Old Pastry Chefs Never Die, They Just Make Less Dough

She blinded me with science!

Periodic Table of Dessert!

Now if this doesn't get you interested in science class, I don't know what will!

You win extra bonus points if you can tell me  why the entry, "Little Silver Balls" has the abbreviation of "Dr"!

For more fun food science, see also:
Table of Condiments that Periodically Go Bad
and
The Tasty Table

Holy Flair, Batman!!!

$4300 Flair

Another entry about the Fantastic Flair oven. Bear with me....but you are looking at......the holiest of holy ovens.

Behold......the $4300.00 Frigidaire Flair. That's right. This baby here went for that much on eBay yesterday.

Why so expensive? Well even though the oven is over 40 years old, it's NEVER BEEN USED. It's brand spankin' new except for one small ding in the underside storage cabinet.
Yes, I dreamed.....I drooled....I even ogled the included elusive MEAT PROBE...but all I could do was watch the auction as bids went all the way up from $99 to the winning bid of $4322.20. Sigh.

I hope the new owner of this Flair appreciates every last bit of it's $4300.00 goodness. Even though my well used Flair cost me $200 on eBay (and it too came from Kansas), I love it as though it's $4300.00 and more. I actually scored a working clock and will be installing it this weekend.

My best to you, brand new $4300.00 Flair owner! All I hope is that it will be well loved and used, and not put in some sort of "museum" to never be enjoyed for what it can do and just be looked at......! The best way to enjoy a Flair is to use it!!!

Pimp my mixer!!!

Now that I'm on the subject of awesome kitchen appliances, here's something I saw on the web forum eGullet this morning......

Flaming Hobart

A completely "pimped out" Hobart mixer. Well, "pimped out" as in, "nice paint job", and the fact that it's brand new.
But ask an experienced pastry chef if they want their mixer "pimped out", and they will list a nice paint job as the
last thing they'd ask for. Realistically, a nice paint job on a mixer is kind of a sad thing because then you feel
more obligated to wipe it down when you get a nice dusting of flour on the thing, which basically happens, oh, every few milliseconds. It's worse than waxing your shiny black Corvette and then taking it for a spin in the Mojave Desert.

Listen to me, Hobart Corporation! If you want to really, I mean REALLY "pimp out" my mixer, then you will remove
that stinking SAFETY CAGE that's around the top of the mixing bowl! Oh yeah, sure, I know, there's "safety regulations" and "liability" and "social responsibility" and all that crap. But you know what, I'm a big subscriber to Spencer's/Darwin's theory of "Survival of the Fittest", and I'm also concerned with how polluted our human gene pool has become, simply because modern safety features are allowing stupid people stay alive to actually procreate and bring into this world more stupid people. We simply must stop this from happening by removing all safety devices and letting "nature take its course".

I've been a baker/pastry chef going on 17 years now, and not once have I ever had the urge to stick my hand or any other body part in a moving commercial mixer. Actually the injuries I suffer most are cuts from knives and burns from ovens, but maybe I shouldn't say anything about that, because GOD FORBID someone puts a safety cage on my chef's knife or a heat shield on my oven doors......for cryin' out loud.

Apparently, however, there ARE people, and ENOUGH of them, that HAVE stuck their hands, ponytails, feet, genitalia, etc, in moving commercial mixers, and so now, we bakers that actually have IQ's above 10 have to suffer for it. Thanks a lot, people. Help! We're stupid! Protect us from OURSELVES!!

Now why would I be so incensed about a safety cage? Well, mostly because in the process of mixing things, I have to
add ingredients as the mixer is running, a lot of it has to do with the success of the batter, icing or dough, and also, if you add an ingredient while the mixer is running, it creates much less of a mess because the ingredient doesn't come splashing back up at you, if you'd added it all at once, then turned the mixer back on. See, the mixer won't run unless the safety cage is fully in place. You have to stop the mixer, spin the cage around, add your ingredient, close the cage again, and then re-start the mixer. Invariably, because you're trying to mix a big of a batch as the mixer is capable of, when you start that sucker, even on low, something is gonna come back up out of the bowl and make a mess. Not only that, it screws up your batter because you've lost a good portion of what you were adding. It's now on the floor, or EVEN WORSE, making your black mixer with the radical flame-age look really pathetic.

Sure, I've tried adding the ingredients to the running mixer through the holes in the cage, but that gives me just as much stuff on the floor as if I'd added it all at once with the mixer off. Dammit!!!!!!!

I'm willing to bet, even though I haven't actually researched it, that Hobart now offers a "special pouring shield" just so  we pissed-off pastry chefs can add our ingredients to a running mixer with the cage still engaged. But how much are you charging for this thing? Knowing Hobart, it's NOT cheap. I say, if we have to live with a stupid safety cage, then we should get the pouring shield for NO EXTRA CHARGE.

Of course, one skill you must possess as a pastry chef is learning how to adapt and make do with equipment that sucks or barely works. In the case of the Hobart with a safety cage, I've become very clever with magnets, cleverly
placed cut out plastic bowl scrapers, and duct tape. Yes, I've figured out many ways to disengage the safety cage
switch so I can get my work done (and done right) in a normal work day, which, for pastry chefs ranges from 8 to 24 hours, and no, I'm not kidding. Best of all, there's little to no ingredients lost due to them jumping out onto the floor!
Bakery owners generally don't like "loss" or "waste". Yeah, I know, they don't like industrial insurance claims either, but if they're gonna hire someone with an IQ of less than 10 and will work for minimum wage and can't figure out that industrial equipment is indeed dangerous, then you know what, they get what they get. That's why we "higher paid" experienced pastry chefs exist because we don't put our hands in moving mixers and then get all whiny about it.
Plus, we seriously know how to kick ass, and "ass kicking" just ain't gonna happen if you make our jobs harder with that STUPID STUPID safety friggin' CAGE!!!!

So really PIMP MY MIXER Hobart Corporation! Remove the cage. Paint it pink, and put Hello Kitty on it. Pink is a calming color you know......we PC's could use some calming colors....it's not like we're uptight about stuff or anything like that.

And speaking of Hello Kitty kitchen appliances........

And let's not forget the most IMPORTANT appliance......

Hello Kitty Happy Housewife

And if any of you "homies" as in, "home bakers" wants to trick out their mixer at home......try this out:

Flaming KitchenAid

NOTE: Now before you get all riled up about my comments about stupid people, the gene pool, "survival of the fittest", employers getting what they deserve for hiring minimum wage workers, etc, look up the meaning of the word "satire". Yes, I'll wait. What did you learn? That satire means: " Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity." Okey dokey then.....don't be getting all mad now, 'cause I'm not totally serious about
the proliferation of stupid people (Bush Administration) and eliminating them. Just partly.

The Fantastic Fantabulous Frigidaire Flair! (cat not included)

Fabflair

Sooner or later, I had to write an ode to my obsession of the last 3 years......the 44 (or so) year old oven in my kitchen. I absolutely LOVE it. I have never been so attached to an appliance in my entire life. In fact I have a closer relationship to it than I have to most people, which, when you look at it, is kind of sad statement on my relationships with people, but I digress.

Actually, when I first moved in with my future husband four years ago, I hated that oven. He lived in a 40 plus year old house, and everything in it was 40 plus years old too. Stepping into this house is like stepping back in time. The spirits of progress, home maintenance and remodeling have never stopped here; as though an overpass were built over us on the spirit superhighway.

As a professional pastry chef, I felt it was a punishment bestowed on me to have to deal with a "substandard" kitchen in my personal life, and I was stuck with an old beat up oven that had probably never been cleaned in it's entire 40 years. Not only that, but it was almost completely useless. It had four burners, but only one worked. It was a double oven, but only the small one worked. Even worse, I couldn't get a lot of normal sized baking dishes in the small oven......never mind a Thanksgiving turkey. Because of this hindrance, the first year I lived here, we tried smoking a turkey, but we couldn't find rolling papers that big. No! I kid! We used our outdoor smoker, but you know, if you're going to smoke a turkey, you need to do it slowly over a couple of days. It's not something you can pull off in under 6 hours. Needless to say, we ate smoked turkey leather that year.

I finally had really just had it with that piece of crap oven and I was frustrated beyond belief. How could I perform my housewifely duties with substandard equipment? I kept pushing my husband about remodeling, but he always deflected the topic when I brought it up. Later, after I took over the family bookkeeping, I discovered that a remodel was WAY OFF into the future, if ever. Ok fine. Forget the remodel. How about a new oven, at least!!!??? Something that works?? Something I could cook dinner on? One small problem....when the kitchen was built 40 plus years ago, it was built around the oven, since it was so "state of the art" at the time. It was the "oven of the future!" If I got a NEW, as in, built after the year 2000, oven, I would have to cut the cabinet that my Flair was sitting on out..... and I would lose cabinet space, and also, the new oven would look horrifically out of place in my old, 1960's kitchen. Frigidaire Flairs came with an optional base cabinet that they sat on if you didn't build a kitchen to accommodate them....in my case, the kitchen was built for it, meaning that we had our own custom built cabinets sitting underneath. What to do?
On a whim I decided to search eBay to see if MAYBE someone was trying to get rid of an old Flair that at least worked better than the one I had. What luck! Not one Flair, but many Flairs were up for sale! There was a beautiful one in Michigan that I missed out on, and another hindrance was that many people refused to ship the ovens because of the hassle, stating "local pickup only".....much to my chagrin. Finally, I saw a listing from a guy in Kansas City who was actually willing to ship to the winning bidder. The Flair he was offering was in perfect working condition except for the clock (which is pretty normal....hardly any clocks work on old Flairs). I won the auction for a final price of $200.....the shipping was $250, but totally worth it! My husband installed the "new" old Flair and we took the old old Flair to the dump.....it was beyond repair unfortunately, although we salvaged some parts from it, for future repair purposes.

Now that I had a WORKING Flair oven, I fell in love! I love the fact that it's a double oven. I love that the ovens are at eye level, and I can see right into them. I love the "speed heat" burner and the "heat minder" burner. Although the stovetop can slide inside and be out of sight, I never slide it in, because I use it so much. My Flair fits right in with my old kitchen since that's the kitchen I will have to live with for some time to come.

You'd think that since I finally possessed a working oven, the story would end there. Not so fast. My Flair still needs work. I'd love for the clock to work, and the timer. The Flair also came with some neato optional features, like the "Kant Slide Griddle", the rotisserie, the "Broiler Grill" and a meat probe. The meat probe wasn't optional, but seems to be missing from almost any Flair owner's inventory. I got a Kant Slide Griddle, but I am still hunting for the Broiler Grill, the meat probe and the HOLY GRAIL, the rotisserie attachment! I KNOW there's someone out there with a Flair, in good condition, and has all those accessories too! I'm just waiting........for you to give them up.

I love my old crappy 1960's kitchen. I love my Flair! I'm a chef that knows how to "make do", as well as "make dough".

Flairbrochure

For other Flair owners, here's a couple of links you might find fun and useful:
Frigidaire Flair Forums and Tech Talk Manual Download!
Dan Langdon's Flair Page!