By Laura Medina
Netflix's pop-up restaurant was never meant to be an usual restaurant.
Other than. it's a temporary restaurant, they replaced the normally popular brunch service with an additional pop-ups of cooking classes lead by their star chefs.
A week later after the final brunch weekend, Chef Curtis Stone showed up, leading his cooking class then pastry chef Nadiya Hussain appeared a week later, teaching an audience some of her pastry dishes.
During her week, she stayed on to autograph copies of her cookbook, "Nadiya Bakes: Over 100 Must-Try Recipes for Breads, Cakes, Biscuits, Pies, and More: A Baking Book" that the restaurant eventually gift to diners, as surprise souvenirs to delighted guests in the following week.
Of course, her guest appearance lasted only for a week.
So, who's the final guest celebrity chef for the weekend, before Netflix Bites shuts down in two weeks?
Can't forget "Mr. Chocolate," French pastry chef, Jacques Torres, he was the final guest chef class for the third and last experience.
Humble and humorous, Jacques lets out all the little secrets or techniques, that makes French cooking and cuisine the standard as it is expectational.
For his first pastry, he taught and fried "french doughnut," it's balls of brioche dough fried in oil.
Here's his first little secret technique. Always have a bowl of sugar ready at hand. As soon as he plucked out fried brioche dough out of the boiling hot pot of fry oil, he quickly dumped the steaming hot fried dough into that bowl of sugar then started tossing it, coating in sugar. Taking advantage of the heat streaming from the fried dough, the heat from the dough instantly melts the sugar in to an instant sugar glaze.
No additional whisking of milk and confectioner sugar into a dipping glaze.
Jacques simply used science and chemistry that was taught and handed down in generations for this classic fried bread that he piped in classic pastry cream.
How do French-trained chefs whip up creamy pastry cream without scrambling it into scrambled eggs?
After he's down separating the yolks away their egg whites, Jacque simply whisk the yolks into a liquid, making it easier for him to pour a little bit of the warm vanilla milk into the liquefied yolks to temper it.
Tempering the yolks, whisking then blend the warmth into the yolks, stops the yolks from being scrambled and making it easier to blend into the greater vanilla milk to make the whole thing in to pastry cream.
This is how Jacques makes filled fried brioche doughnut.
For his second pastry, fried phyllo strips Napoleon, layered with pastry cream, Jacques added another trick.
He taught the raptured audience in how to make sugar dome, to glided the cage over any dessert.
He jokingly taught the audience, if the chef makes a mistake filled it in with more icing, more frosting, and more glaze to cover up the mistakes.
Him making something so fancy, proves that the technique is simply as are ingredients, water and sugar.
But, it's the little things that make it or break it.
Way before you make the sugar dome, spray butter to coat the inside of a metal bowl or pot, so the caramel sugar won't stick.
Keep your eyes out to the sugar caramelizing, that's when you pull out strings of molten caramelize sugar out of the pot.
Jacque spun a web of caramelized sugar threads inside the buttered pot, creating that spun sugar dome, that he simply pop out over the phyllo Napoleon.
Again, the crowd cheers when they got the chance to enjoy Jacque's Phyllo Napoleon.
So sorry, that Netflix Bites cooking demos and the restaurant will disappear soon.
