Turn, Turn, Turn    

September 18 1998
AK-47, Tomcat, F-11
Hardly ever used, tell me what am I bid?

The task of the day:

Advanced Bread Baking

Today we filled three entire tables with bread. We also produced six breads before 10:45 in order to get the tables set up before lunchtime. It was kind of neat to have a load of production crammed into the early part of the day. Chef showed us some shortcuts for things we'd learned the traditional way early in the week. The neatest of these was the "Blitz" method for making croissants. It doesn't require any folding over of the dough, and within an hour the dough is ready for rolling into croissants.

We also ran off Challah and Brioche today, originally we were going to use some frozen and re-heated breads, but the class wanted to do as much of the breads fresh as possible. Pretty neat to have the class come together this way.

The Bread Buffet

  • Baguettes - basic French bread
  • Challah - braided egg bread
  • 4 Day Wheat Sourdough - from start that we created this week
  • 4 Day Rye Sourdough - from start that we created this week
  • Ciabatta - Italian flat bread
  • Focaccia - Seasoned Italian flat bread
  • Brioche - butter muffins
  • Croissant (Blitz) - quick method
  • Gugelhopf - German yeasted fruitcake
  • Panettone - Italian yeasted fruitcake
  • Stollen - Swiss yeasted fruitcake
  • Multi Grain Sourdough - from start that we created this week
  • Fougasse - French flat bread
  • Pan au Manno - hand shaped Italian bread. Also looks like a cow's udder.
Every single one of these breads had a sign for it, made out of decorative dough. The dough is rolled out very thin and then you roll more dough to form each of the letters. It feels like playing with Play-Doh mostly. I did the Challah sign in a very chisseled font, with two small braided Challahs as decoration on the sign. Looked pretty neat.

The display was gobs of work. We also made some centerpieces and a basket from the decorative dough. Each of the signs was about an hour of work. But, since we divided the work between the teams, most of us only had one each to create. I took about half of a roll of film. There was lots of sunlight behind the display, so I hope it comes out okay.

* * *

Shawn is in the kitchen now showing Marla how to tournee vegetables. She's in Skills 1 now, and will shortly be needing to do this. On her tour this week, she went by another Skills Kitchen to see the students working on vegetables and got a bit tweeked, I guess.

* * *

Current driving music: Dead Winter Dead, Savatage. I've been out of listening to metal for a while, and started back up as a defense mechanism to living in White Bread, USA.


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Copyright 1998 Tom Dowdy
Comments? dowdy@poubelle.com