"If you have extraordinary bread..."

April 29, 2014

"If you have extraordinary bread..."

"...and extraordinary butter, it's hard to beat bread and butter." - Jacques Pepin

Since finishing the chocolate module, we've been working in both the modern desserts and bread modules. I missed the first day back in the bread module because there was some pretty major flooding downtown and I couldn't really figure out how to get to school... The class made baguettes and animal-shaped breads, so that was kind of disappointing. But the next day the teacher showed me how to make a crocodile bread, pictured below. The big one was made by the teacher, the baby one is mine. They're pretty fun, and very tasty! :)

Last week we made a miche de pain, which is a dense, round loaf of bread, but we decorated ours with pâte à décor - simple bread dough used solely for modeling. I made a teddy bear, but he was too big and not stuck together very well, so he fell over during baking, but still managed to look like a bear laying down. I'm not sure why my finished miche had such an unappetizing colour to it... :(

We also made little salad rolls - which are really, really yummy, especially with butter! :) - and hamburger and hot dog buns! The hot dog buns turned out ok, but the hamburger buns that my lab partner and I made were in the oven a bit too long and got a bit dried out.

Because the end of the bread module, and therefore the exam, is coming up fairly soon, we practiced making croissants again. We used half the dough to make our croissants (I made mini ones which I took home to sell at a bake sale my mom and I did on the weekend), and with the other half we made torsades, which are chocolate twists. To make them, we rolled out the croissant dough, spread a very thin layer of pastry cream over half of it, and sprinkled with chocolate chips. Then we folded the dough onto itself, rolled out some more, then cut into strips and twisted before placing on a baking sheet. We let them rise for 30 minutes or so and then baked - mmm!

Today we made whole wheat rolls (pains à serviettes = napkin bread?) and practiced making brioche à tête and navettes again. We reserved part of the brioche dough to make a dessert called tropézienne, which is a large disc of brioche dough sprinkled with coarse sugar before baking. Once baked, it is sliced in half and filled with crème léger (pastry cream mixed with whipped cream), and dusted with icing sugar. Yum! It tastes almost like a doughnut! :)