My Dream Stage
No, no, I swear it was real! Internships are hard sought and you never truly know what you’re getting into when you apply. After a 40 minute drive by freeways and through farmlands, I arrive at work at 6am Tuesday - Friday and 5am on Saturdays, not bad for the pastry life. My day starts after I change into my uniform and enter the packing area/break room, I walk through the plastic dividers to the chocolate tempering room, and through another set of plastic dividers to the chocolate lab then make a slight right to the pastry kitchen. Along the entire route, I say individual “Bonjour”s and “Salut”s to each person to both acknowledge their presence and make them aware of my own. Immediately I get started on finishing the pastries to be sent out this morning to the shops and doing final decorations to special orders. Afterwards, we start up a x7 recipe of creme pat, maybe refill some diplomat cremes we used that morning, or even start a giant mixer on some lemon cake.
Everything we did there was made fresh and in-house, nothing was ever solely from a can and dumped into the mix. Every ingredient we had was sourced from the local and neighboring farmlands: Gilbert, the milk delivery man, would come by every two or three days and give us another giant milk churn holding roughly 20L of fresh cow milk, we’d get weekly deliveries of Plougastel strawberries specifically for their namesake pastry which was highly popular, and even the flour was sourced from a local factory nearby. This was only part of the reason why everything tasted delicious. The other reason was our chef, Richard, who has been with Le Derf for 10 years.
Chef Richard is a jolly, tea-loving, shaved headed Frenchman who speaks only a little English and mostly endearing phrases like constantly repeating “you know?” or “perfect!” with an occasional quote from a movie that throws you completely off because it has no context whatsoever. His recipes and skill were above or at least at the standard that I was exposed to at school and I was able to learn a whole lot from him. My faithful teacher and translator was Alexandre, a near-fluent English-speaking Frenchman who was nearing the end of his tenure as a pastry chef to pursue his real love of construction and welding. He was determined to pass on his 10 years of pastry knowledge to me, considering we were the same age and I was just starting this profession as he was leaving it. He taught me many tips and tricks; I learned that you should pick up an alphabetized pocket notebook to jot down recipes you can quickly thumb to when needed, that you should hold the half of the peeled orange in your hand with a towel so when you juice it your fingers don’t get sliced, and so much more.
Amongst the chocolate side of the house there were 15 hard-working people maintaining the entire operation from making the caramels and fillings, to portioning and moulding, to demoulding and packaging, and finally to labeling and shipping to the 5 locations spread throughout Bretagne. One had even went to ENSP for his Chocolate CAP and we would infrequently chant “Yssingeaux!” to each other when we ran out of things to say. Some days a chocolatier would join us in the pastry kitchen when we had a big individual order of 200 mini-pastries, and I was able to spend an entire day on the chocolate side of the house doing many different roles of closing macarons, decorating chocolates, and filling chocolate shelled heart-shaped bonbons with caramel and ganache.
After a lunch break around noon-1pm, we’d wrap up any last minute recipes or items off our daily to-do list and then get to cleaning, usually ending the day around 2:30pm. My drive would be roughly an hour because now everyone else in the city was awake and moving about. The days flew by and before I knew it, my two months were up. It was so wonderful meeting everyone and being able to learn in that welcoming and friendly environment - Chef Richard gave me a big hug and bisous which is very rare for him, I’m told. My last day included bunches of gifts from my fellow dessert makers, including a double round of champagne by Bruno Le Derf himself alongside a little speech. It really was an honor to have worked there and a memory I will cherish forever.