Krista’s adventure through culinary school

I didn’t post yesterday, but we finished our rotation of bread by making Challah and Sunflower Seed Bread. Both were pretty tasty. This was the first time I had Challah before and it was very good…similar to Hawaiian sweet bread in flavor and stringy, similar to a crossiant in texture. Braiding was easier than I expected…especially after shaping the baguettes, etc yesterday from the lean dough. Below are pictures of the parts of our creations that I brought home.

Today we moved on to cookies, which is much easier to manage than making bread. Partly because most of us have some experience with the creaming method(just like when you make chocolate chip cookies) and partly because there are just fewer steps in the process. We made almond spritz cookies and russian tea cookies. I found the russian tea cookies a little dry and crumbly for my taste(that is how they are supposed to be) but they would be good with a big glass of milk or a hot cup of joe.

For dinner they served salmon with a teryaki glaze cooked in a wood plank. It was awesome! I paired it with garlic mashed potatoes and a slice of flank steak. One of the other classes was serving desserts that they worked on for the day, so we tasted various ice cream dishes with cookies. It is fun to try new things that you might not otherwise try(like the goat cheese cheesecake I had today). They serve one of each to every table and people at the table share so they can taste each one if they want. Below is a picture of me in the kitchen…no laughing:) The uniform is quite comfortable…I mean you cant really get any better than elastic waisted pants!

As the title states..yesterday was our first day in the bakery. We were teamed up in pairs of two with half the class working on cookies and the other half on bread. I met with my teammate, Julie, prior to class to go over exactly what we were going to be doing and to make sure our recipe cards were correct. We both had a little anxiety going into the kitchen. Our instructor is very experienced and knowledgable. But, just like on the tv show “Hell’s Kitchen” the atmosphere is always somewhat high strung. I find myself saying things like “Yes chef, thank you chef”. It sounds odd at first, like when you are basic training blurting our “yes drill sergeant!”, but you get used to it.

So we spent all day making two kinds of dough, white wheat lean dough and whole wheat lean dough. In case you dont know, the difference between whole wheat flour and white wheat flour is that the whole wheat is milled with the entire wheat berry(endosperm, germ, and bran), while the white wheat flour only uses the endosperm from the wheat berry, which is mostly made up of starch. From these doughs we made baguettes, batards, fougasse, and boules.

I found that the hardest part of making these breads was shaping them correctly. As with many things in life, you get better with experience. It is definitely an art that I need to work at.

Below are a few pictures of Julie and I’s whole wheat boule and white batard. I brought some home after class and had it for lunch with the triple cream brie I purchased this past weekend at Dean and Deluca. Yum!

Well, off to class. Today we are working on enriched doughs and are going to make sunflower seed bread and challah.