Our Science Project

HI!
Last night was lesson two of ten completely devoted to bread. We made sourdough starter (I will explain soon), poolish starter (ditto) and either walnut, pecan, raisin or olive bread. I was in the Walnut group. Everyone was given the same basic dough and told to add in their ingredient, dispersing it evenly throughout the dough. For any of you who have worked with elastic bread dough before, you know how difficult it is to knead in nuts. It’s like trying to add three pounds of chopped nuts to ten pounds of stiffly chewed gum. They simply won’t incorporate. The more you try, the springier the dough gets, forcing you to double your efforts and put in A LOT of energy into kneading this unwieldy lump of dough. Between the hand beating/whipping from last module and the kneading of large batches of bread from this one, my upper body strength is going to have to triple.
After ten minutes of this, most of the nuts were in the dough and we let it proof before doing the first “tuck and fold”, also known as “punching”- a gentle knead. As the dough rested (and the gluten thankfully relaxed) we went over baker’s percents- I won’t go into detail about this, as it is silly math that I don’t find interesting and don’t see how it will actually be useful in the kitchen. After the first (of three) tuck and folds, we began both of the starters, also known as Pre-ferments.
Sounds gross.
And it is exactly what it sounds like. To add to the flavor and texture of the bread, you make some of the dough days before. For the poolish, you just mix bread flour, water and yeast and let it sit refrigerated at least over night. On Sunday we will mix in the rest of the ingredients and make it into baguettes. For sour dough starter, it’s a bit more complicated. It starts with a mixture of rye flour, water, honey and either grapes or chopped onion. We let it sit out uncovered for an hour to attract the wild yeast spores in the air. Doesn't this sound like science class? Every day, you measure out a pound of the starter (throughout the rest) and feed that pound with more bread flour and water- and don’t refrigerate it (remember, we want it to ferment). The longer you do this, the better tasting the end product. There are bakers who keep portions of the pre-ferment going endlessly. Ours will be baked on Tuesday, giving it a week to mature. We all took home our starters and flour to feed it over the weekend. It felt like we were taking home the class pet for a week.
After the pre-ferments, we did another tuck and fold on our walnut/pecan/raisin/olive bread. Chef showed us how to shape each of the loaves- most of them were standard except for the olive bread. This was made into “Fougasse” or ladder bread. It only rises about an inch and has slits in it reminiscent of ladders. After a final proof, all loaves were loaded into the oven to bake (all but the Fougasse got the steam treatment, naturally).
My job this week was cleaning out the ovens. In module one the job didn’t really exist- things in pans don’t make messes. However, when we bake bread the loaves don’t go into pans (at least not free form ones) and are instead thrown into the oven via pizza peels covered in corn meal. Burnt cornmeal smells bad and makes a mess in the oven (so do raisins and nuts that fall off during baking) and so the ovens need to be swept. The brush used to sweep ovens is very long. The broad head has soft bristles that are never to touch the flour and the handle extends six feet. And because your back is towards your classmates as you sweep the hot ovens (due to time constraints, this happens soon after the bread is taken out and the oven are still about 400 degrees) it is hazardous. I accidentally poked a classmate or two. It is going to be a popular job, second only to dishes.
-Sarah, the oven sweep