Krista’s adventure through culinary school

This is going to be a quick post since I should really be getting ready for my practical tomorrow. The written final was today and was pretty easy. It is like jumping out of an airplane, you just don’t know what to expect until you take that first step. Well, not exactly like the rush of jumping out of an airplane, but I’m sure you get the idea. We didn’t quite know what to expect, but once we got in there, it was fine. Tomorrow is the same thing. We have done all the possible tasks that we will be tested on, it is just a matter or recalling what we learned and putting it to use.

So today, Julie and I started out early and made puff pastry dough and white wheat lean dough before class to get a head start. The puff pastry dough was a left over task from last Friday when I missed class so that I could get a little hands on experience with laminated dough. We used the lean dough to practice hand rolling baguettes, batards, and my favorite, schlumberger rolls.

I had a few problems with the puff pastry dough when I was laminating. It is so touch-ably soft like a babies bottom(even after refrigeration), that I was having a hard time managing it. I also didn’t put enough flour down on the bench at first, so it started to stick. But after a few hours, it firmed up enough and was able to laminate it with 4 folds of dough and butter. We will use it in our next class, hearth breads and rolls.

We also made my favorite, banana bread. It is so delicious! I even brought 2 loaves home, one to share with my neighbors and the other to eat and freeze for later. I also brought our lemon buttermilk bundt cake to share with the neighbors. It is so soft and fluffy! I will definitely keep this recipe close and experiment with it…since my hubby doesn’t like lemon flavored cake.

O..and here is a picture of the blueberry muffins, lemon poppy seed muffins, and orange/pecan scones that we made yesterday.

So… it has been awhile. I had a fun filled weekend in Minnesota. It was so nice to be *home* with Seth and Duke, whom I miss so much. I was back for Jason and Shelby’s wedding, which was a lot of fun…I didn’t know that I knew so many cowboys. Saturday, Seth and I tried our hand at some of the recipes I brought back. We made pizza, almond coffee cake and baguettes. The baguettes didn’t turn out very good as it is hard to get the right conditions in a home kitchen, but we will get our system down and make a better product next time…and then share our baked goodness with others.

Sunday we went to breakfast with Leah, Matt and Gianna at Turtle Bread Company. It is a cool bakery with an open kitchen where you can watch them at work. The bread had good flavor, but was a little light in color for my preference. We then went to the Living Green Expo at the state fair grounds with George and Ayuko. We sampled a lot of local foods, George won a bottle of jam, and we got a lot of great information about local cuisine and ingredients.

So…back to school today…I made fruit filled danish and croissants with the laminated dough that Julie made on Friday. They turned out quite tasty and flaky…even Mr. Crabby the croissant(see picture below). The other teams made banana bread…one of my favorite foods…so I brought some home for a tasty treat. Tomorrow we are making blueberry and lemon poppy seed muffins and scones. Hopefully we get around to practicing some dough shaping, but we will see. Thursday we have our first practical/test which signifies the end of our first class in the bakeshop. I am a little nervous for it, but I’m sure it will be fine. It is nice to work in teams, but it will be equally nice to see what we can all do by ourselves on our own time lines.

For the practical, we will have to bake three things in 4.5 hours. We are given a list of four possible combinations of products that might be on our test. We will work in streams throughout the day to spread out equipment and space. It should be interesting…like I said before, I am a little nervous, but mostly excited to see what I can do.

The rolls from my practical..

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.