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!