I Loaf You — Desserts for Days

I'd like to start this off with a little apology. I've been really busy as of late, and have not had time to blog (obviously). Between work and school, I had just about zero free time, but I feel bad, because I keep hearing that everyone is missing my blogs! In order to get caught up a little bit quicker, I'm going to do a catch-up blog post by unit, just until I get to where I am now. Once that's done, I'll get back into the habit of blogging every week! Anywho, you don't want to hear about how I can't keep on top of my blogs (at least, I doubt it), but rather, let's get into what I've been up to in school lately!

So way back when, after the first cake unit was over, we moved into the unit that I think that I was most looking forward to. *Drumroll please* BREAD! Oh my gosh. I cannot express to you how excited I was for this unit to start. As Chef Jeanne put it, the bread unit feels like the most "useful" unit in the program, meaning that so many of the things that we make in class are extremely indulgent and more of a "every once and awhile" treat, but bread is one of those things that you can just use whenever. Dinner rolls, sandwich bread, toast, you name it!

After a quick lecture on the different types of leavening and the 14 steps of breadmaking, we got right into it! The first thing that we made was two different types of muffins: lemon poppy seed and blueberry crumble. I love a good muffin, really I do! I think that I actually prefer them to cupcakes, since I'm not huge on the whole frosting thing (aside from a select few types). The muffin is like the best thing: it's acceptable to eat for breakfast (unlike a cupcake) and it got rid of all the frosting that sits on top of it's super sweet cousin.

From here, we went on to make bagels, which I think is what I was most looking forward to (for that night, at least). I've only ever made bagels once, and that was at work forever and a half ago, and even then, I didn't get to do them from start to finish, it was just more of a shaping thing.

From the big ball of bagel dough -- from which, my partner and I created bagel man -- we split it into 12 even pieces. They started off as little rectangles, but eventually, they would become our nice, round bagels. Once they had some time to rest, we rolled them out into fatter little logs, and made them bagel shaped by rolling the two ends of the dough together to bind it. Times 12 and bam, we've got a whole tray of bagels! We didn't have time to bake them on that first night, so we stuck them in the fridge until the next class.

Once our bagels were back in the fridge, we went on to make Irish Soda Bread. This was a pretty basic bread dough, I think. We just sort of mixed everything up and ta-da, we had bread! This was a very hefty dough, I must say. It didn't take all that long to bake, so once that was in the oven, we got to make scones. I love scones -- they're one of my favorite things. I felt like I was saying that a lot during this unit. Bread is just so much fun, and like I said before, there are just so many different things that you can do with the products. We made cranberry orange scones, and after they were all baked and cooled, my partner and I decided to melt a little bit of white chocolate and drizzle that over the top. Delicious!

Goodness, what else did we make in this unit that was notable? Really, the better question is what wasn't?! The next class (after we topped and baked our bagels), the first thing that we made was Pan De Mie. The simpler version of this though? White bread. Yup, we made a basic, bogus loaf of white bread. Not that I have anything against white bread, of course, but it was probably the most average thing that we made in the unit. I did, however, hear that it made some delicious toast!

On that same night we also made english muffins and focaccia. Now, I LOVE focaccia bread, and similar to the bagels, I've made it once before at -- yep, you guessed it -- work. I couldn't decide what flavor of bread I wanted to do, so I sectioned my focaccia off into 3 sections, and did some plain with just olive oil and rosemary, some with that, plus kalamata olives, and then the last section was that same oil and rosemary mix, but topped with fresh tomatoes. Focaccia bread is probably one of the easiest things that we did, but MAN, did that thing take forever. This unit has a lot of just standing around (I use this loosely, because we were doing other stuff while we were waiting, but when you have all of your breads proofing, there's not much you can do other than wait!), and the focaccia bread was no exception. That bread was in the proof box for 3.5 hours in total, I believe. Plus, it had half an hour of baking time. So worth it, but it was definitely a long road getting there.

We made a couple different types of doughs that were used for multiple things. First there was the orange cinnamon swirl bread, which sounds tasty by itself, right? You would be perfectly happy with that, until you hear that we made pecan sticky buns out of that same dough. These were so incredible. It's everything that you want a fancy Cinnabon to be, I swear! When we flipped these guys out of the pans (because similar to the store bought monkey bread, the yummy sauce is on the bottom), it was just a big ol' mess of cinnamon, sugar, deliciousness! On this same day we finished baking our harvest grain bread, which is basically just a seeded bread full of all sorts of different things: chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, salt, pepper, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, etc.

Another dough that we made that was multi-use was the brioche dough. Again, we made two different things out of this, a brioche loaf bread, and then little single-serve brioche rolls. Brioche has always been one of my favorite types of breads; it's so delicious and tender. These guys were pretty straight forward, but shaping the little individual rolls were a little bit difficult. Maybe difficult isn't the right word, but they're definitely a funky shape. The class before the brioche, we also made kaiser rolls, milk bread rolls, and challah bread. Of the three, it was really hard to pick one favorite! Kaiser rolls always make a delicious sandwich, milk bread is the most delicious, buttery dinner roll that you've ever eaten, and where to even start with that challah bread?? Who would think that egg bread would be any good. Whoever had that idea, it sure was a good one. What I really liked about the challah bread was that when you cut it into slices, it sort of looked like a cloud, which made me really happy.

Now we came to the end all, be all of breads: croissants! We made so many kinds of croissants... chocolate, plain, raisin, and all SO delicious! Making croissants was so much fun! There were so many steps in getting the dough together, between properly folding together the dough block and butter block, to the turns and all that fun stuff. Once we got all of our turns in our dough and it had gone through its first proofing stage, it was time to shape!! The plain croissants were shaped just like you see in movies or on TV. Make the little triangle, and roll it all up into a cute little rolled log thingey. Then we took that shape, and curved it around so that you got that classic croissant shape. For the chocolate croissants, we started those with a rectangle, and sort of rolled it into thirds. Rather than just using a chocolate bar cut into pieces, I found out that they actually make little sticks of chocolate, that are kind of like chocolate chips. I had no idea that these existed, but they really did make a lot of sense. The last kind of croissant that we made was the raisin croissant. For this one we used one big sheet of dough, spread some pastry cream on it, then sprinkled that with raisins. Rolled it up into a log and then cut it into slices, much like a log cookie.

After we had shaped all of the croissants, we had to let them do their final proof before we baked them. Once they had baked, our teacher suggested that we all try one, since everybody should try a freshly baked croissant at some point in their lives. Once I got home and they had cooled a little bit, I cut one open and couldn't believe how beautiful they were on the inside. This means just one thing: that I made the dough correctly, woo hoo! I had a nice spiral going on, a "spiderweb" effect, which is how Chef Jeanne referred to it. I definitely enjoyed making these, and plan to make more in the future!

The last three things that we made in the bread unit were panettone, stollen, and danishes. The panettone and stollen were both pretty straightforward breads, and the danishes were pretty similar to the croissants, at least in terms of the dough creation process. The danishes were filled with a wide variety of fillings: cream cheese, jam, pastry cream, almond paste, fruit... All were delicious! I think if I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be the pastry cream filled ones. I've come to find that pastry cream is one of the most delicious things we make in culinary school (at least up until now), and that it goes with just about everything.

My perfect practical for the bread unit!

The very last thing that we had to do before we moved onto the next unit (cakes 2!), was the practical. I had to make plain croissants, chocolate croissants, brioche rolls, and scones. I had a feeling that it went really well, and once I got my test papers back, my feeling was correct, and I ended up getting 100%!

And with that, there's a big ol' update on the bread unit! The next blog post is going to cover all of the second cake unit, so stay tuned for that!

As always, if you want more frequent updates, you can check out my Instagram.

Thanks for reading!