Baking with the Bread Whisperers of Paris
saveur.com
saveur.com
A few sporadic notes from the experience:
- Good bread is less about secret ingredients and more about process.
- Milling flour on site was how we made moist loaves with little to no added oil. The natural oils in the wheat go rancid quickly after the wheat is milled. Similarly, nutrient levels tank.
- Bakery hours are awful. In order to have fresh loaves for the day, the sponge person is up before 3am mixing everything for the first rise.
- Breadmaking is an art. Ingredient proportions are more like guidelines and the actual amount of flour/water/etc can vary wildly with the weather/climate.
- Random skill acquisition: I can "dual-wield" loaves of bread on the kneading table (aka knead two loaves at the same time for higher throughput). Also I can roll rolls. Which is harder than you'd think.
Zero regrets with the experience. A few days ago I realized we forgot to buy buns for the pulled pork sandwiches we were making and I was able to look up a recipe and make my own from scratch. The pulled pork was good, but people flipped out about how fantastic the buns were.
Edit: Anyone interested in learning to cook, Americas Test Kitchen Cooking School (And also Cooks Illustrated Cooking Science and Science of Good Cooking) would probably be good for much of HN's audience. It is much more of a cooking "textbook" than most cookbooks. It explains what you are doing and why you do it instead of just a big list of recipes. There is also Modernist Cuisine but those are really pricey.
For general cooking, I will also recommend La Technique [2], its short and digestible (puns always intended) increments of learning that, while old, are fundamental and classic.
If you can work through La Technique and something like Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking [3] (Which is great, but, very dense) you could move on to (and invest in -- they really are expensive) Modernist Cuisine [4], for which I think you need a good basic education on the fundamental building blocks of cooking.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F8H0FNW
[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812906101
We've got copies here in the Seattle system.
I've been looking for stuff like this after reading "Cooking Comics" (by Lauren Thompson (Author) and Tsukuru Anderson (Illustrator)). It's a graphic novel/comic book but what's nice about it (beyond being aimed at beginners) is that they have this nice, systematic approach.
Start with stock, talk about why it's important and how it's done, move on to soups, demonstrate two types of soups, etc, etc. Each one has a simple recipe (and the ones I used worked well)
After reading it I'm totally jazzed about a 'cooking school textbook' sort of approach :)
I'm ordering the Cooking School book as we speak. I'm currently trying to teach the bf how to cook and this seems like the perfect tool to go through.
Another recommendation I'd make for improvisational cooks/bakers is The Flavor Bible. It's great for "what do I do with these random ingredients in the fridge"?
Bakery hours were a mixed blessing, the wonderful smell of fresh baked bread needs no introduction, but in the summer when I left my windows open at night the smell alone would wake me far too early — not really complaining, the towns other dominant odours are from a brewery and a sugar beet processing plant.
(Amusingly people liked his bread so much that there were always queues outside the bakery in the morning. In the Soviet Union they printed photos of this in the newspaper to show that even in the West there were bread queues, so all the claims of a better life there must be propaganda.)
The article also mentions Guy Savoy: his restaurant has three stars which is presumably why he is name-dropped. What they should have mentioned is that when you eat there, not only does the sommelier pair wine with your course, but a bread "sommelier" comes by with a special cart and recommends specific breads for each course as well.
Poilâne's shop in the 7th retains a lot of anachronisms: walk in and everybody greets each other, and the ladies behind the counter liked to hand little treats to my son when he was small.
It's an overstatement, it's totally thinkable (and in fact people often don't eat any bread depending on the kind of meal).
This had the curious result that when I was in Carmel-By-The-Sea a few weeks ago, I went in to what was ostensibly called a "bakery" and tried to buy a baguette, only to be told that they only sold pastries and cookies and didn't make bread at all. I was extraordinarily put out by this.
This is something that is a balance for any bakery - front end and back end operations; I have yet to find someplace that didn't do both.
I dunno how much that distinction still holds in modern France in the era of the supermarket, of course. But it wouldn't be surprising to a see an upmarket French-inspired U.S. bakery using it as a way to signal authenticity.
I remember that I let it rise 3 times and punched it down and re-kneaded (not just the stretch-and-fold), separated by maybe 45 minutes each time.
I seem to recall that I used King Arthur brand flour (no GMO's) and used bread flour with a smaller amount of thoroughly mixed in whole wheat flour.
Using the oven, I pre-heated to 375F and used a spray bottle to mist water onto all sides of the oven. Another suggestion of putting a cup of water into a cast iron skillet placed on the bottom rung of the oven, would probably work also. The purpose is not to dry out the crust so much that it becomes uncomfortably hard.
http://www.tastebook.com/blog/recipes/2699447-Pain-l-Ancienn...
AMD E-350 laptop from 2011 loads fine. Something is terribly wrong with your computer or your config.