Well, after the successful completion of my introductory baking class at GBC I decided that baking would be yet another hobby that I would actively pursue provided there’s enough time and energy to do so. I spent a lot of time looking at the offerings and tried to figure out how each one could fit into my already hectic schedule. Eventually, due to the fact that I seemed to have more events/parties/invitations landing on Saturday afternoons/evenings I decided to take a class scheduled for Sunday afternoon. Between the cookie class and the bread class I opted for the bread one thinking that I might be more likely to meet someone from my old class. Upon arrival…nope: I didn’t know anyone. Actually there was one person there that knows me from Markham RR. Small world, eh? I haven’t coached her (yet) but at some point I gave a talk to her clinic regarding race day preparation. In any case, in the class I ended up with a totally brand new partner and after a slight rough start we were successful with the execution.
Pretty cool, eh? I got to take home half of this. Almost looks pro. There’s something about doing it there in class that I have trouble replicating at home. No, I don’t think I’m imagining it. Perhaps it comes from having a partner there who’s able to act as a second pair of eyes to verify everything. I don’t know. When I try to execute these recipes at home I end up bungling something a good percent of the time. Last night out of boredom (as it often happens) I tried to repeat what I did on Sunday. I didn’t want to do the whole thing so I cut the ingredient weights in half. I had to do a bit of extra work with regards to the yeast. In class we use fresh yeast, but here at home I have the active dry stuff. The teacher said that the conversion was that I’d only need about half of the active dry yeast to replace fresh yeast. Well, all right then. So, I took the weight in the booklet and cut that in half. As things were mixing I added more water to get things going. I really must have added too much. The resulting dough wasn’t all that tough. It was quite soft and sticky. I could have added more flour to balance things out, but I chose to just work with it. Heh. Well, after proofing and baking the resulting loaves were sort of flat. When I ate them they tasted a little odd. The crust wasn’t quite so good. Nope, not a good result at all. I had to analyze my moves to figure out what went wrong. Well, just like the last time I had to do an ingredient conversion prior to cutting the amount in half, I forgot cut the amount of yeast I needed in half. Yeah, and the wet dough made things hard to handle. Eeeeeeeeeeh. I know I can do better. Thing is, I’m now stuck with a lot of average bread. I’m sure I can do something with it like make an awesome bread pudding. All the same…bah! I know that if I want to get better I have to practice, so I don’t mind. In any case, this is something I enjoy. The next few weeks are going to be some tasty ones.
This post is kind of meant to give a little bit of insight as to what it’s like in baking class. In today’s baking class we tackled a recipe for soft rolls. Putting it together was fairly simple. There wasn’t anything terribly out of the ordinary in the ingredient list. We got to use the big mixing machines with the big dough hooks to bring it all together. After forming a big ball of dough we covered it in plastic and covered that with a big bowl to let it rise. From there we all gathered back to the front of the class to watch chef demonstrate how to knot the bread. He was very deft in tying the dough. For some of the knots he did it so fast that it was almost a case of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speeds.
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