Nothing's Better Than Bread

Today was a very satisfying day in the kitchen. We began making two of the three kinds of laminated dough. The dough is interspersed with layers of fat, and the steam in the melting fat is what causes the dough to rise when it's baked. We made danish dough (sweet, with eggs and cardamom) and croissant dough (no eggs), both of which are yeast doughs. The third laminated dough is puff pastry, which is made without yeast. Chef says we don't make that one in class because it's the same process, only more so.

We mixed the two basic doughs and chilled them each for 30 minutes. Then the butter was "locked in": you actually roll butter with a rolling pin into a thin sheet and encase it in the rolled out dough. Every thirty minutes or so, you roll out the dough and fold it again, chilling in between, so that you're creating exponentially more layers. The blocks of dough will be refrigerated overnight, then we'll be making a plethora of products tomorrow, which Chef Judy promised would "delight and amaze" us.

Besides some of the meat-cutting we did in Butchery, laminated dough is one of the only things I've done in culinary school (so far) that I haven't ever done before. Tomorrow will be the true test, but today's production was fun and I loved doing the work. Chef Judy's manner is very conducive to successful learning. She strips all of the mystique and "old wife's tales" away from the process in order to help us understand what we're actually trying to accomplish.

In between making and folding our laminate doughs, we made some of the mise en place for tomorrow's pastry construction. Tashana and I made bear claw filling: hers was vanilla, mine was chocolate. It's almond paste, butter, crumbs and cinnamon, mixed together until it's stiff enough to hold its shape. Other groups made clear glaze, "flat icing," streusel, cream cheese filling, and cinnamon sugar.

I have a funny story about cinnamon sugar. When I was a senior in college, a bunch of us were hanging out late in the evening at Matt Stankey's house and we (inexplicably) developed the munchies. We began a reconnaissance of the kitchen to uncover any edible items. We found bread, and someone quickly decided, "Toast!" And then we searched for possible toppings, and Matt straight-facedly informed us that we couldn't make cinnamon toast, because "we're out of the mixture." I thought that was hilariously funny, as cinnamon toast in my house was constructed using the sugar bowl, a spoon, and the cinnamon with the shaker top. But it turns out that Matt Stankey has been vindicated, at long last. Chef Judy advised us that cinnamon should always be mixed with sugar prior to apply it to a surface, because the burst of raw cinnamon that you could otherwise get is "not pleasant. It's nasty actually." Matt knew what he was talking about. I was the heathen.

We also baked our baguettes and epis, which are baguettes cut to represent wheat sheafs. We used the top two decks of the oven, because they have the "burst of steam" feature (which you can replicate at home with a spray bottle).

We learned today that if your baked goods are browning too quickly on the bottom, you can slide another pan under your product, thereby providing an extra layer of insulation. If they're browning too quickly on the top, don't use my solution, aluminum foil. ("That's a housewife method," Chef said. "It's expensive, and it's a pain.") Instead, use one of the remaining 993 pieces of parchment paper purchased at the restaurant supply store.

The breads came out beautifully. I brought home a baguette and an epi. Because nothing's better than bread. Except bread with butter.