We had our practical for Hearth Breads & Rolls on Thursday, for which I had to make eight 1#2oz ciabatta loaves, 20 palmiers, and 3 large danish loaves with filling. I have gotten pretty comfortable with making breads, so even though making ciabatta has its potential hazards, it’s fun to work with that dough that has the playful instability of a slinky. The biggest trick was calculating the correct moisture loss during baking(it loses about 20% of its weight), and also scaling them carefully so that they all come out at the correct weight and that there was neither extra nor lacking dough. The laminated doughs, on the other hand, were a bit of a free for all. I tend to overwork, mis-shape, or otherwise annoy the dough. Too bad they made up 2/3’s of the test.

My body has recently adjusted to its early risings by waking up at 5am on weekdays, no matter what time I set my alarm for or I go to sleep, which is usually btw 12-1, so by Thursday, I’m tired enough to feel like I was walking in a dream where random things appear in front of me and I have to figure out why. I had tried to sharpen my mind on the way to school by listening to a great audiobook I’m in the middle of about the Lincoln administration’s handling of the Civil War, but somehow I got to school just as an account of the unexpected death of one of Lincoln’s children finished. I was as confused as ever.

Anyway, I did okay, but the fatigue wasn’t truly to blame. I went in knowing that I hadn’t perfected, or even done before, certain techniques. So, I did better than I expected, but not so good as I would ideally want to do. Everything except for a few scorched palmiers were not only edible but even tasty, so it was mostly shaping and baking time faults. I ended up with an 81, which is perfectly respectable even if it is probably the lowest grade I’ve ever gotten for anything…. and I can’t help unfairly thinking that I once did better at deciphering a neuroscience class than at making palmiers (um, for the first the time, anyway).

Given the dreamy haze, I can’t give a blow by blow account as I did before. I was talking to Chad the night before, who had read an article that claimed that people learn well through testing, and that the test itself is a useful learning exercise, so I think this practical is best described by the things that I learned and need to improve on.

Consistency. This is the over-arching concern. There was no luxury of selecting The Chosen One for evaluation, and that makes sense. When I’m eventually working, I need to reliably turn out saleable products. One good cookie out of a couple dozen would be pathetic. Things have to be the same weight, the same size, cooked to the same doneness, and generally look and taste similar.

So, the techniques that should have been improved here are: cutting things to the same thickness, cutting them straight, rolling out dough to an even thickness and a regular shape, and baking them to the same and correct doneness. Intellectually, I knew that these things had to be done and I even made efforts to do them, but I think I just need more practice or help with technique to do them correctly: I should have pursued this more in the previous weeks.

I usually analogize making sure that the products look okay to photography and filmmaking. Especially when I was working with a headshot photographer and with film/video crews, I learned not to focus only on what I want to shoot, but to deconstruct the frame into shapes, colors, and light. So, that means looking for shadows, looking for a clean border to the frame, and generally treating every element of the frame equally to make sure that the whole thing looks right. I try to do that when I’m working with food prep, but things just got away from me on Thursday.

Oh, but there was one amazing shining light of the practical. My ciabatta had seemed a bit too lumpy and oddly-shaped, but once sliced open, they revealed the most awe-inspiring crumb I’ve ever seen (and more cloud-like white than the pic suggests). In that moment, I was more awake than I’d been in years. It tasted great, too.

I’ll miss breads. When we first got our 12 Steps of Breadmaking packet and started baking them, it seemed like quite an odd and tricky ritual to make them. However, I’ve come to appreciate its peculiarities: the way the dough comes together, the catering to the appetite of the yeast, the endless assortment of shapes that rolls and loaves can take and how to achieve them, and the excitement that comes with taking out fresh loaves from the oven and slicing into, or breaking a piece off, a loaf. I even became accustomed to the imposing 4-level deck oven whose top level I can only look into by jumping; using the manual conveyor belt-like loader to load and peels to unload even became fun, too. And I think that moving loaves has started the process of de-sensitizing my hands to heat, which is good as long as it doesn’t get too extreme. And now I’m graced by a freezer full of bread that I’ve squirreled away for future use.

I’ve been slacking in posting pic’s of what we’ve made… So, here’s a final round up of most of our breads.

Ciabatta, potato bread crown, chocolate cherry panini (we baked some with coarse black pepper, and tried a honey glaze sprinkled with coarse black pepper on some plain ones).

Green olive bread, sourdough batard, rosemary bread. The cake of flour on the olive and rosemary comes from letting them proof upside-down in bannetons (Edit: bennetons) sprinkled with flour.

Lavash with a team-made zatar spice blend (thyme, sesame seeds, nigella seeds, salt, powdered sumac)

Naan made in the tandoor oven out back, topped with ghee and salt, and some stuffed with garlic and herbs.

Multigrain and Multigrain Sourdough.

A good ear.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Culinary School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.