Students will have the opportunity to learn from school chefs, home cooks, and professionals in New England. Students will learn basic skills and techniques for both cooking and baking. They will also learn shopping tips and tricks for working with a budget. Travelling will be required for day trips. Cooking and baking classes will be taken at Tuscan Kitchen in Salem, NH, and King Arthur Flour in Norwich, VT. By the end of the week, students will have acquired skills in the kitchen and be able to tell if have a sweet or savory pallet.
Day 1
On our first day of project week, we started the day off by chatting with Ms. Dumont about her farm and chickens. Elyse says she “learned more about eggs” and Lily “learned the difference between free range and pasteurized eggs”.
With our new knowledge, we then made omelets and french toast. Maddie says she is “happy she can make French toast now”!
In the afternoon, we watched videos on various types of charcuterie boards and then were able to make our own for a competition judged by the business office.
Some of our charcuterie boards were sweet!
Congratulations to the fruit group (Lily, Drew, and Cara) for their win in the presentation category! It looked beautiful!
The taco group (Teddy, Sarah, and Maddie) swept the taste category! (and it looked great too!)
Day 2
On the second day of project week, we went to Tuscan Market in Salem, NH. Chef Jarrett taught us how to make flat pasta (like linguine) and two different types of sauce.
After making the dough, we rolled it flat using the pasta roller. The small dough ball stretched out to be about 5 feet long!
Once the pasta dough was thin enough, we cut the dough into thin strips.
After cutting the dough, we added some flour to the noodles (so they wouldn't stick to each other).
Quinn says he learned “to make the sauce taste better, you have it simmer for a long time."
Cara says she learned “that there are many different sizes of pasta and shapes.” (Chef Jarrett says there are as many types of pasta as there are stars in the sky!)
We are heading out for today and picking up pizza supplies for the our adventure with the brick pizza oven tomorrow!!
Day 3
Today we used the brick oven on campus to make pizzas. The first step was to get the fire started in the oven. We collected sticks to use as kindling and then built a small fire inside the oven.
It took a while to get the fire going, but we had fun hanging out and tending to it. (We even convinced Ms. Burke to take us to Dunks for coffee while the oven heated. Lucky day for us!!)
While the oven heated (and after our Dunks run!), we focused on prepping all the ingredients.
For the savory pizzas, we chopped up tomatoes, basil, chicken and even cooked up some delicious sausage meatballs!
Margherita was a popular choice for the savory pizzas. Once we got used to how hot the oven was, the pizzas turned out really well.
We also made some sweet pizzas: a Nutella pizza with strawberries, bananas and raspberries; a s'mores calzone, with chocolate chips, crushed graham crackers and marshmallows; and an apple pie pizza, with sliced apples, and a cinnamon-sugar crumble made with butter. We decided that you can never have too much butter when making the crumble.
The apple pie pizza was so good--Maddie and Elyse would have won first place, if we had a judging panel!
Day 4
Today we woke up early to drive to King Arthur Baking Company, in Norwich, VT, to learn how to make our own bagels.
At King Arthur, they encouraged us to weigh out all of our ingredients, instead of using measuring cups/spoons.
We used mixers to work the dough.
Here's Teddy getting the dough hook attached so he can make his dough.
We let the mixer knead the dough for about 10 minutes!
Quinn found that if you don't put enough flour, you can't really do anything with the dough. Thankfully, our baker, Michelle, helped him figure that out before it was too late.
We even had to knead the dough for a short time using our hands. We knew the dough was finished when we could make a "gluten window".
Then, we let the dough rest for about 30 minutes (to give the gluten time to relax).
Making the bagels took a lot of waiting. But, the dough looks so pretty, it was worth the wait.
After degassing the dough, we cut it into 8 pieces.
Then, we pre-shaped the dough into snakes and rolled them into bagels. The word "bagel" comes from Polish and Yiddish words meaning bracelet!
We were surprised to learn you that you nee to boil bagels before baking. This, along with the high protein flour, is what makes them chewy. Adding some sugar or malt powder to the water also helps give bagels that lovely brown color.
The boiling also helps with applying the toppings. As soon as you are done, you dip the bagels into your selected topping. That is how you cover your bagel in whatever you want.
We used poppy seeds, sesame seeds and everything bagel mix for our savory toppings.
We also used a cinnamon-sugar topping to make sweet bagels.
The bagels turned out amazing! It was a very fun and interesting experience.
Now we know how to make bagels!
Day 5
Today on Friday the 8th, we started our day by completing a scavenger hunt in a grocery store. Our job was to find items that we have learned about over the past week. After, we got into groups and started a competition based on the TV show “Chopped”. Today's challenge was to make ramen. The 4 required ingredients were: ramen, eggs, scallions and dried seaweed.
We started by prepping our ingredients. We learned that sous chefs often do this hours ahead of time to make the cooking process easier.
It was a really nice day, so we cooked outside to soak in the sun.
We cooked the ramen in boiling water for 4-8 minutes.
One group decided to make a vegetarian teriyaki inspired lo mien.
Groups worked on presentation of their ramen, too!
Drew's group went with a traditional interpretation of ramen and included a delicious beef broth.
All three teams presented to the judges' panel--two member of our kitchen staff and two faculty. They had a hard time choosing between two, so we had to recruit a 5th judge!
Here's the winning bowl!!!
Congratulations to Jerry, Maddie, Cara and Seun for taking home the golden spatula award!
Day 6
We started off the day with crepes and smoothies for our delicious breakfast.
Ms. Burke made the crepe shells the night before and then we filled them with Nutella, strawberries and whipped cream.
Ms. Burke made this beautiful crepe!
After we finished and cleaned up, we started to work on what we would present during the symposium. We decided that it was a good idea to make pasta just like on Tuesday when we went to Tuscan Village in Salem, NH.