Thank you for your sarcas-mah

Redemption! The bread universe aligned for me today and I came home with four beautiful, tasty and satisfying loaves of bread today. Cause and Effect is beginning to work itself out in my baking. This procedure = this result (somewhat reliably). Even if I'm not pulling it off every time, today was the first day that I could see that I was really learning. The shackles of shame I have been wearing since I made my play dough baguette was lifted today and I am free. I have been working ever since that day to prove to myself that I can do better. And today I did. If Jacob Marley says we wear the chains we forge in life, my chain is made up of…inconsistency. But look at that baguette!

Redemption!

 I know that any pictorial documentation of my first baguette escapade is conveniently missing but this baguette is just…a thing of beauty. Chef even said to me my scoring was 'not only good but very good, excellent scoring'.

I have been walking on clouds.

I just cut a cross section so I could see the crumb and crust at a later date. The crust was crispy this time, not dense and crunchy. The crumb is light, with irregular openings instead of being tightly packed. And it bloomed! Or 'sprung' I guess. The bread reaches it's final volume during 'oven spring' or 'oven kick' which is the first 5-10 minutes of baking.

And then today was when we learned all about incorporation which is when you add anything (herbs, spices, nuts, seeds, dried fruit) to a dough. Today was the fun day. I love sourdough. I love rye bread. But bread with STUFF in it, that is my favourite. Today we made a walnut rye  bread, with chopped walnuts and a sweetened walnut paste, an olive and rosemary loaf, and an asiago cheese loaf.

Walnut Rye, Asiago Cheese Loaf, and Olive and Rosemary Loaf

The cheese loaf is, of course, very satisfying as anything with even a remote connection to cheese does. The Olive and Rosemary is just such a phenomenal combination. It made most of us think of pizza dough and how fantastic it would be as pizza dough but even if you were going to do a big veg sandwich with some sharp cheese -Mwah! (How can you tell I have an Italian teacher?) The Walnut Rye though was probably the most impressive. It came out of the oven with almost a purpley hue to it, I'm assuming due to the brown of the rye flour and maybe something to do with the walnuts? But the taste was beautiful. Slightly sweet, with that warm, toasted nutty flavour to it. It had great texture because of the nuts and the rye flour. A serving suggestion of French Toast also circulated the classroom many times for this one. What I love about incorporations is that your possibilities are limitless! You can combine flavours and textures that lend themselves well to meals and where the bread is used as an ingredient, but you also create a loaf of bread that stands alone as well. The kind of bread that you could eat all in one sitting, by yourself. I mean, no you wouldn't because that's crazy…right?

Tomorrow we are baking bread that we created ourselves! We went off of a basic recipe but we had to account for all of the ingredients and make the necessary changes ourselves. I am doing a Fig, Walnut and Anise loaf. I wanted to do another fougasse, which is that cool flatbread, with the fun cuts in it. But the purpose of us doing our own bread tomorrow is for them to see that we can handle every aspect of the baking process and that includes kneading, shaping, proofing, and baking. (Uh oh) All of these considerations make me wonder if I shouldn't do a flatbread, but instead a regular boule or batard loaf of bread. Hmm. I have ten hours to figure it out. I've prepped my mise en place already so I can't stray too far from the original fougasse plan but I'll see what it looks like to make the switch. You'll see what I decide :)