Finally, some new food! I wish I'd snapped some pictures of my plates from my final last week, but I was running around like a roasted chicken with its head cut off. I tried a couple of new techniques, like plating my butternut squash soup in the butternut squash itself, which I roasted. I also used my squeeze bottle to sauce my plates, which looked great when I zig-zagged my plate with Sauce Robert, then laid my beautiful chicken roulades haphazardly on top of the sauce with tourne potatoes and mini bunches of parsley. So this week, we started baking class, and I think it's going to be a great time. Chef True and Chef A are super nice. Chef A even has some of what I'm calling baker's zen. She always seem so calm ...they both do, actually...which is odd, because the baking lab is basically a science lab, waiting to blow up. I don't think even Chef Pastore had that effortless, just sense of calm while he was working that these two chefs exude. Chef True was kneading some dough , and I don't know how to describe it, but it was like he was barely using half of one full hand to do it, just chit-chatting like nothing was even going on. When I went to knead my dough, I could barely acknowledge my lab partner standing right next to me, I was so into the kneading. Both hands, all in, full body, brain was working overtime...zero zen. I like my french bread, except that I definitely dusted too much bread flour at the end. Also, my epi isn't formed very well. It should be a lot more beautiful zig-zags than that. Chef A said I might have overproofed my dough a bit, but that the holes in the crumb were nice so I measured just the right amount of flour. Next time, I'll move my dough to the walk-in so that it stops proofing until I'm ready to bake. I've also got to go in more at an angle with those epi cuts.
My dinner rolls came together pretty well, except that I think they got a little too brown on the outside. Interesting fact: these are whole wheat dinner rolls because we used some "whole wheat" flour to make them...not because they are "whole" wheat. I topped mine with oats, sesame seeds, nothing, and poppyseeds. Chef A said they had a very soft texture and that I kneaded just the right amount, but that the tops seem to have deflated a bit. She said I can fix that by pulling my dough a bit more taut when I'm shaping them before the second proof. When Chef True was demo-ing how to shape the rolls, he said you want to pull them so that you have a jagged bottom and a smooth top...to which James and I had a good giggle fit later on. But had I taken that more seriously, I would have had nice smooth tops. Tomorrow: pizza party!
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