grissini

Originally I wasn't even going to post about grissini, but I felt bad for excluding it.

Grissini is basically what I previously knew as breadsticks, aka long pencil-like sticks that get served in restaurants as appetizers. The grissini we made were studded with different spices/seeds and went to the Pierre Coste Room to be served.

I think it's safe to say that grissini was the persona non grata of bread station. It felt dead and flat compared to the other breads, it was a pain cutting the dough into equal-sized strips, and for all that work the grissini was what most often burned because it was so thin and we never could watch it closely enough.

Once I got creative and decided to twist the grissini into spirals so they weren't just plain sticks. The process took longer than one might have thought.



But the best thing I ever did with grissini was probably gather up the scraps into a pile - grissini brains!!!

focaccia(geddon)

In my last post you may have noticed that the bread basket (and the background) contained focaccia bread. Indeed, focaccia bread was something we made about once a week (making enough to last the week) because it was so effort-intensive. In fact, focaccia-making sucked up so much time and effort, the nickname "focaccia-geddon" was coined for the days when we did in fact have to make it.



Focaccia belongs to the category of enriched dough (dough containing fat) due to it containing copious amounts of oil. Oil, or fat, gets between the gluten molecules and prevents strands from developing - which is why focaccia's texture is fluffy and less like chewy bread.

There are also copious amounts of rosemary and garlic that get mixed in with the dough.



Here the focaccia is being portioned into ten pieces, each to eventually take up a whole sheet tray. (Note: I was not involved in the beginning of this process, so I haven't included the recipe, but I intend to make it at home sometime this summer and will likely share the results then.)



Once portioned and rested on well-oiled sheet trays, the dough goes through two pressings with about half an hour between each. The first pressing is to spread the dough out evenly, and the second pressing extends the dough to fill the entire sheet tray.



Once pressed, the focaccia gets drizzled with salt and more oil, then holes are poked throughout the dough (I assume for venting purposes).



The toppings vary from one focaccia-geddon to the next, but we chose tomatoes, mushrooms, pickled jalapenos and a shredded cheese blend (with some toppings omitted on some doughs to accommodate for people's preferences).



After baking, here they are out of the oven, a little brown but just as delicious. Some were used the same day, others got plastic-wrapped and frozen for the remaining non-focaccia-geddon days of the week.

ciabatta

Then there was ciabatta, another indirect fermentation dough with a starter called biga, made the day before with 3 lb 4 oz bread flour, 26.5 oz water, and a big pinch of instant dry yeast.

The dough itself consisted of 6 lb 11.5 oz bread flour, 0.5 oz instant dry yeast, 90.5 oz water, 4 oz of salt (which I usually dissolved in the water first for even distribution), and 4 lb 14.5 oz of biga. All of this was mixed on low speed for 4 minutes and medium speed for 1 minute, then put into a box for fermentation: 30 minutes, fold, 30 minutes, fold, 15 minutes, done. (The fold for ciabatta is different than other doughs though - instead of folding the corners in and turning over, the dough is folded in half, then half again, then turned over.)



Ciabatta is the most watery of all the doughs, which results in it having the largest and most irregular holes (caused by the water evaporating into steam as the bread bakes). This was why the workbench had to be intensely floured in order for the dough to be turned out - anything else and the dough would just stick to the bench. The shaping of ciabatta is actually more like the pulling of it, and the key is getting an even thickness throughout the pulled dough mass (the tendency is for the edges to be thinner than the middle).



Once the dough mass is pulled to about 2 feet wide and 3.5 feet long, it gets to rest a little, and then we portion it out into 15 loaves.



Like the other doughs, the portions are transferred to couches and put in the proofer for about an hour. (Side note: somebody remarked that ciabatta dough looks like old lady skin. It is quite true.)



Then they're loaded into the oven. Again, given their relatively high moisture content, they're the most difficult to load - the transferring boards are floured to help.



Once baked, they are taken out with a hoe and put on racks to cool.



One thing I forgot to mention is that much of the baked bread is sliced and served as an accompaniment to the cafeteria entrees. While slicing the ciabatta, I came to a piece at the end of a loaf that had almost no interior (due again to the water evaporating away). I decided it would make a good mitt/boxing glove.



And here is an example of the assortment of breads we put out in the cafeteria!

baguette

Next up was baguette, another indirect fermentation dough with a starter called poolish, which was made the day before with 3 lbs of bread flour, 48 fl oz of water, and a big pinch of instant dry yeast (available at the supermarket).



Here you have the ingredients for a single batch, but we usually made a double batch: 7lbs of bread flour, 1 oz of instant dry yeast, 6lbs of poolish, 59.5 fl oz of water, and 3.25 oz of salt - enough to yield about twenty 14 oz baguettes. The flour and yeast were mixed together first (so the yeast wouldn't be shocked by the water or killed by the salt), then the others were added and mixed for 4 minutes on low speed and 2 minutes on medium speed.

Fermentation went for 40 minutes, fold, 30 minutes, fold, 20 minutes, done (abbreviated 40 30 20).



Once done, the dough was portioned into 14 oz pieces and preshaped into oblongs - rolled and folded three times (kind of as you would a letter for the mail, except there there's only two folds) - and rested with the seam side down.



Once the last piece of dough was portioned, the first one was about ready to be shaped, so we just went in order, turning the dough pieces over, flattening it, doing the roll and fold thing again (this time with the last seam sealed), then using our hands flat, applying pressure, rolling from the middle outwards until the baguettes were as long as the wooden boards we proofed them on.



The cloth used for prevent the doughs from sticking (to each other and the board) is known as a couche, which coincidentally means "diaper" in French. Anyway, the baguettes on boards went into the proofer for about an hour.



Then we loaded them onto the bread oven belt, transferring them first from the cloth to a floured board then from the floured board to the belt (so each baguette's shape would be retained). The baguettes were each slashed diagonally five times with the lame knife, then pushed into the pre-steamed oven.

[Note: these baguettes were slashed once across, differentiating them as the 10 oz Vietnamese banh mi baguettes. The reason why we made these in addition was because I had brought my mom a regular baguette I made and she said they didn't taste like the Vietnamese baguettes we ate growing up. So I asked Chef what the difference was, and he told me to make baguettes with lean dough (direct fermentation dough without a starter), to take out the slight sour taste. He also had me mix the dough on high for a long time to promote gluten development and incorporate lots of air, so the baguette crumb would be tight with lots of small holes, instead of more hollow with irregular holes. The lean dough recipe is basically 10 lbs bread flour, 1.3 oz instant dry yeast, 107 fl oz water, 3.5 oz salt - fermentation 30 30 15.]



The baguettes baked until they were golden, almost brown (I checked the internal temperature just to make sure - 220F), then taken out to cool.



And there you have it - baguettes!

sourdough

After Plated Desserts and a brief stint as Student Chef, during which time I fetched supplies for everyone, washed ten thousand dishes (which we have to do on the pastry side because the dishwasher's is far away), prepped for Chef's side projects (like the cheese-shredding and horchata-making for the culinary school fundraiser, Wok on the Wild Side), hauled fifty-pound bags of flour and sugar, and generally dug myself into a hole of manual labor / pit of despair... it was time for the hardest station of all - BREAD STATION!

Bread station is intense because everything is time-sensitive, and even with the earlier start of 6am (as opposed to 6:30am for most the other stations) it's hard to fit everything in and get done on time.

On my first day I was assigned to sourdough, which is easier because the time frame is wider: more time between fermentations, and the dough is not baked into bread the day of but, instead, goes into the walk-in refrigerator to sit overnight and further develop the sour taste.



The main ingredients are mostly simple: 6 lb 10.5 oz bread flour*, 8.25 oz whole wheat flour, 78 fl oz water, 3.25 oz salt. The difficult part is the 3 lbs of "starter", or the yeast culture, the part that's alive. While for some doughs you simply add yeast at the time that you're making it (direct fermentation), others, like sourdough, have the pre-fermented part (the starter, for indirect fermentation).

*Bread flour has 10-13% protein, whereas all-purpose flour has 8-12%

Making sourdough starter from scratch is different from making other starters (which are just a combination of flour and water and yeast that's allowed to sit overnight). Sourdough starter relies on the yeast that's naturally occurring in the air and on your skin, so the process of making it is rather lengthy, like a week or two. But once it's made, you can literally keep it forever, either in the fridge or even out (providing that you feed it with flour and water daily). Chef's starter has been around for 6 or 7 years, and every day we use 3 lbs of it and use the remaining 1 lb as the base for the starter the next day (adding to it 4 lbs of bread flour, 2 lbs of water, and 1 tbsp salt).



The mixing process for the dough is very particular: everything except salt mixed for 4 minutes on low speed, then the dough rests for 15 minutes, then add salt and other add-ins (I chose dried cherries and pecans pieces) and mix for 1 minute on low speed and 2 minutes on medium speed.



(Although I chose dried cherries and pecans, savory add-ins were very common, like this roasted garlic and cheddar cheese one made on a different day.)

Once the dough is made, it is put into a oiled, lidded box and left to ferment for an hour. At the end of the hour the dough is "folded" - you take the corners and fold them in toward the middle, then turn the whole dough over - this redistributes all of the yeast/food/heat/ temperature. After another hour and another fold, the dough ferments for another 20 minutes and is ready for portioning by scale.



We divide the dough into two 3 lb pieces, three 2 lb pieces, and four or five 1 lb pieces. Then we pre-shape them into rounds. After they rest on the workbench awhile, we shape them into more perfect rounds by gathering our hands around them until our hands touch underneath them (turning the round and doing this another once or twice). Then the rounds are placed upside down in floured baskets and those are wrapped and placed in the walk-in.



The next day, the sourdoughs are unwrapped and put in the proofer (around 89F and high humidity fridge-like box) for about an hour. Then we load the sourdough by upending the baskets on the bread oven belt (the sourdough coming out neatly due to the baskets having been floured).



Each round is slashed with a cross (or X, depending on the angle) with a lame (pronounced la-may) knife for decoration and for venting/expansion purposes. Then the bread oven (at 450F) is pre-steamed for three seconds, the doughs are pushed in, and the oven is steamed for another five seconds.



We watch the oven until the bread is done - usually you can tell by the color and/or the sound (a heavy hollow thump when you knock on it), but the other, surefire way to check is by thermometer - 220F and it can be taken out!