Sur La Table - French Pastry Class

Just so you don't think that all I do is eat, I also take a good amount of cooking classes. Ok, actually, more like baking classes. You get to take the class, make something yummy, and get to eat it at the end. This time I went to Sur La Table.

I signed up for the French Pastry class, and I love the teacher, Courtney Goff. She is a pastry chef for Intercontinental Hotel at one point and also travelled all over to teach people and make these awesome food.

What else I love about this teacher is that she understands for us doing this at home with a home kitchen, we don't get any fancy stuff like they do in a professional kitchen, so she is more thoughtful in giving us tips to do these awesome pastries at home. The other thing I like about my teacher is that she did compare and contrast with different type of pate a choux dough, so we get the experience and understand why we did what we did in order to yield results.

So, for this class, it's basically all of my favorite pastries in one spot. We did palmier two ways. One was sweet with the store bought dough, and the other was savory w/ prosciutto and feta. Both are very good, but the difference on the dough truly makes a difference. The store bought dough baked thin and tidy. But the homemade dough is more flavorful, especially with the amount of butter that's in the dough.

The other thing we did was profiteroles. If you've never had any profiterole, it's not just your normal cream puff pastry. It's dainty, and can have its own personality. The best one I've been to would be at Jeannine's Bistro. And while you're making that, it's just a small change to make eclairs. The cream for eclairs is sweeter than the cream in profiterole, but if you were to combine the two, which a couple of us did and then went crazy from there... it's way fun and yummy!

The last thing we didn't spent too much time on, was the pouched pear on top of a cracker. It's also made w/ the pate a choux dough, but it's baked w/ a weight on top of it to achieve the thick cracker look. Frankly, I'm not too excited about that. I've seen pouched pear done in a very nice and easy way that I like better. Plus, by the time we get to that point, I'm all sugared out and I can take it or leave it at that point.

Overall, it's fun to go to these hands on classes w/ Sur La Table, the only thing is that anything leftover in class they go to the staff at the store. In the past, they would allow students to buy containers or bring their own and take them home. But, they recently stopped that practice. So, if you think you get to take some leftovers home, fuggetaboutit. I think it mainly has to to do w/ Health Code and laws. Basically because they are not a full kitchen and is not licensed to sell food, so for them to do that would be a violation. I'm not sure how that's different than Well Done because we were allowed to take some leftovers home. So, who knows. Either way, you should go check it out. They offer a pretty wide array of classes, from couples night to kids and teens cooking classes.

Sur La Table

1996 West Gray

Houston, Texas 77019

tel: 713-533-0959