Baked Alaska: A Delicate yet Impressive Dessert

Our middle layer is where things get interesting. We have three layers of ice cream - vanilla and marina cherry, chocolate, and finally fresh mint ice cream. To create this masterpiece, we first make the ice cream bases on day one, which need to chill overnight. The next day, we churn and layer everything, including the meringue topping, which is then blown torch to give it a golden brown finish. We finish off with a layer of chocolate cookie crumbles, making our Baked Alaska truly unforgettable.

The Making of Baked Alaska

One of the most labor-intensive desserts on our menu, Baked Alaska takes three days to make. The process begins with creating the ice cream bases, which need time to chill overnight before being churned and layered into the final dessert. This means that every Baked Alaska we serve cannot be made until the next day. While this may seem daunting, it's all worth it for the stunning presentation and incredible taste of our Baked Alaska.

Our Best-Selling Dessert

Baked Alaska is our top-selling dessert, with anywhere from 20 to 30 servings per night. It's a showstopper, both in terms of its dramatic presentation and its rich flavor profile. The original story behind Baked Alaska dates back to the 1860s, when it was created at Antoine's in New Orleans to commemorate the United States purchasing Alaska from Russia.

Behind the Scenes

As we prepare for service, I take a moment to show you our bar area. Located in a sunken ship, this room is truly one of a kind. The mural on the wall was painted by an artist who is also friends with the restaurant owner. It's a true work of art that transports us all to another world.

Our Pastry Station

While it may look small, our pastry station is actually quite busy during service. We have two desserts on offer, including a delicious chocolate amaretto ice cream sandwich and a miso butterscotch pudding old school sundae coop with whipped cream and toasted coconut. Our pastry team works independently, but I like to check in regularly to ensure they're well-stocked and ready for action.

The Art of Service

As we get ready for service, our front-of-house staff is hard at work setting up the dining room. From bread rolls to desserts, everything needs to be perfectly set up before the guests arrive. With just 30 minutes to spare, it's a mad dash to get everything just right. But with experience and practice, I know that we can deliver an exceptional service.

Service Begins

The moment of truth arrives as our first guests begin to arrive. Our staff springs into action, taking orders and delivering plates of food to the waiting diners. From bread rolls to Baked Alaska, every dish is carefully crafted to ensure a memorable dining experience. And with 30 tickets to manage, it's going to be a busy night indeed.

The Rest of the Restaurant

As we take a moment to catch our breath, let's not forget about the rest of the restaurant. From the sunken harbor club to our private dining rooms, every inch of Gage and Toner has been carefully designed to create an unforgettable atmosphere. Whether you're seated by the window or in one of our cozy booths, every guest is treated to a unique experience.

Behind the Scenes at Gage and Toner

As I prepare for service, I take a moment to reflect on what it's like to be a pastry chef. It's a demanding job, but also incredibly rewarding. From creating intricate desserts to working with some of the best ingredients in the city, every day is different.

Gage and Toner: A Restaurant Like No Other

Our restaurant is more than just a dining experience - it's an event. With its stunning architecture, beautiful gardens, and exceptional service, Gage and Toner is truly one of a kind. Whether you're a foodie, a history buff, or simply someone who loves to celebrate special occasions, we invite you to join us for a memorable night out.

Getting Ready for Service

As the clock strikes 4:30, it's time to get ready for service. Our pastry team is already hard at work, and I take a moment to review the menu and ensure that everything is in order. With just 30 minutes to spare, we need to move quickly but surely if we're going to deliver an exceptional dining experience.

The Art of Plating

As our guests arrive, we take a moment to plate each dish with care and attention to detail. From bread rolls to desserts, every element needs to be perfectly balanced to create a visually stunning presentation that will leave our guests wanting more.

Service is in Full Swing

With the first guests seated, it's full swing now. Our staff is working tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure that every dish is delivered hot and fresh, while also providing exceptional service to each and every guest. From bread rolls to Baked Alaska, we're committed to delivering an unforgettable dining experience.

The Final Act

As our last guests depart for the night, it's time to take a moment to reflect on what we've accomplished. It's been a busy night, but with hard work and dedication from each and every member of our team, we've delivered exceptional service and memories that will last a lifetime.

And so another night at Gage and Toner comes to a close, but we can't wait to do it all again tomorrow!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmy menu for pastry at gage and tolner is just like the menu of my dreams when i was building the menu here i wanted to take into account the history of gage and tolner what this incredible legendary restaurant was and then what it would be taking it into the present in the future it speaks to me for sure as a chef good morning i'm caroline schiff i'm the pastry chef here at gage and toner come on inside follow me welcome okay so it's about 9 a.m and the first thing we have to do is go feed edna edna is our beloved sourdough starter here at gage and toner she likes to eat first thing in the morning so come follow me we're going to go downstairs to the kitchen this is our victorian era dining room everything in here is landmarked and has been restored these are the original chandeliers you can even see the gas valves from before electricity which i think is just very cool we seat about 110 people at any given time including the bar i would say about 80 percent of people order dessert which is huge for a restaurant makes me very happy as a pastry chef come downstairs with me i'm gonna show you everything so this is our service kitchen prep is all downstairs are those raspberries yeah they're from highland new york oh my god very exciting day here welcome to the basement production kitchen everybody's kind of getting started for the day i'm just putting on my my shmata here before we get going this is our whole team it's like our facebook but it's in real life so this is edna our sourdough starter during the pandemic to keep her alive everybody from the pastry team took some edna home we fed her she survived and thrived throughout the pandemic she's a beautiful bubbly fermentation a blend of farmer ground rye flour whole wheat bread flour high extraction whole wheat and some all-purpose flour that blend is really unique and it creates an incredible flavor and texture so it's something we're really really proud of here she likes to eat twice a day this is 400 grams of starter the rest is discard but we also use this we don't throw it out no waste we'll make anywhere from four to six large loaves a day this starter is what's known as 100 hydration just meaning like basically the ratios are always the same so if i have 400 grams of starter i'm gonna add 400 grams of flour and i'm going to add 400 grams of water it's going to give me 1200 grams and that's enough to make four lips sourdough starters they're just like us you know she's gonna get grumpy if she's not fed if she's too hot too cold i think there's a lot of intuition in sourdough that's kind of what makes it really fun and interesting but also tricky you kind of have to know how to sort of read the personality of your sourdough starter we're gonna just let edna do her thing these are the sour to loads that we mixed yesterday we do basically an overnight fermentation it's like 18 hours these are going to be for dinner service tonight in general you want to score sourdough because if you don't the loaf will split really irregularly so if you score it you can kind of control where it splits and we call it the ear everybody here has their own signature scoring like i can always tell who did the bread in the morning based on the designs sourdough you want a hot oven so 475 for the first 25 minutes and then we'll turn it down to 450 it'll get really really super crusty delicious dark brown sourdough goodness it's about 10 a.m things are very much in full swing here whole team is here this is grayson kayla catherine our pastry sous chef i'm gonna check in with everybody just go over our prep lists all the things that are happening tonight we have a party grayson is working on the parker house rolls parker house rolls are beautiful buttery enriched dough they are super popular almost every table gets them we will sell anywhere from 45 to like 60 some odd orders a night with four pieces of bread per order so you do the math it's a lot of bread we're gonna turn alaska's because we're down to 37. that keeps me up at night if we don't have like 90 orders of baked alaska's at any given time like i'm not sleeping deliveries are going to start coming in i want to do an inventory of the ice cream freezers and just make sure i'm on top of everything so it's down this way savory's getting going potatoes we have the best french fries in the world here the world anyway lots of ice cream in this freezer not a lot of places are making ice cream in-house like this at this volume i like to organize it by flavor and then i just get a tally if i had to choose my favorite flavor it's the fresh mint it's the last layer in the baked alaska it's nothing like mint ice cream that you get at the supermarket the fact that i get to make dessert for a living is just like it blows my mind every day it's just so cool i love it follow me inventory part two is in the means walk-in down here looking at my list this is the inventory from like closing last night baked alaska's that's urgent 37 on a busy night we could easily sell 37 baked alaskas and it's a three-day process to make baked alaska's so that is like number one priority so we're getting a whole bunch of deliveries in and i'm expecting blueberries hopefully and definitely strawberries i want to do some r d and update the cheesecake which has rhubarb on it right now it's time to like move into summer summertime so let's go let's check it out we have this incredible delivery shoot it's like a slide and so this hatch opens and boxes just slide down it's a really good time i have been waiting for strawberries for weeks they're my favorite they're typically the first berry of summer so i got two flats of strawberries from two different farms because i want to compare and contrast see which one is going to be sweetest the most delicious we work with amazing purveyors that source from all different local farms it's a way for us to be able to support all of these small growers and producers for me as a chef like this is what gets me so excited is the seasonality and the quality of this stuff i mean it's just it's amazing this one's really sweet and i love when they have the little stem cute as a button all right let's go it's 1pm i have a few more ingredients to play with here i adore my cheesecake it is a chev cheesecake it's all goat cheese it's unique it's not a new york style cheesecake it's really tangy has a lot of brightness to it and it is like the perfect canvas for fruit i'm just thinking about how to put this beautiful local produce on a pedestal the pedestal is the cheesecake i don't even know if this is going to end up on the menu i will go through iterations and iterations and iterations of things it's all just sort of part of the process so these strawberries we got in today are a little more tart so i'm going to roast them with some sugar vanilla bean thyme vanilla beans the pods they're the gift that keeps on giving like after you've scraped out the seeds you want to keep the pot and you can use it for all kinds of stuff it'll infuse sugar jams you can make your own vanilla extract they're pretty magical i'm going to put these in the oven so while those strawberries roast i'm going to take these sweeter ones and we're going to toss them with a little bit of sugar give them some acid i'm gonna do some verzoo which is basically unripe grape juice it's not quite as acidic as vinegar but it's not terribly sweet oh i want to grab one more thing i'm so glad i remembered i made these i made these like sumac meringues the other day i just want to play with them with the strawberries sumac has a really tart kind of almost like citric acid-y kind of quality to it playing with something here i always add a little salt okay it's my timer oh my god look how jammy that is like look at that when fruit tastes like this like it almost tastes fake like a strawberry candy i always like to plate it up because i also want to see like how does the composition look on the plate i'm going to finish it with a tiny bit of this lemon oil that i made i like my whole team to try it oh my gosh summer i want a little bit more jammy you know i love jam more of that goodness more of that goodness that you made right and i love the meringue a little pop of surprise in there this is making me summer excited i know ice cream is churning downstairs for the baked alaska i'm bringing spoons down for everybody if you have never had ice cream like right out of the machine you're not living i'm telling you when we assemble the baked alaskas we use this freezer and we have these big molds so as you can see they're in the process this is the first layer it's setting as the chocolate churns and then that's going to be our middle layer so in our baked alaska the three layers of ice cream are vanilla and marina cherry first chocolate which is the middle that's happening right now and then the very last layer is the fresh mint ice cream and then to order during service we make meringue cover each one and we blow torch each one then we do a layer of chocolate cookie crumbles and send them out to the dining room now we're going to churn the mint ice cream the fresh mint ice cream so i'm gonna add about half of this into the machine the baked alaska is our most high maintenance dessert i would say in the sense that it really does take three days to make so you make the ice cream bases one day those need to chill overnight the next day you can churn and layer everything like we're doing now but then this has to sit overnight so i won't be able to serve the baked alaska's that i'm making today until tomorrow so you've always got to be like three days ahead but it's our best selling dessert we sell anywhere from 20 to 30 something a night which is a lot it's the most expensive dessert on the menu it's 25 but like depending on you know the rest of your meal it could be up to four people it's a really really big celebratory dramatic dessert it's a victorian or dessert so you know it fits the time and place of gage and toner and it was originally as the story goes developed in new orleans at antoine's in the 1860s to commemorate the united states purchasing alaska from the russian empire so we're almost done here sometimes i like joke with people who don't know what it's like to be a pastry chef and i'm like i'm up to my elbows and ice cream and i'm like no but guys like literally i am i'll be here all week it's three o'clock this is the staircase up to the sunken harbor club and the private dining rooms it's just so beautiful this building is so historic maybe a little haunted but like in a very good way i need to restock them a little bit with dessert ice cream sandwiches but before we go to the kitchen i really want to show you the bar because this is the coolest bar in new york you're in a sunken ship this is like so amazing a artist whose friend of the restaurant painted this gorgeous mural for us so this room is just such like a fantasy space it just totally transports you it's tiki drinks we have our own menu up here and i get to do two desserts which is really fun come back to the kitchen it's obviously small but it's mighty we have this delicious chocolate amaretto ice cream sandwich the ice cream sandwich up here is double chocolate so it's the chocolate ice cream same one we use in the baked alaska and a super thin like chewy wafer chocolate cookie and there is a amaretto almond toffee ripple kind of throughout the whole thing it's crazy delicious the miso butterscotch pudding old school sundae coop with whipped cream and toasted coconut and it's just it's really fun and unexpected they work really independently up here during service but i i always want to check the pars and make sure they have like at least two quarts of pudding they should have about on any given night like half a dozen ice cream sandwiches so they've got a couple to start i can get them more as they need them it's pretty low maintenance up here they do such a great job it's 4 30 service starts at five so we got to go downstairs start setting up we have a private party tonight all kinds of things going on so it's go time front of house is here hi everybody so we've got like 30 minutes to fully set up both the dining room pastry station so back to the kitchen i gotta set up my station the very first thing i do is i just wipe everything down with sani i can't set up and work unless i do this first in the very beginning i used to get nervous before service and now i i don't at all you know pastry is the first station that gets hit here because we're bred so people are going to sit down first thing they want to order are parker house rolls or pano levan so the bread and butter nissan plus that needs to be set up first it's almost five o'clock you can probably expect some tickets all right service the way i organize my tickets is bread is over here sweet stuff is over here and i'm working in like this order all right tickets are coming in you guys better get out of here before i put you to work so thank you so much for hanging out with me today at gage and toner it's been an absolute pleasure service does it look like memy menu for pastry at gage and tolner is just like the menu of my dreams when i was building the menu here i wanted to take into account the history of gage and tolner what this incredible legendary restaurant was and then what it would be taking it into the present in the future it speaks to me for sure as a chef good morning i'm caroline schiff i'm the pastry chef here at gage and toner come on inside follow me welcome okay so it's about 9 a.m and the first thing we have to do is go feed edna edna is our beloved sourdough starter here at gage and toner she likes to eat first thing in the morning so come follow me we're going to go downstairs to the kitchen this is our victorian era dining room everything in here is landmarked and has been restored these are the original chandeliers you can even see the gas valves from before electricity which i think is just very cool we seat about 110 people at any given time including the bar i would say about 80 percent of people order dessert which is huge for a restaurant makes me very happy as a pastry chef come downstairs with me i'm gonna show you everything so this is our service kitchen prep is all downstairs are those raspberries yeah they're from highland new york oh my god very exciting day here welcome to the basement production kitchen everybody's kind of getting started for the day i'm just putting on my my shmata here before we get going this is our whole team it's like our facebook but it's in real life so this is edna our sourdough starter during the pandemic to keep her alive everybody from the pastry team took some edna home we fed her she survived and thrived throughout the pandemic she's a beautiful bubbly fermentation a blend of farmer ground rye flour whole wheat bread flour high extraction whole wheat and some all-purpose flour that blend is really unique and it creates an incredible flavor and texture so it's something we're really really proud of here she likes to eat twice a day this is 400 grams of starter the rest is discard but we also use this we don't throw it out no waste we'll make anywhere from four to six large loaves a day this starter is what's known as 100 hydration just meaning like basically the ratios are always the same so if i have 400 grams of starter i'm gonna add 400 grams of flour and i'm going to add 400 grams of water it's going to give me 1200 grams and that's enough to make four lips sourdough starters they're just like us you know she's gonna get grumpy if she's not fed if she's too hot too cold i think there's a lot of intuition in sourdough that's kind of what makes it really fun and interesting but also tricky you kind of have to know how to sort of read the personality of your sourdough starter we're gonna just let edna do her thing these are the sour to loads that we mixed yesterday we do basically an overnight fermentation it's like 18 hours these are going to be for dinner service tonight in general you want to score sourdough because if you don't the loaf will split really irregularly so if you score it you can kind of control where it splits and we call it the ear everybody here has their own signature scoring like i can always tell who did the bread in the morning based on the designs sourdough you want a hot oven so 475 for the first 25 minutes and then we'll turn it down to 450 it'll get really really super crusty delicious dark brown sourdough goodness it's about 10 a.m things are very much in full swing here whole team is here this is grayson kayla catherine our pastry sous chef i'm gonna check in with everybody just go over our prep lists all the things that are happening tonight we have a party grayson is working on the parker house rolls parker house rolls are beautiful buttery enriched dough they are super popular almost every table gets them we will sell anywhere from 45 to like 60 some odd orders a night with four pieces of bread per order so you do the math it's a lot of bread we're gonna turn alaska's because we're down to 37. that keeps me up at night if we don't have like 90 orders of baked alaska's at any given time like i'm not sleeping deliveries are going to start coming in i want to do an inventory of the ice cream freezers and just make sure i'm on top of everything so it's down this way savory's getting going potatoes we have the best french fries in the world here the world anyway lots of ice cream in this freezer not a lot of places are making ice cream in-house like this at this volume i like to organize it by flavor and then i just get a tally if i had to choose my favorite flavor it's the fresh mint it's the last layer in the baked alaska it's nothing like mint ice cream that you get at the supermarket the fact that i get to make dessert for a living is just like it blows my mind every day it's just so cool i love it follow me inventory part two is in the means walk-in down here looking at my list this is the inventory from like closing last night baked alaska's that's urgent 37 on a busy night we could easily sell 37 baked alaskas and it's a three-day process to make baked alaska's so that is like number one priority so we're getting a whole bunch of deliveries in and i'm expecting blueberries hopefully and definitely strawberries i want to do some r d and update the cheesecake which has rhubarb on it right now it's time to like move into summer summertime so let's go let's check it out we have this incredible delivery shoot it's like a slide and so this hatch opens and boxes just slide down it's a really good time i have been waiting for strawberries for weeks they're my favorite they're typically the first berry of summer so i got two flats of strawberries from two different farms because i want to compare and contrast see which one is going to be sweetest the most delicious we work with amazing purveyors that source from all different local farms it's a way for us to be able to support all of these small growers and producers for me as a chef like this is what gets me so excited is the seasonality and the quality of this stuff i mean it's just it's amazing this one's really sweet and i love when they have the little stem cute as a button all right let's go it's 1pm i have a few more ingredients to play with here i adore my cheesecake it is a chev cheesecake it's all goat cheese it's unique it's not a new york style cheesecake it's really tangy has a lot of brightness to it and it is like the perfect canvas for fruit i'm just thinking about how to put this beautiful local produce on a pedestal the pedestal is the cheesecake i don't even know if this is going to end up on the menu i will go through iterations and iterations and iterations of things it's all just sort of part of the process so these strawberries we got in today are a little more tart so i'm going to roast them with some sugar vanilla bean thyme vanilla beans the pods they're the gift that keeps on giving like after you've scraped out the seeds you want to keep the pot and you can use it for all kinds of stuff it'll infuse sugar jams you can make your own vanilla extract they're pretty magical i'm going to put these in the oven so while those strawberries roast i'm going to take these sweeter ones and we're going to toss them with a little bit of sugar give them some acid i'm gonna do some verzoo which is basically unripe grape juice it's not quite as acidic as vinegar but it's not terribly sweet oh i want to grab one more thing i'm so glad i remembered i made these i made these like sumac meringues the other day i just want to play with them with the strawberries sumac has a really tart kind of almost like citric acid-y kind of quality to it playing with something here i always add a little salt okay it's my timer oh my god look how jammy that is like look at that when fruit tastes like this like it almost tastes fake like a strawberry candy i always like to plate it up because i also want to see like how does the composition look on the plate i'm going to finish it with a tiny bit of this lemon oil that i made i like my whole team to try it oh my gosh summer i want a little bit more jammy you know i love jam more of that goodness more of that goodness that you made right and i love the meringue a little pop of surprise in there this is making me summer excited i know ice cream is churning downstairs for the baked alaska i'm bringing spoons down for everybody if you have never had ice cream like right out of the machine you're not living i'm telling you when we assemble the baked alaskas we use this freezer and we have these big molds so as you can see they're in the process this is the first layer it's setting as the chocolate churns and then that's going to be our middle layer so in our baked alaska the three layers of ice cream are vanilla and marina cherry first chocolate which is the middle that's happening right now and then the very last layer is the fresh mint ice cream and then to order during service we make meringue cover each one and we blow torch each one then we do a layer of chocolate cookie crumbles and send them out to the dining room now we're going to churn the mint ice cream the fresh mint ice cream so i'm gonna add about half of this into the machine the baked alaska is our most high maintenance dessert i would say in the sense that it really does take three days to make so you make the ice cream bases one day those need to chill overnight the next day you can churn and layer everything like we're doing now but then this has to sit overnight so i won't be able to serve the baked alaska's that i'm making today until tomorrow so you've always got to be like three days ahead but it's our best selling dessert we sell anywhere from 20 to 30 something a night which is a lot it's the most expensive dessert on the menu it's 25 but like depending on you know the rest of your meal it could be up to four people it's a really really big celebratory dramatic dessert it's a victorian or dessert so you know it fits the time and place of gage and toner and it was originally as the story goes developed in new orleans at antoine's in the 1860s to commemorate the united states purchasing alaska from the russian empire so we're almost done here sometimes i like joke with people who don't know what it's like to be a pastry chef and i'm like i'm up to my elbows and ice cream and i'm like no but guys like literally i am i'll be here all week it's three o'clock this is the staircase up to the sunken harbor club and the private dining rooms it's just so beautiful this building is so historic maybe a little haunted but like in a very good way i need to restock them a little bit with dessert ice cream sandwiches but before we go to the kitchen i really want to show you the bar because this is the coolest bar in new york you're in a sunken ship this is like so amazing a artist whose friend of the restaurant painted this gorgeous mural for us so this room is just such like a fantasy space it just totally transports you it's tiki drinks we have our own menu up here and i get to do two desserts which is really fun come back to the kitchen it's obviously small but it's mighty we have this delicious chocolate amaretto ice cream sandwich the ice cream sandwich up here is double chocolate so it's the chocolate ice cream same one we use in the baked alaska and a super thin like chewy wafer chocolate cookie and there is a amaretto almond toffee ripple kind of throughout the whole thing it's crazy delicious the miso butterscotch pudding old school sundae coop with whipped cream and toasted coconut and it's just it's really fun and unexpected they work really independently up here during service but i i always want to check the pars and make sure they have like at least two quarts of pudding they should have about on any given night like half a dozen ice cream sandwiches so they've got a couple to start i can get them more as they need them it's pretty low maintenance up here they do such a great job it's 4 30 service starts at five so we got to go downstairs start setting up we have a private party tonight all kinds of things going on so it's go time front of house is here hi everybody so we've got like 30 minutes to fully set up both the dining room pastry station so back to the kitchen i gotta set up my station the very first thing i do is i just wipe everything down with sani i can't set up and work unless i do this first in the very beginning i used to get nervous before service and now i i don't at all you know pastry is the first station that gets hit here because we're bred so people are going to sit down first thing they want to order are parker house rolls or pano levan so the bread and butter nissan plus that needs to be set up first it's almost five o'clock you can probably expect some tickets all right service the way i organize my tickets is bread is over here sweet stuff is over here and i'm working in like this order all right tickets are coming in you guys better get out of here before i put you to work so thank you so much for hanging out with me today at gage and toner it's been an absolute pleasure service does it look like me\n"