All Hail Butter

This week, Butter was king.
Rich, wonderful butter was featured prominently in all recipes, used as much for texture as for taste. Sunday night’s class began by baking our pre-made Brioche dough (from way back when- Tuesday night). They came out of the oven golden brown and delicious, and most prominently ended the reign of Yeast Breads. Onto bigger and better and Buttery-er things.
We began with Croissants and Danish dough that same night- both are in a family called Laminated Doughs. Why such an odd name? Because the layers of dough are insulated and separated by, layers of butter. To do this, we pounded out a pound block of butter into a thin sheet- about a quarter of an inch thick. We then rolled out our dough and wrapped the butter in it like a business letter. We rolled out our dough, sandwiching the butter and folded it again. Roll out thin and repeat. The layers of dough and butter multiply exponentially until you have about 80 layers of alternating dough and butter-impossibly thin and impossible delicious.
Monday night’s class was devoted to rolling out our croissants and making a dozen or so fillings for our Danishes. Apple, prune, cheese, raspberry, chocolate, almond, crumb and so on. There were endless flavor combinations and endless shapes you could make your Danish into. As for the croissants, we stuck to the basics and the universally familiar- crescent shaped plain croissants, chocolate croissants and, optionally, ham and cheese pocket croissants. I opted out of the last one. Interestingly, chef recommends making the croissants with part whole wheat flour. “Wont that make them taste healthy?” I asked. She looked at me like I had said something ridiculous, which I guess I had- the idea of a healthy croissant is laughable. Chef explained that the whole wheat gave the pastries a deeper flavor.
When we took them out of the oven, they were puffy, and flaky, and golden brown (the French like their croissants a dark brown on top, Americans prefer golden) and sizzling slightly around their edges where the butter had oozed out and melted. The kitchen smelled heavenly. Making the laminated dough is a long process from start to finish, and require strength, endurance, patience, perfection and a deep love for butter. Anyone up for helping me practice?
Onto Tuesday night. Finally, the class I had been waiting for- PIE
We didn’t actually bake pie this week, but we made pie dough and other baked good using similar doughs and similar methods. Pie dough is a type of Pate Brisee, literally meaning "broken dough" in French. This is because the butter is broken up in the dough, and when baked properly, produces a flaky (broken) crust. Other baked goods using this method include biscuits and some scones- they too are best when flaky and buttery. A similar dough, called pate Sucree, or mealy dough, has you break the butter up into smaller pieces, until it ultimately looks like corn meal. Scones, tart doughs and short cakes use Pate Sucre- it has a finer texture than Brisee.
As Chef introduced this topic, I got so impatient to begin I literally couldn’t sit still- I began to play with the bowl of flour sitting in front of me. I tried hard not to finish Chef's sentences for her and allowed others to ask questions and attempt to answer hers so as to not give away my pie-freak tendencies. After what seemed like ages but what was actually about a half hour demo, we began making our dough. Thankfully, we weren’t asked to do this with a partner- I very much doubt I would have allowed my teammate to touch our (my) dough.
Begin with flour (a mix of all purpose and cake flour) and a bit of salt. If you have no faith in the leavening ability of the butter (I will explain soon) you can also add some baking soda. But this is for the faint of heart! You see, the reason you must keep the butter cold and in large-ish chunks is so that when it bakes and the butter melts, the water in the butter creates steam. The steam pushes the dough apart and then the protein structures from the flour form around these air pockets, creating the flaky result- no chemical leavener needed! Back to the ingredients. To the flour mix, quickly add the butter and try to break it up into small pieces- around the size of a cranberry. Once this is accomplished (if your warm hands and the heat of the kitchen hasn’t already melted your butter and ruined your dough) add in cold water and mix just until the dough forms. Don’t over mix! Gluten will form and butter will melt, and that can only lead to heartache later on.
We froze our dough, to be used next week when we prepare, fill and bake PIES.
The second half of class was happily and hastily spent making quick breads- the genre used to describe scones, biscuits and short cakes. They are a really a mix between a cake and a bread (and cookie of you over bake them), the word “quick” is used because they use chemical leaveners and not yeast to rise, making them much quicker to make than bread.
My team made chive cheddar biscuits and currant scones, both of which I am eager to try on my own, swapping out the currant for chocolate, of course.

-Sarah Baer, Flaky and Proud

Bakin' with Bacon

HI!
It has been a very long time since my last post- I’m sorry about that. A lot has happened culinary-ily wise, and I’ll do my best to fill you all in now.
First of all, I made the best looking focaccia I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t too greasy, it wasn’t too hard or crunchy. It was fluffy and soft, with just the right amount of good olive oil pooling in its nooks and crannies, rosemary baked right in and caramelized tomatoes and onion on top. Hungry yet? Just wait.
Sunday night we made home-made pizza. It was the most cooking we’ve one in class- and the most we’ll ever do to be sure. That class started with more knife skill drills (and onion chopping). Chef was worried that I wouldn’t be able to use my school knifes at home to practice, due to my kosher-ness. You can guess what this said about my performance in class. Alarmed at her deep concern and how close I got to chopping off my thumb, I promised to practice in class to make up for it. We made all sorts of pizzas and calzones in class, with a dozen or more topping to choose from. These toppings included (though weren’t limited to) three different variety of meats. Pepperoni, sausage and…you guess it, BACON. I was surprised at how weird I felt with all the meats- I just wasn’t comfortable or used to cooking with them. I think I literally stared at the bacon for three minutes straight. The sausage wasn’t nearly as fascinating, and pepperoni just looks like little slices of salami, or really more akin to the play-dough ones I used to make when I was younger. That bacon, though, was mesmerizing. And watching people put real meat on a cheese pizza? Fascinating. The most exciting moment of that class was when I discovered that the goat cheese was kosher. Suffice it to say that I have had enough goat cheese to satisfy any craving I might have ever had for it (which is to say no craving at all).
Monday night was bagel/bialy/soft pretzel night. It was also the night of the Sour Dough.
Let me tell you the sad sad saga of the sour dough. You are all probably sick of reading about this pre-ferment by now, and believe me so were my classmates and I. No one wanted to look at the stuff anymore (or more accurately, smell it anymore). We had the option to make either white, whole wheat or rye based sour dough. Feeling adventurous, I went for the Rye. That was my first mistake. As we were all kneading our dough, I noticed that mine wasn’t getting as bouncy and firm as everyone else’s- my gluten wasn’t developing. And so I added more flour. The dough was still sticky. More flour. The dough still wasn’t elastic. More flour. Mistake number two. After twenty five minutes straight of kneading and nearly double the amount of flour, I gave up and put my dough in the proof box along with everyone else’s, and moved onto bagel making (cinnamon raisin!).
After two stretch and folds and proofing sessions, it was time to form our loaves. Due to the nature of the rye (it just doesn’t get as firm as regular flour- it doesn’t have as much gluten), I couldn’t make a free-form loaf and instead put in a cast iron pan. Mistake number three. You see, things baked in cast iron will bake at a different rate as the loaves put directly in the oven. This is obvious to anyone, and should have been obvious to me, to chef, and to any of my classmates. But there were bagels to be boiled and pretzels to be consumed. When we took out bread out of the oven, mine looked great, and so I didn’t check for done-ness. Mistake number Four. I should have used a thermometer to read the internal temperature (bread is done at around 180 degrees). Can you guess the mournful result of all of these mistakes? I could have made some play dough pepperoni with the inside of my loaf. At least my bagels were good. But it was last night, doughnut night, that I shone.
First I had a written exam, which went about as smoothly as my sour dough. Kidding! It was fine. And then we made dough for brioche (both regular and chocolate)- to be baked on Sunday night. Then we moved on to the doughnuts, or in my partner and my case, zeppole (Zeh-Po-Lee).
Zeppole are Italian style doughnuts. They are made using a batter, as opposed to a dough like a doughnut, making for a very fluffy end result. They aren’t shaped like American donuts, but are free-form dropped in oil and end up looking more like fritters. They are very similar to funnel cakes, just roundish. I was told that they were the best things made that night. Who doesn’t like deep fried dough covered in sugar?
We are all sick and tired of yeast based dough and are excited to move onto a new topic- one that required less fermentation.

-Soured by Sourdough Sarah

Braiding Bragging Rights

Good Evening!
Last night I came ten minutes late to class. As a result, I had no partner, and instead of grouping me with another pair, Chef had me work alone for the first part of class. While I really do like my classmates and enjoy working with them, this was a rare treat. I should come late every night! What freedom! Unshackled by my anxiety of being bossy and controlling, unfettered by fears of screwing up not only my own product but a partner’s, I began baking. [ Note: doing things by yourself is more time consuming and often more confusing than it is when doing it with a partner.]
I made my own soft bun dough and my own Biga starter (this pre-ferment was a lot thicker and drier than either the sour dough or polish, but it should make for some good Ciabatta next week). Because I was working alone and Chef didn’t want to over load me, I didn’t make hot cross buns. I had never seen, let alone eaten a hot cross bun, but I did offer to play it for Chef on my recorder. I wish I was making that last bit up, but I did tell her that. When she stared at me blankly, instead of letting it go, I continued to explain how we learned to play the recorder in the fourth (?) grade. Then, to my horror, I started singing it…except the only words I know to the song are “hot cross buns” and I was forced to just hum the rest. Thankfully a classmate backed me with her own elementary school story and I was spared further embarrassment.
What hot cross buns actually are, are small sweet buns with a thin dough/paste piped on top in an X (or cross depending on how you hold them). Once they come out of the oven, the whole thing is basted in a light syrup. They looked delicious. I believe they originated in England, which makes them even more endearing.
Because I didn’t make the Hot Cross Buns, Chef gave me the great honor of feeding her sour-dough starter (yes, I’m STILL talking about that sour dough starter/pre-ferment. The hurricane threw everything off, and now we aren’t baking our sourdough until Tuesday). When I feed my own starter, I don’t measure anything. Apparently, we are supposed to use only a pound of starter and add eight ounces high gluten flour and nine ounces water. I only know this because I looked it up in a panic after contemplating messing up Chef’s pre-ferment, and after feeding hers I went right back to my hap-hazard ways with my own pre-ferment. Old habits die hard.
Soft bun dough is different than the other dough we had been making in that it has fat in it- Eggs and oil. For someone such as myself who has only ever made bread with an egg dough, this wasn’t so strange, but classmates were exclaiming over how smooth and springy the dough was. Chef demonstrated how to shape the dough- either into braided loaves (read: Challah) or small rolls that were shaped like garlic knots (read: challah rolls). The dough itself wasn’t quite the same as challah dough (which is more similar to brioche dough) but it was close enough for me to segue into my own experience and rhapsodize about it to both Chef and classmates. Now, I have attempted to make challah many times to various degrees of failure, but this time was different. Normally they come out misshapen and doughy. While I cannot vouch for the taste of my loaves from last night’s class, they looked great- large and round and nicely brown, shiny from the egg wash. A classmate took them home to her mother.

-Sarah, the Recorder Prodigy

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

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

Is that clear to you?

Good Morning!
Last night was the first day of Module 2, and we jumped right in. I walked into the room to find others busy measuring and sifting—fifteen minutes before class started. Not to be left out, New Chef (I’ll start calling her plain old Chef from here on in) asked me to find the bread proofer from another classroom. I had no idea what a bread proofer was and failed at my mission, but at this point (seven minutes before our first class) Chef didn’t know my name, so I didn’t mind.
Chef introduced herself briefly (read: she told us her name) and began making bread. Because bread making is a long process, we needed to begin right away, otherwise we wouldn’t have time for the bread to bake and risked going home empty handed! Once she demo-ed a large batch of country white bread (to be made into 30 or so loaves), and we began our small batch (to be made into 15 or so rolls) and everything went into the proofer, she began to talk. Chef explains things clearly and has no discernible accent. She must be American (though she never told us anything about her background. There is a chance she is Canadian.) Every other sentence she would slip in “Is that clear to you?” or “Do you get that?” but I think that was first day nerves and will become a less frequent phrase.
Chef is more into homework than Old Chef, and has given us work for tonight’s class- one of the things she did tell us about herself is that she is on the homework committee at school (I don’t think it’s actually called the ‘homework committee” but that’s the gist). Five points to the person to read up on and explain baker’s percentages and the maillard reaction to me.
Learning how to bake bread is entirely different than other types of baked goods. With bread making, everything you do is towards the bettering of the gluten. Gluten is king in bread, whereas with most other baked goods you try to avoid gluten at all cost. Gluten is responsible for the chewiness and texture of bread, but wouldn’t it be awful to have a chewy cake? Chewy pie crust?
In bread making, your schedule is determined by the bread. If the bread needs more proof time, give it to the bread. If it is ready to be kneaded, drop everything and do it. If it needs steam, you had better go take care of it or else a disaster of monstrous proportions will occur- namely, weird bread. A word about steam. It is very important to keep your bread dough hydrated throughout this process- dry dough will yield dried out bread. This is true even when the dough goes into the oven. The first stage of the baking of the dough is Oven Spring, where the yeast in the dough is still alive and is still making the dough rise. It is important not to let the crust form at this point, because otherwise there is no room for the bread to expand and weird tumor-like things will grow out of the bread. How can you prevent the outer layer from baking in a 475 degree oven? Steam! Professional deck ovens have steamers that do this, but at home you can put a cup or two of water into the oven along with the bread to keep things moist. About halfway through the baking, once the yeast has died (140 degrees internally) you want to start crust formation and so you stop adding steam. Crust forms, the inside cooks (to around 180 degrees) and the dough has turned into a beautiful, golden brown loaf of bread.

There will be a lot more production in module two then there was in mod one- we made thirty loaves of bread and 75 rolls last night. The first ten lessons are devoted to bread, which is nice, but I get impatient. Breads are slow, and the more time you give them the better. Chef kept contrasting bread dough to pie dough- which is faster. By the end of class it was clear to her that I have a thing for pie, and she directed all pie questions to me. “Bread dough needs to be kept warm. What about pie dough? Why keep it cold?” What do you do to pie dough if it is browning too quickly- add steam?” and so on. I know my pie. Bread? Not so much, but I guess that’s what the next ten lessons are for.
- “I’m in it for the Pie” Baer

Mission: Precision

Hi!
Exams are over (for now) and I am a quarter done with my course! Last night went as follows: When we walked in, Chef gave us our schedule. No one wants anyone opening their oven while their soufflé is baking, so we were each given a window of time to use an oven. My soufflé had to be in Chef’s hand at exactly 8:07. The last person to go had to have hers in Chef’s hand at 9:45. I’ll describe this in more detail in a moment.
The first forty minutes of class were devoted to our written exam. It wasn’t too difficult, only one or two tricky questions. After the first ten minutes, though, my hand started to cramp (I was over enthusiastic and wrote very quickly) which worried me, as my hands were going to be invaluable to the practical portion of our exam. Don’t Panic! Perhaps a lesser being would allow this to get to her and ruin the rest of her life, but not me. Like a pro, I shook it off and continued, catastrophe avoided. I finished the exam a little bit early and began to prep for my crème anglaise.
There are not enough induction burners for all sixteen of us (remember, we usually work in groups of two), so we were grouped into Group A and B (Group A people presented their products to Chef first). As the Group A person (me) was prepping for her crème anglaise, the group B person would use the burner to melt the chocolate for her soufflé. Once A finished her crème anglaise (which can sit out for a bit and needs to chill anyway), she would melt her chocolate and prep for her soufflé. Once her B partner was done with her crème anglaise and chocolate melting for soufflé, the A would swap out the burner for a stand mixer and continue on with making her soufflé. All the while, Chef was circling and taking notes on technique and cleanliness. It sounds complicated and seemed like it would never work, but class actually flowed like clockwork. We were courteous to our partners and there was no complaining about anyone hogging burners or outlets. There were seven minutes allotted between every person’s soufflés, and so every seven minutes from 8 until 9:45 Chef was sampling another chocolate soufflé. I was impressed with his eating abilities.
Back to my own harrowing experience. Like I said, my soufflé had to be in front of chef at 8:07. Every part of the process had to be timed precisely, and I made myself a schedule. It had to be pulled out of the oven at 8:06 to be transferred to a plate a dusted with powdered sugar. It had to go into the oven at 7:53, so I had to start beating the egg whites at 7:37…I am not a precise person. I don’t like having to time things to a T. If, for some reason, the egg whites take longer to beat than the five minutes I have allotted, then I am going to beat them until they are just right (ironically, I under-beat them. Nerves.) Anyway, I manage to get my Soufflé and Crème Anglaise to Chef sometime between 8:07 and 8:08. We each made three soufflés and chose the best one to give to Chef (just like they do in cook offs). Chef critiques your product right then and there. My crème anglaise was very nice and smooth (“just like your Chef”) but my soufflé could have benefited from a grain or two more salt. The flavors weren’t “punchy” enough. All in all, not terrible. I also got a point or two deducted from my presentation due to the sides of the ramekin having some shmutz on it (I used dirty tongs when transferring the piping hot ramekin to the plate. Oh well). Once Chef pointed this out, everyone in the class who went after me (nearly everyone) made sure to use clean tongs. You're Welcome Class!
By 8:11 I was done. In the end, the exam was actually a lot of fun. Inst culinary school great? Even the tests are a treat. Module two begins on Monday.
-Sarah Baer, for all your Creme Anglaise needs