Lean Dough?

Written in the morning before class about yesterday:

Working in the Bakeshops is proving to be much different than how I thought it would be. It is class but it is also baking. Hmm. It makes things slightly tricky, ya know? Yesterday, I was assigned to the Ciabatta team. With it being the second day of class, however, the TA mixed the dough; my job, with the other three people on my team, was to place the dough on couches, which are bread form sheets (the easiest way I can describe them), and scale the Ciabatta dough for the next day, today. We did not bake them (that was the responsibility of the oven/ lean team), and we did not take them out of the oven. I felt like I did absolutely nothing, really, yesterday, but it is all part of us learning each dough and each station in the shop. With twenty students making bread, there has to be some organization.

Here is what I have learned about bread thus far:
*Lean dough is a mixture of flour, water, yeast, and salt, and that is it. Enriched dough includes fats and sugars, etc.
*Ciabatta is Italian for "slipper." It requires a double hydration method of mixing (80% of water in, mix, and then the remaining 20% water), and this dough is very, very wet (a lot of flour must be used to prevent it from sticking). When baked, ciabatta is fourteen inches long, airy, with large holes in the crumb, flat, and has signature striations on the crust. The crust can have a slight coffee odor, as well.
*Baguettes, which are originally from Vienna, should be twenty one inches long. The scoring, or the cuts in the top of the bread, should be from end to end (not across the dough) and there should be 4-5 scores per baguette, as baguette rules are strict in France. They should also be three different colors when baked.

Chef Adams seems very much impressed with our group. We finished so early yesterday that she opened the floor to random questions (not simply about the class or bread) because she had to stall us from going to dinner. I do not know if she is just saying it, but usually on Day Three, she only adds one dough to the schedule. Today she is adding two, hamburger and kaiser. She wanted to give us some encouragement and praise for a job well-done but she hesitates, with not wanting it to go to our heads and affect our work.

Last night, Top Chef Just Desserts premiered on Bravo. Some of the contestants are already on my nerves, but I can tell that I am going to LOVE this show. Maybe one day, I will find the courage to audition for a cooking competition show. My desserts will include Frangelico or nutella, which is a winning combination it itself. Get excited...

Written tonight after class:

I moved to a different dough today, multi-grain. There were, once again, four people on my team, and I was the only new person. Tomorrow, however, these three people rotate off multi-grain, two people will be added, and I will be the only person who has actually mixed this dough. I AM STRESSED, especially since I sort-of, kind-of, not-really, but-I-felt-like-I-did got yelled at today by the chef for not knowing what I was doing. Well, chef, I have never seen some of the demos for this dough or ever worked with it. Cut me some slack.

Overall, I felt the day went well. We added two doughs to the schedule, but we still managed to leave ten minutes early for dinner. Chef Adams said she took a baguette today to dinner with the other baking and pastry chefs to show them our work on Day Three. She thinks we are doing well. Tomorrow, we are adding cinnamon raisin bread and pretzels. How fun! Another day, same dough, but I am glad we spend a little time with each bread. I would not want to just perfect making one bread!

Here are some specifics from the day:
*Pre-ferments are part of a dough that are mixed and allowed to sit overnight. This allows for the fermentation process to occur, adding more flavor to a dough.
*The soaker in multi-grain bread, which is the nuts, seeds, and oats mixed with water, allowed to soak overnight, cannot be added to the dough until after mixing, to ensure that these "sharp edges" do not cut the gluten.
*There are twelve steps in baking bread: scaling, mixing, bulk fermentation, folding, dividing, pre-shaping, bench rest, shaping, final fermentation, scoring, baking, and cooling.
*The three stages of gluten development, based on mixing times, are short, improved, and intense. Multi-grain is an intense dough, mixed until the dough when stretched appears like a bubble gum bubble.
*There are two main reasons why the dough must be mixed on first speed (slow speed) in a spiral mixer (hooks stays in place but rotates while the bowl spins). One, to form a homogeneous mixture, and two, to form a gluten network.
*Folding during fermentation de-gases the dough and introduces oxygen, strengthens the gluten network, equalizes the dough temperature, and moves the food for yeast.

I still feel like my blogs about bread are all over the place and lacking in structure. I find this ironic, because I feel all over the place and confused when I leave this class. I am learning a lot, but there is a lot to know about bread. Phew. Day Four... bring it on.

BREAD AND WATER

Hay Reh