I Survived!!!

It's truly a miracle that I made it through my first week of class, not because it was hard, but because I was so busy!!! I not only had class every day at 6:30, as usual, but I also had a cake order for 100 people due on Friday and work at the cafe. With no cake pans or supplies, it was pretty difficult. I managed though, and it was safely transported to Pastor Brett Mahlen's ordination on Friday night.

This week we learned the basics of bread making and how not to screw it up. We made first a white pan loaf, which was pretty great, and then a whole wheat dough which we split and shaped into boules (french for balls,) and took the rest and shaped it into a regular loaf filled with almond paste. It was really sweet and delicious. I didn't taste the boules because I sent them home to my dear family. Hopefully they were decent. We also prepped pain au lait dough, which is milk dough.Pain means bread, au lait means with milk. So instead of water, we used milk. But here are some pointers for bread making:

• Keep your water the temperature in the recipe, and don't add more or use less
• Proof your bread at around 70 to 90 degrees internal temp. So an air temp of 100 or 110 wouldn't be a problem, because the dough is very dense.
• When making a whole wheat dough by hand, aka not in the mixer, don't add more flour. This may make it easier to handle, but it also dries out the dough.
• When buying flour, instead of all purpose, use patent or restaurant flour, this is what the professionals use, because it doesn't clump. All purpose is a mixture of patent and cake flour. So its not a terrible thing to use in general, but its not great for baking.
• Always dust your table with patent flour. When a recipe says dust, it doesn't mean sprinkle the entire surface with flour, as I'd originally thought. It means take a pinch of flour in your hand and throw it at about a 45 degree angle at the table, so that it fans out. Like skipping a rock.
• Most cooking times are difficult to tell depending on what kind of oven you have or the pans that you use, so the best way to cook your bread is to put it in the oven, rotate it once one side is brown, and when the top of the bread is a dark golden brown, check the temperature by sticking a thermometer into the side of the loaf. Its should reach 180 degrees.

That's all I have for now,

     M