Fun with Flour

I've always been told that cooks and bakers are two different species. Cooking on the line is fast-paced and, obviously, hot. It requires improvisation and experienced cooks take pride in never measuring ingredients. In the bakeshop, on the other hand, everything is precisely measured: volume measures like cups and teaspoons won't even do; in Intro to Baking & Pastry, all of our ingredients must be scaled by weight. And baked goods aren't nearly as forgiving as savory dishes. If you screw up a cake batter, you may not even know it until the cake comes out of the oven totally ruined. Though this all sounds stressful, Chef D.'s bakeshop is nice and cool and feels less frenetic than the cuisine kitchens I've been in so far.

This rotation was one of my most anticipated. I love bread and dessert and the smells wafting from the bakeshop were always so enticing as I sweated over sauce pans in Skills 2. My previous baking experience is pretty limited: I make the occasional batch of from-scratch cupcakes and am a pro when it comes to boxed No Pudge brownies. But I figured that my type-A personality might prove to be well-suited to baking--I like the idea of having everything measured just so and following a formula (recipes in the bakeshop are called formulas, because they're all based on ratios). I'm still not sure where I fall in the cooking vs. baking divide, but it's only Day 3, so we'll see how these next three weeks play out.

My group already had our first dough mishap, which gave us a hands-on example of why it's so important to scale everything precisely. On Day 1, we made danish dough, and when we rolled it out yesterday after letting it rest overnight, it was way too moist and sticky. Somehow, we'd gotten the proportions a little bit off. So when we tried to laminate the dough--this is when you fold in copious amounts of butter--it didn't work out too well. The chefs helped us to get it to a decent state, but delicate even layers of dough and butter definitely didn't happen. Still, we were able to salvage the botched dough and make several kinds of danishes from it: sticky buns, "snails", pinwheels, etc. They just didn't puff up quite as perfectly as the ones Chef demoed with the danish dough he'd made himself.

Chef D., a hilarious guy with a strong New Jersey accent and a serious passion for baking, is our lead instructor. His assistant, Chef H., is a former musician who graduated from Julliard. They seem like a great team so far, and hearing Northern accents makes me feel at home. They've been especially great about mistakes, stressing that in the bakeshop that's the only way to learn.

Though the danish experience was frustrating, I haven't lost all confidence in making dough because the baguettes that we made yesterday were awesome. I couldn't believe how beautifully they turned out on our first try. Soft on the inside with a gorgeous, crisp, golden brown crust. Fortunately, we get to make them again next week and then again for our practical, so there will be pictures to come.

For now, here are the hundreds of danishes that our class produced. Once ours were baked, filled, glazed, and iced, the dough crisis was pretty much forgotten.