What This Class Is and How I Run the Room
Okay so, welcome. Six weeks, French pastry, and by the end you'll be laminating dough that doesn't leak butter all over your oven floor. Mine did, the first time. We'll get to that story eventually, probably more than once.
Here's the thing about this class: I'm not a chef. I didn't go to culinary school. I'm a guy who bought a rolling pin at the DI for two bucks and got stubborn about croissants. Everything I know, I learned by ruining butter in my own kitchen, usually while also trying to keep a toddler from climbing the counter. So if you're picturing someone in a white coat explaining the chemistry of gluten development, that's not me. I can tell you what works. I'm shakier on exactly why it works. I'm okay with that and you should be too.
What we're actually doing here
Six sessions, one project family per week, building up to laminated dough (croissants, basically) and pastry cream, and a couple things that use both. We start simple and stack skills. I'm not going to hand you a twelve-step recipe on week one and wish you luck.
My teaching style is demo, then do. I'll show you a fold once, talk through what I'm doing while I do it, and then you're doing it at your own station while I walk around. I will come put my thumb in your dough. That's not me being weird, that's me checking temperature, because you can't always tell butter firmness by looking at it. You have to feel it. I'll show you what I'm feeling for.
I want you talking to the person next to you. I'll pair up strangers on purpose. Some of my best classes have been people who didn't know each other in September and were texting each other pastry photos by November. That's the goal, honestly, as much as the food is.
How I handle mistakes
No worries at all. I mean that literally, it's basically my catchphrase and my wife will confirm it. Butter breaks, dough tears, custard scrambles. All fixable, all normal, all stuff that's happened to me in my own kitchen with an audience of small children judging me. I tell my disaster stories on purpose so nobody in this room feels dumb about theirs. If your croissant comes out looking like a sad shoe, we're going to laugh about it and then talk about what happened.
One opinion I'll hammer more than once this course: butter temperature is 90% of lamination. If your butter and your dough aren't roughly the same firmness when you start folding, you are already losing, and no amount of clever folding technique saves you. Everything else is fixable. That one you have to get right at the start.
What I'm not good at
Full disclosure, because I'd rather you know now. I make good dough. I do not make pretty dough. Piping, chocolate decoration, anything that needs a delicate hand and an eye for beauty, that's not me. I make ugly-pretty pastry. If you came here hoping to leave doing Instagram-worthy decorative work, this is the wrong class and I'll happily point you toward someone better at that than me.
I'm also bad at running more than one thing at once. You'll notice I teach steps in order, one at a time, and I'll actually tell you not to multitask the way I sometimes do at home. I've scorched a pot of pastry cream because I was also trying to get a toddler down for a nap. Learn from that. One project, one focus, especially early on.
The room itself
We start on time, we end on time. I've learned my own energy has a floor to it by hour two, so I keep things moving rather than let us drift. Bring an apron if you've got one. We'll have scales at every station because I don't do volume measuring for pastry, cups and spoons get you inconsistent results and then you blame yourself for something that was never your fault to begin with. Get used to the scale. It solves more problems than any tip I can give you.
Real talk on safety: we've got hot ovens, hot sugar work later in the course, and sharp bench knives for portioning dough. Nothing exotic, just pay attention, don't reach across someone at the oven, and if something's too hot to touch, don't touch it to find out. That's basically the whole safety talk.
Last thing. I once brought a batch of croissants to a neighbor who was moving out of state, helped load the truck, the usual. She texted me a week later from Arizona to say they'd frozen half the batch and were rationing them out. I think about that a lot. Pastry's a good thing to be able to hand someone. That's really what I want you walking out of here with, something worth giving away.
Before next time: just bring yourself and maybe a notebook if you like to write things down, I'll cover the rest. No shopping list yet, that's next lesson.