Baker's Truly Have A Gift

Today there was a pretty loose agenda. One of the breads we planned to make, a Red Wine Shallot Bread, ended up needing to preferment overnight so we had one less bread to make today. We, of course, made croissants & baguettes (of which I have good news) and we also made a Tabatiere which translates to something similar to a cigar box. I think once you see it you'll recognize it. Then...a surprise for all of us. But first...

Today I got my one-on-one with Chef on how to roll a baguette. Turns out the largest portion of my struggle was in the rolling process. Getting that seam to seal on the bottom of the loaf and making sure the entire loaf is the same size was really getting more difficult for me rather than easier. Just for effect, here's yesterday's baguettes:

Lumpy & bumpy, tiny centers with bulbous ends...

And now I give you today's baguettes:

Wow, what a difference...don't you think? Chef rolled two of these four and of the two I rolled I only, slightly, jacked up one of them & you'd probably have to search out which one I messed up on. That's because I only "slightly" jacked it up :) YAY!!!!
Now if only I can pull this off for my test next week. Please, lets bow our heads & pray...

With our Tabatieres we made a fairly basic bread dough, it was a White Wheat Lean Dough, which we made rolls out of last time. We used 1,000g of flour, which for us was a lot. For an average recipe we generally scale out 500g of flour each. Obviously it depends what we're making which determines how many items 500g of flour gives us but consider that we use 500g for about six of the tomato rolls, 5-6 of the walnut bread rolls, and about 12-15 croissants (depending how we cut them up). So in comparison 1,000g of flour is a lot for us.

I jumped right in a took my dough divided it in half to make two tabatieres, which Chef later told me was going to make really big tabatieres. While I didn't make them "perfect" I truly appreciate his attitude around experimentation; that most everything can be played with, toyed with and manipulated. Chef explained to us early on that this is a continual learning process and if you've done something a particular way for your whole life & someone can teach you a more efficient way then why not change? I was under no impression what I was doing offered a "better" way I just didn't read the recipe as thoroughly as I usually do. So he allowed me to keep my dough in these huge balls and bake them as gigantic breads...I thought that was pretty cool ;) Oh, so here's a tabatiere:

Have you seen these before? They looked familiar to me once I saw them baked. How cute are these???

Wait...not as cute as these...first though, Chef was playing around with a student's dough and asked her if she wanted to make a turtle with her tabatiere dough & she said yes. Chef showed us how and allowed those who wanted to make turtles. I think I took a picture of everyone's but here are two to give you an idea of what they created:

Absolutely amazing, don't you think?

Tomorrow Chef said that we could also learn how to make some birds & other animals. We, as a class, did learn a big lesson on baking bread today. These tabatiere and turtle bread were very large and we waaaay undercooked them and tried to pull them off as done & ready. Now we didn't do this on purpose, none of us were being sneaky but we definitely weren't paying close attention to the product as a whole. We put them back in the oven and baked them to perfection, my concern was we were going to burn them which we didn't! And now we know.

Tomorrow we get to bake up some of that Red Wine Shallot Bread, I think my friend Rico is going to go nuts over that. I'll have to put it in his bread care package. Then this week I get a couple more practice rounds of baguettes before our test, Friday we have a written test & Monday-Wednesday is our practical exam...I'm nervous/excited/ready/unsure/excited!!! :)