Cooking Lab

Last year I took cooking just to try it out and to see if I liked it. I ended up loving it and had lots of fun so I took it again this year. This year we cooked a lot more and we had a large variety of recipes. We did some pickled and canned foods, different kinds of breads, soups and stocks, and different kinds of pastries. The recipe that stood out for me was the apple pie. I thought it would be super fun to learn how to make an apple pie. We had to make our own pie crust, apple filling, and pie top. I thought that my final end product was pretty average. I didn't have any trouble doing the pie crust because I tried to work fast and not warm up the dough too much. When making the dough I was able to use the pastry blender which was very helpful. I put a good amount of apple filling so at the end, the apples shrunk but there was still enough filling left so that the top didn't collapse. The filling wasn't too sweet and the apples were cooked enough that it wasn't still hard but not mushy. The top design that I put was a lattice mixed with a couple of braids. The design didn't turn out as nice as I hoped because it ended up looking messy. So I learned that I should be more precise and careful when making a design on pies. Try to keep it simple but nice at the same time. I had an amazing time in this course learning about new techniques and new recipes.