Spoil Yourself With Crusty Bread

I imagine that many people don't give much thought to bread, bakers included. Compared to the media's promotion of the cake and pastry world, bread gets a little shunned. I mean, grocery stores have started to bring in "artisan" breads, but they really don't measure up. Have you read an ingredient list for a simple Farmer's loaf? What ARE those unpronounceable things?

But these last two classes are really inspiring the bread baker in me. I had a bread stint a few years ago when I got my first (that's right, first) cookbook, The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. I know I mentioned it before, but there's really nothing like the mind-blowingly flavourful crust of a freash crusty artisan loaf. :) So I really encourage you to stop by a specialty bread store (Cobs is quite good!) and try a loaf if you don't know what I'm talking about. Or even stop by SAIT downtown or The Marketplace right when the bread comes out around 12pm. That loaf might just spoil you for life. :P (Unless you head overseas, that's a whole 'other story.)

Yesterday's demos were of three kinds of croissants, plain, chocolate, and almond, danishes of different styles, bread pudding, brioche, and a bialy.

A terribly fuzzy picture of an almond croissant, but you can see the filling poking out.

Chocolate croissant

Our Chef showed us a neat trick to create a swirl of raspberry jam and cream cheese for the danishes.

Brioche a tete - brioche with a little head.

Day old danishes, even at 50% off, don't sell downtown, so we turn them into bread pudding! This version had raspberries and white chocolate mixed in.

The only savoury item yesterday was the bialy. A bialy is often described as Italy's version of a bagel. The texture is similar but there is no hole. Instead, a bialy is pressed down in the middle to create a craddle to hold all sorts of fillings. These bialy's were filled with bacon and sauteed onions. (As bakers, we make a lot of sweet things so we always seem to crave salty things.)

Today, fougasse, multi-grain bread, red wine and sausage bread, and coconut ensaymadas were up. 

Fougasse is similar to ciabatta except that it is shaped differently. Traditionally it looks like a leaf. Although it has yeast in it, it gets rolled out so it ends up more like a fluffy flatbread. Ours were brushed with olive oil and topped with herbs and cheese. I added garlic powder to mine because I love garlic!

The red wine and sausage dough is very similar to ciabatta and fougasse dough - it is very very soft. So soft, it can start to 'melt' between your fingers while you hold it. I bet it would make an amazing pillow if it didn't deflate all the way. :) I personally wasn't a fan of the flavours, probably because I am not a fan of red wine or salami.

We twist the dough

My group was incharge of the multi-grain bread. Multi-grain and other hardy breads are some of my favourites. They produce some of the best and most flavourful crusts.

Our big dough baby about to head into the proofer

A little dark but so good with garlic butter

The last item we tasted was my favourite (other than the multi-grain) - the coconut ensaymada. Coconut ensaymada is a Philipino sweet bread. It can have all kinds of fillings but we do coconut here at SAIT. It's a rich dough similar to brioche or challah but it gets a little bit of filling and a macaron topping. After baking, the topping is a lot like a meringue cookie - chewy, crispy, and sweet. It's like a Philipino version of the Chinese pineapple bun or the Mexican concha.

One more day of demos and then we finally get to start our rotations. :) I'm sure I can speak for everyone in my class when I say we're itching to get started. Just standing for hours is really hard on the knees and backs.

Downtown Campus

Bread, You Are My Drug

Hi everyone! It's been a while since I last wrote because I had a week of theory followed by reading week. When I decided to come back to school, I have to admit I was excited to have winter, spring, and summer break again. :)

Theory class this time was all about nutrition. While the material was interesting, I don't think it would have made for interesting posts. At the end of nutrition, we were given two recipes, a cheesecake and a chocolate chip cookie, to modify to meet certain dietary restrictions - the cheesecake was to be low-fat and the chocolate chip cookie, gluten-free. We were then graded on how closely the modified product imitated the original. I thought it was rather unfair that we were given a restricted list of substitutions and some of them few of us had ever encountered, much less worked with. Friday was our one and only chance to make our product with the substitutions.

My partner and I went with a combination of cottage cheese and quark for a super low-fat cheesecake (the lower the fat per serving, the better your score, but possibly at the risk of scoring lower in flavour, texture, and appearance). We had high hopes as the mixture smelled exactly like regular full-fat cream cheese. How did it turn out? Well...not terrible, haha. The texture was slightly grainy due to the quark and it had a surprisingly savoury flavour. Unfortunately, we couldn't taste the lemon flavour at all.

Next up were the gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. To be honest, I found a recipe for gluten-free chocolate chip cookies in our textbook so my partner and I used it with a few substitutions (potato flour instead of chickpea flour and more cornstarch instead of xantham gum). No one else knew the recipe was there. :P We baked it all up and! The cookies flattened out like crazy and started melding together like one big happy cookie family. They tasted exactly like a regular chocolate chip cookie but the appearance was just unacceptable. We weren't supposed to, but my partner and I quickly gathered more ingredients, tweaked the recipe, and remade the cookies. :P This time we added more cornstarch for structure and spaced the cookies out a lot more. This second batch came out looking a lot like the original recipe but, unfortunately, just didn't taste as good. Cornstarch really seems to create this chalky flavour and texture. It wasn't terrible but not as good as our first batch.

It was fun to experiment, I just wish that we didn't get marked for something we had no experience in.

*Unfortunately I lost the photos I took of the cheesecake and cookies but I'm sure you can imagine what they looked like. :)

And now, after a week's rest, I am back to the world of bread. This past Saturday, myself and two other students helped a Chef teach his weekend continuing education Artisan Breads class. What? We got paid to have fun, make bread, help people, and take home as much bread as we could hold? You bet your fat-from-bread pants we did! (We had to clean all the tables and tools though, so I think it all balances out. :P )

After two weeks of not baking my stock of bread was slowly dwindling. I was worried. This new bread class I was about to start on Monday (today!) isn't so easy going about taking a loaf here or there. But be calm, my little heart. Pitter patter no more for my freezer is stocked once again! Two full bags!

A lot of students didn't take their bread home

For class (the baking program's Artisan Breads) I'm at SAIT's downtown campus. The downtown campus is entirely open so customers can watch us students at work while they buy lunch.

Today all the way to Thursday will be demo days. On today's menu was challah, brioche dough, bialy (Italy's version of a bagel), ciabatta, and a sweet dough whose name I forgot. I didn't get the chance to take as many photos because downtown campus is more strict with cell phone usage since we're out in the open but here are a few

Challah is similar to brioche, a rich dough made with butter, eggs, and milk. Challah, however, gets braided. We practiced five strand braids and eight strand braids. I think the hardest part about braiding bread is making the end look nice.

My eight strand braid

A baby three strand Challah

Ciabatta dough is beautiful! It is so fluffy and soft, just like the fluffiest pillow in the world. This ciabatta was a little burnt so we got to cut it open for sampling. :)

Ciabatta has a wonderful crust and chewy interior

To make up for the lack of photos how about a little factoid that I learned in class today? You probably already know salt is important for flavour in bread baking, but did you also know it is important for moistness as well? Salt adds flavour, helps to control yeast fermentation, and also helps the gluten strands to absorb water so if there is not enough salt, the final bread will taste bad, be dry, and have a thick crust! Think of it in terms of your body: not enough salt and we can't hold water, but too much salt and we gain "water weight".

I'll be sure to get back into picture taking mode soon so look forward to future yum-a-licious photos!

Bun Voyage

Today was the end of another awesome class. This last week our class really pulled together and banged out some amazing products and the team work really improved all around.

Yesterday was a standard day on the rye station. Nothing terribly exciting to report other than my first oven burn. I decided on making a peanut butter and chocolate rye sourdough so I spent a lot time in front of the deck ovens attempting to put parchment paper on top of the loaves to prevent the chocolate from burning. Deck ovens are deep but have little vertical clearance so it is very easy to touch the top or bottom when trying to pull out or put in loaves. I'm surprised it took this long!

Makeshift cold bandage

One neat thing was the Chef asked A and I to try and incorporate quinoa into the baguette dough. It seems that the colorful little grains intrigued him. We made two batches - one batch had raw quinoa soaked in water overnight and another batch with cooked quinoa. Chef, A and I were all quite sure the baguettes with precooked quinoa would turn out better but we were surprised that the raw quinoa was better! The raw quinoa still kept some of its structure and lent a popping texture to the bread where as the cooked quinoa had a similar texture to the rest of the bread so it was hard to tell there was any quinoa at all.

Cooked quinoa

Shaping the baguettes

Tasting time!

Today, our last day, A and I made no bread at all! A and I have been hired to work for our Chef for two Saturdays. Those Saturdays our Chef is teaching an artisan bread class to the public. Myself, A, and one more girl will be his assistants in measuring out ingredients and helping to guide the students. A and I sped through the measuring and quickly filled up an entire rack full of dry ingredients. The wet will be measured day of.

And what's a last day without pizza? The white bread group made four giant pizzas. One even had a cheese stuffed crust! Total yum! Then they took the leftover quinoa and made a salad with arugula. So good!

Cheese stuffed!

I have no idea where it came from, but there was also a tray of baklava. Woot!

Some more fun breads from our Chef and classmates:

Braaaaaains

Hercules beetle

Today and tomorrow is SAIT's open house. I will be helping out my Chef tomorrow making muffins, cookies, and answering questions. Stop on by and grab some free goodies if you're around! :)

Root Beer Float Reincarnates as a Doughnut!

The past two days have been a blast. A and I never stop surprising the Chef with our creations. For our last two days on the doughnut station, A and I decided to do half savoury doughnuts and half sweet.

We knew right away the savoury had to contain brie. There was a giant wheel of brie in the fridge; who can resist? We saw a tub of cherry compote sitting all alone and begging to be used so we grabbed it along with a huge chunk of turkey and some thyme.

I'm not sure why the idea of a savoury doughnut seems so weird. What about the Krispy Kreme burger? I actually wanted to make a grilled cheese doughnut, haha! Chef shook his head when we told him our plan for the brie, but when he tried it, he liked it. :)

On our first day back on doughnut duty, A and I were stumped as to what sweet flavour to do. We both just stood in the fridge for 15 minutes, staring at the shelves. We were looking into different containers and moving things around when A spotted a tub of strawberry jam. For a commercial product, it was pretty decent. Then I spotted a tub of sour cream. Bingo! Strawberry sour cream it was! (Unfortunately, we found that the sour cream was previously frozen and thus, gritty. We switched to cream cheese instead. :))

Of course, this doughnut had to be a filled one with the classic and simple dusting of icing sugar on top.

Do you like root beer floats? Do you like doughnuts? If you like both, have I got the best doughnut for you! Root beer float doughnut! A root beer cream with root beer jello (that still fizzes), vanilla whipped cream, and a bright red cherry to top it all off. The class loved it!

It was funny to listen to my classmates comment with surprise that the jello "tastes like root beer". It was simply root beer with some gelatin so I would expect it to taste like root beer. :)

The doughnut station also produces, oddly enough, a batch of no-time bread. The past two days have been sourdough because we've been on an animal shaping binge. Yesterday was turtles.

Happy turtle in a house

Some of the leftover turtle dough got fried. Other bits were stuffed before frying. :)

Today was octopi and other random shapes.

Sir Ocotpus

Sam the Piggie

Round octopus

Chef's, of course, was crazy awesome. I wanted to make suction cups for mine as well, but I didn't have the time.

Devilishly cute!

Just before baking I topped Sir Oct with some seeds and olives for eyes.

I'll be spending my last two days at the rye station. The Chef wants our table to experiment with quinoa in the baguettes. He doesn't have a recipe so we have to adjust as we see fit. Tomorrow is going to be fun again, I can feel it!