Sugar High

Some for real Alaska stuff

Aialik Glacier (sooo many vowels)

It really shouldn’t have taken so many attempts, but I’m pleased to announce that I finally made a perfect (well, damn near perfect) apple strudel.  Important lessons learned:
- you want a less-sticky dough
- a cloth is essential for rolling
- heat the apple pieces through and cool before filling the dough and they won’t collapse
- brush dough with clarified butter and a sprinkling of powdered sugar to get better layers
- your coworkers love anything with sugar, no matter how short of your own expectations it may have turned out

Also in baking success this week was the ideal blueberry crumble: the filling cooked down just right, the notes of lemon and almond and cinnamon superbly balanced.  I made enough for 34 instead of 14, but can you have too much of a good thing?

Something awful and fun about a cooking job is that you’ve never done stuff before.  On one hand, I’ve made various crumbles hundreds of times and have a good idea of how much I can mess with ingredients — but I’ve never made ten pounds of it at once with industrial equipment.  And on the other hand, I’d never made strudel before.  So that’s cool that I get to learn and try it out, and even when it sucks the fifth time, I can think “Well, this is only the fifth strudel I’ve ever made.”

Fun fact: I’ve been going through about 75 pounds of flour per week.  That’s not that crazy, especially considering the volume of cookies we churn out.  My collection of egg whites was getting pretty unwieldy, so I made a couple hundred meringue cookies that we plan to artfully crumble atop...something.

As I write this I’m struggling not to fall asleep at 7pm after an action-packed weekend.  Unprecedented levels of sunshine and blue skies correlated with being in an 8.5 hour fjord sealife boat tour.  It takes s surprising amount of energy to sit and watch otters paddling, orcas feeding, humpbacks breaching, sea lions sunning, puffins diving, glaciers calving, rock formations gleaming, and other tourists scampering around the boat.  Then this morning an overeager friend tapped in my door and motivated me to go on a “strenuous” hike with willpower-testing ascent and rewarding views.  It was sooooo beautiful.  I’m not surprised, but I am quite sleepy.