Teamwork

Teamwork !

Nice day today...sick push in the morning with everyone hands on, Benjamin and I doing the pate blanche, Yann doing bio, Alex doing the viennoiserie, seigle Auvergne, ciabatta, Sarasin, autolyse etc...And Alexandre on the oven. I ended up spending the morning with Alexandre, taking notes about small details when scoring different ways. He told me he knows 30 different ways to score a boule, different shapes just by changing small details, even if it’s still the same amount of scores. And the difference between a baker and someone just chucking some dough in the oven is the finesse and the attention to visual detail. Making sure your scores are all parallel, corners all in line etc...It’s all noticed on a subconscious level.

It made me kind of sad to think about coming home...I don’t want to stop learning. But I’ll have to put more effort into upping my game and trying things out myself. I definitely want to visit Maison Pozzoli again in a few years... or maybe even have chef and Alexandre come visit Cape Town for a bit...I already want to try to organise to get a case of wine to them...

I ended up loading most of the bread today...it went ok, except for a few very borderline bakes...and I let the Sarasin over prove which sucks. It’s a really dense bread and not really responsive...one minute I check it and it feels dense and under proved, 5 min later and I see the surface starting to separate like when dough is over proving and I knew it was a mess. And it bakes pretty long as well...

We had some baking students come in and visit today... like I mentioned before most areas have a baking school but these kids looked young. When I asked chef about it he said most were 15/16 and already studying to enter the service/kitchen/baking area. That’s hectic!! They all looked very smart in formal suits though.

After baking was done I helped the others line crap loads of tins with pate feulletage for the quiches...everyone was involved, even chef and Jean-Luc (the guy who calls me compote) after that we prepped a huge batch of monsieur. Here they put the cheese on top and gratinate it.

Came home and chilled. Yesterday the curtain fell down when I tried to open it (the walls are very old and powdery and the curtain was too heavy. So now I just put them around my bed so I have a curtain to keep light out and heat in since I sleep on the couch anyway. Fatiha and I were joking that it’s like those bed forts you make when you’re a kid J

Getting it RIGHT !

Today was standard. Good push in the morning...still need to kick it up a gear with the shaping. I guess I’m just impatient to get to that level of efficiency already.

We made bread today with buckwheat, also known as “sarrasin/blé noir”, with 20% buckwheat and 80% T80 as buckwheat has no gluten in it so its suitable for people who can’t handle gluten, but obviously you’d need a recipe without wheat as well...because it had no gluten, it’s not ideal to use for bread on its own and is more commonly used to make pancakes and noodles in other countries.

Possibly a combination of that and maybe rice flour or potato flour would work but I’d have to play around to find out. The colour was a deep, dark colour. Darker than rye and had a slightly not aniseed, but floral, sweet flavour.

I’ve been thinking and it seems like to make alternate wheats/grains more accessible to people who want to try it for flavour and not for allergy reasons, it works best to combine the alternate grain/wheat with wheat flour to give a better texture and volume...as most would end up quite dense without the addition.

Also, for some reason I was adamant that internal body temperature was 32.4....I have no clue wtf I got it from but I was arguing with everyone at work that it wasn’t 37.5 (it all started because the final temp for the seigle Auvergne is 37.5)...I was positive that I had read it somewhere before and that maybe they had it different in France.

We had an order for about 180 brioches a la forme de miche today. So we cooked them in the deck oven at 175...it’s possible to cook viennoiserie in a deck oven provided you give the deck enough time to cool down sufficiently. You have to bake at a slightly lower temperature than you would in a convection, but also for a longer time as you don’t have the ambient heat circulating. Useful for mornings when your pastries are proved overnight and your doughs are only mixed and fermented that morning.

NOTE: with a viennoiserie recipe, when you increase water and lower eggs it will be lighter as the eggs provide extra protein which adds structure to the dough and water creates steam during baking which will obviously aerate the product and make it lighter.

Working Out...

Starting today, this week I no longer divide the baguette dough in the morning, but divide and shape the biological bread which includes the pain aux 6 cereales, L’Authentic, T80, Epeautre, Campagne, pain complet, seigle Auvergne and pain au lin.

We do various shapes and sizes with the different doughs, ranging from “boules” or round loaves, to “miches” which are a longer, tapered oval shape, shorter than a baguette but much thicker. “Batards” or small ovals, and the large “flutes” as well. Some of the doughs are coated in either seeds or maybe oats or dried maize after shaping. For instance, the pain aux 6 cereales is coated in rolled oats which gives it a really nice almost peanut butter flavour when cooked.

Alexandre showed me some techniques to shape things really quickly and it really is insanely fast at a slight loss of regularity but that’s just because I’m not used to the method and the wetter dough as well. I think within the week I’ll have it down. When you see the movement of the shaping it makes sense in terms of flow and tightness/strength of the shape.

After shaping was done, I did the autolyse for the pate blanche (the base dough for all the baguettes we make)...200kg of dough is no laughing matter...

i lug 4x25kg bags of flour up from the cellar each morning and then have to take all the dough out of the mixer for the autolyse and put back for the final mixing.

Otherwise a pretty normal day. Finished really early so left work at like 10:30...did my weekly grocery shopping and then just chilled.