Chef Jocelyn

Now that we are half way through our Basic Pastry training, I think it is safe to speak for my classmates when I say that we really like our main chef: Chef Jocelyn.  Girls in my group often giggle about how adorable he is, not in a romantic way, but in the same way that one would smile at kids in Halloween costumes or foreign students who are lost on campus (before you help them, of course).

No, Chef Jocelyn is cute in his own unique way that is composed of a few elements: 1) his humor, 2) his accent and grasp of the English language, and 3) his look.  These things combined make him the perfect chef for a large group of Basic Pastry students like us, and makes our 3-hour classes pass quickly, usually with at least a few instances of laughter, even if they are just for courtesy.

His Humor

The Chef has a very specific kind of humor that usually involves making word puns in English.  They usually don’t work out very well, but when that happens, we (or at least those of us in the first two rows) force a little giggle, smile out of kindness and appreciation for his trying, or laugh a little at his reaction to his own joke.  I really appreciate that he makes jokes, and they’re usually some of my favorite parts of the demo, whether they’re funny or not.  They include things like calling his rolling pin his “Rolling Stones” repeatedly, then giggling to himself.  He has also adopted the Star Trek quote, “He’s dead, Jim” and uses it to break the news to students that they need to start over in practical.  The same day he adopted that quote, he repeated, “I’m the Doctor!  Doctor Who?  I’m the Doctor!  Doctor Who?” as he did his rounds in the lab kitchen, stopping to giggle every few rotations.

As I’m sure you can imagine, a pastry demo generally has a lot of quiet time in which we watch the chef repeat tasks until he is out of dough, all the pans are prepared, etc.  Chef Jocelyn likes to fill this quiet time, which we appreciate.  These sidebars are sometimes about the chemistry or mechanics of what will happen in the pastry, but usually they are about different subjects like cycling or cell phones or technology as a whole.  One of my favorites was about fast food restaurants, which I have included in the recordings below.

His Accent and Grasp of the English Language

I have been blessed with the natural and uncanny ability to easily decipher the spoken word of someone who speaks English as a second (or third or fourth) language.  I’m not sure why, but from a young age, I have just always been able to understand accents very easily.  Everyone from my professors from Turkey and Germany and Algeria and Mongolia to the Frenchmen I met while studying in Chambéry.  That talent, combined with my knowledge of the French language, has made it almost natural to understand the chefs here.  Chef Jocelyn, though, evidently is not always easy to understand, as I often hear my classmates asking each other to repeat things from class or complain about how difficult it is to understand him.

Just because I can understand his accent doesn’t mean that I can ignore it – it is fantastic!  Words like “butter” and “flour” and “counter” have distinctly French endings, words like “temperature” get an extra syllable, and words like “coagulation” and “vapor,” which are very similar in French, get to stay in French.

He understands and speaks English very well, considering it isn’t his native language, and I can’t think of a time that I simply did not understand him.  Sometimes he has to get a little creative with his words and it doesn’t come out quite correctly (like explaining yeast as being a “microscopic mushroom”), but we understand what he means.

I take an audio recording of each lesson, just in case I miss something or want to review later, and I re-recorded a few samples of his accent for you.  Is he easy to understand?  If not, I've included a cheat sheet at the end of the post.  Let me know how easy (or not) he is to understand -- I'm really curious!  Here are a few samples (click on the titles to open in another window, click on the large orange play button):

Microscopic Mushroom

Pâte à Choux

Big Mac = Freshness

Soupy

His Look

Chef Jocelyn looks like a pastry chef.  It’s undeniable!  Usually he wears clear-rimmed classes and he smiles ALL the time.  He’s pretty skinny, which one would not expect from a seasoned pastry chef, but he explained it to us:  Pastry chefs stay skinny because of all the hard work that goes into successful doughs.  And I can say – it is truly exhausting.

Cheat Sheet

The transcripts of the first three recordings of Chef's accent, just in case he is difficult to understand:

Microscopic Mushroom

“So the…the yeast as you know is uh…it’s a mushroom.  It’s a microscopic mushroom. So the yeast is alive.  By comparison with baking powder: baking powder is chemical.  Uh?  K?  So that means yeast need a process before to be active.  If you put like this in the dough like you do with baking powder, it does not work.  To active the yeast, you need to feed the mushroom.  Imagine it’s a mushroom; it’s a vegetable.  So he needs food…for the, the best condition to survive he needs food.  He needs humidity, and he need temperature.”

Big Mac

“Fast food.  The success of fast food.  Two idées: serve very fastly and fresh.  Period.  That’s all.  If you eat, if you buy a Big Mac now, leave it on the counter and you eat it in one hour, you puke.  K?  This is the biggest success of the food chain is that: freshness.  Not the ingredients, no.  The cheapest ingredients.  But, C’est la vie.”

Pâte à Choux

“Now I’m going to incorporate the eggs.  The eggs are crucial in this recipe because the steam; because I did not dry all the water from the recipe, ok?  I just dry a part of it.  The water that is inside the panade is going to be transform in steam in oven that will push the pâte à choux up.  Then the eggs are going to coagulate.  Ok?  And when there is no steam anymore inside the pâte à choux, the eggs, after coagulation, will be hard.  That’s what makes the shell of pâte à choux.  Ok?  So, it’s necessary to dry the panade, but not too much.  If you over-dry the panade, your pâte à choux will never rise.  You understood?  There is no liquid, there is no water in the panade anymore so it doesn’t puff.  You don’t have steam.  K?  Voilà.  Alors, you can press again, a little bit on your bowl.  The quantity of eggs that I have is approximatively 10, 15% too much.  K?  So that means you can add first half of it.  There is no problem if you add half of it.  But then at the end you have to do it very very very carefully.  You adjust the correct consistency.  I will tell you the correct consistency.  So I have 8, uh, 10 eggs to incorporate, so I can add 5 eggs without over-dosing.  Oui.  I have no risk since I add only 50% of the quantity; I have no risk to over-dose.  That’s only at the end.  The risk is at the end.”