This week’s class about Rich Doughs was continuation of last week’s class all about Lean Doughs; we revisited a lot of the same techniques that were introduced last week. Yeast and gluten are still our friends so many recipes featured today called for an initial ‘proving’ of the yeast to ensure that it would provide the rising action for our breads. Additionally, many of the recipes also called for lengthy kneading periods (done by hand, as opposed to using a kitchenaid) in order to ensure proper gluten development in our breads. The main difference this week would be in the actual composition of our doughs. Lean doughs generally contain very little added fat or enrichment while the rich doughs we covered this week often feature copious amounts of butter and sugar and other good things. Because of all of that added fat and sugar, the breads that we made this week were texturally very different than the ones we made last week. As we discussed back in week 3 when we made pate brisee (pie crust), fat in dough helps to ensure a final product that is tender and less ‘chewy’ than the breads that we prepared last week.
In addition to fat’s role, we also discussed the other raw materials required for bread making. Sugar also plays a role in helping to ensure tenderness in our baked goods. As sugar is hygroscopic* (meaning that it attracts water) it helps to pull moisture away from the flour, which inhibits gluten production to a certain degree. With our rich doughs, we do want gluten to provide structure, but we don’t want as much elasticity in our final product. The goal is to have a bread with a tender ‘crumb’ construction, something provided through the addition of fat and sugar. Sugar is also there to help feed the yeast. Even though we all made sweet breads today, I believe that everyone added small amounts of salt to their dough. This is done to help strengthen the bread and also to help keep the rising activity of the yeast in check (we don’t want our breads to rise too much, or else they’d become structurally unsound). Eggs are added to help enrich the dough and to provide color. Last but not least, we have flour, the cornerstone of any bread recipe.
*yes, hygro-, not hydroscopic. Look it up. I’ve keep wanting to say hyrdoscopic but a few Google searches reveal the word to actually be hygroscopic.
We talked in depth about flour, beginning with a discussion of the different types of grain that can be made into flour; corn, rye, oats, rice, and buckwheat to name a few. Most importantly, bread making relies on wheat. Wheat is important because for all intents and purposes, it is the only grain where gluten development is possible. Without it, breads would have no structure. Even something like cornbread typically calls for some all-purpose flour to provide structure to the final product as there can be no gluten development with corn flour. Grain can be broken up into three parts; bran, germ, endosperm. Bran is the outer layer and when making white flour, it must be removed. It represents about 15% of the total weight and is high in fiber. Next is the germ, which is the embryo of a future plant, thus it is the source of most of the fat and nutrients found in grain. This represents about 3% of the total weight. The endosperm makes up the remaining 82% and this is what gets ground into flour. Most of the good things in flour come from the first two parts (the high fat content in germ necessitates it’s removal or else it can go rancid and bran can be tricky to work with) so most flours are often chemically enriched to add back a lot of the vitamins and minerals that were removed with the bran and germ. Most flours must be aged 2-3 months before they become viable for baking. For the impatient manufacturer that doesn’t want tons of flour sitting around, bleaching (for whatever reason) accomplishes the same thing as aging. If this bothers you, buy unbleached flour.
We also learned that there are different types of white flours, with the main differences coming from the protein content. High gluten flour is any flour that is at least 16% protein. Bread flour is usually between 14-16% protein, all-purpose flour is about 10.5%, pastry flour is about 8.5% and cake flour is 7.5%. Chef D pointed out that the home chef need not purchase the more ‘specialty’ types of flour, like cake flour. If you take 1 cup of all purpose flour, remove 2 tbps of it and replace that with 2 tbsp of corn starch, you basically have cake flour. Also as a side note, unless it specifically says otherwise, your recipe calls for all purpose flour. There was a lot more covered in class, but I can tell that you’re ready to see some handsome baked goods, so without further ado, I present to you….streusels!
I made these bad boys today…one had a raspberry/cream cheese filling, the other had a pear/cream cheese filling. Ok, so someone else made the pear filling, but for the most part, I did everything else. My dough was enriched with butter, dry milk, sugar, and eggs. After I mixed all of the ingredients together, my dough required about 10 min of kneading, which is a technique that I am still struggling with. I just can’t seem to get it right. This week I was manhandling my dough a bit too much and tearing the gluten strands, which is bad. Chef D smoothed things out for me and saved the day. Here’s what the inside of the raspberry/cream cheese filled streusel looked like:
The dough needed about an hour to rise (it was ‘punched down’ once during this process) before shaping and filling. After it was shaped and filled, it proofed until it had almost doubled in volume. Right after this proof, I applied an egg wash to the top, sprinkled a brown sugar/flour/butter mixture, and baked until an internal temperature of 200 degrees had been reached (about 35 min in a 325 convection oven).
We also had some homemade donuts. Some were glazed with chocolate and some of were also filled with vanilla pastry cream:
Sooo good. Eat your heart out Dunkin Donuts. Because there were no preservatives or any junk like that added to the donuts, they started to stale almost immediately. The one donut I brought home for the wife was noticeably staler than the ones I had eaten only a few hours earlier. This same problem has come up with almost all of the breads that we’ve made in the last three weeks of class. We touched on proper bread storage over these last two weeks. Thankfully, bread wrapped in plastic (then in foil) freezes well. It can also be wrapped in plastic and stored on the counter. Under no circumstances should it be refrigerated…that will only fast-track it’s degradation.
Glazed Cinnamon Raisin Monkey Bread:
Something called Slovenian Filled Christmas Bread (filled with a walnut/sugar/honey/vanilla mixture):
Pumpkin Biscuits (not flaky ‘Southern’ style…much lighter and chewier than that):
“No Knead” Cheddar Casserole Bread (it was almost cake-like in texture):
We also had a really good sweet bread made with dried cherries that I forgot to photograph. I think I was too busy shoving donuts in my face.
The students also helped to make a few savory, non-bread items, providing a bit of a reprieve from our carb overloading. This is a Cold Cucumber Soup served with Crabmeat, Dill, Quinoa, and Toasted Fennel Seeds (we sure do love our cold soups at CSCA):
Another day, another great class. It seemed like everyone really enjoyed themselves today. I guess it’s hard to be surly when you’re making monkey bread and donuts from scratch. Chef D even remarked that as a class, we were producing some remarkably good baked goods. That was nice to hear as I still feel like baking isn’t something that comes naturally to me. There are definite procedures, techniques and ratios that must be adhered to when baking. Sure, some of those things apply when we are not baking and in our food basics classes on Wednesdays, but I feel like there is a lot more room for ‘rule breaking’ when making savory food. But overall I really am enjoying the baking…I think it’s fun…and I was feeling pretty good about things when I took my two massive streusels out of the oven today. They looked great and after I cut into them, Chef D was quick to praise the crumb-structure of my breads.
