Mama Feed You

Who's ready for Round 2?!

We're are totally moving now, so fast that I'm amazed that I haven't reverted to toddler mode, where I just sleep and cry in my spare time. I'm sure that will come. Operation Better-Time-Management is a go. Last Friday, I was pulling bread out of the oven ten minutes before I was supposed to be OUT of the kitchen. Doesn't allow for much cooling of any kind.

The irony of my program is that I LOVE bread. I want to become excellent at it. Not just at creating interesting bread or even necessarily pretty bread, but tasty, well made bread. I want to KNOW the bread (in a biblical sense). But bread is so dependent on timing! And timing…is not my thing. You've got the mixing. And if you mix for too long, the dough becomes stiff. If you don't mix long enough, the dough is too weak and will collapse under it's own weight. Then there's the bulk fermentation, when the dough is left to relax. The first fermentation needs to be long enough for the dough to develop flavour and aroma and also for the enzymes to get working on creating a tasty dough. If it's not long enough, you don't get any of those things. The dough is still tough, it stales faster and it doesn't have any of that beautiful yeasty flavour that bread is so loved for. And then you have dividing, and shaping, and bench rest, and final proof and baking -all of which are intensely dependant on timing and acute attention paid. And so producing a large amount of bread in one day, especially around other people (even if there are only eleven others) who are delightfully distracting, is, too say the least, not something for which I have a whole lot of skills to draw up. WRITING IS TOTALLY SOLITARY! And -AND! There's never a timer. Ever. Even when there should be.

So yesterday, I was very excited, was bagel day. And pretzel day. But as a Canadian, pretzels are boring. Bagels, BAGELS, for someone with a massive Jewish crush (on basically everything even remotely connected to that -New York, SNL, Seinfield) and a carb crush, bagels are exciting! Bagels are worth an entire day unto themselves. The pretzels got in there too. But with the pretzels, being made out of the same dough as the bagels, also boiled and having a fun shape, I am willing to get excited. But they have no Jew cred. Sad pretzels. Despite my enthusiasm, I had some issues with both the pretzels and the bagels. My dough shaping method needs some…finesse. Or a complete do-over. My teacher drills, "Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent." each and every day. He also says, "Mama feed you" numerous times a day also. He's Italian. It's endearing.

In so many words, I can't keep on practicing shaping that produces bagel smiles. I chose to 'turn the frown upside down' if you will. He kind of looks like he's wearing a monocle doesn't he? As for the pretzels, they (in retrospect) needed to be a little bit….thinner before they were baked. They are more like bunny ears or peace signs. Which also have no Jew cred. Still sad pretzels.

We also made some caraway rye, which is always delicious. My shaping kind of broke down on this loaf. If you rotate it ninety degrees counterclockwise, it kind of looks like lips. Which is not what I was going for but works alright I guess. I am one of like two people in my class who actually like caraway, but everyone put caraway in their bread because we're are still in that awkward, new-class stage where we think we can actually have an opinion. We will get over that. I think we're nearly there, especially after the recurrent gag noises made by members of my class today over the olives that we pitted and chopped for our bread tomorrow. My bench partner, a fellow broccoli-head (aka vegetarian) loves olives too so we'll prob put in double what everyone else does. You know, so we don't have to share.

But sharing is not a problem, because we each go home with, on average, four loaves of bread each. Some have given in already, leaving the majority of their bread at school to be offered to staff and the culinary students. I have lovely friends that I would love to bequeath with fresh bread of questionable shaping (need I mention everything posted above) but of unquestionable tastiness.

We finished with Pain Meuniere, or Miller's Bread, which is supposed to be a homage to all of the grains that a miller would produce traditionally. It's made in the artisan style. It is by far the prettiest loaf I made yesterday. And I got to bake it in the fancy oven, which honks like a car when the time is up. An oven I will likely never encounter in the real world.

And then today -oy I haven't even talked about today yet -today I realized that I have SO MUCH to learn before I can function in a commercial kitchen. I stick my bread in the proofer (a humidity controlled cabinet), which is the last step before baking, and I forget about it until I see it sitting on a cooling rack. At home, I am vigilant about watching the oven. I repeatedly check to see the progress and I always set the time. At school, I don't check the oven. I never check the proofer. A lot of times, I never set a timer or even glance at the clock to have some semblance of what I'm doing or what I should be paying attention to. Which has to change. Because when people pay you, they expect you not to burn the shit out of everything. They tend to fire you when that happens. Or not. I've worked in enough bakeries that when that happens, you just throw it out, record it as wastage and start again. The world doesn't end. But you go home for self-flagellation.

Anyway! Today we were shown a variety of different decorative breads. Often, decorative breads, the ones you see hanging from the walls in bakeries, are made out of 'dead dough' which is simply flour and sugar syrup. It's not meant to be eaten, but meant to be dried out so that it can be displayed and won't mould. Chef showed us a couronne (crown), a pain d'epi (wheat stalk), a spiral and then assorted slashes that you can make in the surface of a boule or batard. The back is slightly blurred but that six-point star is all one piece. Each of the strands that meet in the middle are then braided together (in a six-strand braid) to form a six-point star. Braiding is a skill that will come after. After I learn to pay attention to the oven.

Clockwise from top: couronne, epi and spiral

What we actually baked today though, was two sourdoughs, one without yeast and one multigrain, a pumpernickel and a two castle rye. I lost my two castle rye. I don't' know what happened to it. You see what I mean? Ridiculous. But, in my defence, after everyone slashes their loaves the same way, it's very hard to distinguish between them once they're baked. Unless they get baked in the fancy oven. Then they look like holy loaves. Instead of potatoes (which is what they look like in the regular oven).

The multigrain sourdough, which is the one on the far left, looks pretty good. I seem to get one pretty loaf a day. The sourdough in the middle was baked in an oven that was too hot so consequently it coloured unevenly (which has to do with the Maillard Reaction, with is a chemical reaction resulting in colour on the crust). It didn't rise in the oven. You see how it is still very small and looks quite dense, even in the picture. When bread rises in the oven, that's called 'oven spring'. No oven spring. I't also did not bake in the middle. It was totally raw. So sad sourdough.

Tomorrow is another day. We made olive bread. And bread with cheese in it. It's gonna be a good day. And then by Friday, no more bread. We are already onto Viennoiserie, which is croissants, danishes, and brioche. We make Stollen in week 3, which makes up for my well-intentioned plan to make it during the holidays that flashed by like a peep show. I have stashed the prettier bread in the freezer for coming weeks when we no longer have four loaves of bread coming home in one day. It'll be like rationing. 'Oh shame, no more bread. I guess I'll have to have a croissant for dinner'. We live a hard life.