Dead Roses

Good Morning!
We returned to school last night, sour dough starter in hand, ready to make some baguettes (not with the sour dough starter, but with the Poolish pre-ferment from last week- don’t you remember?). Baguette dough is very sticky (there is more liquid in it than in regular old white bread) and this helps makes the inside airy and light with a nice crisp crust. After the dough went into the proof box, we had a salt tasting. Chef laid out four different types of salts (table salt, kosher salt, Flur de Sel and another one that I can’t remember) and the proceeded to claim that she could taste the difference between all of them. The only difference that I could discern was texture- ranging from fine to chunky to flakey. They all tasted salty. Pastry chefs rarely use Kosher salt in baking because of its coarse texture; it doesn’t melt or incorporate as easily as a finer salt, so there is a risk of biting into salty parts of a cake or over kneading/mixing to help incorporate it. Chef then casually mentioned the following anecdote. After seeing Alton Brown (of Food Network fame) use kosher salt while baking, she was intrigued. Did Alton Brown, foodie/Chef extraordinaire know something that she didn’t? She quickly called Alton’s food scientist (who is featured on his show regularly) to ask about this phenomenon. Do you know what Alton Brown’s food scientist said? That Alton doesn’t know any better and doesn’t really care about baking. Absurd! I’m going to need to rethink my Chef heroes (Don’t worry Ina, you’re safe).
Back to class. Once the baguette dough had its first tuck and fold, we began mixing dead dough.
In stark contrast to our precious sour dough starter which we struggle to keep alive and well, feeding it so that it thrives and grows, dead dough is…dead. It has no yeast, or leavener of any sort for that matter. The point of dead dough isn’t to be eaten, it is to be decorative. It resembles (in consistency and taste) play dough. We made two colors- “red” and “yellow”. The red is more of a reddish-purpley-brown, and the yellow is more of a vomit green (beet powder and turmeric were our dyes). Fancy pastry chefs make elaborate bread show pieces with bread, akin to the chocolate and sugar showpieces many of you know from watching Food network challenge. There is also an international bread competition called the The Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie (the French usually win) where amazing bread sculptures are made. We attempted to make roses.
Chef demonstrated how it was done, then after our first stretch and fold of our baguettes, we started making our own. This is a lot of fun to do. The whole class sits around a table, rolling and pinching dough, chatting and comparing our products. Midway through our roses, we are called by Chef to form our dough into baguettes. As you know by now, bread rises and poufs up when it bakes. There is a risk of the loaf shape changing even after it has been shaped, (especially during oven spring) and so the dough must be slashed. To retain the baguette’s thin, long shape, a series of straight lines must be slashed in at an angle. Using a very sharp razor, you move down the log slashing very quickly (so as to not tear the dough). I slashed my thumb on the last loaf. Thankfully, I spared the bread and quickly ran over to the sink before I could get my blood anywhere. As I was losing copious amount of blood, I was thinking that if could only add it to the dead dough, perhaps we could actually achieve a true red color. Ill attribute this thought to light-headedness induces by blood loss.
A classmate helped bandage me up, and I though I resisted slashing any more bread, I did help load them into the oven, and of course I resumed rose making. One thumb down, making the roses was a bit harder, but I rose to the challenge. Pun not intended.
-Nine Fingered Sarah