Cleaning Up Pastry

Today I got in early for a grueling, busy day on the pastry section in the restaurant – not. We began with only four people booked for dinner tonight, which turned into eleven people, which then turned out only to be nine people, of which only five ordered a dessert. Easy day.

I was working in pastry by myself today, and only had a few things on my prep list. It is nice to get ahead, but there is no point in overprepping things if you won’t be busy the next few days as they get old and will just have to be thrown out. I began with blitzing crumble for the mojito, then organizing my station by topping up the croutons, banana tarts, and cheeses. Next I assembled one tray of fruit flowers as the garnish for the crème brulée and cut up a bunch of passionfruit for that as well. I moved on to the cheeses – slicing a bunch of cheeses to prep for the cheese platter, and making hot wrapped brie as well. Then I moved on to cutting one tray of crème brulée. I baked the petit fours, experimenting by using strawberries and raspberries and blackberries in the fananciers instead of just blueberries, to which the head chef said was nice, but the reason they tend to stick to blueberries was they had the best sweet-to-tart balance. I tasted them all and decided he was right, but it never hurts to experiment. I trayed up all the petit fours and prepped the blueberry sorbet for tonight. Then it was bread time. Today I made cranberry raisin, walnut, and mixed seed – sesame, flax, and pumpkin, as well as the cranberry buns for the starter section. 

The bread rolls I made today

Once my rolls were proofing, I had everything I needed prepped for tomorrow, so it was time to move on to deep-cleaning, which the pastry kitchen hadn’t seen in a while and desperately needed. I went through the refrigerators and labelled and wrapped everything. Then I took everything off the ten shelves in the kitchen and cleaned off containers, relabelled them, and threw out anything old, while making the shelves shine. Then I scrubbed down the entire kitchen until it shone and it looked awesome. I didn’t really have anything else to prep, and wanted to keep busy and be productive. By this time it was time to set up for service, not that there was much set-up to do with so few people in.
Since service was so quiet and slow, with a group of two and one in at 6:00p.m., and a group of two and four in at 6:30p.m., I did help with apps and starters and veg but it wasn’t really necessary. I just did mini jobs in between waiting for dessert orders to come in. I cleaned out the pastry section in the walk-in fridge downstairs, which also really needed it, made a few things for chef on the starter section, made prep lists for the next two days, reviewed recipes for tomorrow, cleaned the sink, etc. It was different and a bit nerve-wracking working alone in a two AA Rosette restaurant with the two head chefs, but service tonight was fairly laid-back. At the end of the night, the head chef had an extra cooked duck breast and potatoes and veg for the two he thought were coming (but ended up dining in the bar), so he offered them to me, and made sure I was “ok with all the orders” before leaving. I finished up, cleaned up, and was shocked to discover it was only 8:30p.m.

So I headed down to the bar, which doesn’t stop orders until 9:00p.m., and offered to help them start cleaning up so we could all get out earlier. Maybe I’m just crazy, not taking an early day and running while I can, but I’m sure they appreciated it. I put away some soups and sauces, organized the walk-in, vacpaced some items, wrapped and labelled things, then cleaned down the entire kitchen. We were all out of there by 10:00pm.