Experiments, Surgeries and Assembly lines
Feb 24th, 2009 by michelle
Embarking on a Culinary Adventure
Expecting to do some office work, I came into the restaurant this afternoon and was handed a bag of apples and a pair of gloves. Safe Communities had invited a number of local restaurants to provide one course each for their charity event. In an effort to create a wonderfully unique dish for this cause, our chefs put together some ideas that would take some experimenting and some extra hands. That is how a day of office work turned into a day of trial and error in the kitchen for me.
My task was to make 150 apple and goat’s cheese caramel lollipops. Roger showed me what to do but I quickly encountered some problems: As I started dipping the lollipops in the caramel, casualties came early and frequently since the goat’s cheese was falling off the sticks and getting stuck in the caramel creation Roger had put together to coat the lollipops.
With all of the casualties, we quickly realized that a surgeon’s skills would be
required so we gathered some tools (chief among them being the Retrieval Spoon). We developed and exercised a number of revival techniques and soon discovered that the best healing process involved “50 CC’s of caramel, STAT!” (for reattachment purposes).
After a few surgeries, I called on the Chemists (better known as the Chefs) for some advice, and they shared some of their expertise with me (“If we heat the caramel to this temperature, and cool the cheese to this temperature then…”).
The “chemists” were close to solving the problem, but it required several hands. And so we became an assembly line. Four of us stood in our assembly line which happened to face a window, and we wondered how strange we must look to the people looking in on us as they walked by. By the end of the night we were no closer to perfecting our technique, but we’d had a lot of fun in the process.
The next day when I came in, I saw 150 beautifully complete Goat’s Cheese Lollipops sitting on the counter. Roger, ever the experimenter and creator, had discovered the secret to candy making overnight. I forgot to ask how he did it (because I was too busy staring at all of our hard work and beaming with pride), but perhaps if Roger is feeling so kind one day, he might share his recipe for all of our readers (myself included)!
I never got to see the dish plated and served at the charity event, but I heard that our course was a complete success. No doubt it was thanks to all of my hard work! (Okay, MAYBE it had something to do with the rest of the great staff at One99 too…)