Biscuits & Muffins

Orange-cherry muffins

These things are difficult. They seem easy, but getting a muffin to burst with flavor and be really interesting and  worth eating is not as easy as it might seem.

My baking class starts with breads, then moves on to croissants, then puff pastry, then I forgot what but saves muffins for near the end of the half-semester. That doesn't stop me from playing with them, especially when my wife says she'd really like a muffin or two.

There's still more work to be done with these. Maybe some brown sugar mixed in, maybe pre-soak the dried cherries in Kirschwasser... Maybe cut back on the orange zest? Hopefully I'll have them figured out by the time I have to master them for class.

Bread!

 braided loaf before egg wash & seeds

 

 braided loaf after baking

 olive bread, herbed focaccia, epi baguette (behind)

 potato bread with a subtle hint of rosemary

sourdough, with a few "accompagnements"

We now turn to transforming yeast, water, flour and salt into delicious bread. Unlike with people, the best bread is agitated bread. This develops the protein (gluten) that gives it structure. You don't have to stop at these three ingredients, of course. We made olive bread, herbed focaccia with olive oil, potato-rosemary bread and a seeded braided bread.

Braiding bread is interesting. You create four 12" tubes of dough, then start braiding at the middle, chanting the mantra, "Four over three! Two over three! One under two!". This corresponds to the order of the tubes facing you, and repeats until there's nothing left to braid. Then, you flip the loaf (which now looks like a deranged octopus) and finish with the other side.

We also made braided dinner rolls. Same kind of thing, starting with a tube of dough. It's formed into a shape like a "6". The top of the "6" then goes through the hole, the hole's loop gets twisted and the top of the "6" gets threaded back through the remaining hole. These would have been interesting to see, but somehow we forgot them in the refrigerator and never baked them. They're now frozen, awaiting some better use in the future.

Since my home oven is dead, I brought some sourdough that I'd been working on, proofed and baked it at school. Only three people asked for a taste, strangely enough.

That's it for bread in this class. Now we move on to laminated dough, used for making croissants and danishes when it's yeasted and puff pastry when it's not.

Amazon dot Com? NEVER AGAIN!

 Arrrr! Shiver me textbooks!

When the delivery man drove up today, I thought to myself, "Yay! The last of my textbooks has arrived, four days after I ordered it with two day priority shipping.".

I checked the envelope. Correct address, correct name, correct book title. I opened the package. Correct book title on the "In this shipment" form.
Then I looked at the book. Crocheting. Crocheting? My book is about food and wine pairings! Fashion classes are next door!

So, there must be a way to resolve this, since it probably happens from time to time. Amazon will do what's necessary to make everything good. They'll give me a return shipping label to return the wrong book and immediately ship the right book via two day shipping (or even overnight to prove they care). Right?

Wrong! Here's the deal:

1. They give a return number, and e-mail a bar coded document to print out for the return.

2. The book travels via regular (slow) UPS shipping.

3. The wrong book arrives in Kentucky.

4. It gets processed or something. Entries are made. Numbers travel through computers.

5. They find the right book. Or they find the wrong book again, and ship whatever it is via regular (slow) rate. Maybe I'll get something like U.S. Civil War Relic Counterfeiting for Europeans.

6. Four to six weeks later, if all goes well, I might possibly have the book that I ordered long ago with two day shipping. In other words, after I've flunked several tests because the book never arrived, I'll finally be able to study.

7. The supervisor confirmed that there is no way they would find the correct book and ship it with two day priority shipping so that their error would be corrected and I would have my book. The best they could do was a refund, which takes 36 hours to appear. Or ten days. Or whatever. Unless it doesn't.

Considering the futile nature of any resistance, I asked for a refund. Although billing instantly sucks money out of my account, refunds are different:
"Refunds typically complete within 10 business days and appear as a credit on your statement."
Pay special attention to the word, "typically". The book people order probably "typically" arrives as it should, too. But when it doesn't?

So, fellow students, unless you have seven weeks advance before your class and like dealing with companies who take no responsibility for their errors, I would council you to avoid Amazon.com like a salmonella, trichinosis and mold infested porkburger! If for some reason you find yourself in a similar situation, please don't come crying to me. And especially don't go crying to Amazon!

I think the Amazon in the picture is an accurate depiction of their current attitude towards fixing snafus. Do you think this person would help you? No? Me, neither!

Grease + Heat = dead oven

Grease. Heat. Electronics. Plastic. These are things that go together like beef liver, chocolate, anchovies and Vegemite. That doesn't stop people from using these things in ovens. So, it looks like every eight years or so, our oven will no longer accept input. The keypad is plastic, brilliantly located right above the oven's exhaust vent where it can enjoy maximum exposure to everything that will shorten its lifespan.

So, sometime next week, a repair person will arrive with a shiny new touch pad and hopefully all will be well again. At least for another eight years. Unless we don't use the oven. Ever. Not even for proofing bread. Maybe for storing dishes... no heat.

Your mission: become a baker

 Are you worthy?

Baking is scary. You don't use recipes; you have formulas. It's not "a dash of this..." it's 38 grams. There's no seat of the pants stuff in baking. This is science. Chemistry. Crystalline precision with no room for error.

There are things considered baking that I love: puff pastry, croissant dough, breads. Then there are the other things that I've never liked, even when I was a wee bairn. Cakes. Sugary things with no mouthfeel, no oomph, not enough chocolate or fruit or whatever. Cakes in the USA, or at least California, bore me because they seem to be not much more than sugar held in a flour matrix with more sugar on top. This is not the case in France, but the norm here seems to be a dessert desert comprised of drifting dunes of pure sugar. At least as far as most cakes I've tried here. Now, I'll be the creator. Making these things, responsible for their quality, interest and beauty. The question is, can I do better than the typical supermarket slab of sweetness and rise into the heights of wonderful European desserts?

All baking experiments will be scrutinized in minute detail, subject to professional review. Making things I may not even enjoy eating, sugary, puffy concoctions that are usually just a substrate for some ceremonial decoration. Things that often have more chemicals than your local refinery, glowing with all the colors of an unnatural rainbow. So, from sustainable cooking and wholesome, natural ingredients I pass to the dark side of numbered food coloring agents, massive amounts of sugar, and about the same nutritional content as your favorite free newspaper.

Hopefully, when I emerge in March at the other end of the tunnel, I will know how to make really wonderful bread that puts the stuff in the markets to shame. Big ears, wonderful crumb, light, crackling crust, subtle and complex flavor. But will I have managed to create a cake that I really enjoy eating?