Artisan Breads Week 2

Sorry about the late update....

This quarter is gonna be pretty intense, even with just two classes. There are reports to write, recipe cards to make, notes that need to be typed, plus my own at-home practicing/baking...

But anyway, here's the recap of Week 2 in Artisan Breads.

Day 1 is the preparation day for Day 2. We prepare the sourdough starters, old dough, and biga (an Italian pre-fermented dough) on Day 1, let it ferment overnight, then use it on Day 2. Day 1 generally involves making breads using the straight dough method.

Before we got started, Chef announced that he wanted everyone to make pizza for dinner tonight.

....Eh?? I thought.

He wanted us to practice making and tossing pizza dough--and I had to agree that, indeed, every baker ought to know how to toss a pizza dough.

One group volunteered to make a huge batch for the entire class. Upon finishing, Chef demonstrated the tossing...

Try to use the knuckles to stretch and toss them. Using the fingertips can poke holes through the dough and cause it to tear.

Chef spreading the tomato sauce on the dough. The pizza is built on the peel (the huge paddle thing), so it can be slid directly onto the oven floor. Unlike regular ovens, the deck ovens that we use do not have racks. They have solid floor (deck) on which food is placed directly to cook. Ours have stone floors that allows the same results as baking in stone hearth brick ovens--where the true artisan breads have been produced for centuries.

Sliced mozzarella being placed on the pizza. Now for the topping...

Each group got to choose their own topping. Since my entire group consists of veggie fans, we topped ours with eggplants, onions and fresh basil. Very refreshing and delicious! The deck floor definitely produced a thicker, crisper crust on the bottom--and has that distinctive, hearth-baked taste.

Now for our actual breads....

Whole wheat, Potato-Cheddar bread, and Onion Ring Loaves. The whole wheat turned out tasty, but a little dense. Potato-Cheddar baked very nicely, a little dense but great texture and flavor--but the shaping wasn't done properly and got all lopsided. The Onion Ring Loaves turned out perfect, very pretty, nice color, and great flavor.

On Day 2, we used the Sourdough Starter, the Old Dough, and the Biga to make San Francisco Sourdough Bread, Onion Walnut Bread, the Italian lean dough bread and French Country Loaf.

We were scrambling for time--baking four different kinds of breads in 5 hours is no small task. I didn't get the picture of our Italian bread; it was still in the oven. But we managed to get it out before the class ended, so that's good...

Our S.F. Sourdough turned out, again, a little dense and not much sourdough flavor either. But the sourdough starter need be kept alive and matured for a long time to develop its true flavor. Our lean dough and French country loaves turned out with great texture, but again, dense. Only our Onion Walnut loaf turned out beautifully, with nice, crispy crust and lots of flavor from the onion and nuts. Trust me, if the Chef instructor says, "Mmmmmm!!!!" upon the first bite, then it's a good bread. We sauteed the onions and toasted the nuts before incorporating them into the dough. Doing so sweetens and enhances their flavor, and removes that gross, astringent aftertaste from the raw nuts.

For our bread dish on Day 2, we made what I thought was called panzanella, a "bread salad" from Italy that uses toasted breads. We made croutons out of our focaccia, and tossed together tomatoes, romaine lettuce, diced mozzarella, and olives. Drizzled with olive oil and raspberry vinaigrette, and finished with salt and pepper--Chef loved it, saying it was very flavorful, delicious and good use of leftover bread. But he also explained that this isn't panzanella. Actual panzanella uses toasted bread chunks or slices in place of the lettuce. The breads are then topped with vegetables and dressing. So it's more like a mound of crostinis/bread chunks and vegetables, sans the leaves. Oops, I should've researched that a lot more :( But the flavor was great, and Chef actually finished the entire dish (which is rare). Must've been a refreshing change from all the breads he has to sample.

Sadly, Chef announced that he's moving to Houston to take up a position as an executive pastry chef at a prestigious hotel...so this was his last day. He was a great instructor...we'll all miss him.

Artisan Breads Week 1

School started up again! I only have two quarters left to go. If everything goes well, I'll be done around March of next year. This quarter, I have Artisan Bread and European Cakes & Tortes.

On Day 1 of Week 1, we made breads using the Sponge method. The sponge is a very wet, sticky yeast dough that is fermented before being incorporated into the actual bread dough.

Sponge starter for the Turkish Pide Bread. It's a mixture of water, yeast, and flour, fermented for about an hour or so. The sponge doesn't assist in leavening--it's used just for flavor.

Our finished product: the top ones are Soft Yeast Dinner Rolls and the bottom ones are the Turkish Pide Bread. I love this dinner roll recipe; so soft, sweet, delicious and not that hard to make either.
For Day 2, we made breads using the Straight Dough method (i.e. Mix everything together, let rise, punch down, shape, proof, and bake). We sort of concentrated on different shapes of breads this day. We made French Bread, and each group got to shape them differently.

Baguette and the famous epi rope. Sharp scissors are used to cut the piece to resemble an ear of wheat.

Tavatiere, the 'tobacco pouch'. Interesting shape for a bread...

Fougasse, meaning (I think) 'ring', from the rings formed here. Most of the pictures of fougasse that I've seen are flat breads shaped like a leaf or a tree.

The tricorner. I think the reason why there are so many different shapes for this particular bread is due to its lack of flavor. Made of only 4 ingredients (flour, water, yeast, and salt), the bread relies solely on its crust (formed during baking) for flavor. Hence, to add interesting to an otherwise flavorless and plain bread, maybe it was shaped in cool, pretty shapes...at least that's my theory.

My group shaped ours into a giant grape. It turned out so pretty that we didn't want to break it

apart. The hard, chewy crust on these breads were created by injecting steam into the oven the first few minutes of baking.

Focaccia, the Italian flatbread. We drenched the bread with olive oil (before and after baking)and sprinkled chopped rosemary and parmesan cheese. Very flavorful, but it turned out a little dense.

Potato herb rolls. The rosemary paired well with the potato flavor. These turned out nice and tender, although could've been a little saltier.

Each class, we make some sort of a dish using the breads we've made. We had the Pide bread (we ate all the dinner rolls...they were so good...), so we used that to make a basil-black garlic butter toast with sauteed eggplants and onions. It was flavorful, but needed more veggies...

So that was Week 1. We'll be making sourdough, old dough, and biga breads next week!

Gastronomical Exploration: Diva's Cupcakes

More flavors I haven't tried at Diva's! Lavender-Lemon and Red Velvet cupcakes. Red Velvet cupcake doesn't seem like such an unusual flavor...but the thing is, I've never had a store-bought Red Velvet cake before, at least not that I recall. I've baked one before, for a friend of mine. I layered it with vanilla cheesecake to make this Red Velvet cheesecake torte, drizzled the entire thing with chocolate ganache, and finished it with creamcheese frosting. Yes. It was delicious. And artery-clogging rich. The cake itself had this in-between vanilla and chocolate flavor; it definitely wasn't vanilla, but it wasn't quite chocolate either. I wasn't sure if that was how Red Velvet cakes were supposed to taste--and it was about time I found out.

The Red Velvet had the cake crumb and the Lavender-Lemon had a lemon-colored sanding sugar topping. Both added a nice little texture to the creamy frosting.

We tried the Lavender-Lemon first. The cream itself didn't taste too much like lavender, but the cake was really good--lemon with lavender blossoms incorporated into the cake. You get this taste of lavender every time you hit the lavender, and the surrounding lemon flavor of the cake rounds everything off. The cake had fine crumbs, moist but not soggy exactly like the vanilla cupcake I baked the other day--which my Mom claimed was "too crumbly". Sorry Mom, that means that the cake had been made correctly. Otherwise, the cake turns dense and tough, and can potentially be turned into a lethal weapon (i.e. the Chinese fighting muffin from Charlie's Angels). The buttercream was, as usual, very light and oh-so-smooth...but now I think that there maybe too much of it. Looking at the photo, it appears that the cake to frosting ratio is too much, probably around 1:0.7

Red Velvet. This one was fine-crumbed too, but a wee bit dry. It had indeed, that vanilla-chocolate hybrid flavor that mine had (except mine was way more moist). And the frosting didn't taste like creamcheese--it was probably just vanilla. And there was too much of it.

Overall, very good taste and great frosting. They just need to tone down on the amount of cream.

More Macarons!

Last week, I made this fruit cream pie for a competition at the local farmer's market. I didn't win...probably because the competition was on Sunday and I ended up skipping church. Indeed, the Sabbath must be kept holy.

To use up the egg whites leftover from the cream filling, I decided to make macarons for practice. I made pistachio macarons, since the last one I made didn't have a whole lot of pistachio flavor, so I increased the amount of ground pistachios a little. I wanted to keep everything natural, so I didn't add any green food color, but sprinkled finely chopped pistachios instead.

Macaron batter, piped, whacked, and resting. I need a bigger silpat...
The dimples on the batter kinda worried me. The sesame macarons I've made previously had the similar dimples and they turned out to be a disaster. But what else can I do besides just popping them in the oven and praying to God?
About halfway through baking, I took a peek through the oven window (please excuse the grime....)

Sweet! The 'feet' are starting to develop on some of them!

Fully developed feet. Looking good!

Removed from the oven and cooling on the rack. As they cool, the 'feet' tends to shrink.

Pistachio Macarons with Strawberry Buttercream filling.

I whipped up a strawberry (American) buttercream to fill these beauties. Although their feet got a little tiny, they still qualify as the perfect macaron, with smooth, eggshell-like dome (no bumps); the interior was a little too hollow to my liking, but it turned out soft and meringue-like. I'm thinking of using other methods to make these--instead of French meringue, maybe use Italian meringue method. What's interesting is that there are no recipes (at least I haven't found any) that utilizes Swiss meringue method. I wonder why?

Gastronomical Exploration: Carlucci's Bakery

So far, most of the pics I post here, I've already posted on my profile on Facebook. All those pics taken on my gastronomical adventures have made my friend want to come along with me. I was definitely excited to have someone just as passionate about food as I am to go with me to explore :)

We made plans to try Carlucci's Bakery, since she had never been there. I've been there before, but it's been years--but I remembered their pastries to be pretty decent.
We got there around 1pm. It was fairly busy, but the staff was courteous and smiling. I wanted to try their red velvet cake, but they didn't have any :( But there were plenty of other selections to choose from:

My friend got the Olive Oil Cake, Chocolate cupcake, and almond tart. The cake was dense and moist, like a financier, and "olive oil-y"(instead of buttery), same as the one we made in Advanced Desserts class. The almond tart was good, but didn't taste very almond-y. The chocolate cupcake was pretty good--they used good quality chocolate for the curls on the top, and the cake part itself had a good chocolatey flavor. The buttercream was also good, nice and smooth American buttercream. There might have been some cream cheese in it, but I wasn't sure. My friend liked the olive oil cake and the cupcake, but not the almond tart so much.

I got the rosemary cookie and mini fruit tart. I've made savory rosemary shortbread before, but I've never used rosemary in sweet baked goods (other than that strawberry-rosemary sorbet I made in class) so I was curious. It was pretty good, just like Mexican wedding cookie with rosemary in it. The cream in the fruit tart tasted good, but kinda buttery, almost like that buttery cream filling I encountered at Leslie's Pastry shop.

We split everything up, so we got a taste of everything. And they were so cheap, at around $0.95 each! After we sampled everything, we talked for perhaps an hour and a half, mostly about food. She told me about a sesame oil cake she had that was too greasy to be eaten alone--but it was perfect with the ice cream served with it; about this 'soy sauce' candy made only in Japan; how cakes at Chinese bakeries are light and fluffy, but without substance and somewhat dry (I think so too!); and how I should open a macaron boutique in Salt Lake City.

This was so much fun! I can't wait to go on another exploration!

Gastronomical Exploration: Carol's Pastry Shop

The only way I would've found this place was through the web. It came up in the list of bakeries and pastry shops in Salt Lake on Google. I thought the address to be strange...it wasn't on a major street of any sorts, almost like in the middle of an obscure neighborhood. But it wasn't far away, so I made a trip to go there.

Indeed, it was in the middle of an obscure residential area.

I passed by it several times before I finally located it. It was in the middle of an alleyway, behind a residential house. There was a delivery truck parked right in front of the entrance. You can see the door almost obstructed from view....

With only a very simple sign that says, "Carol's Pastry Shop", this was very easy to miss.
Now a little skeptical, I opened the entrance....only to be blasted by the sweet smell of vanilla and baked goods. There goes my skepticism.

Inside was more like a factory. The "storefront" consisted of a wall decorated with old newspaper articles about this place and antique trinkets (the only part of the store that was decorated at all) and a very small display case, filled with simple, basic pastries: cookies, brownies, cupcakes, napoleons, eclairs, etc.

The frame next to the painting says, "Give us this day, our daily bread." (I wonder if they're Christians...??) This place just had this warm, inviting feeling and I couldn't help but smile. :)

The other display case had whole pies and cakes. Right next to that....was the biggest oven I've ever seen.

There was an elderly gentleman with a hunched back spreading what looked like chocolate fudge into a sheet pan (turned out to be brownies). He carried the tray over to the oven and placed it on the rack.
Dazzled by the whole scenery, I asked for a tour of their "factory", after purchasing a cream puff, a napoleon, and a chocolate cupcake. They were very kind and showed me around. The racks in the giant oven were rotating like a ferris-wheel. The oven was set at 350F. They said it surprisingly doesn't take too long to preheat the oven.
Then I spotted a machine that looked like a blender with a metal spout. Turned out it was a machine for piping cream into eclairs. A guy there did a demo for me and filled an eclair and smeared it with chocolate glaze. He then said, "Here you can have this one" and gave me the freshly filled eclair!
I thanked them for the eclair and the tour. These people definitely won me over.

Back at home....I now had four pastries to sample. I decided to have the eclair and the cream puff for lunch, and the napoleon and the cupcake for dinner.

These turned out to be the best choux pastries I've ever had in Salt Lake. It was buttery and tender...and almost flaky. The cream inside the cream puff was, unfortunately, probably the canned stuff, and the raspberry filling wasn't made from scratch. The cream in the eclair was a regular vanilla pastry cream, (they actually said they use the mix) but good flavor for what it is. I still wonder about Leslie's strangely buttery eclair cream filling. Overall, pretty good.

Now the cupcake on the other hand...quite dry. The frosting was smooth, and the flavor was your average chocolate cupcake. I don't know if this was an overbaked batch or it simply sat on the display case too long. I'll try it again just to verify.

The napoleon was very good! It was filled with whipped cream on the upper layer, with pastry cream and raspberry on the bottom. I like this one a whole lot better than Leslie's (which had been filled with the same, strangely buttery cream as their eclairs).

I'm so glad to have found this little gem. This was a great experience, in this day and age when the Mom-&-Pop shops like this one are quickly disappearing. And the best part? The pastries are $0.80 each. :)

Gastronomical Exploration: Creme de Bakery

A second post for the day! Since classes start next week, I figured I should keep up on my blogging before my life gets too hectic.

Creme de Bakery

The last time I came here was back in January. We had gotten their green tea and chestnut mousse cakes--I remember them being sweet but bland, airy and light but strangely like a Nerf ball. Granted, we got there towards the evening, so the cakes may not have been fresh as they should've been. Even then, I didn't think I would go back there.
This week, as I browsed through the web looking for various pastry shops to visit in Salt Lake, I checked out the reviews of this bakery. "What did other customers think of this place?" I wondered. I was surprised to see that it had really good reviews. Everyone was saying how the bread is so soft and fresh, how their sandwiches are delicious, etc. Maybe they improved since January, I thought. So curiosity got the best of me, and I went there for the second time.

I came a little before noon/lunch, so there was a pretty good variety. They had Pork buns, Coconut Buns, Mung Bean buns, Cream buns, and an assortment of their mousse cakes.

I had a hard time deciding which one to get, but I chose this one--Blueberry Cream Cheese Mousse Cake. Blueberries are in season, so if they're using fresh ones, then this cake should be blueberry-licious. Since the other reviewers were raving about the breads here, I also got their Cream Bun.

Now, when an item has the word "Cream" in its name, then it should have cream in it. This? That filling just barely peeking out of the slit in the bun was actually sweetened whipped butter. Technically butter is a cream, but the name is misleading.
And I didn't notice this when the lady/owner packaged the cake for me, but....

...Whoa. She squished the cake into the container! Remeber how the white chocolate decoration was sitting prettily on top of the swirled cream? Now it's embedded. They need to either get larger containers or make smaller cakes.

Welllllll lets see if they've changed since the last time I was there.... I took a bite.
...............meh. They haven't changed. It was the same, Nerf-ball sponge cake with a borderline rubbery mousse. And the flavor? The blueberries aren't fresh. They might have been either dried or frozen. The mousse had a mild blueberry flavor, but cream cheese flavor at all. What bugged me the most was the texture. The cake was the same, nice and airy--yet dry. It lacked the moisture that the usual tortes have. And then, just on a whim, I took a small portion of the cake and dropped it on the plate. It BOUNCED. Seriously. Normally mousse cakes won't stand such abuse, but this one tolerated it well for a cake.
Maybe mousse cakes in China are supposed to be like this; I've never been to China or to Chinatown and had their Chinese-style European cakes. Either way, I doubt I'll come back here for their cakes. Maybe for their breads.

Gastronomical Exploration: Leslie's French Pastries

Around the same neighborhood as Normandie Cafe--as a matter of fact, on the same street, just a mile or two apart--is an old, been-there-for-the-last-fifty-years pastry shop. My parents and I have often passed by Leslie's French Pastry Shop, vowing to someday try their pastries.

So, as part of my pastry shop-hopping, I paid them a visit....

Inside was very modest, 'mom-and-pop' bakery shop, nothing gawdy which I appreciated--definitely NOT like Mrs. Backer's. They had a decent variety of pastries and baked goods, from the usual cookies/brownies to the fancy wedding cakes on display. I got the eclair and the napoelon topped with marzipan--which is unusual in Salt Lake. This is perhaps the only place that tops their napoleons with marzipan; all the other places simply dust them with powdered sugar or use sugar glaze.

Very cute, pink marzipan. It was the usual marzipan, sweet, but not cloyingly so, The puff pastry it was pretty standard. As for the cream...there was something about it that I can't quite figure out...it was unusually buttery for a pastry cream. I wonder if they whipped butter into the pastry cream??

Cross-section of the eclairs. Again, pretty standard--and again, the cream was the same one used in the napoleon. Too buttery to be pastry cream, but not quite straight butter either.

I may have to try this place again, this time with my mother, to get a second opinion.

Gastronomical Exploration: Mini's Cupcakes

Yet another cupcake place! I've heard a lot of good things about Mini's Cupcakes...that and my friend works at one of their shops.

The display of cupcakes. I came here in the morning--but I would imagine that towards the evening, the sun would be striking them. Do they have to move this entire thing towards the back to prevent a meltdown?

They had an impressive array of flavor varieties. There were S'mores, Key Lime Pie, Tiramisu, Peanutbutter-Chocolate, Cookies&Cream...

The cashier was very friendly and nice--it was funny how he confessed that he had made a mistake and added lemon zest instead of lime zest to the cupcakes, so it's actually Lemon pie with lime curd filling. I assured him that is not a problem, and if it tastes good, then it's not a mistake.

So I picked his "mistake", the Lemon-Lime Meringue Pie. Then he spotted a 'reject' Tiramisu cupcake (frosting was very lopsided) and gave that to me for free as a sample :)

On the way home, the already lopsided cupcake got even more disheveled, as the warm temperature caused the frosting to slide off. The cashier said that the Tiramisu cupcake is vanilla cupcake soaked in coffee syrup, with coffee frosting. I could definitely see the coffee granules in the frosting...which was yet another American buttercream, which was borderline too sweet and gritty (from the sugar, not the coffee). The flavor was good, although it had a strange aftertaste. I'm glad I got this one for free; I doubt I would get this one again considering the price (yes, their cupcakes are pretty pricey, but they use quality ingredients).

The Lemon-Lime Meringue. The curd filling was very good, not too tart, not too sweet. The meringue on top nice and fluffy. Both cakes were moist and flavorful, but a little tough and dense.

Overall, this is a good cupcake shop--but I'm not sure if I'm willing to pay the $2 for this mini-size...