Degree over, I am currently on holiday in Cologne, Germany, working at a teriffic French style patisserie. I met the owner, Torsten, on eGullet discussing a particular kind of caramel and he invited me to come and do a stage.
His company is called Toertchen Toertchen. They have 3 boutiques in Cologne and another one in Dusseldorf. All the products are made in the lab at the original boutique - including a number of products which are made for other establishments including a Japanese restaurant.
Toertchen Toercthen only sells what the French call petits gateaux - small fancy cakes - plus a few other items like eclairs and tartlets. They sell no bread and no Vienoisserie (i.e. croissants, pains au chocolat, Danish pastries...) The range changes from time to time but at the moment we are making:
Chocolate and vanilla eclairs
They pipe from a star tip. I am very suspicious of this technique because you end up with a boggy interior. You also see the ridges through the glaze. I was talking about different methods for eclairs with Torsten and the head chef, Matthias, and they asked me to demonstrate the technique I had learnt in France (although it is with noting that many French patisseries do use a star tip). Much to my frustration, despite trying twice, both attempts failed with the dough exploding and I cannot work out why - I'ver seen a result like that before. I can only imagine it was a difference in oven or flour but it annoyed me a lot, not being able to demonstrate what I had been talking about. And looking like a monstrous prat.
More products
Mango Chilli
Top left is a mango chilli number. The body is a chocolate mousse made with a little chilli powder sitting on a thin almond biscuit. It has a two layered insert: a very thin layer of jellified mango-chilli puree and a mango bavarois. The decor is a miniature chocolate macaron.
Top Middle
This one is no longer being made so not sure what it is.
Coconut
Top right is something I haven´t tasted because I don't like coconut. It is, I think, a vanilla yoghurt mousse with a coconutty insert, all sitting on a coconut dacquoise.
Ispahan
Bottom left is Herme's famous Ispahan - a flavour combination of raspberry, rose and lychee. Inside the macaron is a lychee resting on a bed of rose buttercream and the raspberies sit around the outside.
Passion White
This is a very fine cake. A white chocolate (creme anglaise based) mousse containing a passion fruit mousse insert (all sitting on a thin layer of biscuit). The glaze is home made and uses passion fruit puree.
Raspberry tart
Classic.
Chococube
This is my favourite looking of all the cakes.It's a rich chocolate mousse with a white chocolate, cocoa-nib infused insert all sitting on a thin biscuit. Underneath is quite a salty sablé. The front decor is chocolate studded with crispy chocolate pearls. The top decor is chocolate sprinkled with cocoa nibs.
Others
I think the full range is 12 different items. There is also a cassis-chocolate number, a classic opéra, a slab entremets made with the Japanese citrus fruit Yuzu, a classic fraisier, a lime cheesecake, something mixed berry and a lovely strawberry-mint number.
There are also small bite-sized financiers in various flavours, some large tarts (lemon, passion fruit) and large chocolate fondant cakes (like brownie).
Work
There are up to 6 people working in the kitchen although there are normally 4.
All patisseries make a lot of use of freezing. It is the only way possible to make these kinds of cakes because demoulding of the inserts and the cakes themselves can only be done frozen. It means the shop runs on a system of batch production. One day you might make 300 passion-whites and 300 chococubes, for instance, and these are removed from the deep freeze as necessary. The items are frozen glazed but without decor.
The day begins at 6. Each of the boutiques send a daily list of what they require. The items are taken out of the freeyer, half-thawed and decor applied. They are distributed into insulating polystyrene boxes which are taken off to the shops. The decor is an extremely time consuming process and must increase the cost of production a lot.
The fraisiers, ispahans and raspberry macarons are made up each day because of the fresh fruit - but even then, the bicscuit layers, pastry and macaron shells are frozen.
Once the items have gone out to the shops, the day's production commences based on what stock needs replacing.
Most of the items are mousses with inserts so the production runs like this:
- inserts are prepared, moulded, blast-chilled and demoulded
- mousse is prepared, moulded with the insert, blast chilled and demoulded
-the whole batch is glazed and deep frozen
This process may be split over two days for the items begun late in the day. It's quite labour intensive but largely unskilled. The assembly of the items from the component parts could easily be done by a moron.
As for the preparation of the mousses, creams &c., this does require some awareness of what you're doing. The recipes for all the building blocks are written on laminated A5 sheets and colour-coded according to the type of product.
Most of the mousse numbers have a thin biscuit base. Large batches of the thin almond biscuit are made, frozen and used as required. Similarly, large numbers of tart rings are lined and frozen uncooked to be baked as required.
All the team are friendly and good humoured. At the start of the day the head chef puts up a list of what needs to be do and people just get on with it. Everyone knows what each task involves and when a task needs a second pair of hands, people drop what they're doing to help. So, say you're preparing the white chocolate mousse for the passion-white (a one man job), when it comes to moulding, others will spring up to plonk in the inserts and biscuit bottoms.
The radio plays gently and there is general chat about this and that and the fact that the German for spatula translates as rubber cunt.
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