Class 11/05/09 - Midterm

Twas a good day in class. We had our midterm and it went quite swimmingly. I'm glad I put in the bit of practice this week. As stated previously, we had three recipes to make - country biscuits which was done individually, and then blueberry muffins and soft yeast dinner rolls as a group. I ended the night with a perfect score on the practical so I must say I'm content.


Everything looked really nice. You can't tell from the picture, but the muffins turned out better than I've ever made them before (they got a bit damaged in transport, I should have just taken the picture in class).

We did some more stuff in class as well. We made up some sweet tart dough which we refrigerated for Friday and Saturday. It's basically pie dough only it's full of sugar (hence sweet) and fully incorporated rather than being flaky or mealy like pie dough is. Nothing to really see, hence no pictures. Wait for the finished tarts.

We're also going to be doing some bread production in class tomorrow, so that calls for a lot of dough. We made two starters for tomorrow. One other group did a sourdough, a very dense dough that I didn't take a picture of-I'll try to get one tomorrow before it's portioned. My group made a poolish for levain baguettes. A poolish is half the flour, the water, and the yeast mixed and let to sit and rise and develop flavor. The rest is added tomorrow. It was quite a recipe, 11.25 pounds flour, 10 pounds (1.25 gallons) water and 3.5 ounces of yeast. And more is going into it tomorrow. It's gonna really grow tonight though. When we first mixed it together it was about 2/3 full in the round container. By the end of class, about an hours time, the container was already full and it had to be split into a second. Sounds like tomorrow is going to be fun, and I'm gonna get a lot of free bread. I already made off with a lot of free food tonight so I'm happy (though my diet is like 90% carbs right now, I'll need some variation when I run through all this stuff).