It's Saturday. That means it time for a cooking class to learn how to make croissants. Our class was at the La Cuisine school, not too far from our hotel. Hopefully the 20 pictures below will give an idea of what we learned and did over the course of the 4 hours.
The first step in the process was to fold our coated paper into the proper shape. We had an instruction sheet that was the correct size for the rolled out butter. As seen in the first picture, it will be almost like an envelope. Next the slab of butter is cut diagonally into halves, each person getting 1 half. The individual half is cut in half again so it can be reformed into a rectangle for rolling. The butter is then rolled to the size and shape of the center portion of our envelope, wrapped up and put into the refrigerator to cool down for the next step,
The next step was to make our dough ball and roll it out to the proper size and shape to fit the rectangle of butter. The center picture is just to prove that I was there, wearing an apron and doing less than my share. The butter - flour rectangle is folded and rolled a number of time to make the layers that will become flaky layers in the finished product.
Our dough mixture is rolled out a final time and cut into two pieces - one for croissants and one for pain au chocolat. The croissant portion is cut into triangles and the pain au chocolat is cut into rectangles. The triangles are carefully rolled from the large end to the small. The rectangles are filled with the chocolate strips and folded. Everything is brushed with an egg wash and everything is placed on baking pans ready for baking.
The scraps are saved for some other goodies. Some of the excess is cut into squares that can then be shaped into pinwheels and pockets. Very clever.
Here we have Granny awaiting the egg wash that is being prepared by two of our classmates. Of course we need directions on how to cut the dough, and finally Granny applying the egg wash to our products.
The next to the last step is the baking. They had a couple of very nice ovens to finish our culinary creations. While the main output was being baked, we put raisins on some of the scraps that had been rolled out. These will be used to make cinnamon swirls and some twists.
The final step of the process is to test the products and make sure they are OK. Of course this takes a considerable amount of skill and knowledge and you certainly can't give a proper critique by tasting only one. Fortunately this production run was large enough that everybody had some items for export.
Our cooking class was finished at 1pm. It took us a little while to get a taxi back to the hotel. We wanted to go to the Musee Marmottan Monet but decided that first we should get ourselves packed. So the afternoon was spent packing and then a non-descript dinner at a nearby restaurant finished the day.
Sunday. The barge group was to meet at the hotel at 2pm for the ride to the barge. We had the morning and a bit of the afternoon. We were all packed. So, we went to the Musee Marmottan. Unfortunately, they don't allow photography inside the museum so I have nothing to show. Take my word for it, the museum has an outstanding collection of Monet's paintings. At first it looked like a tiny exhibit of just a few paintings. Then we went downstairs into a very large, multi-room gallery where the primary collection is displayed. There is also an upstairs gallery of impressionists but we felt it would be too much and had to skip that. Besides, it was time to get back to the hotel, have lunch and meet our barge mates.
Good Bye Paris we had a wonderful stay, Now it's time for the next leg of the trip.
