Today we worked more with our pastry puff dough. The Classical Pastry Puff dough requires six single turns so ever hour and a half we would remove our dough from the refrigerator and roll out the two slabs of dough we had, fold them and place them back in the refrigerator. Today we did five, of the six, turns. It was somewhere around the fourth turn I started noticing my hands were really sore. Turns out my upper body strength isn't, yet, cut out for pastry dough...yet!!! Chef says that each day next week we'll be making croissants so I'll have plenty of opportunity to build up my baker's body ;)
After feeding our starter (which we'll be making bread with next week) we tended to our croissants. Mine were all different shapes and sizes. The rolling technique for croissants involved rolling the dough on itself with one hand while pulling & stretching the dough with the other hand, both actions moving in the same direction; towards you. It's quite awkward at first. A fellow student said that rolling croissants is like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. I figure if I can do that then I can figure out how the heck to roll a croissant correctly. Anyway, so here are my first batch of croissants before they went into the oven (it shows off their "oddities" better):
and here are the batch all baked up and tanned:
My croissants were flaky and buttery and so delicious I ate about four of them during class. I couldn't help myself. These beautiful, puffy breads sat atop my station for a couple of hours before I wrapped them up and put them away and each time I walked past them or saw them out of the corner of my eye I had to eat at least a piece of them...thems was delicious.
Look at the flaky inside:
Seriously how was I going to resist these???
Two students in class had made mistakes with their croissants which ended up being a great way to learn about why certain aspects are so important and essential to the quality of the finished product. One student hadn't added the sugar to her dough. This, of course, resulted in a very salty croissant, really, truly, very salty, but it also resulted in a much lighter color on her baked croissants. The sugar plays a role in adding depth to the color of the products its used in by caramelizing and hers were a bit lighter than the rest of ours. The same student, on our second batch, added salt to her mix putting it in direct contact with the yeast. In each demo Chef always adds his salt after the flour and today I asked him why this had to be and he explained that if the salt touches the yeast it will begin killing it and will result in a dough that does not rise well. The student that added her salt to the yeast had smaller, less poofy, croissants than the rest of us, though her dough puffed so nicely (meaning she had many separated layers) and she said everything tasted great. The final mistake of the day was a student who forgot to add the butter to her croissant puff pastry dough. This would result in no steam to separate the layers of dough. Her final product was basically a biscuit disguised as a croissant. Obviously it wasn't buttery, at all, and I didn't care much for the final product but I'm glad we're being given the chance to see what happens when steps are missed or ingredients are forgotten.
While we continued rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling our dough today we also made an apple compote which we'll use next week to make apple turnovers. I've made a similar compote at home in the form of a chunky applesauce and I always add some cinnamon, a standard with apples, right? Chef invited us to season our compote as we wanted and suggested vanilla as an addition. I was intrigued and added some and boy oh boy was I glad I did. There was just a hint of vanilla taste but it made such a fantastic difference in the apples. I may only make applesauce this way from now on.
And we rolled and rolled and rolled...
Last thing we did today was make Milk Bread (Pain au Lait). Milk bread is a sweet breakfast bread which Chef called a "poor man's Brioche". This is a yeast bread which, once mixed properly, is divided into little balls and rolled into mini-loafs. They are super cute! We did half of our batch plain:
and the other half with chocolate:
My milk breads are almost all gone. I have to say I am quite surprised how much I like these. I only gave away a couple of the chocolate ones because they were the my favorites, though Chef said you could made sandwiches with the plain ones and I think that might just be a great idea.
Currently my house is filled with all types of breads and cake which I can't quite seem to eat quickly enough. I think my body is about to start begging me to stop consuming breads however knowing that we'll be making croissants every day next week I don't think that's going to happen.
I am excited for this weekend, to hang out, review the things I've learned this week, prepare and be on the top of my game for next week (so lots of sleeping in, hydrating my spirit with some wine, and maybe a hike to make up for what's probably about 3 pounds I've added to my body this week). Things are getting busy in our kitchen; we're doing two to three tasks at a time and making sure everything is getting done properly. Though it can be a lot of pressure Chef has been great about keeping us on our toes and still making sure we're all able to manage our time properly. He helps us out a lot too with getting things in and out of the oven at the correct times along with also checking in that we're preparing & mixing everything properly.
Oh, what's that I hear...the cork popping off a Cabernet Sauvignon? Looks like my weekend has begun :)
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