My Culinary Moment #2: Underpaid in F&B Line

The thing that most culinary students (like me) would think about working in F&B line is that, it's glamorous. Most celebrity chefs that we saw in TV deceived us to think that F&B world would be glamorous (Not that I choose to study culinary arts for the glamour).

But let’s face it. The F&B world isn’t as glamorous at all (unless you end up as a celebrity chef). The working hour is terrible; the environment is awful and the pay isn’t that much. Then, there were times where you get to be treated like shit by your customers and supervisors.

The thing is, no matter what’s your academic qualification, whether you graduated from school with your diploma or degree or high school you would still have to start off from the bottom and the salary didn’t differ much no matter how high your academic qualification is. After you received your diploma and degree, you would expect to work with something that pays you better. Perhaps that is why most of my friends end up working out of F&B line. Or some end up as a lecturer.

I think, to work in the F&B line, you would have to have a lot of passions. You have to love it really much that you wouldn’t mind all that crappy pay and working hours. So, if anyone wanted to study something related with F&B line, I would ask them if they would stand the working hour and payment even though your academic qualification is high. If they do, well... good luck! It's a jungle out there :)

Experimenting: More Macarons

I have lost my counts on how many attempts I made for macarons. I have tried various of recipes and techniques featured in blogs, magazine and books. If you read my previous post, Experimenting: Macarons and Experimenting: Macaron 2, (well, those are two of my early attempts to make Macarons) you would know that I didn't succeed in my first try.

There were recipes that turned out to be sweet and not so sweet. There were recipes that require me to make sugar syrup. There were recipes that require me to preheat the oven in high heat, and reduce the temperature once the macarons tray went into the oven. And there were this baking technique where I was supposed to put a wooden spoon to ensure that the oven wasn't properly shut.

But most of my experiments weren't so successful. I burnt some of my macarons and some of them sunk. And all I wanted was for my macarons to have that glossy, smooth surface and for them to have those feet. Those ruffles feet.

When I failed, some of those macarons ended up in the dumpster because they were not edible. Sometimes I gave them away to a friend because she didn't mind how it looked like. But every time something went wrong with my macarons, I was more determined to try them again and again. 

After countless of attempts, my macarons finally looked like this. Almost smooth surface and ruffles feet. I was really, really happy when I saw those ruffles feet. I decided to draw some smiley and funny faces (find that troll face my little sister drew for me!) on the surface with edible ink pen. But of course, I need to practice more to ensure that they have the standard size... And I hope that someday, they would turn out to be perfect! 

Oh well...

Wish me luck!

My Culinary Moment #2: Colored Vanilla Muffins

Last week, I was really busy with baking vanilla muffins. An ex-schoolmate ordered 1600 muffins for her wedding - as a door gift to the guest. Making 1600 muffins on your own was not easy. So, I started making these muffins a few days earlier. I made these muffins into a few colors - red, orange, pink, purple, blue and peach. And these muffins comes with a few designs too - spiral, polka dots and marbled. I think, marbled muffins looks the best!

Working with lots of muffins isn't as easy as I thought. You have to work quicker with muffins. You need to pop them into the oven once you mix the ingredients and scoop them into the paper cups to prevent loss of volume. So, I figured that I should be preparing the muffin mix in advance. I weighted the dry ingredients, sifted them and portioned them into 250g each packet. I figured that I couldn't work with large volume of muffins all in once as I was working in the kitchen by myself. There's no way that I could scoop the muffins into the pan, checking the muffins in the oven, cooling the muffins and arranging them on the table all at once.

Fortunately, my family helped me a lot with packaging (my customer requested me to package the muffins into individual packaging). Folding the small boxes and packaging those muffins were time consuming. So I am really glad that they help me with packaging and counting those muffins. THANK YOU! :)

My Culinary Moment #1

I'm thinking of starting a few post of my culinary moments. It's going to be fun, and silly (since I was an idiot when it comes to food. It does't matter that I had a bachelor degree in culinary art, I'm still an idiot)

I still remember the first time I went into the kitchen (or class) back in 2005. I was wondering around looking for our kitchen class with a few friends, including Aimi from burb! le festin avec moi. We were all naïve (Okay, I’m not sure about my other friend, but I was pretty naïve back then (and still do)).

The first class (pastry) was kind of fun. My lecturer was really sweet and kind. My classmate and I (there were +30 of us) had to jam packed into one small class. Watching demonstration from my lecturer was quite hard though…

But, I was really looking forward to class, not knowing that I’ve signed in for something tough which includes a back-stabbing, harsh world that makes me and my fellow classmates cursed a lot! (chuckles)