Tuesday, October 8, 2019 | Written by Karsten
About a week ago, we got an email about having the chance to cook with a couple of chefs at CROUS, a cafeteria close to Georgia Tech Lorraine’s campus that lots of students go to for lunch. Set up by the BDE, students would be learning to make pasta and pastries—this alone enticed me enough to sign up, as my Tuesday afternoons are very free. However, when I talked to my friends, most of them didn’t sign up for one reason or another, so it was my goal to try to convince them to go so I wouldn’t be alone. I managed to get a couple of them to come, so I knew it’d be a good time.
Pasta
We started with pasta. On the tables, there was 100 grams of flour, one egg, and salt and pepper. We poured the flour onto the table, made a gap in the middle for the egg so it wouldn’t go everywhere, and mixed the two together by hand. From there, we added a pinch of salt and pepper and then let it rest for twenty minutes. Since we were making tortellini, we were able to make the filling while the dough rested. The filling was cream cheese, Parmesan cheese, pepper, a little bit of olive oil and an even smaller bit of truffle oil. Next, we put the dough through the pasta press, which made our dough into a very thin sheet. In the end, the dough was only one to two millimeters thick. From there, we used a circular cookie cutter to make as many circles of dough as we could fit. We put a little bit of our cream cheese mixture into the middle of the circle of dough, put some water along the edges of the circles (so the dough stuck to itself upon folding), and folded the pasta. Once all of our pasta had been folded, we dropped them into a primarily water, boiling, water-oil mixture. They only needed a couple minutes in there until the tortellini was done. There was no sauce for the pasta, but it was still some of the best pasta I’ve ever had—not that me making it had anything to do with that.
Pastries
For the pastry, we were making a chocolate fondant—better known in the U.S. as molten chocolate cake. We actually didn’t get much in terms of amounts of each ingredient, but we did mix eggs, flour, sugar, chocolate chips, and butter (chocolate chips and butter made a chocolate liquid when heated). That was all we had to do, and so we scooped some of the batter into a little cup and into the oven it went. When it came out, it was very molten—so much so that it didn’t stay in the cake shape when we took it from its container. Though it probably should’ve been cooked a tiny bit longer, it tasted phenomenal and I had three, as my sweet tooth can’t be contained at times.
Conclusion
I’m really happy that I signed up to do this, as I’d never done any form of homemade pasta before. If my hands weren’t so dirty, I would’ve enjoyed taking more pictures of the event, but luckily Katia was there with her camera and got lots of pictures for us. The chefs were interested in doing another event in the future, so if you’re reading this from GTL, please come out, it’s a good time.