A Day Making England’s Oldest Afternoon Tea

[majestic music]

The hotel's 160 years old

and obviously afternoon tea

has been a big part of that history.

The Grand Hotel's made it a special occasion

and the Langham was the first serving it in 1865.

It's now a view to something very high class.

Afternoon tea was originally a meal period

to kind of fill in between lunch and dinner.

The pastries and sandwiches tend to be smaller

because the aristocracy didn't want to get dirty

whilst they socialized

and it would've been dainty little portions that were eaten.

Now they are still small

because when people come for afternoon tea,

they want more flavor and variety in what they're eating.

Five cakes, two scones, jams, creams.

We tend to average around 120, 130 teas

and we can go up to 180, 190.

We're hitting 1,400, 1,500 pieces each day.

The role as executive pastry chef

is to get it as good as we can.

And what we want is that the guest leaves this hotel

with a really good impression of the products that we made.

It's that simple.

Good morning. Welcome to London.

And most importantly, welcome to the Langham Hotel.

My name's Andrew Gravett.

I'm the executive pastry chef.

It's around 7:30 AM

and we're going to show you what we do today.

[sophisticated music]

So here is the original Langham lobby

and I'm just going to walk you

through some of the corridors

and we'll get down to the kitchens.

So through here we've got our in-room dining room

where all the breakfast will be prepared and served,

taken up into the 380 or so rooms in the hotel.

So we're in the smaller one of the pastry kitchens

where afternoon tea is produced every day.

Today there's over a hundred covers for tea.

Scott, Charlie, Ashik were getting ready,

finalizing the cakes.

And there'll be another shift coming in later

around 2:00 to do the dinner shifts.

Now we can move on to,

we're going to do some chocolate amenities,

so chocolate bonbons.

So this is a ganache chocolate cream

that's been infused with Earl Grey tea,

the specific sugar added,

a layer of very fine chocolate over the top of it.

In this case we're using a dark chocolate.

We're melting it to above 50 degrees.

Then inside there is a mechanism

that basically cools the chocolate,

then it will come out of the tube here, the pipe here,

to around 31 degrees.

So it's called a tempering process.

Traditionally we would do it on a table, on a marble,

but in this case when we need so much chocolate,

the machine helps us

and saves us a lot of time in doing that.

What we've done here in the machine,

we've melted the chocolate completely.

So we've broken the temper

and what will happen in the cooling

and the reheating process,

we're realigning the cocoa butter crystals

so that when we eat, we finish the chocolate,

we're able to pick it up, it has a slight shine to it,

and it should have a snap to it.

So they're ready now.

They're going to go through this tunnel of chocolate

which is going to coat them.

There's a fan just blowing the excess chocolate off the top

and then it will come onto this mat.

Charlie's going to decorate them with the cornflower.

The chocolate will set and then tomorrow ready to go.

We're using a Manjari chocolate.

It's cocoa beans from Madagascar.

They have a very fruity acidic flavor.

So you see these little blue flowers going through the tea.

We know this is an Earl Grey chocolate

because we could have four or five different varieties

and it's just a nice decoration.

For a batch of 220,

probably in about 10 minutes, the machine is done.

So it's a technique that gives consistency

because the coating is always the same.

And it also, it means that two people within, in an hour,

can probably dip 1500, 2000 chocolates.

Charlie's going to finish these off.

We're going to head into the bigger pastry kitchen

to finish and finalize the pastries

that we're going to be doing

for the Christmas afternoon tea.

[sophisticated jazzy music]

So the Palm Court originally used to have a glass roof

and the cakes we wanted to go with a design

that was as white as possible

resembling the snow outside of a winter garden.

And then the idea was inside the cakes

we would have fruit or products that you would grow

in a Victorian glass house.

So we've got a bowl of egg whites that we're going to whisk

and this is going to make a super light sponge

for the roll that we're going to be doing.

The aeration just makes a light, slightly unctuous sponge.

The French have a recipe, it's called a langues de chat,

a cat's tongue.

So in here we've done that mix.

We've melted butter, we've added the icing sugar,

we've added the flour with the egg whites,

and it just gives us this kind of pasty texture.

Traditionally, if you bake this,

it will give you a very crunchy texture on its own,

but we're going to spread this onto the mat

and then we're going to add the sponge mix onto it.

The sponge on its own

would just give a caramelized color on the outside.

So by adding this tool,

we'll have something that's super white when it bakes.

And certainly through Christmas

we'll be making 180, 200 of these cakes.

In this recipe we have eggs, inverted sugar.

There's also oil in here.

The oil will give you the soft texture in the cake,

but in the baking process,

because it's oil, there's no evaporation.

Then we've got corn flour and ginger.

We've taken out normal wheat flour.

It's going to help us

when we've got the gluten-free allergies.

So that just needs to be sieved to get any lumps out.

So then the egg whites now are going to be ready.

As you can see there, it's very elastic.

It's quite springy.

We're going to take a part of the mixture out.

We're going to put it into the egg yolk and sugar mix

and we're just going to whisk it.

We fold everything in one go

rather than doing it in two goes.

So that's that in

and then we're just going to add this at the same time

and we'll fold.

So this is the frozen tour mix that we spread on earlier

and we're just going to weigh on the sponge that we put in.

And like that we should guarantee that every time

our rolls are going to be the same thickness,

same flavor, same amount of love.

Okay? Then we spread it.

We've worked out now that the thickness of the 230 grams,

if it's evenly spread over the mat,

will give us the thickness that we want.

Okay, so that's going to bake in the oven now,

160, eight minutes.

We've just reduced the fan slightly there and off we go.

Simple.

This is now we're going to make the plum compote.

So this is for me the main part of the dessert.

They're called watermelon plums

because they have a kind of a watermelony skin,

kind of a crunchy texture

as when you bite into a really fresh watermelon

and they're just actually super sweet and super nice.

The products that we're using in our cakes

are products that would have been grown

in those glass houses.

If we can revert back to Victorian ideas

but making them in modern ways,

then we will try and do that.

Here we have a plum puree that we've made.

So we've just cooked down plums,

we've blended them super smooth.

And then into that we're going to add the fresh plum

that we've just chopped up.

So then we have a texture of a crunchiness.

So here we're going to add a mix of it's sugar and pectin.

It helps to stabilize

and it will set this as a jelly in our mold.

We've mixed it with sugar,

so like that the pectin dissolves much quicker.

So this sponge here you can see is caramelized on this side

so that color is there and now we're going to demold it

and hope that it's going to be white underneath.

There we go. Wonderful.

So we're going to pour our plum compote in here.

We want that diameter of plum of the compote in there

and then a quick tap to get all the air out

and then that's going to go next door at minus 30.

We've just got a very light ginger syrup.

It just gives us an extra strength of ginger in the cake.

Then a very, very thin layer of the cream.

I think the technique is how much butter

I would normally put on my cucumber sandwich.

There we go, there's the idea.

That's the strict rule.

Then it's super simple and the roll helps us here

is because it's already got the shape that we want.

There's the parchment just to wrap it.

Then we just use the tray and that's rolled.

We're going to freeze it so that gets put into the freezer

so we should get nine to 10 portions in it.

It's about 9:30.

It's time to go and do some meetings

with these pastry chefs.

[sophisticated music]

The team have been in here for an hour

and we're just going to catch up.

So in the team we've got Brigitte who's a sous chef,

looks after daily production in both kitchens.

We've got Oscar who's our youngest member of the team,

an apprentice.

Fantastic colleague over here, Ashik

who Charlie enjoys winding up.

Charlie, CDP.

Scott, one of our commis, the better looking of us all.

Lecky and I, we've worked together for nearly 10 years.

Sometimes we're like as on a wife,

sometimes we're like auntie and uncle.

So this is the sheet that we would receive every day.

We see if there are any VIPs.

Very importantly for us,

it's about the allergens, the dietary needs.

So Charlie today and Ashik,

they'll be looking after afternoon tea.

They will take that dietary sheet.

We've got around 100 covers today.

We've got a nut allergy at 2:00,

fish allergy at two o'clock.

A couple of vegetarians,

we need to check with gelatin for that.

The guests don't always tell us

what they have as an allergy.

So we run two teas.

We have a normal tea that we can put every ingredient

that we want in and not worry about it.

And then we do a tea that will be identical in presentation,

will be used for vegan guests, gluten-free guests,

nut-free guests, halal guests.

That tea should be able to cover that.

Then if we have guests who have something extra,

there might be a cake that we have to make on the spot

for that guest.

Leck, what's the cream in there?

Lecky, Brigitte are going to be working here.

They'll make a plan

on what they're going to be doing in this kitchen.

And between Brigitte and I,

we'll be checking and making sure

that both kitchens are working well.

I'll be in predominantly in this kitchen getting stuff done.

We're doing 150, are we?

[Ashik] Yes.

It will depend day to day who is working,

who is running the different kitchens.

We have about 100 or so covers and have a wonderful day.

[bright sophisticated music]

We're going to move on to making the jam.

And this is a strawberry jam

that we'll be making for the serve for afternoon tea.

We're going to jar it, label it.

It's kind of a staple

and it's a product that we sell throughout the hotel.

So the strawberries are going to get chopped.

The ideal time of year for strawberries in England

is just at the end of May, June.

So it's probably four or five weeks ideally

that we should be eating strawberries.

This year we worked with a farm in Kent

and used their strawberries for all of our jams

and our strawberry products.

So we were getting the best British fruit

just for those five weeks from them.

And you really saw a difference in the product.

Strawberry just has to be on there.

We tried to take it off and the guests have just said,

No, you keep the strawberry on.

So there are certain things that guests will expect

and strawberry jam is one of those.

We've got the strawberries chopped.

We've got the sugar, the glucose in here.

We've got the citric acid, we've got the pectin,

the water in, and we're going to make a syrup.

So there's glucose and sugar.

The pan is set at 160 degrees.

That's why it's boiling straight away.

We're just going to dissolve the sugar,

the glucose in the water, which gives us the right density

before we add the fruit into it.

By cooking a syrup beforehand,

rather than adding all the fruit in the same time,

it means that it will also help

in the speed of the fruit actually cooking.

The strawberries go in,

the moisture is going to come out of the strawberry.

So it's still thick and you're going to see very quickly,

it will loosen up.

So what we want to see now is the percentage of sugar

and we're going to use the refractometer

and we'll check that we're at 62 bricks,

which means 62 grams of sugar per hundred gram of mix.

So the jam is ready.

We're going to start to tip it out into our container.

We add the acid as well.

There we go.

And there's the jam.

We're going to go back

and we're going to jar the jam.

The jars are hot from the oven

and they're at 120 degrees, so they're sterilized.

Then it doesn't look nice in a jam jar

or on a jam if you've got the white foam.

And we're just going to fill them like that

and you leave a gap above.

Traditionally, my mom, she would do that.

What happens is the air gap

that you had at the top is now at the bottom,

but it means that the air is run through the jam,

so it's pasteurized through the heat of the jam

and then they would turn it back.

But for us, we don't want to have that jam on the lid.

When you open the jam, this one, you can see the lid,

it's got jam on it.

Our ones, they won't have the jam on it.

It's a simple little thing.

And then we'll put them in the oven, in the steamer,

for about 20 minutes and that's it.

The jam is done.

[sophisticated music]

So now we're going to make the scones.

So every day we're working a day in advance.

What we've also done the day before is we've made,

we call it our crumble.

This mix gives us a fine crumb.

Then when we add the liquid in, we're going to work it hard

so that we start to get the gluten elastic.

And when we cook these scones, they should give us something

that is as tall as the thickness that we cut it

that holds in that high texture.

But inside it's going to be a really fine,

almost like a cake texture rather than a bread texture.

So as the dough is done, we find that kneading by hand,

we get the elasticity,

and then there's two of us because I'm getting old,

so I need help, so Charlie's going to help us with it.

I think that without the machine that we have,

it's almost too aggressive

so it rips the gluten rather than keeps the elasticity.

And our hands as soft and tender

as Charlie and I hands are,

we just get the right elasticity in the scones.

We cook kind of 9:00, 10:00 in the morning,

so they're almost still warm

when they're going up for the service.

For me, the scone is a utensil

that is used to serve the cream and the jam.

If we can make the texture nice,

that gives a good blend with the cream and the jam,

then people don't want anything else.

Right.

You see that when you push into it,

there's a bit of elasticity.

So we're going to put it on the rolling machine

so that it's level,

that we're ready to set it onto the tray

and we're going to fridge it before we cut it.

The butter hardens again,

so it gives us a really clean cut

when we're going to cut them.

So then we're going to put them in the fridge,

dough will harden up, and then we'll cut them,

and ready for baking for tomorrow.

We've baked a couple of trays.

So what we want is that they're white on the edge.

So these are the raisin versions,

so the basic dough with raisins added.

There we go. They're quite small, the scones,

but we like that size,

and I think it's probably we can offer more to the guests

rather than just having a big, big scone.

And they've just got this breakability. They hold together.

They're moist inside and super light, super nice actually.

We'll leave them to cool on the rack

and then these will be put into trays

and they go upstairs into a warming oven.

And so they get them just slightly warm.

It's about 11:00 now.

So we're going to see Roldan,

fantastic sandwich maker in our Palm Court kitchen.

[sophisticated ethereal music]

So this is Roldan. He's our sandwich man.

Today he'll be making over a thousand sandwiches

for the guests.

He's in at 7:00, 7:30,

so he does all the prep in the morning

and then afterwards it will be all the fillings, et cetera,

and he'll get them done for the next day.

The sandwiches tend to be quite traditional in flavors.

The cucumber is infused with champagne.

The salmon we're serving it with fennel.

The chicken currently I think is a coronation one.

The bread, as you can see, it's long slices.

We can build in here about nine to 10 sandwiches.

So it will be the salmon, the fennel, a topping,

and then Roldan will get his tool.

He'll slice the sandwiches into the nine, 10 portions.

And how long have you been here, Roldan?

11.

11 years, cutting sandwiches every day.

I don't think Roldan needs this one.

His sandwiches are pretty perfect most of the time without.

So here is a batch of the chicken.

So it's on a paprika bread, rocket, peppers, super tasty.

And as you can see, he's built all his layers of sandwiches.

And these, once he's built everything

up on the tray like this, then it will be all sliced.

So he works kind of a factory way.

Dump cloths over them so that they don't dry out

and then he'll cut everything, trim everything, box it,

and they'll be stored in the fridge.

So it's funny, it's in theory a really simple thing,

but it's all about the pressure

you put on with his hand when he's holding it down,

the pressure with the knife, et cetera.

But he gets a really clean cut in his sandwiches.

He can do anything fancy, but give me cucumber every time.

And when I come up here very often, come to annoy Roldan,

I ask him, have you got a new cucumber recipe?

And I just eat cucumber. There we go.

Roland's obviously on his way

to getting the sandwiches done.

I'm going to have a cucumber sandwich.

We're going to go to the kitchens.

[sophisticated music]

Now we're going to make, it's a Langham Bear.

It's an amenity that we make for a lot of guests.

Sometimes it will be for every single room.

Sometimes it will be for one particular guest.

In this case, we're going to turn it into a Santa bear.

We did it earlier with the chocolate machine

was tempering the chocolate for us.

For the bear, we're just going to make a small batch,

so I'm going to temper it by hand.

So the chocolate is being cooled onto the table.

We've melted it above 45 degrees.

And then by continually moving it on the table,

we are going to be cooling it down.

At the beginning, you make a mess, your apron,

your table are covered in chocolate when you finished.

And the more that you do it,

the better and the tidier you become at it.

So this is granite.

Basically the heat of the chocolate on here

will be distributed through the granite.

And then I've left a little bit of the chocolate in the bowl

so that it would just warm back up

to between 28, 29 degrees.

And that's the temperature

for then being able to pour it into our molds.

So we want to get the air out,

the excess will drop off.

And this one we're going to put two layers on.

We just leave the excess chocolate to drain there.

But the bear now, we've had it long enough

where we do have guests asking,

can we have another bear this year when they come back?

For the children at the hotel,

very often they'll be given a bear.

And so that's where the initial thought came from.

It's kind of that memory of when you're young,

I think a lot of people

can associate with having a teddy bear.

This has been settling now

for about a couple of hours,

so we're just going to demold it.

We're going to see if it demolds. Hopefully it will.

But this is the warming tables.

It will melt just the edges of the chocolate

so that it enables us to stick them together.

So there the bear's stuck now.

We'll just melt the feet

and then that sticks into the staircase.

So then you've got the base of the bear is made.

And what we've done here,

we spray white chocolate with a compressor gun.

We spray it onto the staircase.

So it gives you that kind of snow effect for Christmas.

The bear body has been sprayed with a red colored chocolate,

so it's going to be the base of the Santa Claus suit.

And then here we've got just little attachments

and hopefully it will come alive

and look like Father Christmas.

Right Brigitte, you're going to come and do this.

Brigitte is the designer of the Christmas bear.

It's going to be stuck with the tempered chocolates.

We call it plastic chocolate,

so it's a mix of chocolate and glucose melted together,

left to set, and it gives us this malleable texture

that we can shape into how we want,

what we want, and where we want.

Before Christmas, I would imagine the beginning of December,

we're going to have 300, nearly 400 lined up

and we'll be doing this process to all of them.

It will look like a factory line

and it's all the tables will be covered in bears.

So whilst Brigitte is finishing this off,

it's going to be ready for a room

that we'll take up to later.

Chris is in charge of the in-room dining department.

We're just trying out how the amenity's

going to look for Christmas in the suite

just to see that he's happy

and we're going to go off, Chris will continue his day.

[sophisticated jazzy music]

So this is Stephan, our managing director in the hotel,

coming to check on us, walking around the corridors.

I'm behaving today, Stephan.

Thank you very much, Andrew.

We're delighted to have you here today.

This is Alberto. Yes, I am.

He's our window cleaner in the hotel.

So he cleans.

Well, if there's 380 rooms plus the restaurants,

plus, plus, plus, plus, plus,

guess how many rooms he cleans in a day?

A lot. The happiest man in the hotel.

Thank you.

So we're going to go now to the Palm Court kitchen

where the chefs are just preparing,

tasting for one of the savory dishes for Christmas.

Fire second, fire tech course.

Joannis is the executive chef of the hotel.

And funnily enough,

we used to work with each other 20 years ago.

We were young. We were beautiful.

He was. I wasn't.

Joannis will come and taste something sweet,

give his opinions,

and we kind of bounce off each other at times.

It's a good, simple dish with really good ingredients.

Our main course could be super rich,

then we'll tone down and we'll freshen up in the desserts

to try and get it that it balances

and people are feeling comfortable when they walk out,

but having eaten something really nice.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

[sophisticated music]

It's about four o'clock.

We're just going to get ready,

just the final kind of presentation

of a dessert that we'll be doing for Christmas.

So in here is egg, sugar, yuzu juice.

And this is just going to be brought to around 85 degrees.

It is as simple as does it taste nice?

Does it look as we want it to look,

but most importantly, does it taste nice?

Has it got the right textures, creaminess?

It just, it can vary

throughout whatever we're making at the time.

So just the quick blending. It smooths the cream.

There we are. And done.

We'll push a cling film against it

so it, when it goes in the fridge,

there's no skin on top of it.

So this one for three days.

So this is, it's called a whipped ganache,

white chocolate, cream,

Madagascan vanilla that we blitz into the cream.

We've boiled that with a glucose and an inverted sugar.

We then add cold liquid cream into that mix.

And after a few hours of being in the fridge,

it gives us a texture like that.

So here's the meringue.

We made sure that it was an indent inside this.

The yuzu will just sit in it.

We use that just to stick it

so it's not going to slide on the plate.

So then the user cream goes in the indent,

a quick smooth over.

The whipped ganache again in another piping bag.

So this will just pipe on like that.

Then we have, these are just little confit lime zests.

So they've just been put in a very light syrup,

glucose sugar, and lime juice.

So these are lime segments, fresh lime segments,

a bit of the lime zest,

then little white chocolate decorations,

they match the whipped ganache.

And what we want

is that the dessert appears to be super airy,

so there's very light decorations on it.

Then just a little bit of meringue crumb.

So sorbet's going to go into that.

And that's it. Dessert done.

Enjoy it.

[sophisticated music]

Thanks for joining us at the Langham.

It's been lots of fun.

We've got a busy service to do tonight.

We've got some events and a service in the restaurant,

so some of us have to work.

Thank you very much.

Have a great evening and enjoy.

[sophisticated music]