Around the world in pastry....with one special stop.

Well, we were very busy today, but not lots of photos.  We made two pastries: croissant and long flake pastries, and we made five fillings for savory pastries today.  We literally travelled around the world.  All of these fillings will be made up into pastries in the next few days.  First destination was China, as we marinated the pork that will fill the steamed buns called Char Siu Bau.  The pork is slow roasted in the oven after an extremely long marinade consisting of ginger, soy, brown sugar, hoisin, sake, and oyster sauce.  The dough will be made up in a couple of days, and the buns steamed.  The meat will marinate for almost two days before roasting.   The buns are filled with the barbecue pork and then  Then on to Poland as we combined mashed potatoes, sour cream, and sharp cheddar cheese for Pierogi or Pieroshki.  We also made Empanada filling from Venezuela with pork, jalapenos, green olives, salsa, and pine nuts with a few other goodies and spices.  After that, we moved on to Indonesia with Samosas, that are a vegetarian blend of potatoes, peas, onions, mustard seed , fennel, and garam masala mixed with other spice that are all cooked in clarified butter.  Our last stop in the savory pastry tour was in Japan.  We made the filling for Curry Puffs that are a combination of Japaneses and Indian cuisine.  This curry flavor is particular to Japan and their adaptation of Indian flavors in their cooking. 

Of course, during all of this, I was going back and forth to the sheeter rolling out the various stages of flaky pastry that will cover most of these pastries tomorrow.  I was also back in France and making Croissant dough which we will bake out tomorrow into almond croissant and plain croissant. 

 These were not on my original schedule, but my teacher had a need for some croissants to be made this week, and so I got to do it which is a great review for me.  I was really hoping that we could cover croissants again in class, but there was so much to learn that I had not mentioned it to Marda.  This came as great windfall and will be a good refresher before I begin making these pastries at home. That took most of the day and we finished by packaging up the rest of the chocolates and wrapping up the frozen strudel for storage in the freezer.  More pastries and baking tomorrow, and bread later this week.