i have had so much fun making bread this week, but holy schmoly i am way beyond exhausted and i think my feet might fall off. today was a really great day in the kitchen. we had a really intense production schedule, but it wasn't as nutty as i thought it was going to be. we made potato rosemary bread, dinner rolls, challah, and pizza dough. the rest of the class made whole grain bread, onion focaccia, soft pretzels, grissini (breadsticks), fougasse (kind of like focaccia), and pan rustique. here are some pictures of everything:
1) our dinner roll dough while it was fermenting. it is oh so fun to deal with such a serious amount of dough.
2) the pizza that i made for lunch. artichoke hearts, sundried tomato, spinach, and mushrooms with herb infused white sauce, fresh mozzarella, and ricotta cheese that we made in class, which is a truly amazing process by the way. and fresh ricotta is WAY better than store bought.
3) my potato rosemary bread. this bread was amazingly tasty. if you want an idea of what it tasted like, go grab the rosemary out of your spice rack and rub a little between your palms. that overwhelmingly delightful smell is what the whole kitchen smelled like today while we were baking. the shaping of this loaf was really awesome. you take a ball of dough and turn it really quickly in a circle between your hands and you can actually feel the dough tighten on itself and make a beautiful round loaf. it was such a fun process and the taste was beyond phenomenal, though you have to like rosemary to really appreciate it.
4) our finished products from the day including challah with and without seeds, dinner rolls, and our 4 loaves of potato rosemary bread. we used two different methods for proofing these loaves. one was just to shape it as a circle and proof it on a sheet pan. the other way is to form it in a wicker basket called a banneton, which gives the coiled effect to the flour on the dough.
5) another group's fougasse and other doughs. the fougasse has an amazingly soft crumb, which makes it just a little chewy and it can be flavored with just about any flavor. a truly cool bread with some really great potential for any meal.
6) the grissini, which are crunchy, buttery little breadsticks that make you want a big bowl of pasta or really yummy soup to go along with them. i literally could not stop eating them. when the weather gets cold, these are seriously going to need a big pot of pasta fagioli to go with them.
after we finished our baking, we did a sensory analysis of different acids. we had to taste buttermilk, fresh cultured yogurt, lemon juice, and champagne vinegar. the buttermilk and vinegar were unbelievably awful, but the yogurt was made by chef marilyn and it was really tasty. we also did an acid analysis of champagne, which was quite tasty and sort of worth having to taste the vinegar first.
so the coolest thing about bread is how everything about bread has something to do with the finished product. the food geek in me is on a serious high because of everything that i learned this week. did you know that the score marks on the top of a loaf of bread can help control the shape of the loaf depending on length, depth, and curvature of the cut? food flat out rocks my world!
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