Last week was a MUCH better week, thank f**k. For one thing I finally got to do some proper baking again, which I’ve not really done since I left E5, and secondly I got some pretty awesome news, on which more later.
It was a really important week for me as it enabled me to actually use the bakery and see if everything was in the right place and was working how I wanted it to. Oven issues aside, I was really please with how the week went, and the bakes got progressively better over time as I tweaked formulas and techniques, worked around the oven’s foibles, and jiggled around a few bits of furniture to get the place flowing better.
There’s still plenty to do, but I’m already feeling pretty comfortable, and am hoping that the more into it I get, the better the product will become. Of everything thus far, the Country White and Peckham Rye are coming out the best, both in terms of taste and look. The raisin and walnut and multigrain breads still need some tweaking, and I’m finding it really hard to get the pop and ears on the Peckham Rye rounds that I’ve been able to pull off to great effect in my Dutch oven at home. Saying that, from a purely functional point of view, I have a feeling that the Rye actually works better as a batard shape as it’s more practical for toast, sandwiches etc.
I saw this video about New York based Mast Brothers Chocolate about a year or so ago, and have desperately wanted to visit their shop ever since. As someone who’s interested in starting their own business, I found the approach they discuss really inspirational. I love the romantic idealism of treating their business like a boys own adventure, and striving for something that feels nostalgic and hand made, as opposed to mass produced and uniform.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon I managed to satisfy my desire by paying their Williamsburgh shop a visit. I was hoping to take the factory tour they mention on the site, but alas they aren’t doing them at the moment as they are in the process of expanding their operation. However, when the lovely guy behind the counter saw we were a bit bummed out about not getting to do the tour, he snuck us in to have a look at their new space. It’s a really lovely big, open brick walled warehouse unit, but what hits you first is the smell. It’s like being in a chocolate cloud. I’m pretty sure I started to drool almost instantly. The room is filled will sacks of cocoa beans, a roasting oven, ‘conching’ drums (these heat and grind the beans for 3 days until the chocolate is beautifully smooth), and this awesome mad scientist-esque glass vacuum pump device that separates the cracked beans from the husk. It’s very cool, and feels really nicely old fashioned.
So that’s it. It’s over. 4 and a half months, 18 weeks, 90 days, 720 hours, 43,200 minutes of hardcore baking action. We graduated from the SFBI Professional Bread & Pastry Programme last Friday, and I’ve go to say it was a bitter sweet occasion.
In the week running up to the graduation, as a group we made over 160 products, and most of them in multiple numbers. We were split into four groups as usual, with two groups concentrating more on bread and the other two predominantly on cakes and pastry. It was a full on week of late nights, early mornings, little sleep and lots of coffee. We all started on pastry, prepping stuff to be frozen and items with good shelf life, and the production schedule steadily ramped up over the week to fever pitch, particularly on Thursday and Friday for us bread people. It was full on, but hugely enjoyable. I have to admit, I felt pretty emotional as I scored the very last loaf that went into the oven.
A real mixed bag last week at SFBI. Monday & Tuesday were dedicated to making all kinds of Petit Fours, Wednesday & Thursday we were set a two day practical, revisiting the pastry section of the course, and then on Friday we rounded off the week with a tour of the great and the good of the Bay Area’s bakeries. Tell Tale, ACME, La Farine, Semifreddi’s and Firebrand.
So, rewind selectah to the beginning of last week. A big part of Petit Fours is chocolate based, from mendiants and molded chocolates to truffles, you need a lot of the stuff, and being more accustomed to eating it than making it, I wasn’t really aware of one of the key skills of the master chocalatier, tempering. I’ve got to to tell you, it’s a tricky business.
If chocolate isn’t tempered properly it lacks gloss and sheen, and doesn’t set properly, so it’s more prone to melting. For properly tempered chocolate, you need your choc to have a concentration of the right kind of crystals (I’m not going to get into the science, so you’ll just have to trust me), and this is achieved through the combination of time, agitation and temperature. Whilst tabling is a valid method, for us this equated to A LOT of stirring. And don’t I know it. My right arm is still aching, and not from self abuse for once! I think I’ve contracted Tempeperer’s Elbow. But once you’ve got your chocolate right, you can create some pretty tasty morsels, as you can see. But it wasn’t all chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. We also made caramels, more macaroons, a rather unsuccessful peanut brittle, marshmallows, and some mouth-wateringly delicious passion fruit pâtes de fruits. Diabetes alert!
For the un-initiated, Ray Mears is a legend. He’s a quietly authoritative survival and bush-craft expert, who’s brilliant TV shows have been running in the UK for years. He basically gets to live out every schoolboy’s fantasy of surviving in the great outdoors, whittling wood, foraging, and using a few of the hundred or so ways he knows how to start a fire in the wild.
Anyways, I remember seeing an episode of one of his shows a while ago (I think it was the one where he met up with another survival legend, Les Hiddins aka The Bush Tucker Man) where he cooked foil wrapped bananas with cocoa powder in the dieing embers of his camp fire.
Hardly haute cuisine I think you’ll agree, but they looked tasty, so the next time I had a barbie I thought I’d give it a go, and they’ve been a fixture ever since. So I figured if some guy from New Orleans called Foster can have a banana dish named after him, why can’t our Ray?
These ones are a posher remix of Ray’s iron rations, using dark chocolate and a bit of booze, but I’d like to think the man himself would approve.
BIG day for me on Friday. I broke my S’Mores virginity. We don’t really have anything like this traditional US fireside treat in the UK, so I thought it warranted a little post.
For the uninitiated (as I was until a few days ago) s’mores are a kind of sweet sandwich of Graham Cracker (a bit like a digestive biscuit back home), marshmallow and chocolate. Traditionally enjoyed by girl guides and scouts round the camp fire, you toast a marshmallow over a fire and then sandwich it between two crackers containing a square of chocolate. The residual heat from the molten mallow melts the chocolate, and you’ve got yourself a sweet, chewy, crunchy, chocolatey treat.
We had some ‘posh’ s’mores at college this week as the wood fired oven had been stoked up by Mike, the SFBI’s resident pyromaniac. I was chatting to him about them, and he told me that the Graham cracker was invented by an eccentric minister from the same school of thought as Dr Kellogg, and believed that his crackers could cure all sorts of modern life’s ills from alcoholism to ’self abuse’.
So there you have it. Tasty AND good for you. Win win.
Oh, and I should add that the s’mores in question were created by Jen, one of the interns at SFBI, who has seriously wicked way with all things sweet.
Hand To Mouth is a blog about food. Eating it. Cooking it. Reviewing it. Reading about it. And everything in between.
I’ll be regularly posting recipes, reviews of some of my favourite places and opinion about anything food related that grabs my eye. Hopefully there’ll be a few laughs along the way, and I promise not to cut the cheese.
If you like what you see please let me know, and equally don’t be afraid of throwing a few rotten tomatoes my way if you don’t.
BIG thanks to Tom Hardcore at Nation for the blog design.
