Bread Day Part 1

Okay, I'll be honest. Bread day was really only one day. But you don't understand! There was so. much. bread. On the menu for the day: 7 grain bread, focaccia, pita, and breadsticks.

For all 4 breads, we were using yeast to help with rising. There are 10 production stages for yeast breads:

1. Scaling the ingredients 
2. Mixing and kneading the dough
3. Fermenting the dough
4. Punching down the dough
5. Portioning the dough
6. Rounding the portions
7. Shaping the portions
8. Proofing the products
9. Baking the products
10. Cooling and storing the products

A lot of these steps are self explanatory, but I'll briefly go through them anyway.

So, we started with 7 grain bread, a heavy dough with tons of, well, grains. The 7 grains consisted of bread flour, rye flour, barley flour, cornmeal, rolled oats, flax seeds, and millets. First you need to start by scaling the ingredients and making sure that you have the right amount of everything you need. In baking, it's all chemistry. The only thing which changes the amounts in baking is the humidity. On a rainy or humid day, you may find your dough to be stickier than normal, and you should have extra flour on hand to add during mixing. Once you have all of your ingredients, mixing and kneading the dough comes next. This is one of the self explanatory ones. Although, maybe not. We started by adding the yeast mixture into a mixing bowl first, and sifting all of the dry ingredients together so that they were evenly distributed. If you add them directly in, you may get globs of salt or other tastes in your bread that aren't properly mixed in. Once the dry ingredients are sifted, they are then added to the yeast mixture, and mixed in and kneaded together. Fermenting the dough came next. Fermentation begins the second the mixing has finished, and continues until the point when the dough is baked. The dough should be covered in a bowl and placed in a dry, warm place in order for the dough to rise. Some people turn their oven on very low and allow the dough to rise on an open oven door, others prefer to not leave the oven door open and put the bowl on top of the stove with the oven on. After the dough has risen, punch down the dough.  Punching the dough down reactivates the yeast cells, encouraging more yeast activity. When portioning the dough you want all of the portions to be the same size so they can cook evenly. After you portion the dough, round the portions using the sides of your hands and kind of tuck it under to be rounded. Rounding stretches the outside layer of gluten into a smooth coating. This helps hold in the gases and makes it easier to shape. Once you're ready to shape the dough,  you have a bunch of shapes to choose from. If making a challah, you can make rolls, braided loaves, or pull apart challahs. For seven grain, we rolled the dough out into an oval, and then rolled the dough and placed it in a loaf pan. Proofing the dough is the last of the fermentation process, and is done while the dough is already shaped. Egg the loaves and bake the products until you've determined that they are done. Doneness can be determined by tapping on the top of the bread and listening for a hollow sound. When you cool and store breads, take the product out of the pan to cool on racks. Store breads at room temperature or freeze them. Do not refrigerate breads. They'll get stale pretty quickly.

I absolutely love this seven grain bread. After shaping the breads and washing them with egg, we added crushed garlic and rosemary to the top. You can choose any variety of toppings for this type of bread since it's so rich with grains; you can top it with oats, flax seeds, or any herbs and spices.

Tip of the day: When beginning the process of baking bread, you need to test the yeast to make sure it's active. Follow recipe directions, but when it says "warm water" to be mixed with the yeast, make sure the water isn't too hot. If it's too hot, it'll kill the yeast. You want your water to be about 90-100 degrees. Also, add some sugar to the yeast mixture, just a tablespoon or so, and it'll get the yeast bubbling real quick. 

Bake Shop Part 2

We're learning all of these new techniques that are pretty specific to baking and not to cooking, so it's been a rough week for me so far. I feel a little out of my element. I find myself double and triple checking each baking recipe because in baking, once you skip something, there's no turning back. I think cooking is a lot more forgiving in that way. Sure, there are recipes in which you can't skip a step, or mixing up the timing for certain ingredients can change, improve, or ruin a dish, but in baking, there's little to no forgiveness in these cases. You dump it out and start from scratch.

So, Day 2 of bake shop was all about foaming. The foaming method is any method where the eggs are whipped or beaten to incorporate air before they are folded into the batter.

For Pate a Choux, or eclair paste, is not made by following the foaming method, it's done using the creaming method, which we spoke about yesterday. The dough must be thick enough to be piped through a pastry bag, and the dough will stay together and not bleed into each other.

Now back to the foaming method. I know, I get sidetracked. So, we made this delicious pastry filling (it had a custard-like consistency). We were going to be piping the filling into the eclairs. So, the pastry filling was made using the foaming method.

In a saucepan, we heated the sugar and milk until it became hot, and in a separate bowl, whipped the eggs, cornstarch, and sugar to incorporate as much air as possible into the eggs. Then, we tempered the egg mixture into the milk/sugar mixture. You don't want your eggs to cook or becomes scrambled eggs once they hit the hot mixture, so you add a little bit at a time, off the fire, and slowly bring down the temperature of the mixture, and raise the temperature of the eggs as they hit the heat. If you do this slowly, the eggs will be incorporated into the mixture. After it's all mixed together and tempered, butter is added so the cream becomes thicker. We used a vanilla bean to flavor the cream, and before we cooled it, split it in half, added melted chocolate to one bowl and instantly had two flavors!

Once the eclairs (or cream puffs) were out of the oven, we filled them with the cream and drizzled with chocolate icing and royal icing.

Tip of the day: When using vanilla to flavor things while baking, you can choose between vanilla extract and vanilla bean. Extract is easier to deal with and it's cheaper, but the flavor in no way compares to that in a vanilla bean. When using vanilla bean, split the bean down the center and use your knife to scrape out the insides of the bean to add to your dish. If you choose to use vanilla bean, add the flavor at the beginning of your baking process. In this case, we added it to the milk and sugar before we put it on the fire. This way, the cream gets the maximum flavor out of the bean. If using extract, add it at the way end. It has a stronger flavor and doesn't need to be in there for so long. 

Bake Shop Part 1

I'm not a big fan. Baking. It's fine, I'm not obsessed, though. I just don't feel like there's much creativity or freedom like there is in cooking. But let's talk about it.

One of the most common ingredients in baking is.... flour. There's a lot to flour, apparently. Flour is made up of some protein, and proteins coagulate. So in baking, flour acts as a builder. Gluten is a long chain of molecules that make the dough rise (high gluten flour is used for breads, pizzas, and bagels), and when you add fat to gluten, it cuts the long strain of gluten to make the product less chewy.

There are three main types of flour:

1. Cake flour- This has the least amount of gluten; it's used a lot in baking. 
2. All purpose flour- This is the middle of the gluten scale. It's used in cooking and has a mild effect on final products. 
3. Bread (or high gluten) flour- This is that long chain we were talking about. You use high gluten flour in things that you'd like to come out chewy. 

So, next time your recipe calls for a specific type of flour, don't just grab the AP flour. Gluten counts.

The thing we learned about on Monday was a technique called creaming. When baking, the sugar and butter are blended together first and then you slowly add in the eggs, one at a time. This ensures that the eggs get mixed in completely.

We worked on a few things on Monday. First up was a pound cake. We started the recipe with creaming the butter and sugar and then slowly adding the eggs, sifting all the dry ingredients together first, and then slowly adding them to the wet ingredients. We used the same technique when making two types of cookies: Lady fingers and chocolate chunk cookies.

Now, I'm not the biggest dessert fan, but the chocolate chunk cookies were to die for. They were fabulous. I'm not exactly sure why they turned out so good, but it's one of the best cookies I've ever tasted!

Here's a quick look of Bake Shop Part 1

Tip of the day: Before scooping out dough to place on a baking sheet, start with a piece of parchment paper that's the size of the sheet. Before you put the parchment paper down, use a little dough to act as "glue" to keep the parchment paper down so that it doesn't stick every time you put dough down for a new cookie. Also, use an ice cream scoop to ensure that your cookies are all the same size. 

Asian Fusion

Asian food. We all get it. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Mongolian... But what about those other Asian countries? You know which ones I mean. I'm talking about Russia, Iraq, Egypt, and Kazakhstan. Why don't we order Egyptian cuisine on Christmas? Today really got me thinking about those cuisines which we don't honor when we talk about Asian cuisine. Poor guys.

You may be thinking that this post will honor the lesser known Asian cuisines. Wrong. We're gonna keep it traditional up in here. Maybe we'll talk about Borscht another time.

This morning we started with pot stickers. For those of you who don't know, but I know a few of you do (because we've made them together), pot stickers are Chinese dumplings. How did they come about, you ask?

Chinese dumplings are called guotie. Originally, the dumplings were boiled in a wok, the standard Chinese cooking pot. Legend has it that a Chinese chef boiled the dumplings but forgot about them while he was cleaning up, and when he returned to the wok, the water had boiled out and the dumplings were stuck to the wok. The result? Crispy, tender, delicious dumplings. And so, guoties were born. Guo, Chinese for Wok, and tie, for stuck.

We actually started our pot stickers by browning them first and then we moved to steaming. When I've made pot stickers in the past, I've used a skillet or a soup pot instead of a wok, simply because I don't have one at home (hint hint). A wok has a small bottom and wide sides, so you can only fry a few pot stickers at a time in there. In a skillet, your surface area is much bigger, so you can fry many at a time.

After we made the dough and the filling (ground chicken thighs, scallions, ginger, and spices), we made the dumplings, pinched the sides and started frying.

After the color developed and a few minutes passed, I threw in (a little too much) water. Chef says to put in about a cup, I probably did more and I think you probably need less than a cup. Maybe 3/4 cup. But who knows? Then I quickly covered it and let it steam for about 5 more minutes.

We served them with a mild dipping sauce and ate pot stickers at like 10:30 am. Pura vida.

Then we moved on to General Tso's chicken with fried rice. We marinated dark meat chicken tenders and then coated them in corn starch and deep fried them. We got some high temperature oil in a wok (hot wok, cold oil) and threw in some whole chili peppers. It was very cool actually, since the peppers weren't cut, they didn't give off an intense heat, but they flavored the oil just slightly to give the whole dish a little bit of a kick. We got the deeply fried chicken into more oil, because never too much oil, apparently. Poured some sauce in, added ginger and garlic, and finished it off with some scallions and bean sprouts.

The sauce had a great balance of sweet and salty. We even added some more soy sauce and sugar to intensify those flavors and the result was deliciousness.

Last dish of the day was Szechuan Beef with Lo Mein noodles. Szechuan is uber spicy. We took very tender meat, a surprise steak, and marinated that in dark soy sauce. I'd never worked with dark soy sauce before, it's thicker than regular soy sauce and tastes more like La Choy rather than Kikoman. We added chili oil, chili paste, garlic, ginger, and other spicy things so that it could live up to its name. We browned the meat first and set it aside, and then added sticks of carrot, celery, red and green pepper, put some spicy sauce on it, and added the beef back into the pan.

Tip of the day: When working with fried food, specifically deep fried, always have a wire rack on a sheet pan next to the stove. Take the fried food out with a skimmer or slotted spoon and put it on the wire rack so that any excess oil drips off. Paper towels are a popular choice when frying shnitzel and latkes, but if you want your food to stay crispy, put it on a wire rack. Even if you place on serving the food immediately after frying, do the rack thing for a minute or two and then serve. 

Try not to crack up from this post..

Let's face it. All egg puns are, to put it delicately, not too eggcelent. So, let's lay off of them, shall we?

But we should definitely talk about eggs.

Eggs serve many different purposes in cooking. They can be used as an egg wash for pastries, they help with rising, they help coagulate, they make souffles puff up, and they serve as insulation (like egging a cutlet before frying it).

There are tons of ways to eat an egg:

• Poached
• Fried
• Sunny side up
• Over easy, medium, hard
• Scrambled
• Frittata 
• Omelette 

On egg day, Chef told us to make a simple sunny side up egg. That's when you crack the egg straight into a hot pan with oil without breaking the yolk, then getting the yolk on the plate without a spatula. We did a few, then he made us do it with two eggs, then he showed us eggs over easy. Eggs over easy is two eggs sunny side up, and then flipped over in the pan without the yolks being broken.

Next we turn to Eggs Benedict. It's something that I'm not familiar with since it's typically not served in kosher restaurants. Served on an English muffin, Eggs Benedict is complete with fried bacon (or kosher beef fry), a poached egg, and a hollandaise sauce. Everything needs to be times perfectly so that everything gets on the plate hot. 

I guess this class was the breakfast class, and no breakfast is complete without pancakes and french toast. 

And of course we finished it up with a delicious apple-cinnamon filled crepe. 

So, all items we made here contained eggs. I guess you wouldn't think that french toast is an "egg" dish, but I guess this just turned into breakfast all day long. All. Day. Long. 

Tip of the day: It's very important to use fresh eggs. And yes, there are ways to check to make sure eggs are fresh. 

-The float test: If an egg sinks in water, it's fresh. It means that the yolk takes up most of the space in the egg. When eggs aren't fresh, air gets in through the pores of the shell, and the air in the shell will make the egg float in water. 

-The spread test: When you crack a fresh egg, it'll stay close together and the yolk will be very high. Older eggs spread out a lot once cracked. 

What do you do with older eggs? Hard boil them. Eggs are actually easier to peel if they're older. 

Outside the Work

Hors D'oeuvres. We all know how it's pronounced, but none of us really know why. Do we even know what it actually means?

Back in the day, when a waiter wanted to impress a table (presumably to get a bigger tip), after a table would order, he would bring them an appetizer on the house. Usually, this appetizer was created by the waiter himself. He would slip to the back of the kitchen, sneak around and find odds and ends that weren't being used for dinner service. He'd quickly put something together and bring it to his table to impress his customers. This dish was made "outside of the kitchen," and so the dish became called "Hors D'oeuvres" which means "outside of work" in French.

Hors D'oeuvres are usually one biters. When you're a a cocktail party and you're meeting new people, you usually have a drink in one hand and an hors d'oeuvre in the other, and when someone comes to shake your hand, you need to act fast. So, you pop the food in your mouth, and viola! A free hand! Simple as that.

We know hors d'oeuvres as mini hot dogs and little potato knishes. On Wednesday, we took it a little further. We also learned something about canapes, which have a base of a bread, cracker, or chip. Canapes consist of a base, a spread, a body (protein), and a garnish.

My lovely cousin, Aliza, came to cook with us on Wednesday. It was such a great day for her to join and we had so much fun! We started on blinis with sour cream, smoked salmon, and garnishes. Aliza tasted the first one and immediately suggested that we add some heat. So, instead of chives, we added jalepeno to half of our blinis.

The blinis were made from a buckwheat flour mixture. It's very similar to a pancake mixture and the blinis are made similarly, too.

She's a natural!

We also worked on these (fake) crab meat wontons with an apricot dipping sauce. It wasn't anything I would have thought to put together in the mix, but they turned out to be delicious! We used the fake crab meat, mixed it with cream cheese, and added scallions, sesame oil, worcestershire sauce, garlic, salt, and pepper. We wrapped them in wonton wrappers (so time consuming when you wrap a hundred of them!) and then deep fried them. Meanwhile, the we made the apricot dipping sauce with apricot preserves, ginger, dry mustard, and red wine vinegar.

After everyone was done with their dishes, we made a banquet table filled with hors d'oeuvres.

And how great does Aliza look in (my) chef's coat?!

Tip of the day: When making small pancakes, or blinis, heat up the griddle and spray it with nonstick spray. Use a squeeze bottle as a way to keep the mess to a minimum, instead of dripping batter everywhere with a ladle. 

Just Beet it

This Monday was "Garde Manger" day. The Garde Manger in the kitchen is also known as The Pantry Chef, in charge of cold foods, elaborate buffets, salads and dressings, desserts, snacks, and most importantly, ice carvings.

We worked on preservation. A few techniques or tools in the kitchen can help with preservation, such as salting, jarring, curing, and pickling.

And beets. It was all about beets. Right beets are so good?

Pickling and preserving the beets is a tedious process, but I'm sure you know that I think it's worth it. First, we boiled the beets to soften them and make them easier to peel. We added vinegar, water, sugar, and salt to a pot with the beets and a bunch of onions, and got the mixture hot. Meanwhile, we had to sterilize the jars by floating them and the covers in boiling water, removing (carefully) with tongs and set them up on a wire rack over a sheet pan. We filled up hot jars with hot (delicious) beets, and then we had to process them. The time it takes to process the jars depends on the type of food and the altitude level. We placed the open jars of beets in a pot of boiling water and covered them for 30 minutes. Then we put the covers on but didn't screw them on tightly until the cap acted like a vacuum to seal it itself.

Finally, once we felt the cap get suctioned down, we were able to screw on the lid tightly. These jars can stay on your shelf for 10 years! It's amazing. And delicious. Did you know that I like beets?

Tip of the day: When working with vegetables which are difficult to peel with a peeler (like beets or potatoes) boil them first and the skin will just pop right off and make your life much easier. Also, when you work with beets, wear gloves. You'll thank me later.