Various Baked Goods

My post-vacation plan to get back to healthy eating has been seriously challenged by all of the delicious carbs we've been baking up in class. I'm amazed by how much we've covered in just over a week: baguettes, danishes, croissants, brioche, bagels, challah, and more. The dessert side of baking--think cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, cream puffs--is still to come. Oy.

I'm proud to say that I now know how to make two delicious breads that date back to my Jewish ancestors. How gorgeous are those bagels? We learned the importance of quickly boiling them before baking--about 1 minute in boiling water on each side--to achieve that crispy, caramelized exterior and chewy texture inside. Today, we tackled challah. Chef showed us how to do different braids, and I got ambitious and went for the six-strand version. Here's how it turned out, pre-baking:


The ends here look a little questionable, but Chef assured me that it would bake up beautifully. Here are our finished products:

How'd they taste? Let's just say it was really hard to limit myself to just a little piece. But challah is health food compared to the laminated doughs we've been working with. We started with danishes and moved on to croissants and then puff pastry. Each recipe calls for more butter than the next. The amount of butter in the puff pastry dough we made today was nothing short of alarming:

See that block in the middle of the dough? That's straight-up butter, 2 pounds, mixed with just a little bit of flour. The dough is wrapped around it like a present and then rolled out several times to create the puff pastry's hundreds of flaky layers.

The wrapped butter pocket:

Now the dough is rolled out and resting overnight in the cooler; we'll bake all kinds of puff pastry treats tomorrow. I'll try to put that block-of-butter image out of my mind when I taste one. Another rich dough that we learned last week was brioche. Brioche is delicious in any form--it makes amazing hamburger buns (they use them at Flip, a new burger joint in Atlanta that I checked out recently), bread pudding, French toast. Now I know why it's so good. You guessed it...butter!

Some of the goods we made with the rich, eggy brioche dough, clockwise from left: galette with pastry cream and cherries, brioche loaf (reminded me of the Parker House rolls at DC's CityZen, perhaps my favorite bread of all time), brioche a tete, and pain au chocolat (made with croissant dough, not brioche).