Baking A Sweet Life

It’s been a wonderful week but it must come to an end. Today is my last day at SFBI’s Artisan 1 Bread class, and I must say.. I’ve learned a ton! I can’t wait to go home and apply everything that I’ve learned, not to mention actually using my at-home equipment, which is so different from the industrial versions that we used during the class.

We started the day with a little bit of lecture. We had made our pre-ferments on day 4 that we were going to focus on today. We made a poolish (named after the Polish, no less), and a sponge. We also did a pate fermentee, and I’ll talk about what happened with that later :)

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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!

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I’m finally able to write about day three and on! I visited family on the evenings of class day #3 and #4, and was out too late to blog! Then, after day #5, I flew out (red eye!) and the airport didn’t have free wi-fi, or my laptop couldn’t find it.

The focus of day three’s material was to study the autolyse method, and then to compare the use of high gluten flour to regular bread flour. I was looking forward to this day because I wanted to know more about high gluten flour, and what made it so “special”.

For some reason, I had acquired the notion that high gluten flour was better than bread flour for regular, every day bread use. I mean, if gluten is good, then more is better, right? Well, the class showed me that it does have its purpose - it might be a good choice when using alternate flours that do not create much (if any) gluten on their own, like spelt, rye. To combine these with a high gluten flour may contribute to more of a rise. However, regular bread flour would work just fine, as we saw on day #4 when we used a rye/bread flour combo.

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It’s day two at SFBI and things are going very well! Today we had about an hour’s worth of lecture and spent the majority day in the kitchen baking up 15 baguettes per person. That’s a lot of white flour! The point of today was to really learn about the intricacies of the three different mixing methods: Short Mix, Improved Mix, and the Intensive Mix. This is a long post with lots of pictures, so I apologize if you get tired reading this! I’ve posted this for my own reference later on, as well as to share with all of you!

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Because my husband is definitely the most fabulous man on the face of the earth, he decided to get me an Artisan bread class for my birthday. Not only did he set up the class, but he arranged my flight with his extra miles, and arranged my hotel stay with his redemption points as well. On Sunday, before we went to the airport, he handed me a packet with all of my flight and hotel info in it, as well as mapped directions to and from every place I would need them for. I told you he was fabulous! He even hit the bank the day before so that I would have the cash on hand that I’d need for cabs, etc. That was necessary since I really don’t know how to access our money if I’m not whipping out the credit card at Williams-Sonoma or Sur la Table. Whew… I’m glad he knows how to get to it :)

Today was day one at the San Francisco Baking Institute. I’m enrolled in the Artisan I bread class. This is a 5-day course with a huge amount of hands-on instruction and lecture from an amazing instructor - Steven Isaac. He has worked at many highly acclaimed restaurants and hotels, and was even the corporate pastry/bakery chef for Wolfgang Puck. He worked for Daniel Leader (of Bread Alone) in the early 1990’s.

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