Word of the Day: Hygroscopic

Today, we talked about the "building blocks of bread": flour, water, salt, and yeast; gluten development and yeast fermentation, which are the principles of yeast bread production; and leavening methods (yeast, chemicals, air, and steam).

We learned that when you "punch down" the dough (and you really don't want to take a swipe at it — be gentle), you are accomplishing a number of things: you're expelling carbon dioxide, relaxing the gluten, and evening out the temperature of the dough.

We learned that bread stales six times faster in the refrigerator than at room temperature, so you should eat it, or freeze it.

And we learned that sugar is HYGROSCOPIC: it attracts and retains moisture. So it's hard to work with meringue on humid days, and your sugar sculptures would be prone to melting if you refrigerated them.

And we took another in a long series of weights and measures tests. I guess it'd be pretty embarrassing to graduate from culinary school and not know how many pints are in a gallon.

We baked challah and made soft rolls from the same dough, and mixed the dough and formed baguettes, which we'll bake off tomorrow. They're "retarding" in the refrigerator overnight. Jim showed up today and was working with Ryan, who also missed class yesterday and is taking the class out of sequence, for whatever reason. They were weighing the vegetable oil for the challah dough even though the recipe called for "6 oz. oil (volume)." I walked by and said "You should measure that in a measuring cup," and Jim said, "How do you know?" "Because it says 'volume' in the recipe," I pointed out, and he said "Well, what difference does it make?" I wanted to yell YOU WOULD KNOW IF YOU WERE IN CLASS YESTERDAY but I didn't.