Check those Ears

Friday, are you serious, its Friday?! This week just flew by! After Monday we switched to two day rotations on stations in breads class so Tuesday and Wednesday we spent doing multigrain and breakfast pastry/breads.

Tuesday we used Chef's sweet dough recipe to make monkey bread.




Wednesday we made sort of a quick danish with the same sweet dough, cream cheese filling, and a coconut crumb topping. Both of the breakfast items went downstairs for the next day. I never make it to breakfast and eat in my room due to running but its pretty cool :)


Yesterday we again switched stations to honey whole wheat, some of which gets walnuts. Challah is also on this station which we might do today. Chef had us scale it on Wednesday but decided to not have us mix it yesterday. I jumped in to assist the current oven team while they were loading some breads and got to score some of my honey whole wheats. Both multigrain and the honey whole wheat get a belly cut score. I'm hoping these two examples were ones I did because its what we are looking for...a nice "ear" which is that lip. It also demonstrates the three tones you want with the ear being darkest, the cut section lightest, and the sides sort of in between...beautiful :)


I'd also like you to meet Gus. Gus is our sour starter that we started on Monday. I thought up his name yesterday in the middle of my run. Such strange thoughts come at those times haha.



This final part has nothing to do with bread...well I guess it sort of does...The mixology club had a Maker's Mark tasting and discussion Wednesday night. The speaker was discussing what went into it, why it is better than the rest etc, and besides the required corn and malted barley, it also gets red winter wheat...so that relates to bread. I was surprised that I actually liked this stuff and its cool how it is a very hands on production. The speaker actually went down and worked through the various production aspects as part of his training.


Random meal:

Cornmeal crusted pompano stuffed with shrimp and wilted spinach

This was actually much better than it sounded or looked. Like a lot of my meals, I turned it into a composed salad using the salad bar.

Just a few more hours to go until the weekend! I can't be lazy though! I have so much to do before we get off school next week and to prepare for Monday! Its our shaping practical...eek. Have a great Friday all!

Another team's poolish pre-ferment the other day...Pre-ferments give a jump start on fermentation of the dough resulting in a few things like less yeast needed in the end product, strength, shelf life, and flavor. This pre-ferment is made with equal parts flour and water. The high water content makes it super active but also does not hold long. We make our pre-ferments the night before so this type does not work for weekend holding.