Posts Tagged ‘Viennoiserie’
Sunday, September 11th, 2011
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.
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Tags: Baking Institute, Bread, Chocolate, Class Of 2011, Diploma, Graduation, Michel Suas, Pastry, Production, Products, San Francisco, SFBI, Viennoiserie
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
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.
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Tags: Buckwheat, Coupe Du Monde De La Patisserie, Course, Croissasnt, Danish pastry, Lamination, Pan Au Chocolat, Pan D'oro, San Franciso, SFBI, Sheeter, Sticky Buns, Teff, Viennoiserie
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 1 Comment »
Friday, July 8th, 2011
Croissants and Danish Pastries are the new baguettes. FACT. We made a shed load of them last week as we finally got stuck into laminated doughs.
Laminating doughs with butter is one of the key skills of Viennoiserie, and it can be pretty tricky. Get it right and you end up with beautiful, flaky, buttery pastry. Win. Get it wrong and you can end up with greasy products or a clogged up sheeter. Lose.
As before, the doughs are yeasted and mixed in a very similar way, but the new techniques came into play after the initial proof. One of the most important things with lamination is to keep everything cold. You want your butter and dough to be almost frozen with a ‘plastic’ like consistency. This enables you to sheet the dough thin and ‘lock in’ the butter over a series of folds creating alternating layers of pastry and fat.
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Tags: Almond, Beton, Bienenstitch, Brea Claws, Butter, Croissants, Danish pastry, Diplomat Cream, Filling, Koign-amann, Lamination, Lock In, Lunettes, Pain Au Chocolat, Roll In, Viennoiserie
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 5 Comments »
Thursday, June 30th, 2011
A couple of weeks ago it was East 17, and now blam! I’m hitting you with an Ultravox reference. High brow shizzle I think you’ll agree. And why did up this 80s relic? Because last week we started the Viennoiserie section of our course.
Viennoiserie is the name given to all kinds of yeasted, enriched doughs. From croissants, to Danish pastries, sticky buns to brioche, we’re talking about doughs enriched with sugar, eggs, milk and butter. Lots of butter. I’ve never seen so much of the stuff than in the past week.
We’re going to be getting in to lamination next week, the technique for making croissants amongst other things, but the breads we made last week were mixed in a similar way to what we’ve become familiar with, even if the formulas were in some cases a lot more complicated.
We started off the week slowly, making a range of products based around brioche and sweet roll doughs. With most of these we had to adjust our mixing to incorporate the sugar and butter after the dough had developed in strength in the mixer. The reason for this is that both inhibit the development of gluten, and if added at the beginning you end up mixing for bloody ages and your dough comes off the mixer too warm, which in turn effects fermentation. Best avoided in other words.
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Tags: Bakewell tart, Bostock, Brioche, Buns, Butter, Columba Di Pasqua, Croissants, Danish, Dough, Enriched, Gibassier, Hot Cross Buns, Kugelhopf, Pain au lait, Pan D'oro, Pannetone, Roll, Sticky, Sticky Buns, Stollen, Sugar, Sweet, Viennoiserie
Posted in Reviews, Sweet Stuff, Travel, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 25th, 2011
Last week bought with it mixed feelings. It was our last week of studying ‘pure’ bread. This week we’ve moved on to Viennoiserie, and whilst I am totally relishing the fresh challenges and new techniques we’re getting to experience dealing with enriched doughs, I’ve got to confess, I’m missing the bread ‘lab’ quite a bit.
The week was basically a review of all the techniques and baking concepts we’d covered over the past couple of months, and started where we began with baguettes. It was really good to revisit our French friends, as it helped cement a bunch of stuff that wasn’t really glued down. I guess in those first few weeks there was so much information flooding into my brain that I couldn’t really grasp hold of it all, and with baguettes being one of the most challenging breads, there was a lot to remember.
So we did a good day of mixing, shaping, rolling, scoring and baking the buggers, and I was relieved that aside from a few howlers here and there, I was pretty happy with how they turned out. For me, in many ways the scoring is the trickiest thing. You need to get the angle and depth of the cuts just right to get that spring and the famous baguette ears. I changed my technique after a bit more of an in-depth critique of my first batch, which improved results, but I’ve still got a lot of practicing to do.
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Tags: Baguette, Bread, Flat Bread, Gluten Free, Hand Mix, lavash, Miche, Naan, Pitta, Pizza, Poilaine, review, San Francisco, SFBI, Sourdough, Viennoiserie, Week, Wood Fired Oven
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | No Comments »
