
Bit of a funny week last week. We returned to college on Tuesday after the long 4th July weekend, and everyone seemed a bit lacking in vim and vigour. Think maybe there’s a bit of course fatigue going down. It’s been a pretty full on ten weeks, so it’s not surprising, and it was also our last week of Viennoiserie before we move on to pastry.
We started the week week working on more croissants, continuing our lamination education. It was great to get a few more batches under our belts. Getting more used to the sheeters, tidying up our lamination techniques, and working on our shaping. As part of this, we also made a couple of batches of croissants using some more exotic flours.

Firstly, a teff variation using 60% teff flour pre-cooked into a rubbery porridge which we made into traditional shapes and pain au chocolat. And also a dough made using a buckwheat poolish. As noted here before, I’m not a huge fan of teff, but the croissants actually tasted pretty good, better in fact than the pain au chocolat variation, which is odd. To my palate, the buckwheat didn’t offer a great deal, although the danish-like shapes we filled with a mix of mashed potato, goats cheese and spring onions did taste pretty damn good.