end of semester

To conclude the semester's work, I leave you with a picture of me practicing for the last practical of the year: chocolate writing.



I put in the most effort for this last practical, and I think it paid off.

Congratulations to all of my fellow first-semesters for having made it through!

And congratulations to me for finally making through this semester's worth of blog posts. Now onto non-school but nevertheless food-related stuff!

brotchen rolls

On the last day of kitchen I decided to make something by special request of my dearest Jonas, because he remembered the rolls that he used to get at the bakery back in Germany.

A quick Google search led me to this recipe, which I presented to Chef for approval. I was told to make a double batch and to approximate the ingredients, since we measure ingredients by weight and not by volume.



(Here I am with my assigned task of rolls, in the last Bread Station game plan of the semester!)



This dough was different than all of the other doughs I made because it included meringue (not sure what difference meringue makes in bread though). In terms of ingredients, I used half the amount of yeast the recipe called for, and also it was instant dry yeast instead of active dry yeast (so the yeast-soaking step was omitted).

The dough turned out rather wet, so I had to add a bunch of flour in order to knead it. Then I fermented it and folded it (what the recipe termed "deflating" the dough, or what other recipes will term "punching down").



Then I placed the dough on this metal plate, which goes into the roll machine so it can be shaped into rolls (same process for challah rolls).



I thought it was an amazing coincidence that the roll machine had been made in West Germany, the same place where these rolls originated from.



Because the dough mass was moist and unwieldy, the rolls didn't come out shaped as nicely as the challah rolls had. Nevermind though, I hand-shaped some and put others through the machine once more.



The recipe called for an egg white/milk wash, but the one I prepared was accidentally thrown out so the rolls went into the oven without. Chef steamed them in the oven extra though, to make up for it.



This is how they came out. I had no basis for comparison as to whether or not these looked or tasted right. I thought they tasted like plain dinner rolls, but Jonas liked how they tasted and said they were pretty much like the rolls he had been used to. Und das ist gut!

challah (holla!)

Challah bread was a semi-regular of bread station, most commonly made into rolls but sometimes braided into loaves as well.

Challah is another example of enriched dough because it contains egg yolks (fat) and oil (also fat). First, 5 lb 4 oz of bread flour and 1 oz of instant dry yeast are mixed together. Then, separately mixed is 32 oz of water, 1 lb of egg yolks, 8 oz of vegetable oil, 8 oz of sugar, and 1.5 oz of salt. The flour mixture is added to the wet mixture in the mixer, and together it's mixed for 4 minutes on low speed and 4 minutes on medium speed. Then it is fermented for just one hour before it gets portioned.



This batch of challah was portioned for a loaf and two batches of rolls. We did a five-braid loaf, with each braid being 5.5 oz (pre-shaped and shaped much like a baguette would be). The two batches for rolls were 3 lbs each, to be inserted into the roll machine to be shaped into two dozen rolls (four dozen altogether).



Braiding challah was really fun. Basically the five strands are lined up together, pinched at the top, and then the braids were invisibly numbered from 1 to 5, left to right. As the braids switched places they were renumbered 1 to 5, so there was no need to keep track of what number went where. The pattern basically went: 1 over 3, 2 over 3, 5 over 2 (repeat). If a low-number was going over a high-number, it would go to the right of that braid, and if a high-number was going over a low-number, it would go to the left. This continued until the ends of the strands, where all five were pinched together to end.



Here is everybody braiding, all serious-like.



The idea was to make a braid that would come out looking like this.



Before the challah rolls and loaves were baked, they were egg-washed so they would come out with a nice sheen.



Here are the rolls after baking.



This was my first loaf, deceptively nice-looking but still raw on the inside because at this point I had not known that you could tell a bread's doneness by checking its temperature. I fretted over the rawness because that day's challah had been by special request of Chef Morse, and I really wanted him to have nice bread (oh well, too bad).

The next time I made challah it turned out really nice, and my housemate Molly made delicious French toast out of it :)

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.