Today was the first day of my artisan practicum and I am
learning all about truffle making with my German exchange student, Lisa. I came with a ball of
nervous and excitement inside my stomach but all nerves washed away when the
women we were interning for, Cheryl who explained to us all we needed to know
about her business and she then told us a little bit of the businesses she
shares with in the same building. In the building there are a lot, if not
dozens of small businesses all working right next to each other because in each
room, there are a whole bunch of areas where every business member works to
create their products. In the large concrete room we were working in, there
were about six other businesses running such as Mompops, which create AMAZING
popsicles, there was also a man who had his own space where he got all his
ingredients prepared before cooking them in his food truck and then there was another
man who makes pasta! So pretty much everywhere you go in the building it smells
delicious.
For the first hour or so we learned all about the tools
Cheryl uses when she makes her truffles and all the kinds she makes. She then
showed us a few truffle making essentials which included the truffle bible
which was pretty much a 500 paged book full of tips, suggestions, how to’s and
recipes. Of course tasting a bunch of samples was a must during this entire
explaining of things. After hearing and seeing a few things we had the
opportunity to dip our very first chocolate!!!!!!! To do this we had to first
plug in and press all these buttons on this machine that would spin and melt
the Ganache chocolate that we were dipping with. It smelled amazing and twirled
and flowed like a dream. I actually caught myself zoning out when I stared to
long. To dip it, we used a spiraling tool that we could hold the chocolate in
and when it was coated and placed on the tray, would get a swirly effect on the
top. After learning how to do this, we got a great deal of practice by doing
this over again to 300 more, about. It was a calm experience; a food lover’s
yoga is the best way to describe the feeling.
As soon as we finished this and our lunch, half the power
went out but we didn’t let that stop us one bit! So to end the day we made a
batch of truffle filling, crushed Oreo cooking with cream cheese. We put all of
the mixture in a piping bag and pushed out, with our women strength, small
round mounds. With that we were done but to make it so much better we both
received a delicious popsicle that went so well with the 60 degree weather.
No comments:
Post a Comment