Baker vs. Pastry Chef

There has been such a high degree of experimentation this week in class. Today is was with croissants. This entry will be croissant heavy so if that doesn't interest you much then go ahead and slip out now...really I won't mind.

Yesterday we folded our butter into our dough differently than usual & today we set out to tell if there was any real difference. Yesterday I was pleased with the new method because my dough was so much easier to roll. This matters a lot when my shoulders have been tight for three weeks now from rolling and I have, consistently, sore hands from all the pressure on the rolling pins. There was no difference in cutting these and they proofed just as well as the others, which really has nothing to do with how the butter is incorporated...and then we baked them.

I made regular croissants & the binocular shaped chocolate croissants:

Now these are pretty good croissants, right?

However something just wasn't working for me about these croissants. They didn't look as alluring as the croissants before. What do I mean exactly? Well allow me to offer you an example:

These are the bitchin' chocolate croissants I was bragging about a couple of days ago:

Can you see how the dough pulls up & away in thicker layers with each smaller, in between, layer also separating from one another?

If you compare this pic to the first, regular croissant picture (where the layers of dough just sit and rest upon one another) there's a significant difference. But all in all what truly matters is taste. So I sliced open my croissant and got to chomping. Buttery. Flavorful. Doughy. But what's this...what's going on here...what the heck happened to my croissant???:

THIS is the inside of my croissant. What the...?!?!? Where are all the layers, the flakiness, that crispy crunch I've been falling in love with all these weeks? This looks like freakin' bread on the inside, not a croissant.

THIS is what I'm looking for inside a croissant:

This is buttery layer after layer, this is crispy, flaky greatness...THIS is croissant!!!

When I brought this up to Chef he said that the former croissant is what would be considered a "pastry chef's" croissant while the latter would be considered a "baker's" croissant. See a baker specializes in breads, obviously (you knew that, right?) and a pastry chef may, or may not, dabble in bread making. Therefore the art & detail & delicate nature of breads is generally found in those products created by a baker. These past three weeks I have been, heart & soul, a baker.

Today we also played with some more brioche. Three new kinds we haven't made before. First we made Sombreros (which I'm certain isn't any sort of official name as Chef told us that's just what his dad called them & are usually made with halved apricots but I preferred pears and that resulted in a less sombrero-like sombrero), a crown, and a loaf (which I'll be making french toast out of this weekend):

Now if you look closely at that loaf it may look a little bit lopsided but I'd like to go on record saying, first that it is, but more importantly that its not my fault.

My teammate in class was removing it from the pan and it got damaged (or "busted" as I've been calling it). I double checked with Chef that it wasn't anything that was done incorrectly before heading into the oven. That loaf is actually little dough balls which have been squeezed into the loaf pan next to one another, tightly fitted. They come up only about an inch from the bottom of the loaf pan and then they rest in the oven area of our kitchen, where its really warm, and proof until they are popping out & over the top of the pan. Then we bake them to that beautiful golden color and eat them up (preferably in the form of french toast)!!!

The crown is cute too, sort of looks like a big doughnut:

There's supposed to be a hole in the middle there but I struggled with gaining any degree of grace in how to shape it so my edges proofed, then baked together, closing up the middle.

The last items we made today were more baguettes, which I am just not getting! They're ok but in a week I'm going to be tested & and I do not feel comfortable with my baguette shaping skills as of today. I hope we make more next week...I gotta focus. We also made a Fougasses, a french bread, from the south of France, which is a baguette flat bread and scrumptious!!! It was my dinner tonight :) It's made with a prefermentation technique called a Poolish and we develop its gluten not by mixing and mixing and mixing it, which is what we've done to all our other breads, but by allowing the flour and water to sit & rest together over a period of time. While its completely contradictory it definitely worked. My dinner was gluten-tastic! We brushed it with olive oil (similar to a Focaccia) and gave it toppings (I did herbs on one and minced jalapenos on another) and while I do not have pictures just know it was as beautiful as it was tasty.

Off to my weekend...yay!!! Long week, lots of stuff got learned and I'm still having a BLAST!!! :)