I slept in this a.m., which for those who know me will understand is as common winning the lottery.. which it is for me, really, in one sense except for the panic when I realized at 6:55 a.m. that it was an hour later than I had thought. My leisurely stroll through the word games was ditched, things were thrown into bags, coffee was guzzled, breakfast downed and out the door I catapulted.
Oh yes, the lights were long and the roadwork on Las Vegas Boulevard was in full swing. Many thanks to the tandem truck that went through an orange light and completely blocked the intersection for an entire cycle so nobody could turn right (only one lane out of four functional thanks to the roadwork). I wasn’t alone in slow traffic this a.m. as there was a fatality early in the a.m going south at my highway entrance and the lineups going in rush hour direction were epic as it was still closed from early a.m. Happily once I got onto the freeway the coast was clear and I made it with 10 mins to spare, although yet again I had to make a trip back to the car to retrieve my locker key (a daily experience). Other classmates were arriving having spent at least twice the usual time enroute due to the accident.
The main theme of today was Brioche, which we made in dizzying varieties – after constructing a large batch of basic dough it was divided to make a variety of sweet pastries which we worked through in various phases of bench resting, chilling, blast freezing, shaping, decorating, proofing, baking and decorating again. It was hard to keep up with the options! Apparently on Friday we put together a buffet with all that we made, so more pictures to come. There were some outstanding results today, with Brioche Saint Nicolas (orange and chocolate brioche dough twisted together), Cramique (hazelnut, cranberry, white chocolate and rock sugar) and the fruit inserts (raspberry, pictured below, and strawberry rhubarb) being my favourites – oh, along with Kougelhoff, lemon brioche, and plain braided Brioche (pictured below). Shaping ranged from figures to bicoloured loaves to crowns to muffin shapes, loaves and not a traditional Brioche shape in sight. Who knew you could do so much with brioche???
Braided brioche
If the calories in the variations weren’t enough, we did laminated brioche in the afternoon – !!!! as an intro to croissants, which we will laminate tomorrow and bake for breakfast on Thursday (with multiple options of course). The precious croissant dough is made and fermenting away in the fridge – quite a different consistency to mine.
We managed to also sandwich in a few bread varieties as well – Tiger Bread, a bread with a beer topping added – pictured below and I’ll attest it goes down very well warm from the oven with brie or Port Salut cheese and tomato.
We made multigrain baguette bread (awesome), and a regional Rye bread Tourte Auvergnate, from central France- excellent, but needs to dry overnight, one of the few not best fresh. The dough was mixed for Peruvian bread made with creamed corn – many of the recipes ferment overnight in the fridge and almost all use either Levain or fermented dough (leftovers from previous recipes) as well as yeast to produce the complex flavours. Bread making at a different level, and I’m looking forward to trying the recipes with a puny home mixer vs. the industrial sized mixers we are currently using. Chatting with fellow students, it seems few have the equipment in their working kitchens such as the dough rollers, proofing ovens, deck ovens….though a couple do have the industrial mixers.
Tomorrow shows promise for ancient grain bread (Kamut), red wine bread, foccacia, and Danish to come, as well as finishing the other breads fermenting overnight.
I’ll never look at bread the same again…