And Pesto! It's Delicious

The last day on rye went nice and smoothly. My group turned out beautiful whole wheat loaves. The best yet, according to the Chef. :)

Deep cuts creates contrast

Creative scoring

We also used up the last of the spinach to make a spinach, Parmesan and bacon rye sourdough. Each loaf was chocked full of goodies.

Rye dough

The doughnut group made these wonderful brie doughnuts with a raspberry and cranberry compote. That was some good brie. A and I couldn't help ourselves; we simply had to keep nipping slices off that giant wheel of creamy buttery goodness.

It's brie, how can you go wrong?

While the class was busy, the Chef made crab bread! (No, it doesn't contain crab meat, unforunately.)

Mr. Krab

Today was my group's first day on the white bread station. As always with first days, we were a little overwhelmed with the timing of when to do what. Tension was running a bit high, but it eased off as we realized time-wise, we were doing well.

A and M threw together some killer pesto. We had no pine nuts (too expensive), so they substituted with walnuts, almonds, and pistachios. And since A roasted a huge batch of garlic yesterday, some of that went in as well. Simply amazing stuff. Green foods are good for you, right?

Green goodness

The green goodness got mixed in with our cheese loaves along with some parmesan.

Then A had the genius idea to try rolling some into the baguettes. To show off the swirl of pesto and cheese, Chef showed us how to cut the bread to resemble a wheat stalk.

The wheat stalk shape is very easy to do but it looks great and makes it very easy to rip off small bun-sized pieces - ideal for dinner parties.

Also part of the white bread station are buns. Tons of buns. Daily, we shape and roll about 216 buns. By the end of these three days, we'll either be bun rounding masters, or have carpel tunnel. :P

Setup for making fancy buns

On another note, the Chef made us breakfast today! He fried up some crepes and filled them with apricot jam. Then the rye table jumped in and scrambled some eggs, fried some bacon, and added garnishes for the sweet crepes. Getting a chance to break and eat something other than disaster doughnuts was very much needed.

Sweet and savoury

My group didn't plan what flavours we would do tomorrow, but there's a few pieces of roasted garlic left in the fridge and I'm excited to get into them. Unless, of course, the class devours it first. Many people were eyeing our leftovers. "What shall we do today? What shall we do today? What shall we do today? What shall we doooo?"