Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Baking Christmas in August
The kitchens of the Grande Epicerie de Paris, the gourmet food shop attached to the upscale Bon Marché department store, are down in the basement, away from the August sunshine.
[Ambi: ‘Putting on the booties.’]
Visitors need to put on plastic booties over their shoes, wear a hair net and a plastic coat to keep dirt and germs from the outside out of the kitchen.
[Ambi: ‘I do feel like I’m going into surgery’]
Down here, in the pastry lab, half a dozen people in white coats and checkered pants are busy stirring folding croissants and glazing cakes on stainless steel counters.
Sarah Tyler manages the petit gateau section—the small cakes—the petit fours and bite sized pastries that are served at weddings and brunches. Today she and her team are working on test batches of creams that will be considered as part of the fall “collection”
Tyler: “We have little chocolate boxes that will be filled with different fillings. We have a tart. We have a cake that we’re probably doing tomorrow”
Tyler moves quickly between her counters and her stocks. She then shows off what is one of the most important tools a pastry chef has
Tyler: “This is the freezer, it’s kind of loud!”
These are room-sized freezers—trays of finished tarts and cakes are stacked on wheeled carts, ready to go up and be sold. Along the walls are towers of white styrophone boxes with labels
Tyler: “Those are cheesecakes- we did them last week. And those will take me hopefully until November.”
[Ambi]
Tyler: “Everything we do is in freezers. Nothing - except if it’s a fresh fruit tart - is fresh. I’ve been in little stores, in big stores- everybody works with freezers. It’s simply not possible with the amount of products we have and the staff to do every single thing every day.
[Ambi: stirring]
Tyler: “Right now it’s the summer. Very calm. So, what we’re doing in my section, and also in the cake section, is that we’re starting to prepare for winter, for crhistmas.”
The Christmas season is the busiest time of the year for pastry chefs, with the buches - the traditional yule log cakes - as well as the galettes - puff pastry kings cakes that are eaten at the beginning of January.
Tyler: “We’ll start those in October and November, for January. Even making them in November we still have to make some all through January. We’ll make about 10,000. During the holidays, we’re probably using close 200 kilos of butter, just for the puff pastries.”
Someone from the cake section wheels by a stack of jelly-covered sponge cake, a component of the yule logs
[Ambi ‘On passe a noel.’]
We’re moving towards Christmas, he says
Tyler: “They’re being frozen and stocked, and in December production will stop. It will just shift into decoration. We decorate them almost as fast as we sell them.”
[Ambi]
Tyler: “So this is the flash freezer, you can hear it, it’s humming.”
[Ambi]
Tyler: “Anything that is going to be frozen needs to first be put into a flash freezer, which will bring any product down to a very, very cold temperature - negative 30 is ours - in a very fast time, and then it can be put in our regular freezer, which is at about negative 20 Celsius.”
[Ambi: stirring]
Back in the testing kitchen, Tyler and two other chefs are still stirring and boiling. When they’re done with the samples, they’ll sit down with the head chef and chose their favorites. They’ll start producing those in October.
[Ambi: mixer]
Upstairs in the warm August sun, it’s hard to imagine that the chefs underground are working away at Christmas, like so many of Santa’s little helpers. It’s all in a summer’s work!
This is Sarah Elzas in Paris
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