Soups Stocks and Sauces, another Grossmont College Class

I just thought I'd talk a little about the class I've been doing every Tuesday evening with chef Kim at Grossmont College. Its called 'Soups, Stocks and Sauces' which sounds a little dry, but it really is the foundation for all other cooking.

It was an extremely enjoyable class, made even more enjoyable by my team, we were all a little older, and really wanted to do our best, so we were always very happy with our dishes.

The class started with a lot of boiling of bones to make stocks. This wasnt so interesting for me as a vegetarian, but it was useful to know the principles in case I do ever plunge back into a truly omnivorous diet again.


We moved onto reductions, vegetable stocks and soups, and then some tomato sauces.



There was an investigation into the fine art of making a roux, and we made white, blond and brown roux and then used it in various applications.

Next were healthy hot and cold soups, some delicious vichysoisse, gazpacho and curried soups.

We explored chowders and bisques.

Then came the tricky hollandaise and beurre blanc. Divine but scary to see the amount of butter in there!

It was really fun to delve so deeply into flavors and seasonings and to test our palletes against other peoples, and to learn these basic techniques. The complete snob in me was excited to be officialy educated in 'the mother sauces' so I can sound all poncy at any chosen occasion!

I will definitely keep some of the things I learned in class close to hand, many of the reductions we made were truly delicious and add a depth of flavor that will be really useful for my cooking, in particular some of the reductions we did.

If anyone is interested in signing up for any classes then pop on over to the Grossmont College website. Classes fill up almost immediately and there are some pre-requisites. This class required you to take 'Basic Culinary' which is another reason why it is so pleasant, everyone in the class had already been through a semester of knife skills, breaking down chickens and general classes.

The last picture is our final exam. We made consomme, beurre blanc, red pepper coulis, a corn chowder and hollandaise sauce and we aced it with an A!

Real Life

Welcome to the real world, Jennywenny!

I had the opportunity to work at a local bakery as part of the Culinary Program at Grossmont College. It was a fantastic experience. I learned about a million dollars worth of stuff, and although I worked for free, it was well worth it for all the stuff I learned.

The bakery has a few different cake flavors and designs that they generally make, mostly presented with buttercream frosting and simple piping. They have an incredibly sturdy system for making sure that the cake stands up to all manner of abuse and wobbling before the happy couple take their chunk of cake.


It was a little disappointing to find that the buttercream used was a standard 'American Buttercream' made with shortening and sugar and a little butter flavor and vanilla to make it palatable. I generally use swiss meringue buttercream for my cakes and it seems to be really easy to work with, this stuff took a bit of getting used to, and doesnt taste the best. I understand that most bakeries use this, so it wasnt an enormous shock for me.


In my 120 hours of experience, I learned how to torte and cut the cakes to size, then fill a 'dam' of buttercream with a tasty filling, making sure to use lots of flavored syrup to moisten the cake. A 'crumb coat' of buttercream was added, followed by at least two layers of buttercream, then lots of smoothing to get the perfect finish.


I never did get the perfect finish, but I got close! I'm told the secret is dipping the scraper into really hot water and having the cake very well chilled.


I also learned about putting ribbons on cakes, which I've not tried, and about piping, which I got used to.


This is a finished cake that I did, I was very happy with how it turned out, I did get some help with smoothing the buttercream, but I built the cake and did the ribbon and the piping.

It was an invaluable experience, I've read lots about what its like working in the food industry and it was great having this experience. I'm eternally grateful to grossmont college, since I'd worked in their kitchen I had a feeling for how things work in an industrial kitchen so it didnt feel too wierd.

Something I was reminded of was that it will become repetitive pretty quickly. Making cakes for friends is one thing, the cakes are different every time, and its fun, but as a profession, you have to pare things down a little and things get repetitive pretty quickly. Most bakeries have a choice of somewhere around 10 different flavors of cake/filling, and a similar number of designs. It wasnt a long enough period of time to know whether I would be bored out of my mind in a few months.

Cake class-final

Today was our last class with Chef Foran at Grossmont College. I was sad because it was an awesome class and I learned so much. My confidence has really grown and I've learned so much. I'm hoping to start some work experience soon so I can use some of my skills and learn much more.

We were given 4 tiers of dummy cakes, I was really keen to try the square cakes, my team were very apprehensive, but I thought we might as well challenge ourselves as much as possible since we're learning.

I think they were very thankful in the end. We decided on a white cake with red accents, which we saw in a book, which I've forgotten the title of! Jessica made some awesome gumpaste roses, I'd love to learn them, they were spectacular! We all had a go at piping the designs, which we traced on with a pin and then piped over the dots. We also used gumpaste cutouts and some pearls.

Here are most of the cakes all together, amazing how all of the groups came up with such different designs! All very pretty though.

My favourite cake (apart from ours!!) was this one with the beautiful purple flowers and painted vines. This was a really pretty technique and I noticed it seemed relatively quick too, which is always a bonus!

This is the other cake which didnt fit on the main table. An amazingly cheery yellow cake with pretty piping and lots of great flowers. I thought it was a really interesting design too. It would be a bit scary to do with real cake!

This was another fun design which looked like maybe a baby shower cake. They chose to put the top tier on its side, which I thought was in interesting look.

Please see http://www.grossmont.edu/ for more details about culinary classes at grossmont college.