Pastry: Week 1

For the past week I have been working the morning shift in the pastry kitchen of one of the restaurants. The rationale behind me starting in pastry is that it is a good introduction to the kitchens as well as being a very compartmentalized portion of cooking and food service. The hours are also a lot better as we start in the morning and keep going until the work is done. This is allowing me to still recover from the mammoth catering job that we just finished and work on some of the administrative and organizational work that I am also implementing for the group. It is also allowing me to spend some time to get to know Bali a lot better and make some friends.

There is something terribly rewarding about baking your own bread and pastry that I felt was missing from my life before I started doing it. Not to sound too philosophical, but baking is difficult and time consuming so it seems like the first thing that we can eliminate from daily routines and outsource to the supermarket. I have found that the experience for waiting for dough to rise, whisking egg whites for a cake (and the pleasure of being able to hold a bowl upside down and not have them fall out), and rolling your own pasta to be extremely rewarding and truly makes your appreciate the effort that goes into such products. The quality of the goods is almost unparalleled as well; handmade spinach pasta, sweet potato gnocchi, in-house fermented sourdough are all some of the finest I have ever had. Knowing that I made them myself is even better.

My teacher goes by the name of Guskartika. Although he speaks very little English (and I very little Indonesian) we get along great and he is patient enough to allow me to make mistakes. He has no problem watching me struggle to separate 20 egg yolks from their whites or how to properly roll the delicate gnocchi into the correct shape using a fork. Apparently, all things considered, I am quite the bagus (good) latihan (student) of the pastry and I am moving along very well. Although I have barely scratched the surface, I am lucky enough to be working in a kitchen that services 5 restaurants and has a very diverse menu of breads, pastry, and desserts. Everyday after I finish my shift I write down pages of notes and diagrams of what I learned so that I am able to have a detailed overview of what I have done for when I try to do it myself.