Baking A Sweet Life

Finally something besides baguettes! Day 4 at SFBI’s Artisan I bread class was such a great (and busy!) day. The last three days had been primarily spent learning about bread and applying that knowledge to our constant – the baguette. The mixing methods, different flours, shaping… all the baguette. Believe me, I loved the baguette, but I was ready to play with some different doughs. Today gave us just that very chance!

The picture quality isn’t as good for this day as the others because my camera battery had completely died from my constant picture taking, and so I had to use my cell phone’s camera.

We started our busy day by mixing up the dough for egg bread. The egg bread was something we were all looking forward too. This was also probably the most fun of all due to the shaping. I loved the flavor too. This was my first attempt at any real “egg” bread. Challah is similar to egg bread, but it is sweeter, and I believe that it contains even more eggs? (I’ll have to verify that). Shaping was merely making three baguette-like doughs, and then braiding them together, just as you would hair.

Then we worked on the dough for “pan bread” – everyday white sandwich bread. It was definitely more than everyday. It was so tasty! We made enough to prepare into three different shaped loaves, one was twist, another was just based on five balls laid into the pan, and the last one was simply to logs placed next to each other that ended up looking like the ideal sandwich bread once baked:

Next, we made up the dough for a 50/50 whole wheat flour and bread flour boule. I was excited to do this because I needed practice shaping boules. My boules at home just aren’t cute. This gave me great practice at shaping them the correct way. They weren’t half bad, actually.

Next was our rye bread. I’ll pull out my notes at sometime and let you know what the percentage of rye flour was in the recipe, but I don’t think that it was more than 50%. We shaped these into little logs, and after scoring and baking they bloomed into adorable loaves. They tasted amazing! I was surprised, however, at how few people in my class actually liked rye. Go figure! These beauties were scored immediately after shaping. This was the only time we did this in the entire class, and that was because there is very little oven spring with the bread, and we wanted to get the maximum scored look from them, so to do that we scored early, and let the final proof blossom the loaves. Before baking, they were sprinkled with flour to give a more rustic appearance as they came out of the oven.

Finally, the last bread we did for the day was the multi-grain bread that we had toasted the seeds for yesterday. We shaped these into torpedos, and like the boules, I was excited to learn how to properly attain this shape. It was much easier than I thought it would be! After shaping, just before letting it sit for its final rise, we had the option to roll the dough in whole oats as a nice decoration/texture change. I did that to one of mine, as I’m not a huge fan of large toppings on breads.

And finally for lunch!! This is on the pizza dough that we made on day two – it sat in the chill chest for two days to let the protease break down the proteins so that the dough would be more extensible and rise less in the oven. The dough was fantastic! Really chewy and great flavor.

And here’s our schedule for the day :

The last thing we did for the day was prepare the pre-ferments that we were going to study on the last day: a Poolish, and a sponge.

The Poolish:

And the sponge:

We’ll talk pre-ferment details tomorrow :)