3rd & Final Day at Le Cordon Bleu

 

The Iron Lady today

After breakfast at the hotel, we hopped on the Metro and headed up to the cooking supply store. But first we had to make a stop at THE place the locals go to eat crepes, the Breizh. 

Hot chocolate for Jo Anne. 

A brown sugar butter crepe to share. This photo was taken at 10:10. 

This one at 10:12. You can tell we didn’t like it. 

The modern art museum, Pompidou. In 1969. Georges Pompidou decided to provide France with a venue like no other; a center for art and culture capable of housing both the national museum of modern and contemporary art with an International dimension, a large public library, a center for industrial création and a center for musical research and creation, all together in one building in the heart of the capital city of Paris. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Matisse, Duchamp and Mondrian have works of “art” here.  

Bamboo beehive on the corner of a building. I told Jo Anne this was her next project. 

The Church of St. Eustache, Paris is a

church in the 1st arrondissement of

Paris. The present building was built

between 1532 and 1632. Situated

near the site of Paris' medieval

marketplace and rue Montorgueil,

Saint-Eustache exemplifies a mixture

of multiple architectural styles: its

structure is Flamboyant Gothic while

its interior decoration and other

details are Renaissance and classical. 

Beautiful bright red berries on 'heavenly bamboo', more commonly known as nandina. 

E. Dehillerin is the big restaurant supply store here in Paris. Founded in the 1880s, they are specialists in the supply and sale of kitchen equipment, their motto is “modest assistance in the promotion of French cuisine.” This was Julia Child's favorite store. She bought almost all of her cooking supplies here while she was living and training in Paris at Le Cordon Bleu. She was known to fly in to Paris and go straight to this store from the airport. 

The Louvre. This is not the best side of it but the one we walked by today. 

We stopped for lunch at the Eiffel Cafe. French onion soup. 

More beautiful cherry blossoms on our way back to class.  

Today we are going to complete the croquembouche we started yesterday. Rolling out the nougatine we just made for the base and top of our croquembouche. It is similar to an almond brittle. 

We covered a ring mold with our kitchen towel and hammered it down to cut the circular shapes.

Chef is making his fancy. We’re only making the base of the tower due to time constraints. 

Jo Anne filling her choux pastry. 

Chef has made the base and also the traditional pyramid shape to sit on top. 

This is my base. Notice that each cream puff is dipped in caramel forming a "hat" of caramel. We use another caramel process to "glue" the puffs together, forming the column.

Jo Anne dipped some of hers in sugar.

I’m pretty sure everyone in class left with a burn or two from working with the hot caramel. 

Chef’s finished croquembouche

Chef and his helpers

These are all the things we learned to make at Le Cordon Bleu this week. It doesn’t look like that much for 18 hours of class time but there were so many steps and processes for everything we made. 

A video of our class at work.

Receiving our certificates 😁

Chef Corentin Droulin is a master of boulangerie, pastry, ice cream and chocolate. He has ten years experience in the industry and has been a chef instructor at Le Cordon Bleu for the past 3 years. He was a great instructor and very patient. Many of the people in our class worked in or had their own bakeries or restaurants. Of course the problem with that is they like to tell other people what to do and talk when the instructor is talking. Then you always have one or two who like to monopolize the class 🥴. But, all in all, we learned so much and had great fun while doing it. You’ll be happy to know we gave one of our tarts to the people at the hotel registration desk (I just hated to throw all this in the trash).  They were quite appreciative. We have one more cooking class at La Cuisine Paris while we’re here. 

For dinner we ate at Le Volant Basque, a traditional basque restaurant. We had been looking for someplace that offered Beef Bourguignon. We found this place online and it was only 5-10 minutes walk from our hotel. The reviews were great so we decided to give it a try. When we got there he asked if we had reservations and when we said no, he started to say they were booked. Then he said, wait a minute. I’ve got room for two here. My only seats left. We were very happy. You could tell it was a place frequented by the locals. And the bourguignon was amazing. They brought it out in a pot with a basket of bread and a tray of mashed potatoes, rice and polenta. 

We stopped in the market on our way back to the hotel for some more water. They keep the eggs on the regular shelves in the markets here. No refrigeration. 

Tomorrow we are off to the world's largest flea market. 

15,668 steps

6.9 miles 

8 floors

We sloughed off today. 🤣

Bonne nuit!