PASTRY DOUGH

Here is Chef Michael Jaimeson, our Patisserie Lecturer, demonstrating pastry dough management. If there is one technique we must pick up & make it second nature, this is it. Arguably, it is one of the trickiest techniques to master. Chef Didier told me today, ' .... in patisserie you must firstly understand why things are done a certain way, and secondly, you must follow recipes, to the letter .... '. An old Chinese saying refers to developing a child's character to 'managing dough' in part becasue of the hard & soft approach. Today we learned how to take our palms, hands & fingers through the paces. The name of the game is to alternate between strength & tenderness. The first thing that came to my mind was parenting, closely followed by people management ie the good-cop & bad cop routine in both scenarios. See how our daily life can apply to cooking, and vice versa? If I have known the physical intensity earlier, I would have trained for it at the HKJC gym. Right now my fingers are not dexterous enough, my arms not strong enough, but my adrenalin is almost as high as my cholesterol, being single-mindedly focused on a discipline I am passionately in love with, 6 days a week. What more is there to ask?