Olive Internship - Day 1

Since I am currently on my summer vacation (April-June in India), I decided to do an internship at Olive Beach. Chef Girish- the head pastry chef, is mentoring me and I cannot begin to describe how much fun my first day was. I have already learnt an incredible amount and can only imagine how much more there is to come!

When I reached Olive, I was given an apron and was immediately submerged into work. We started off simple; a batch of brownies. 

Then we proceeded to make Soba ice-cream and a Soy sticky toffee sauce. Both are served with a Buckwheat Chocolate cake. Chef Girish said that the idea was to give the consumer a new sensation in the mouth with each bite, through the warmth of the sticky toffee, the density of the cake, and the coolness of the ice-cream to help soften everything. 

Chef Babu- the Sous chef, taught me how to make a berry sorbet using blueberries and strawberries, after which we made vanilla bean and mint marshmallows. They were a lot easier to make than anticipated, and Chef Babu piped a layer of the marshmallow liquid in a rectangular mould, placed a cube of pre-made mango and orange sorbet, and piped some more marshmallow over it, covering it completely. When it set, it looked like a cube of mint and vanilla bean marshmallow but it had a log of the mango and orange sorbet inside. I found it delicious! (I am not a big fan of most fruits)

Chef Girish and I then made a 'Honeycomb' Toffee. It looks like caramel until baking soda is added. This aerates it immensely, causing bubbles to form throughout when it is poured into the mould to set. Once it's set, you crack it out of the mould and when you look inside (cross section) it looks exactly like a honeycomb. 

When I asked Chef how they serve it at Olive, he said that they use it as a base over which they place their salted caramel desserts.

Once we were done with that, we began to make pretzels. In the pretzel dough, Chef Girish added protein enhancers and bread improvement powders to help the texture and stability of the dough as well as provide it with greater elasticity when relaxed. Once everything was kneaded, we tested the dough by forming a window with it (stretching the dough between four fingers in the shape of a square) .On the first go, the window tore apart which showed us that the dough was not ready yet, however on the second go (once it was kneaded for a bit longer) the window didn't break. This method of testing is called 'Gluten Matrix'. 

We rolled the dough really thin and cut it into 3-6cm pieces, placed each piece onto a silicon mat on a large baking sheet, wrapped it, and left it to ferment overnight. Tomorrow, we are going to dip them in a baking soda mixture to extract maximum flavour, bake them, and dip them into tempered dark chocolate. 

Before I left, I watched Chef Babu make a dark chocolate and almond-pistachio praline, which is a component in Olive's signature 'snicker bar' dessert.

Once I went home, I was eager to try making the marshmallows again, and so I did. I didn't have dried mint powder so i made them with vanilla bean instead. They came out deliciously, and I was so proud of them however the next time I make them, I may have to work quicker as they begin to set very quickly, and they need to be rolled out on a flat surface so that it makes it easier for you to cut them into cubes and roll in icing sugar. 

This is how my marshmallows turned out: