Class 10/16/09 - More Yeast Dough

Day 2 of yeast doughs. A difficulty that I'm quickly learning with baking bread is timing. The baking of bread is a very long procedure. Dough has to be prepped, usually 10-15 minutes. Next is fermentation. Depending on the dough it can be 45 minutes to 3 hours. And we have a 4.5 hour class. For long doughs we just prepare them and then do them the next day I think. If you leave dough to ferment in a refrigerator, the fermentation process will be slow, but that extended time enhances the flavor of the bread. But then after fermenting, you punch it down, and then need to let it rest another 5-10 min to relax the gluten. Then you portion and shape the dough. Then you gotta proof the dough, let it rise again, so that takes from 15-45 min. Then you can finally bake it. Small things like rolls can take 10 minutes, but big loaves can take an hour. Then finally it's done and it has to cool a while. It's difficult to time everything well when you're making several recipes in a short time frame. Though I'm gonna blame it on the fact that these past two days we've been short a team member so it's only been two of us. Anyways, onwards.

First bread we made today was focaccia. I remember buying mix for it back when I lived in Connecticut (and back when I was fat) and I loved it. I think our product turned out pretty well. At least it certainly looks good. I haven't tried it yet but I haven't heard good things. I guess the recipe that we used was pretty bad-it has you incorporated finely diced onion into the dough. On top, maybe. But in the dough, I don't think it worked very well. The chef said we may make it again without it. I'll still have it though, I don't waste food if there's nothing really wrong with it. Mine is the left half, with lotsa herbs. I plan to make a pizza out of it, just top it with some sauce, a little cheese, and vegetables.

Digression: One thing that really bummed me out when I moved here was that there are no pizza places nearby. I'd need a car or would have to walk like 15 minutes, which I don't mind, but it isn't really practical to carry a pizza that far-I wouldn't eat out since I eat so little, I make several meals of one pizza. A month ago or so my desire for pizza almost made me cave in and try Domino's, which there is one close to my apartment. Luckily I resisted and tried making my own. I got a recipe for pizza dough back in Skills. I don't have a pizza pan or a stone, so I tried to make it in a rectangular baking pan. I had kinda too much dough for the size of the pan but didn't wanna waste it so I just made it really thick. And I was extremely surprised with the outcome. It wasn't excellent, but it was very good. I scaled back the recipe and made it a second time recently and was quite nice. I hope that the focaccia will be similar (but much better). End digression.

Next was soft yeast dinner rolls. It was a rather simple and straightforward recipe. I think our dough was a little overmixed however. Plus with time constraints they didn't rise all that great. To top it off, they were cooked a tad too long. You can see how brown they are. However after tasting, I was rather content with them. Despite being so dark, they aren't burnt. The inside is fine. They have a crust to them so they aren't the soft dinner rolls that they should have been, but they're still decent.

Finally was our light rye bread. This was made with the sponge I talked about yesterday. Here's a pic since I forgot it before. Look at all that fermenty goodness. In preparation, we added a little too much flour to the sponge, however. It got a little too tough. Thus it didn't rise as well as it should have. Still, the final product turned out pretty well. It's a rye so it should be dense, just maybe not quite that dense. I haven't tasted it but I hope it's okay.

I also learned that you don't put plastic proofing forms in an oven. Ya know, cuz they're plastic. The loaf goes in a metal pan after proofing.

i r smrt.