Oh My Land, What A Bread-Filled Day Of Fun!

Unlike yesterday which I found to be a little tedious, today's pastry class was a hoot. We shaped and dipped our grissini in toppings, made pizza dough, fed our sourdough starters (more on that a little later), and we made and braided soft dough. It was a fun and full day. As I explained yesterday, grissini are long, thin, crisp bread sticks. We dipped ours in powdered garlic and Parmesan cheese. They were pretty tasty and they were also pretty easy. If I make the grissini at home, which I intend to do soon, I will post the recipe with more pictures.


Parmesan and Garlic Grissini

Next we made the pizza dough which was a bit of a process. Like some of the bread we made last week, we made a poolish or a sponge for the pizza dough and then we mixed the sponge with flour, water, and eventually a herb oil. The dough is resting and slowly rising tonight and we are going to use it tomorrow to make...PIZZA!! Apparently the whole class is going to be devoted to pizza making and foccacia and I am very excited. I think that my team is going to make four-cheese pizza but there are a lot of other types that we will probably have the opportunity to make tomorrow -- stay tuned!

As we have been every single day since last Wednesday, we fed our sourdough starters or our "babies" today. Our babies are getting quite big and very bubbly and soon they will have developed enough sourness that we can use them to make bread. When we do, I will be sure to tell you all the information about sourdough and all that jazz but I can't right now because I don't know. I know how to feed my baby (equal parts flour and water daily) but that's about it! What I did want to share with y'all is something we learned today that was fascinating to me. At school there is a chef-instructor who used to be the head baker at Balthazar Bakery in New York. Balthazar is a wonderful restaurant owned by famed restaurateur Keith McNally and Balthazar Bakery supplies all of Mr. McNally's restaurants with bread as well as functioning as a separate entity of its own. The chef-instructor, who as a side note seems a little nuts, told us that at Balthazar they use a starter that has been feeding for 38 years. Seriously. 38 years! And if that is not crazy enough, they have one person at the bakery whose job it is to feed the starter...four times a day! Every six hours. It is just crazy to me. Crazy!

Ok, so on to the best part of the day, the braiding of the bread. The dough that we used was pretty egg-y. It had eight fluid ounces of egg yolks in it which is about 12 eggs and it was verra, verra sticky. We made it and let it proof till it had at least doubled in size and then we punched it down and divided it in order to shape it. To braid, you take three, four, five, or more strands of dough that weighs relatively the same amount, pinch the ends and braid. I made a four-strand and a three strand braid and then one of the girls in the class and I combined our left overs and made a Windsor knot roll. It was a lot of fun and I wish we had had more bread so we could have braided all day long. Before we baked, we proofed the dough again, egg washed it and baked it until the internal temperature of the bread was 220F. So fun and so delicious looking and delicious tasting too. I was planning on making waffles tomorrow morning for a FLAVOR PICNIC story that I am working on but I might just have to change my plan and make French toast with the buttery, moist, and rich braided dough instead!


Just braided dough so that you can see just how rich the color develops with the egg wash


Happy loaves all in the oven


The finished four-strand braid loaf


A close-up of the finished soft dough loaf