Journal...day 2

Journal de Lyon Mardi 23 Juliet

Aujourd’hui est mon secondes journee a l’institut Paul Bocuse.  Nous avons fait le pain de campagne avec le poudre de pesto, pain bio avec farine bio 65, et (some bread with fermented grains in it) et enfin les croissants.

The main differences that I’ve noticed between French bread and the bread we make in south Africa is that they mix their doughs for a long period of time and then handle them and shape them less as the gluten will be too developed and then you won’t be able to use it. whereas the way I’ve been taught, we mix the dough less in the mixer as it avoids over oxidising the proteins  and losing some nutritional value, but then give it a longer fermentation process with more rigorous folds in-between.

therefore the shaping of the baguettes is more gentle and has fewer steps as you simply fold the dough over itself a few times and then proceed to roll it out, this method is great for when you have less time to spend waiting to make bread although I still am quite religious about the use of preferments as it adds whole world of flavour.

Chef Jean-Marc told me that for the bread doughs he uses about 50% levain and for the croissant and Danish pastries, 20% as the levain adds to the keeping properties of the baked goods. I had heard of the use of a poolish or levain in pastries before but had not tried it out.

The pain de mie au lait has a lovely light texture and with the hail sugar and nice sugary crunch, there is an interesting method to make the hedgehog like spikes on it.

As for the croissants, we made the dough in the morning and then refrigerated it then later we took it out and divided it into 8 pieces and the n likewise divided the butter into 8x250g pieces. Butter for puff, croissant and Danish pastries is bought in a 1kg flat block/sheet...86% fat content, 14% water, whereas the butter used for normal pastry comes in 500g rolls/blocks with a 84% fat content and 16% water content. It tastes more creamy than fatty.

2 machines that fascinate me are the chambre de la fermentation which essentially is a fridge that you can control the humidity and temperature in so you can make croissants or pain de mie au lait and leave it inside, then set a timer so that at a certain time in the morning, it will go from sat 1-2 degrees up to 12 degrees for 5 hours and then when the chef comes in it can be baked off.
the other machine is one that controls the temperature of the water. It has a tank, thermostat and a pump, so if we need water at 4degrees when it’s very hot like today, it’s possible and therefore we can have our desired dough temperature.

The burger buns that we baked off in the deck oven today were shaped, egg washed and seeded yesterday and left in the fermentation room overnight. The croissants are in there tonight, already egg washed, and we’ll bake them tomorrow.

On a side note, I managed to get in contact with a saffa ( colloquial for ‘ South African ‘ ) living in the foch area of Lyon and I might meet him for a beer on Thursday. Weather seems to be cooling slightly and from around 9:30pm there was thunder and lightning, reminding me of Cape Town’s weather.