Dos and Doughnts.

After a few days away from the kitchen, I returned to Day 2 of the bread section. I worked pretty much by myself today in order to catch up to what everyone else was doing. I haven't completely caught up, but man, does the bread group make a lot of stuff. I actually found it kind of therapeutic, especially when we had to make clover rolls, which consisted of a lot of dough rolling and shaping.

First, Jean-Luc demonstrated a basic shortbread, which he is going to roll out tomorrow to make some Halloween cookies. Later in the month, we're all going to have to choose five designs and make a bunch of Halloween cookies ourselves. He wanted to show us now so we could start to think about what shapes/designs we are going to use and start practicing drawing/piping them.

Then, I made the dough for: 

- Whole wheat/"clover" rolls
- Zimt brotchen - which I think are just German cinnamon buns
- Herb bread (with basil, sage, and thyme)
- And, brioche

The only thing I started and finished today were the whole wheat rolls. After it doubled in size (yeast is so cool), I split it in half and used this really cool machine that cuts the dough into separate little pieces, the perfect size for rolls. Then, I rounded out all of these little pieces, and did it again with the other half of the dough. After this, each ball gets split in half (you pretend your hand is a knife!) and then three of the smaller pieces get attached to each other (like a clover) and placed in a greased muffin tin. As I'm typing this now, I'm realizing that it's sort of weird that we do three leaf clovers... is eating them bad luck? After these were all done (it took a long time, but I found it sort of relaxing), I put them on a baking rack to let them rise a little bit more. Then they went in the proofer for about 10 minutes until they were basically exploding out of the muffin pans. I egg-washed them before they went into the oven, where they expanded even more in the 10 minutes they were in there and they looked really good. They got sent to the cafeteria right away... fresh-from-the-oven rolls. Yum.

Two of the people in our group weren't here today and Jean-Luc didn't want to store the brioche dough they made yesterday for another day, so I finished theirs off (and made a batch of my own later). We rolled out the dough to the length and width of our rolling pins -- I'm still working on getting my dough to be completely square -- and spread a thin layer of pastry cream and sprinkled raisins all over the dough. Then, we rolled it up and cut it into 16 "equal" pieces (because my dough wasn't square at all, I had a lot of really awkward end pieces). We set them aside to rise for a bit before putting them in the proofer and kept them in there for about 10 minutes before putting them in the oven. I think while these were cooking, I was making something entirely different, so I'm not even sure exactly how long they were in the oven. After they came out, we brushed them with a flat icing glaze, which is just icing sugar and water. I am probably going to want to eat eight of everything we make in this section. Good thing we're only supposed to have one.

I ate my brioche in the car on the way home from class and I just wanted it to last forever. Making bread is a lot less labour intensive when you have a giant industrial bread mixer (though they can be a little intimidating to use at first). What do you do if you don't have one of those?

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Today's Recipes

Whole Wheat Rolls
1.5 kg bread flour
700 g whole wheat flour
44 g salt
130 g yeast
110 g butter
88 g sugar
1400 ml milk (28 degrees)

Zimt Brotchen
1 kg flour
550 ml cold milk
100 g sugar
15 ml honey
1 egg
2 egg yolks
60 g yeast
18 g salt
1/2 lemon zest
15 ml vanilla
150 g butter

Herb Bread
1250 g flour
75 sugar
30 g salt
200 ml olive oil
700 ml water (32 degrees)
75 g yeast
2 g sage
2 g basil
1 g thyme

Brioche
1 kg flour
500 g bread flour
250 g sugar
30 g salt
100 g yeast
12 eggs
200 ml cold water
375 g butter
375 g margarine

Flat Icing
icing sugar
water