Farmers markets around the country are screaming with color right now and magazines are full of recipes for preserving.  But many habitues of these markets demur at the prospect of making their own fruit preserves.  It may be the 10-quart pot of boiling water or the terrifying images of spoilage indelibly imprinted by home economics teachers that leave serious cooks and local food proponents content to try elk and goat but too timid to try jam-making.

If professional training in French pastry-making taught me one thing beyond candy-making, it certainly de-mystified and simplified preserving.  Market devotees deserve to know they've been unnecessarily intimidated.  The techniques I learned from pastry chef Christine Ferber, France's queen of confitures, and from my chefs at the French Pastry School, have almost nothing in common but fruit and sugar with what I had learned in the past.  These guys have had some pretty sensitive jobs -- like working for the French president and the Sultan of Brunei -- so I am confident that this is not casual advice.  In this time of seasonal bounty, it seems unfair not to share what I learned and debunk a few myths.

Myth 1: Jam Jars Must be Sterilized in a Water Bath Before Filling 

Most cookbooks will tell you to wash your jam jars in soapy water and then submerge them in a large pot of boiling water for about 15 minutes to sterilize them.  Get rid of the pot!  There's no need to cap a glorious day at the market with a steamy day in the kitchen. 

Clean jars can be effectively sterilized by placing them on a clean cookie sheet in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes.  That's enough time to kill bacteria and provide a sanitary receptacle for your fruit jam.

Myth 2: Leave Some "Headroom" in Filled Jars

Jars should be filled to within an 1/8 of an inch of the top, according to most recipes.  Think about it.  This makes no sense at all!   Fill the jars as full as you can.  That's what Ferber, who turns out over a million dollars of hand-filled jars a year, does in her small Alsatian kitchen.

Less space will leave less room for funky things to grow. You just need to make sure the outer rim of the jar is clean so that the lid will seal tightly.  As soon as you fill the jar, seal it.  Don't leave a jar open while you fill others and then seal them all together at the end.

Myth 3: Cutting the Sugar Won't Affect a Recipe

Maybe, but sugar helps preserve fruit.  Reduce the sugar, but know that you may also be cutting the preserving power.  As a guide, consider that in France, by law, preserves need to consist of roughly 60 percent solids after cooking. 

Myth 4: Jars Need to be Re-boiled Once Sealed

If standing over a large hot pot to sterilize empty jars is not enough of a nuisance, conventional wisdom says you also need to boil the filled jars to create a tight seal.  Not true!  All you need to do is turn the filled jars, while they are still hot, upside down on a wire rack or sheetpan.  Then let them cool completely.

When you turn them right-side-up, check the vacuum by giving a gentle push with your thumb in the center of the lid. If you have sealed the jars properly, you will not be able to depress the lid further as you will have already created a vacuum.  However, if you have not sealed the jars well, you will hear a slight click and feel a slight depression.   You can still forget about the terrifying lessons of your home economics teacher, but I'd stick the preserves in the fridge.  Once any preserves are opened, even those that have been sealed properly, they always belong in the refrigerator.

 

I always wanted to be a French pastry chef, long before I went to the French Pastry School of Chicago at age 50 to become a professional confectionery and pastry chef.  As a teenager, I taught myself to bake with the aid of a single orange book by a French pastry chef who seemed obscure to me at the time.   Little did I know until many years later, that I was just one of generations in France, Japan, and the United States -- indeed around the globe -- who fell madly in love with pastry through the inspiration of the book's author, the "God of Desserts," as Washington chef Michel Richard referred to Gaston Lenotre.

Since one of my great pastry heros, Jacquy Pfeiffer, the co-founder of the French Pastry School, famously tells aspiring pastry chefs that there is no such thing as inventions in French pastry, I thought it would be worth launching this blog with a few words instead on inspirations.  Everything to come in this blog is intended to offer inspirations - visual and literary - from my own heroes who, apart from the precious few who have made their way into Parisian travel guides, still too often labor in relative obscurity in restaurants or in their own shops in "second cities" like Metz. (Stay tuned for a word on my friend Franck Fresson in Metz.  His shop in the center of the old town is, as the Michelin Guide would say, "vaut le voyage" or worth the trip.) 

But the story has to start with Lenotre, who died earlier this year after a long and influential career.   His contribution to the style, flavor, and production of modern pastry can hardly be overestimated, even if he is not quite the household name in the United States that he is in France.  Creator of now-commonplace products such as multi-layer cakes with mousse and macarons, Lenotre is widely considered to be the greatest pastry chef of the twentieth century.  An artist as well as an astute businessman, Lenotre revolutionized French pastry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and along with three-star luminaries Paul Bocuse, Michel Guerard, and the Troisgros brothers, helped found the "nouvelle cuisine." 

Few aspiring French pastry chefs in the 1970s would turn down an opportunity to work in the Lenotre pastry empire, which now includes shops in Paris, Japan, Korea, and the Middle East.  If their parents could afford it, young French patissiers from family pastry shops across the country would be sent to Lenotre's school outside Paris for professional "perfectionnement," California pastry chef and cookbook author Alice Medrich recalls.  

Americans in the know followed close behind.  Lenotre was New York restaurateur David Bouley's first link to French cuisine, teaching him for a solid week how to whip egg whites so they would not break.  A good baguette, Lenotre told Bouley, who went on to work with many of the legendary French chefs of the 70s and 80s, is "caramel on the outside and meringue on the inside."

Medrich who did two "stages" at the fabled Lenotre Schoosl outside Paris said she could "see the hand of Lenotre" in small pastry shops throughout France. Lenotre had a rigor, "a way to work, a way to think, and a way to handle ingredients," Medrich said. The lessons she learned there were like "time release capsules" providing her with solutions to problems she didn't realize existed until much later in her professional life, she said.

Countless culinary professionals in France, especially, trace there style and technique to Lenotre -- or Monsieur Lenotre as he was always known because, endearing as he was, he inspired so much awe that no one, rich or poor, weak or mighty, would ever want to call him anything else, Sebastien Canonne, the other co-founder of Chicago's French Pastry School said.  Lenotre's shop and his school are legendary for producing a higher concentration of so-called "Meilleurs Ouvriers de France" (Best Artisans in France) than practically any place else in the country. 

Two of the five 2007 laureates in the tri-annual "MOF" competition, which is akin to winning a Pulitzer Prize or a Kennedy Center Award, had worked for Lenotre.   And of the Lenotre School's current staff of 12 chef-instructors, 8 have the privilege of donning the special "bleu, blanc, rouge"  collar of the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France.

But talk to any of these accomplished patissiers -- and I have talked to dozens in the last year and a half for a film and book on the "MOF" -- and you will see that what Gaston Lenotre did reached well beyond reformulating recipes, renewing respect for the best ingredients, raising training standards for the profession, or expanding the appetite for fine pastry beyond France.  Even as he built an international global pastry empire that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars when it was sold in the 1980s to the Accor Group, Lenotre breathed fire into generations of young pastry chefs up to the present. 

Michel Richard, who currently owns the much-praised Citronelle Restaurant in Washington, said he was ready to abandon the profession before meeting Lenotre, whom he encountered almost by chance in the late 1960s after admiring a cake that a friend had purchased from Lenotre's flagship shop in Paris' upscale 16th Arrondissement.   Inspired by the then-unheard of possibility that a pastry chef could emerge from the kitchen and travel the world, Richard jumped at the opportunity to work at Lenotre.

Over a decade later, Lenotre plucked Canonne, one of the five pastry "MOF"s working in the U.S., from a promising career in cooking and convinced him to join the maiden class of pastry apprentices at Lenotre's Plaisir facility. "He could look in my eyes and understand how much I wanted to learn pastry," said Canonne, who had bunked down with friends and family in Paris just for the opportunity to work for several months at Lenotre's Pre Catalan restaurant, now three stars.

Most of all he showed the profession the value of generosity.  Sometimes this generosity led his colleagues to question his business judgment.   When Lenotre first opened his school in the early 1970s, many in the field questioned the wisdom of sharing recipes and techniques that might fall into the hands of competitors.  Even with lowly stagiares, Lenotre made sure everyone saw they were number one when he was talking with them, Canonne said.  "He had the ability to build armies and do right," he said. 

By the time I entered the profession, almost exactly three decades after purchasing Lenotre's first recipe book, I had built quite a collection of pastry books so his hold on my imagination had loosened a bit.  But in an ironic twist of fate, Monsieur Lenotre re-entered my life the very minute I set foot in the French Pastry School and met Canonne.   And in a turn of events worthy of Willy Wonka, I found myself in Monsieur Lenotre's living room shortly after I graduated from the school. 

Pushing 90 and ailing, Lenotre had agreed to talk to me and my friends Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker for the MOF  film. The interview would be brief, we promised his solicitous wife in advance.  But after taking us to dinner in a local bistro, Monsieur Lenotre insisted that our team stay for the evening at his Loire Valley "manoir" and eat his famous "Kugelhopf Lenotre" before beating a path back to Paris.

I had not been in the kitchen for several months when I returned to the US after shooting the film.  And although I always return with a stack of new recipes books, the first place I went this time was to the well-worn orange book to make the Kugelhopf that Monsieur Lenotre had served that Sunday. It, like Monsieur Lenotre, was stunningly current.