Owned today!! Pushed out production like machines...ok, it
was Alex, Alexandre, myself and Benjamin the new guy (in French its pronounced
“bahn-jah-mahn” had no idea at first then I was like oh its BenjaminJ) we were done before
11am. Alex left around 10 as he had to go to school as well.
This month, the special bread that we’re making is with the
Sarasin (buckwheat), I
still prefer the pain au lin though as the seeds give so much flavour to the
bread...
After work I missioned home, had a nice shower and then
passed out until about 5pm...Woke up can started continuing on the product list
of all the items I’ve made/tried/come across while here in France. I want to
combine it with a list of what I’ve done before and have a data base of ideas
and recipes.
Really excited about going back to SA and starting the next
chapter in my life and career in Stellenbosch, South Africa and with the Hurst
Campus. I’ve already started looking for a place to stay and thinking about
what sort of stuff I want to make at the school and what I want to teach...
I
think the biggest thing for me is if I can help nurture a generation of bakers...which
is sorely needed in South Africa and really start growing the industry there.
Possibly help start baking competitions or compete in some if there are, which I
haven’t heard of.
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.
