Day 3 - Pastry Kitchen!

Today I caught the ferry and the view was so lovely on the harbour. I came early again today at 9am and found it was pretty empty except for a couple of people so I helped out Marella (mid 40’s – owner’s wife) in the pastry section to start with and stayed there all day. Definitely put on like 5kg today from eating but it was SO worth it!

Marella and I began the day making flatbread and sourdough bread. She had already prepared the dough’s before I got there so for the flatbreads, she weighed 350g of dough and rolled them into their oval shapes. My job was to sprinkle semolina onto the trays, place the dough on there, brush them with olive oil, sprinkle with thyme salt, then press with my fingers and pop them in the oven. For the sourdough, I weighed them and she shaped, cut and sprinkled them with flour. They came out half an hour later and tasted SOOOO GOOD! I fell in love with the flat bread – definitely making these at homeJ

< Flat bread           ..        Sourdough >

Paula and Andrew were the main pastry chefs and they were both so nice and funny. Paula helped me out so much and I learned a lot from her all day. She told me in all seriousness I was the best work placement student she’s had and that made me so happy! So after making bread, I had lots of different little jobs to help the prep of all the desserts throughout the day. These included:

-          Zesting and juicing heaps of oranges for this thick orange curd; made with eggs, sugar, orange, zest and juice whisked over heat until thick. Then butter is whisked through. This sauce is used for tartlets later on.

-          Blending up the caramel pistachio nuts. Paula put a heap of caster sugar into a pot and simply let it cook. I was amazed as it just melted and turned to toffee! When it was melted, she took it off the heat and chucked in the pistachio nuts, stirred them up and let them cool on a tray. When they were cool, I blended half of them and packaged it and bashed up the other half for presentation. I can’t wait to try this sauce on popcorn or peanuts at home!

Pistachio blendOrange Curd

-          Breaking up this sponge-cake like creation that will be used for presentation and putting these into containers. These tasted awesome too!

-          Peeling 20 pears which were poached in water, red wine, lemon juice, actual lemons, oranges and cinnamon quills. This smelled so good.

-          Bashing up cooked honeycomb to put into containers – yum! (for the vanilla cheesecake presentation)

-          Very carefully peeling off these thin jelly circles from the flat board they were cooked on and packaging them in plastic and storing them.

-          Helped Marella coat ramekins in butter, sugar and then cocoa which were to be used for chocolate souffle’s (these tasted so good raw!)

-          I also helped plate up some trifles and cheesecake again however these 13 plates were all sent back later because the people decided they didn’t want dessert anymore! How annoying!

(1st step of pres for trifles & cheesecake)



-   Everything was labelled with dates which I also helped doing throughout the day. It’s so organized and helps hygiene standards too.

Andrew asked me later in the day if I wanted to do a cool job and I jumped in excitement. He told me to follow a recipe and he wasn’t going to help me so it was all up to me! I felt so pro doing it all by myself because the others had gone downstairs to help with service and I had the kitchen to myself (doing my recipe and also stirring Paula’s toffee sauce). So my job was to make 4x the amount for the ‘chocolate almond soil’ which goes on the recipe “Chocolate mint aero with Ron Zacapa rum jelly, sour cherry foam, chocolate bark, lime and coconut cream sorbet”. So I followed my recipe and used a MASSIVE mixing bowl to measure all my stuff and baked them in the huge oven (I asked for the name of it but I forget now- below is a photo). They turned out well! J

I popped down to the entree section to see my mates down there and saw Justin plate up a duck entree. It looked so pro so I took a pikki. He cut off some for me to taste and YUM!!! It had my candied ginger on it from Monday, as well as my segmented mandarin and other bits and bops.

Just before I left, Paula had to make 6 “Bombe Alaska’s”. It consisted of 3 types of sorbets with a crumbed base and Paula piped small meringue spikes to completely cover it. It will later be blowtorched. I asked if I could try pipe meringue onto the last one and she was more than happy to let me. So she showed me how to do it and I tried but didn’t do a very good job! She had to redo it quickly because the sorbet melts in a short period of time but she said to practise with the rest of the meringue on the bench-top and she would get me to do one tomorrow J So I did and I got a lot better at it! When I went to get dressed, I was covered in sticky meringue and loved it.

Some of the equipment:

Huge dough mixer

Huge oven (where bread was cooked)

I also noticed how everyone calls each other “chef” so they would say “yes chef” and stuff like in masterchef! I really like it as it shows respect to each other even though they are all chefs themselves.

I love it so much at Wildfire, I didn’t want to leave at 5! I’m hoping that I can get an apprenticeship here when I leave year 12 next year. Can’t wait for tomorrow again J