The Gluten Structure

Recap!

I have completed the first week of my six month training. I have received and dirtied my uniform. I have nicks in my dough scraper. I have dough under my fingernails and under my ring. I am wicked tired but I have never been happier. You stick a bunch of foodies on a single floor with toys at their disposal and you generally have a pretty happy environment. The practical kitchens at the school (which cook for the student-run restaurant and for the catering service) can get pretty hectic as you step into a real-world environment but the fifty or so people in the school at a given time are generally pretty happy.

Here's what I've been up to.

I could not be more thankful for my Chef. He is teaches precisely the things that I want to learn. It isn't simply do 'this' because it will yield the results that you want. He teaches what to do and why, with all of the science and formula behind it that really equips you to understand and consequently manipulate the formulas, to read your product results and know how to fix problems. And he is hilarious. Today, to go around and help students, he draped an apron over his head and snugged a baking ring on over top of it. Looking like Laurence of Arabia, he expected us to learn. Which didn't' happen.

Day One was simply housekeeping. We did learn some of the foundations of a bread starter. We named it Baby Goo. My favourite story about a bread starter is in Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential (which is a hilarious read if you haven't read it) where he recounts a quirky baker he worked with who affectionately called his sourdough starter "The Bitch". If he were ever incapacitated, which happened frequently, he would simply call into the restaurant and beg Bourdain over the phone. "Feed The Bitch. If you don't feed The Bitch, she'll die." This deals with a sourdough starter's rather fragile dependency on regular "feeding" intervals wherein you remove a portion of the dough and perpetuate the culture by adding more flour and water.

Day two was learning shaping, scoring, gluten development and scaling. The culinary students spend the entire first week just finessing knife skills. Which are finessed. Matt 'turned' a cucumber for me last night and I had no idea there was so much to it. As required by the standards in French cuisine, a 'turned' vegetable must have so many points on it. Yesterday, when I walked past the AM Training kitchen, every single person was bent over the bench, their faces inches from a pile of ribboned carrots. Pastry, we have it a bit easier. Our main learning curve is scaling and kneading, especially because we start with bread.

We made a whole wheat honey boule (left) and an olive oil semolina boule (right). 'Boule' is simply the French word for a round loaf.

You will notice that Day three is conveniently missing. We spent the day learning further about scoring and kneading, learned the math behind baking (Baker's Percentage) and made our first recipe using a starter. That recipe was a baguette. Be it out of shame, expedient storage, or simply forgetfulness, I have no pictures of my baguettes. Which is for the best. The one looked like it was made out of play-dough, due to a scaling malfunction which a funny almost coppery colour to it. Not a huge deal; the bread itself still tasted okay but it punctured a hole in my inflated, cavalier attitude that I could be taught nothing about bread or kneading OR rolling in the first week. The folding and rolling technique for baguettes, while essentially very simple, is a process and each step affects the next. Due to this, my second baguette looked like more of a baseball bat. Also, not the end of the world but I just stuffed them in a ziploc and stuffed the bag in our freezer as soon as I got home. My excuse was (quite legitimately) that we already had SO MUCH bread in our house that I was preserving it.

But Day Four! Day Four was exciting. We further worked with starters of different hyrdations (meaning differing water content) such as a sponge, and a pate fermentee (meaning 'old dough'). With these, we made pizza dough, focaccia, and fougasse (which is a decorative bread with a distinctive structure and crispy crust). Now, I love making pizza dough. I have tried out many recipes for pizza dough in the past, kneading by hand, let to rest. And they were always very good. I could never get a thin crust but I like thicker crust too so I never really pushed past why I couldn't get it thinner. I could also never get out of my head when I would see bakers in pizzerias or on cooking shows how the baker would be stretching the dough and it would drape over their fingers almost like fabric. Delicate, fluid folds where the dough was almost translucent in the centre of the dough. But yesterday, I did it. I watched, I saw, I did. And then we made pizza for the entire school. My teacher is VERY Italian so he was a rather opinionated voice of reason when it came to pizza. But the entire class ate a grotesque amount of pizza in a very short amount of time. So I also have no picture of my pizza dough. But I will make another. As for the focaccia, it was a little crisper on top than I intended, but all the better excuse to make another. And focaccia never lasts long in our house. Om nom and all that.

Focaccia with Parmesan, Rosemary and Maldon Salt

Fougasse with Olive

 As for Fougasse, I had never actually eaten it. Having seen it in bakery windows and oohed and aahed over the shape and cut, I never thought to make it. It's a very simple, accessible dough and the cuts are extremely simple with quite an effect. I kneaded some olives into mine (which proved to be a VERY good but awfully attractive decision).

Finally, today we made challah, naan, Armenian lavash and ciabatta buns. Four doughs turned out to be A LOT for one day and I need to get better at my time management (Not a surprise. Not a surprise at all.). I did a five-braid challah with a simplified five strand braid. There is a more ornamental one that I would love to figure out. It will simple take some time and possibly learning aids (and by that I do not mean alcohol). At the top, you
Again, I don't have documentation of my ciabatta buns. Because of my aforementioned time management (or lack thereof), the ciabatta came out of the oven right before it was time to get out of the kitchen for the other class. So fresh from the oven, I got to make my way home, toting my newly baked ciabatta buns. The first one, I don't remember chewing. There were three. I didn't eat them all….seriously. The Naan turned out more like pita in my opinion. The recipe is awesome but I think they just dried out too much which caused them to puff up and separate in layers. And the lavash, which is meant to be like a cracker, got a little brown. I'm starting to see a theme in my baking. I'm at the back of the classroom facing away from the ovens so I don't even think about the ovens. And the girls stationed on the benches next the oven are really keen and end up taking care of it. Which is going to come in so handy when they are no longer there and I am burning everything in sight. Hmmm.

Rock sugar Challah and Naan bread

Lavash

By the end of the first week, I can already tell that this is going to be a growing experience for me, in the best of ways but also in ways that are going to be hard for me. I can be SO controlling, I'm a perfectionist and I'm a solitary worker. So even for how small our class is, the amount to which all of those buttons are being pushed is going to form me into a better person, especially one better suited for the workplace afterwards.

It is 430 and the sun is set. Tomorrow some semblance of the life we had before school will return for a brief day or two. But MOnday will come and we're doing Rye bread!! And I can already tell you that it will require a short mixing time and a polka-cut style scoring because of the weaker gluten structure in the bread. Who's reading their book? I am.