Lecture: Bread
Demo./Production: Peanut Butter Cookies and Brioche
Today we covered a lot about dough for bread making. There are 2 basic types, lean and rich dough. Lean doughs are made for breads like French and Italian loaves, pizza dough, and whole wheat breads. They are typically low in fat and sugar, have strong gluten development, and are hard crusted. In comparison, rich doughs contain higher levels of fat and sugar, need less gluten, and are soft crusted. Examples of rich doughs might be challah, brioche, or sweet rolls.
There are also a few different methods to mixing your doughs. The straight dough method is essentially the dump and run method, where the yeast and water are added together to dissolve the yeast and then the flour and salt are added and mix. The modified method for rich doughs is a combination of the creaming method and the straight method. Finally, the sponge method uses a preferment or starter. A starter is added on top of the yeast and a slurry of the other liquids is added. A preferment gives you a head start to the final bread fermentation stage. Pate Ferments, Biga, and Poolish are all types of doughs made from this "old bread." If you are familiar with Amish bread, this is the same concept. But what I didn't realize is that it is a common practice for most bakeries to save a piece of dough from the day before's bread and use it for the next days batch. Cool!
Today we made peanut butter cookies a type of molded cookie, cut our brownies from yesterday, and we also made brioche dough, a rich French dough.
When all was said and done, I had consumed 2.5 brownies and 2 cookies. I felt so sick and had a HUGE sugar rush and felt crappy all day. So much for not gaining any weight back....
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| These brownies were frigging awesome!!! |
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| A decent PB cookie |
