Breaking from Bread

And like that, my first baking and production class came to an end Thursday. My apologies for going MIA once again. The last few days have been pretty non-stop. I drove home overnight Thursday and promptly spent the day sleeping! Its just a brief stop in York though. Tomorrow morning I'm getting on a train to NYC and then start interning Wednesday at Jean-Georges! I'll be doing four days a week there, and only know one person in NYC but would love to meet people...just throwing it out there ;)

Anyway, back to breads class...I'm definitely sad this class is over. I really enjoyed it and absolutely loved the chef. Since my last post my group rotated through a few more stations...

Challah-I only got to try braiding one before I had to go divide our other dough. Its one of those things that I have a hard time doing. Even as a kid, I could barely do a standard braid!


Cinnamon raisin bread-Chef upped the amount of raisins and cinnamon from the last time it was made in class and it tasted better, but we still all thought it needed a bit more cinnamon.


Sourdough using our sour starters-The product of Gus! He lived on though in the communal starter that was created from everyone's excess. One of Gus's "kids" made it home with me and my 'rents really liked it :) What was really interesting about this was every team did their own sour starter. On the bread eval day we went over each team's loaves and noted the differences in not only appearance, but aroma, flavor, and texture. It demonstrated how tiny things can affect the final outcome.






Pretzels-Best pretzels I have ever tried. I got to dip all the pretzels in the lye solution. They were mixed and shaped the day before by another group. The lye solution is super caustic so I resembled a mad scientist with goggles and yellow gloves...it was interesting to wear all that and then have a toque on as well!




Bagels-Again, another group made and shaped them the day before but I did the dipping in the boiling water.


Ciabatta with poolish pre-ferment-I was in charge of hand mixing the ciabatta which was quite the workout and quite messy, so no pics yet of it. A friend of mine took some so if I get a hold of them I'll get them up. Unfortunately this was the last day and we were also deep cleaning the bakeshop to shut it down for the summer. I was a little bummed to not be able to see how the inside turned out...I'm assuming it was good though. Here's our poolish, bubbly and alive :)


Besides all that fun with bread, we had our shaping practical Monday which I think I did well on: 96 for my baguette, 95 for my round, and 93 for my braid. We also had our final and our first Grand Buffet! I and a few others assisted Chef in setting up our table. LOL, setting up a display table is a lot of smoke and mirrors per Chef to attain height and visual aspects. It came out well I think.




Alright, I have to go unpack and repack so I'm not bringing too much with me to the city! I have no idea if I'll be allowed to take pics while I intern so that much is up in the air right now but I do plan on continuing blogging and getting back to more frequent posts. Thanks for hanging in there with me lately! Also, I am blogging about my experiences at school at chef2chef.net now! My blogger name there is Bakerface so check it out if you like!

Random fun: The Chef that teaches cookies, tarts, and mignardises gave me this mini loaf of cheddar jalapeno bread the other day. He sees me run and always talks to me about it. I can't wait for his class!