martin went back to the station, chopped his apples very thickly and started arranging them the way chef just told us not to. He seems to go off onto his own planet during lectures...The rest of the day went pretty well, except for the quiche that wouldn't stay together. At the end of the day we finally got to try the ice cream that we made earlier in the week and it was a huge disappointment. Chef Jeff added some sort of liquor to the vanilla ice cream that made it taste solely of alcohol and then for some reason the chocolate ice cream because totally crystallized and had a very strange texture that wasn't appetizing at all. But fortunately, Chef Rogers saved the day with a bowl of liquid nitrogen, which is nitrogen in a liquid state and is well below freezing point. Chef Dave Arnold is a chef who works at the FCI who does a lot of scientific experiments with food and liquid nitrogen is one of the materials he works with. Chef Rogers poured the creme anglaise we made earlier in the week into a cuisinart mixer and then Chef Dave Arnold came into the kitchen with a bowl of liquid nitrogen that had frozen steam pouring off of it. He added the liquid nitrogen into the mixer with the creme anglaise as the cloud of liquid nitrogen poured over the bowl and off the sides of the counter. Within 30 seconds, the creme anglaise was delicious vanilla ice cream. It was very cool to watch.

Tomorrow we're doing egg white cakes and puff pastry. And I finally get a new partner!