Breakfast for Dessert

Prior to working in the restaurant kitchen at school, I had my two hot foods culinary courses with Chef Huber, an excellent chef with experience from all over the world.  Two of the major things he stressed in class were the concepts of substitution and utilization, two big words that allow for the arts in "culinary arts."

Have you ever tried a recipe, but didn't have all the ingredients or changed some of the ingredients to your personal tastes?  That's substitution!  Now, that concept doesn't always work, especially in baking where specific ingredients have very specific purposes, depending on their specified amounts.  Anyhow, Chef Huber always encouraged us to substitute wherever we saw fit.

In addition to substitution, utilization is another concept in the kitchen that forces you to get creative, often in conjunction with substitution. A restaurant usually ends up with leftover ingredients, or leftovers of a final product; simply throwing it away would fill up your garbage bin with piles and piles of money (costs to buy the food ingredients, costs to make the dish, profit lost because it was not sold, and costs for the garbage man to take it away).  One example of utilization is taking unused breakfast pastries that never made it to the buffet line (e.g. danish, cinnamon rolls, etc.) and turning them into bread pudding the next day.

These pastries have a future beyond breakfast.

The Pastry Demons in Careme's came upon such a predicament when we held a breakfast service, rather than our usual lunch service.  In addition to having a plethora of leftover danishes and sticky buns, the hot line cooks made an excessive amount of bacon.  By the end of the breakfast, a small hotel pan was still filled with a heaping pile of crispy bacon strips.  The kitchen staff, a.k.a. the students, could only eat so much of the leftovers. Rather than throwing it all away, we could hear echoes of Chef Huber's lectures, "Utilization!  Utilization!  Substitution!  Substitution!"

For fans of my Disney food blog, you are well aware of my success of bacon in pastries (If not, check out my February 6th Superbowl Sunday Brunch); bacon at the pastry station is not a strange concept to the Pastry Demons.  Aliesha was all over the task of using this bacon somehow, and I gave her my full support.  The only thing was, how would we use it?  Well, we had another problem to solve that day; we needed a new flavor to serve with our Ice Cream Trio dessert...

Vanilla ice cream churning with a special ingredient.

Yep, you guessed it! We made up our favorite vanilla ice cream recipe and while it was churning, we added some diced up bacon and swirled in a few spoonfuls of maple syrup as an accompaniment.  The other guys in the kitchen thought we were nuts.  A few cringed at the thought, while others were eager to give it a try once it was done, even if it was a crazy idea.  Churning ice cream takes quite sometime, even with an automatic ice cream churner. While going about our other dessert business, the student chefs in the other stations kept finding a reason to come by our little pastry corner asking, "Is it done yet? Is it done yet?"

Finally, after 30 minutes of turning cream into its popular iced variety, the maple bacon ice cream concoction was ready to sample.  The sweet, creamy vanilla ice cream had a subtle, maple flavor and was balanced with the salty, savory flavor of the bacon bits.  The overall result was a creamy, delicious, full breakfast on a spoon!

We felt like the popular kids in school as word got around that there was bacon ice cream in the kitchen.  One student got such a kick out of it that he ran upstairs to the computer lab and updated his Facebook to tell his friends he just had bacon ice cream.

Our new Ice Cream Trio: Vanilla, Chocolate, and Maple Bacon

- Sandwich