a little background on our exams

i'm not quite sure how it happened, but april is already next week, and my third set of written and practical exams is close on its heels (april 6, to be exact). before another set of exams is behind me, i'd like to share the experiences of the first two with you!

before coming to pastry school, i wasn't quite sure how we would be evaluated. would it be top chef style, where we have little to no time to create, plate, and then watch it get devoured, while we're hoping that the face the instructor just made was because of a sudden and unrelated illness, or that the instructor will say we're too good for school, and it would be an honor if we would teach the class*? or maybe it would just be a series of quizzes on the technical aspects, and in the practical portions, we would have to execute a set of techniques and call it a night?

i was nervous that we would have to have everything memorized, not just for the written exams but also for the practical portion, which had the potential to be disastrous. baking is not about throwing a little of this here, and that there, and magically producing a beautiful/delicious treat, but about understanding your ingredients, the conditions surrounding them, and how to combine them to get the results you want. getting one ratio off will not only result in a wonky product, but could create a series of negative effects that could basically render your product inedible, if not for health reasons, then out of concern for one's palate. the first example i can think of is not entirely related to ingredients per se, but if you changed the temperature at which you baked a pot de crème, you could end up with scrambled eggs in a mess of chocolate, which sounds disgusting. or, for an example related to ingredient ratios, if you let water evaporate when boiling to prepare for pâte à choux, that would change the ratio of wet:dry ingredients, which would change the number of eggs absorbed by the dough, which would change the structure of the finished pastries, going from a beautifully risen choux with a perfect hollow to an eggy, web-filled, collapsed mess.

luckily enough, we were allowed to keep our recipes with us. as chef t pointed out after our second exams, and this was said with all of the love in the world, "[we] are nowhere near the level of being able to improvise and stray from the beaten path. now is not the time to be creative, but to learn the basics from which you can create." i was reading a piece on what makes good food writing, and that piece paired with chef's words of wisdom really resonated with me; if you don't know what a traditional pastry cream is, or what it tastes like, how can you talk about it with any degree of confidence, but more important for the kitchen, how can you tweak and change it when you don't know where you're starting from?

the next two posts will be dedicated to the individual evaluations, but it's helpful to know these points before going into each unit:

1.  we are given a forty five minute written exam before the practical portion. anything and everything can be asked of us in this written exam.
2. immediately following, we have three hours to mise en place, execute, plate, and clean up after our assigned products. for every minute we are late once that three hour period is complete, we lose points. for every mistake we make, we lose points. for meeting expectations, we are given constructive feedback to become better.
3. three hours sounds like a long time, but when you consider that one recipe alone can take three hours, between prep, baking, and cooling time, and we have to execute multiple products at the same time, it's really not that long at all.
4. during class, we can ask any question we have of our chef instructors. during the exam, they basically just make sure we don't burn the place down. and going from an atmosphere of calm and joy to an anxiety filled, over-heated room has an incredible impact on the entire process.

i think that's it for the basics! now head on over to the tarts and cookies post, or to the pâte à choux post, to really sink your teeth into the process.

*and no, neither have happened, and those are pretty extreme reactions, but you get my point.