Sous Chef for a day

One of my very best friends got married on Saturday (wooooohoooo!!!) and although the forecast throughout the majority of the week was rain all day Saturday, God delighted us with a gorgeous sunny day! She was a beautiful bride, and it was a beautiful day!

Then Sunday morning came... a little more tired than usual, I woke up for class. Imagine my surprise (and panic) when my clock said 6:32, which is already two minutes later than I need to leave my house, not to mention the fact that I still had bright pink fingernails (a major no-no in the culinary department). So after a stop at CVS for fingernail polish remover, since of course I couldn't find any at my house, I arrived to room 301 twenty minutes late. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who hadn't shown up, and our chef had already combined groups. This left me joining a group to make a group of 5, which is really not desirable, since we would be getting in each other's way all day. After apologizing for my tardiness, (which was appreciated and accepted), chef looked around and decided that it might be best for me to work with him for the day, doing side work and prep. He asked if I would be alright with this, to which I casually (as casually as I could anyway) said, "Sure!" 

Getting to work with the chef all day was busy, busy, busy, but awesome! I got to prepare different kinds of dough for demos, make Russian braid, hazelnut, apple, and cream cheese fillings, and pastry cream. I did start to feel a teensy bit self-conscious when other people in my class started calling me "sous-chef"; it was sort of reminiscent of being called "teacher's pet" in elementary school. It was nice to have answers to questions and be able to help people out, but I don't at all like it when I feel that people think I think I'm somehow better than them. (Know what I mean??)

Anyway, after being on my feet all day, learning tons of things about pastry, the huge box of goodies I brought home from class included the following delicious items: 

Russian Braid

Tea Rings (2 of them)

Banana Bread muffins

Sour Cream Coffee Cake muffins

Croissants

Danishes

and last but not least, Brioche with hazelnut filling, chocolate sticks and crumb topping

Anyone in the mood for some pastries? :) 

Chef said I did a great job on my tea rings (he might have even said they looked better than the ones he made that day for the demo!) 

Check out how you make them here:

After preparing the dough, you layer it with cinnamon filling and cake crumbs (which help absorb moisture). That 1-2 inches of open dough on the left is important.. you'll see why!

 Then you roll up the dough, not too tightly, not too loosely. (Here is the chef making a demo ring). 

Then, tuck the end of the cylinder into the dough that didn't have the filling, making a ring. 

 You then cut the dough at an angle with scissors, fanning out the cut pieces just a bit. 

After baking, the tea ring gets a glaze of apricot nepage and cinnamon roll glaze. (I put some sliced almonds on one ring too!)

Besides all the exciting baking in class yesterday, I also did a lot of other baking. For my friend's dress rehearsal dinner, I made vanilla-coconut cupcakes with 3 different kinds of buttercream: coconut, lime, and chocolate (so so so delicious!). Here are some pictures of those: 

 The "trial" cupcakes to test the frosting :) 

(coconut buttercream in the front)

 Chocolate buttercream: pre-toasted coconut

 Lime buttercream (with the swirl and sugar sprinkles)

Big cupcakes (regular size) with coconut mixed into the batter, chocolate buttercream and toasted coconut. 

Also, I made gingerbread men with my kiddos in school on Friday. They loved it! (And the hallways smelled like Christmas!) I decorated some and then they each decorate their own as well.. nothing like bringing home two cookies instead of one! 

Sticky Buns and Cinnamon Rolls :)

Sticky Buns.. a-ma-zing.

I've moved from artisan breads which are mostly lean, meaning they don't have any, or very little, fats and/or sugars, to viennoiserie... which is essentially baking with doughs that are made of butter, butter, and more butter (and maybe some sugar too). Although I certainly can't eat anything I made yesterday, I can definitely admire the products and enjoy giving them to people who can eat them (and love to!)

Really though, these doughs, known as enriched or sweet doughs, have a lot of butter... our laminated dough formula (used to make croissants and danishes) contains 20% butter of the final dough weight. And not just any butter, mind you, but butter that has at least 82% fat. Our chef (who is awesome! he's been a vegetarian for 32 years for health reasons, and can deliver hilarious one liners without cracking a smile, plus he is great at challenging us to challenge ourselves).. anyway.. our chef prefers to use "plugra" butter.. which is a play on the French words for "more fat" (plus gras). 

So for my first day, which was the longest by far at 12 and a half hours, we were going non-stop all day... and I LOVED it! First, we made some laminated dough, which would later be used for croissants. The process is crazy, and let me tell you, those "crescent rolls" that pop out of a can have nothing on real croissants. Without telling you every single step... the basics are: you use a sheeter (a manually-directed machine that rolls dough back and forth, making it thinner with each pass) to create layers of butter and dough. By the time you get to the last step, you essentially have a dough that is layer upon layer upon layer of dough and butter- which makes for beautifully flaky pastries. See what I mean...

Check out these layers!

Chocolate croissants

Notice how these are darker than you typically see in grocery stores, etc. 

Chef says that many American pastries and baked goods are underbaked, 

because we see darker coloring and think- burned!!! But, this isn't the case. 

These croissants have perfect coloring (they've been egg washed twice). 

One step of the lamination process- the tri-fold.

Dough on the sheeter.

Chocolate croissants ready to proof.

Rolling up a chocolate croissant. 

We also made sticky buns and cinnamon rolls... which again, are much darker than we typically see them. Also, chef noted that he puts the glaze on the rolls while they are still hot, so that the glaze seals in over the roll combining with and complementing the other flavors and textures of the roll, rather than waiting until the roll is cool, so there is a layer of white sugar on top. Sticky buns start out as cinnamon rolls, but they get a special home in a muffin tin coated with a brown sugar, honey & butter smear with pecans. The bottom of each bun then becomes the top. 

Rolling up cinnamon rolls

Making sticky buns.

Our cinnamon rolls (pre-glaze)

Sticky buns!! 

Cinnamon rolls!

I brought home a HUGE box full of cinnamon rolls, sticky buns, croissants and brioche. HUGE. I have no room left in my freezer. Stay tuned to see what yummy treats I get to make next week! 

Pitas are my new favorite bread!

So this post is a few days late... but things have been a little busy outside of class! (I'll update on that later.)

Class was a little crazy too! By 10am, we were down to 2 people in my group (including me!) and we actually made all of these breads:

Ciabatta

Challah

Pita

Baguette

Sesame Crackers

Out of all these awesome and delicious and different breads, I've gotta say my new favorite is pita, if only because it is the coolest ever thing to watch bake! I tried to find a good video online to share with you all, but it's so much neater in person, you should just make some at home! :) All you need is a pizza stone and a peel to move the hot bread around. (If you can't bake it at home, then I guess a you tube video will do!)

So we did a repeat of ciabatta, challah and baguette... we got some extra practice on ciabatta and baguette, since those two breads will be on our final practical (this Sunday!). The challah my group tried again, since we didn't get it right the first time... and again... we missed a very small thing, but it turned out to be a big problem later! We used regular instant yeast, instead of osmotolerant yeast. Osmotolerant yeast reacts differently with the sugars in the dough, and because we didn't use it, we had to proof our dough for nearly 4 hours!! (Instead of 2!!) It looked fine, and tastes delicious... definitely different than before!

We also made some sesame crackers, with sesame and wasabi sesame crackers. They had a little bit of milk in them, and butter, but I tried them anyway. I really don't like not knowing if something that I've made is good or not! Getting the crispy cracker consistency is harder than I realized! But they were tasty little crackers (especially with the little kick of wasabi!)

Now for the most exciting part of the day... the pitas!!!!

I don't know about you, but I've wondered since I ate my first pita sandwich how they heck they get that pocket in the middle. So I was so excited to finally find out how pitas are made. The dough itself is quite simple, and the shaping isn't too difficult either. You take a chunk of the dough, and roll it around in your hand on the workbench, but not like a snowball. You keep the same surface touching the palm of your hand, so that the little ball of dough gets a "belly button".

Now, once the little dough balls have their belly buttons, they need to rest for a little bit, and then you roll them out into flat disks, 1/8th inch thick.... no thinner, no thicker!

From here, its off to the oven, where the magic happens! The flat disks are loaded into the hot, hot oven (500 degrees), so they're not touching each other, and after just a couple of minutes, you start to see the yeast bubbles pop up on the surface of each pita. The dough starts to look like its alive as all the bubbles join together, and when they all join together, the pita puffs up like a whoopie cushion. When most of the pitas are whoopie cushions, you take the peel and scoop under all the pitas, which kind of act like balloons! While they're still on the peel, you very carefully and quickly flip over each pita, and put them back in the oven. The puffing up process is even faster the second time, about 10 seconds, and then all the pitas come out of the oven.

(Here's a peek at the pitas puffing up in the oven)

I had to check one of our pitas, just to make sure it really did have a pocket... and sure enough, it did!! Here's the pocket (which you can fill with lots of yummy delicious things!)

This next class will be my last breads class... there's so much more I'd love to learn about breads! Its fascinating to learn how breads bake!