It’s been a wonderful week but it must come to an end. Today is my last day at SFBI’s Artisan 1 Bread class, and I must say.. I’ve learned a ton! I can’t wait to go home and apply everything that I’ve learned, not to mention actually using my at-home equipment, which is so different from the industrial versions that we used during the class.

We started the day with a little bit of lecture. We had made our pre-ferments on day 4 that we were going to focus on today. We made a poolish (named after the Polish, no less), and a sponge. We also did a pate fermentee, and I’ll talk about what happened with that later

The main difference between a poolish and a sponge is hydration.  Both were made with 100% flour, and 0.1% yeast, but the poolish had water at 100%, and the sponge at 63%.  Significant difference in hydration… Because of these differences, the poolish sat overnight creating lactic acid and lots of flavor, and the sponge sat overnight creating acetic acid and lots of flavor as well.   The pate fermentee simply means “old dough” and that’s exactly what it was.  It was a complete dough, in that included flour (100%), water (65%), yeast (0.5%), and salt (2%).  It was mixed the day before like the poolish and sponge.

Here are the pictures of the poolish, sponge, and pate fermentee, respectively:

The first thing that was noticed was the smells that they all had.  The poolish so closely resembled the smell of my sourdough starter, because I keep that at 100% hydration as well.  The texture was the same, too; super bubbly, just shy of foaming, and lighty and jiggly.

The sponge had a different smell, more astringent than the poolish.  That was because of the acetic acid that was dancing around within it.  Because it was less “wet”, there weren’t as many air pockets swimming around.  It was still quite light and fluffy.. just not as “jiggly” – very technical terms here 

The pate fermentee was just some nice dough.  Smelled like dough, looked like dough.  Smell was a little acetic…

Here was our schedule for the day:

So… the funny thing that happened came when we were mixing all of our doughs.  The poolish, sponge and pate fermentee mixes were all going to be compared to our control – the standard baguette.  Well, we mixed up the poolish dough just fine, and the sponge just fine, but when it came time to mix in the pate fermentee, we couldn’t find it.  We looked high and low for the missing dough without any luck.  We had an idea that it ended up in the sponge dough (somehow) because we had way more than 5 baguettes per person when it came time to dividing and preshaping.  Oh well.  Makes for a funny story!

At the end of the day, Chef Steven also gave us a hand mixing demo – that was so incredible to watch.  You see this mound go from a shaggy mass to a very cohesive, smooth dough that actually has a gluten window.  Incredible.

We ended the final day with some lecture on the preferments, and of course, some bread tasting.  I think we all were a bit carbed out, and barely tasted much of anything.  I know I would’ve traded any number of tasty baguettes for a salad and some fruit.

It really was amazing to yet again see the huge differences in what seemed like subtle changes to the bread. 

On the left is the standard baguette.  In the middle is the poolish version, and on the right is the sponge (and pate fermentee!) version.  You can see the difference in crumb and texture between the three.  There were definitely taste differences that were becoming less and less subtle after a week of the class.   The poolish, with its 100% hydration really gave some nice great uneven and large holes that made for a really beautiful bread.
I so highly recommend this class to anyone that is interested in learning more about bread making.  Even though we didn’t a regular kitchen oven or kitchenaid mixer, the principles are completely applicable to home baking.  It will just take a little tinkering to learn to use our home machines to get the same results.  The shaping, scoring, and basic bread info was fantastic.  The staff was always trying to see how they could help us learn more, and get more out of the class.  I definitely plan on taking Artisan II at some poin – I look forward to getting the same quality education and fundamentals when it comes to sourdoughs.

And my new favorite tool (the lame) that I had to put in my checked bags or I might not have made it home…

Finally something besides baguettes! Day 4 at SFBI’s Artisan I bread class was such a great (and busy!) day. The last three days had been primarily spent learning about bread and applying that knowledge to our constant – the baguette. The mixing methods, different flours, shaping… all the baguette. Believe me, I loved the baguette, but I was ready to play with some different doughs. Today gave us just that very chance!

The picture quality isn’t as good for this day as the others because my camera battery had completely died from my constant picture taking, and so I had to use my cell phone’s camera.

We started our busy day by mixing up the dough for egg bread. The egg bread was something we were all looking forward too. This was also probably the most fun of all due to the shaping. I loved the flavor too. This was my first attempt at any real “egg” bread. Challah is similar to egg bread, but it is sweeter, and I believe that it contains even more eggs? (I’ll have to verify that). Shaping was merely making three baguette-like doughs, and then braiding them together, just as you would hair.

Then we worked on the dough for “pan bread” – everyday white sandwich bread. It was definitely more than everyday. It was so tasty! We made enough to prepare into three different shaped loaves, one was twist, another was just based on five balls laid into the pan, and the last one was simply to logs placed next to each other that ended up looking like the ideal sandwich bread once baked:

Next, we made up the dough for a 50/50 whole wheat flour and bread flour boule. I was excited to do this because I needed practice shaping boules. My boules at home just aren’t cute. This gave me great practice at shaping them the correct way. They weren’t half bad, actually.

Next was our rye bread. I’ll pull out my notes at sometime and let you know what the percentage of rye flour was in the recipe, but I don’t think that it was more than 50%. We shaped these into little logs, and after scoring and baking they bloomed into adorable loaves. They tasted amazing! I was surprised, however, at how few people in my class actually liked rye. Go figure! These beauties were scored immediately after shaping. This was the only time we did this in the entire class, and that was because there is very little oven spring with the bread, and we wanted to get the maximum scored look from them, so to do that we scored early, and let the final proof blossom the loaves. Before baking, they were sprinkled with flour to give a more rustic appearance as they came out of the oven.

Finally, the last bread we did for the day was the multi-grain bread that we had toasted the seeds for yesterday. We shaped these into torpedos, and like the boules, I was excited to learn how to properly attain this shape. It was much easier than I thought it would be! After shaping, just before letting it sit for its final rise, we had the option to roll the dough in whole oats as a nice decoration/texture change. I did that to one of mine, as I’m not a huge fan of large toppings on breads.

And finally for lunch!! This is on the pizza dough that we made on day two – it sat in the chill chest for two days to let the protease break down the proteins so that the dough would be more extensible and rise less in the oven. The dough was fantastic! Really chewy and great flavor.

And here’s our schedule for the day :

The last thing we did for the day was prepare the pre-ferments that we were going to study on the last day: a Poolish, and a sponge.

The Poolish:

And the sponge:

We’ll talk pre-ferment details tomorrow

The focus of day three’s material was to study the autolyse method, and then to compare the use of high gluten flour to regular bread flour. I was looking forward to this day because I wanted to know more about high gluten flour, and what made it so “special”.

For some reason, I had acquired the notion that high gluten flour was better than bread flour for regular, every day bread use. I mean, if gluten is good, then more is better, right? Well, the class showed me that it does have its purpose – it might be a good choice when using alternate flours that do not create much (if any) gluten on their own, like spelt, rye. To combine these with a high gluten flour may contribute to more of a rise. However, regular bread flour would work just fine, as we saw on day #4 when we used a rye/bread flour combo.

For the autolyse, we mixed the flour and water until just hydrated, then let the the dough sit for about 3 hours while we were in our lecture.

Then we came back to the kitchen and added the salt and yeast, and mixed for just a few minutes until we had some moderate gluten development. Then we turned it out into a bin and let it proof for about an hour and a half. After proofing, we divided and pre-shaped, then bench-proofed for about 40 minutes. The final rise took about an hour and a half. Here’s a picture of the cell structure of the autolyse dough (notice how it has bubbles all over, and not just in the cut area):

The high gluten flour was a bit harder to work with. It was much more elastic, and this is because there were more gluten bonds present, and this made the dough a bit tougher to shape. I say a “bit” because it wasn’t horrible – its not like two of us were each holding an end and walking to opposite sides of the room! It just wasn’t as quick to lend itself to a new shape, even after the benchproof.  High gluten dough:

The regular bread flour version was now a familiar friend. It felt just as it had the last two days as our control for learning about mixing methods and general shaping/handling. I would say, though, that it didn’t feel as luxurious as the autolysed dough.  Bread flour dough:

When all the baguettes had been made for the day, it was really intriguing to see the difference in the cell structure. There was definitely a noticeable difference in how all three doughs felt when shaping and handling. The autolysed dough was a dream. It was like a puffy pillow that you wanted to lay your head on and take a nice long nap. It handled so nicely. It was a really nice balance between extensible and elastic – it rolled into a baguette with ease, as did the bread flour baguettes. There was just a lighter, less tight feel to the autolysed dough.

Here are the autolysed baguettes, right before going into the oven:

Here was today’s schedule:

And now for the bread right out of the oven!

And here is a side-by-side comparison of the crumb structure between the three types:

I honestly wasn’t expecting such a dramatic difference between the three breads. I mean, two of the three used the same (bread) flour, and the only difference in the other one was the use of the high gluten flour. (in the left picture…)The bread on the left is the autolyse. Can you see how markedly more open the crumb is compared to the other two, especially the high gluten baguette on the far right. The middle bread is the regular bread flour, and it did its usual impressive job of good flavor and open crumb. But… compared to the autolyse… it was just okay. The autolyse shined in every way. Flavor was superb. Crumb was open and very irregular. And its hard to tell from this picture, but the color is a little more yellow than the other two, which is because it was much less oxidized because there was hardly any true mixing time compared to the others. The longer you mix the dough, the longer and more frequently it comes in contact with air (oxygen), which oxidizes the dough and essentially bleaches it. We saw on day #2 that with the intensive mix, you had a lot more change of color because of the extended mixing time.

Having worked with autolysed dough before, what really surprised me about today’s work was the result of the high gluten flour. Because it creates more gluten bonds, it makes the dough a bit harder to work with, more elastic, and as a result, it provides you with a less open (and more regular) crumb. This would be great if we were looking for a sandwich bread – but not a great baguette or rustic bread. As I said above, I had come in with the preconceived notion that high gluten flour was somehow better. Its not… its.. different. I wouldn’t replace the bread flour I use every day with this. And like I also said above, I think this is more for specialty flours that don’t create enough gluten on their own, or if you’re looking for a tighter crumb, with more “chew” to the bite.

Today we also started working on a bread for tomorrow – we toasted the sesame, flax, and sunflower seeds that are to go into our multigrain bread!

Oh – and here’s the yumminess that they served up for lunch – Roast Beef and Swiss sandwiches on a walnut bread, and grilled cheese with avocado and chipotle mayo (my fav of the day) on pan bread. They were both fantastic!!

I ended the day at the Ferry Market Plaza (foodie’s dreamland) and stopped by Acme Bread Co to check out the offerings. I was told that their pan di’epi was to die for. Too bad they were out. (although I was (gasp!) starting to grow weary of bread – I wanted some of the other food groups!)

It’s day two at SFBI and things are going very well! Today we had about an hour’s worth of lecture and spent the majority day in the kitchen baking up 15 baguettes per person. That’s a lot of white flour! The point of today was to really learn about the intricacies of the three different mixing methods: Short Mix, Improved Mix, and the Intensive Mix. This is a long post with lots of pictures, so I apologize if you get tired reading this! I’ve posted this for my own reference later on, as well as to share with all of you!

With the Short Mix, you mix all the ingredients (in this case just flour, water, salt and yeast) at speed 1 for 5 minutes just to hydrate the dough. After that, you transfer the dough to a lightly greased bowl, folding it at that time, and then again every 45 minutes for 2-3 hours, until you get the windowpane that you desire. Today we ended up giving the dough a 3rd fold. Once you have the level of gluten development that you desire, you pre-shape the dough. We each did 5 pieces at 35o g each. We let the pieces of dough bench proof for about 45 minutes after being pre-shaped, and then shaped them into baguettes. They did a fermentation for about 45 minutes, and then were ready to bake at 450 F for 20 minutes.

With the Improved Mix, you mix all the ingredients (same as before) at speed 1 for 5 minutes to hydrate the dough, then speed 2 for about 3 minutes to start the gluten development. There is a decent windowpane, (which will fully develop as it ferments). After that you transfer the dough to a lightly greased bowl, folding it to create a smooth skin on top, and letting it ferment for about 1.5 hours without intermediate folds. You then divide the dough into 5 pieces again, each 350 g, and bench proof for about 20 minutes after pre-shaping. Then you shape them into baguettes, and in about an hour, they were off into the oven!

With the Intensive Mix, you again mix all of the same ingredients for 5 minutes on speed 1 to hydrate, then you bump it up to speed 2 for about 5-6 minutes to fully develop the gluten. We had a nice windowpane at the end of this time. We then moved it to a lightly greased container, and merely turned it over into a pillow shape so that it could bulk ferment for about 20 minutes, at which time we pre-shaped. It bench proofed for only 20 minutes before shaping, and then proofed for about 80 minutes before marching into the oven.

Here’s an erase board that had our day’s schedule on it, including dough temps that were measured just after the dough had come out of the mixer:

The large scale equipment that they have is so fun to use – its just super hard to get the dough out because it weighs about 60 pounds!!!!

Here’s our flour, measured out, before going into the mixer. This is 14.5 kg!!!

Here’s the dough in the mixer…

Here’s the dough after the bulk fermentation, being portioned out:

Here’s one of my classmates pre-shaping:

I’m forming the baguette after the bench proof. The technique has you fold the top of the dough over your left thumb, and smoothing it out with the palm of your right hand. This forms a seam. The next step is actually rolling it out.

Rolling out the pre-shaped dough into baguettes, then moving them to the couche for their final proof:

Into the proofing rack they go!

Here’s the edges – not quite perfect, but okay for my 2nd batch ever!

We took a break to make pizza dough that we’ll retard for two days in the fridge, and use on Thursday:

The pizza dough up close – I wasn’t sure the mixer could handle this huge batch, but it did fine!

Now back to the baguettes… Here’s a classmate moving her baguettes from the couche to the oven conveyor belt:

And now my classmate is scoring his bread:

Making sure all dough is straight on the belt:

Chef Steven showing us how to properly score:

Further instruction on scoring:

Into the oven they go!

They are now all in the oven, and the conveyor is on its way out.

Chef Steven is showing us how to make mini epis!

Finishing the epi:

My epi is the one above the bottom one:

Finally a break for lunch! Its 1:30 and we’re starved!

My baguettes are out of the oven!

My other baguettes are on the cooling rack:

And now for discussion about the different mixing styles:

Above, there are two loaves that represent each of the three mixing styles. On the far right are the two Short Mixed baguettes, in the middle are the two Improved Mixed baguettes, and on the left are the two Intensive Mixed baguettes. The characteristics for each mixing style are:

• Short Mix – More dense loaf, more flavor and more aroma. More open crumb because of being at wetter dough – 70% hydration was used for these. These don’t puff up as much as the other two types. Has a lot of moisture in the taste – leaves you feeling “refreshed”. The shelf life on this would be about 8-12 hours.
• Intensive Mix – Most fluff of all the styles. Very little flavor compared with the short mix. Very little aroma as well. The crumb is very tight – more appropriate for sandwich bread. This was a stiffer dough – we used a 65% hydration. After eating a slice of this, you actually feel thirsty. Its very dry. The shelf life on this would be about 2-3 hours.
• Improved Mix – Best of both worlds. Good fluff with great flavor and aroma than the Intensive, but not quite as much as the Short. Has a decent amount of moisture – we used a 67% hydration. Crumb was a nice combination of open and tight. Shelf life would be about 5-8 hours. Also feel refreshed after eating a slice of this.

Below is a picture showing the crumb of each of the three, again with Intensive on the left, Improved in the middle, and Short on the right. You can see that the short has the most open crumb, while the Intensive has the tightest crumb of the three. It can’t be seen in this photo, but the color of the crumb is more cream in the Short (right) mix than the Improved and the Intensive. This is because it was the least oxidized from spending the least amount of time being whipped with air in mixer.

Slice of the Improved Mixed dough after biting into it

We had taken a moment to discuss the difference between browning due to the Maillard reaction, which is not to be mistaken for being burned. Chef Steven brought in a truly charred baguette to show us what actual carbon looked like when a baguette had been forgotten!

Here are my three example loaves – the top one is the Intensive, middle is the Improved, and bottom is the Short. These don’t really give justice to the difference that the entire batch showed in size/spring.

Because of the high gluten development in the Intensive Mix, they are able to form better “ears” after being scored. Yum!!

Now to critique some of my loaves – this one split open at the seam. It was a combination of not sealing the seam tight enough, but mostly because the seam had ended up face-up when baking, instead of being on the bottom as it should be.

This one showed a score that wasn’t done deep enough. As you can see, it barely pierced the skin, and therefore opened up very little. The score should be about 1/4″ deep, and this one was MAYBE an 1/8″.

Here they are, all bunched together ready to be taken home! You can see the one in the very middle was slashed more on the horizon, rather than the vertical axis, and that didn’t allow it to open up as nicely as it could’ve. No real “ears” there.

Nice picture showing all of the baguettes, and two epis. I’m in love with the epi. The crust to crumb ratio is very high – perfect, IMO.

Today was really a great day – I feel as though I’ve walked away with so much more information than what I came in with. I’ve also realized that I’ve been primarily using the Intensive mixing method thus far, and probably overworking the gluten in my bread each time. I really loved seeing how much merely folding bread periodically can really develop gluten to a level comparable to 10 minutes of mixing. And you’re not oxidizing the dough nearly as much, and really allowing a lot of flavor and acid to build up, ultimately producing a great tasting loaf!

Now onto day three!

Because my husband is definitely the most fabulous man on the face of the earth, he decided to get me an Artisan bread class for my birthday. Not only did he set up the class, but he arranged my flight with his extra miles, and arranged my hotel stay with his redemption points as well. On Sunday, before we went to the airport, he handed me a packet with all of my flight and hotel info in it, as well as mapped directions to and from every place I would need them for. I told you he was fabulous! He even hit the bank the day before so that I would have the cash on hand that I’d need for cabs, etc. That was necessary since I really don’t know how to access our money if I’m not whipping out the credit card at Williams-Sonoma or Sur la Table. Whew… I’m glad he knows how to get to it

Today was day one at the San Francisco Baking Institute. I’m enrolled in the Artisan I bread class. This is a 5-day course with a huge amount of hands-on instruction and lecture from an amazing instructor – Steven Isaac. He has worked at many highly acclaimed restaurants and hotels, and was even the corporate pastry/bakery chef for Wolfgang Puck. He worked for Daniel Leader (of Bread Alone) in the early 1990’s.

The facilities are just what you’d expect from a culinary institution. Lots of big Boos board table tops with gigantic mixers and ovens everywhere. You have this sense of freedom that you don’t have in your own kitchen at home because there is *supposed* to be flour dust everywhere!

Here’s a couple pieces of their large-scale equipment. This is a mixer, I think its called an Oblique (?) mixer. I don’t remember what the piece of equipment next to it is. Beyond that, the wooden contraption, is a grain mill. It looks nothing like the electric one that I have at home! And next to that is a dough divider – it can portion out your dough into 12, 24, or 48 pieces!

Here’s a view of the adjacent wall, that has some of the other mixers on it. Through those windows is where the pastry class participants were working. Immediately in the bottom right corner of the picture is a piece of equipment that will shape dough into baguettes, or other long shapes (batards, etc).

The left most metal thing is the large scale oven with the automatic loader and unloader. This is what we baked today’s (and I think the subsequent days’ breads in). There were 60 baguettes in there at once, and it could’ve held a LOT more than that. To the right of that is a small(ish) proofing box. We used that to proof our baguettes in. To the right of that is another oven that (I think) you proof bread in, and then can automatically move the bread from that to the oven attached. This set-up is really amazing…

These two racks sit on the wall adjacent to the ovens. The first rack, as you can see, has a ton of bannetons on it, as well as loaf pans and boards used to flip bread from the couche to the baking sheet. Next to that is the bread cooling rack.

Here are my first ever attempts at baguettes! They’re not so cute here, but this was just a pre-shaping before the actual shaping. On the bottom right corner of the board is an “M” carved out of flour – its how we identified our dough from everyone elses. Clever.

Here are my shaped baguettes! We used little green stickers, with our initials on them, on the center loaf to distinguish our bread from everyone elses. Again, clever!

Here’s a picture of some of my classmates scoring their bread with a lame. Lame is prounced as if it rhymed with calm.

And the soldiers march into the oven by way of a large conveyor belt.

They bake for about 20 minutes, at 450 degrees F.

They are starting to brown!

Here are my baguettes right out of the oven! Not too shabby for my first attempt. My scores tended to be more at an angle than straight, so I need to work on that some this week.

Chef Steven showed us how to make pan d’epis, and I can’t wait to try those at home!

And here the loaves are at my hotel room. I gave one to the sweet gentleman at the front desk. I ate one. Yes, the whole thing. And because I couldn’t trust myself with the rest of them, I gave them to the lady that was handing out wine downstairs during “happy hour”. I thought that she might know what to do with them.

All in all, today was such a wonderful experience! We spent about 4 hours in lecture, going over terminology, mixing methods, the reason for the standard four ingredients, and Chef Steven generally entertaining our silly questions.

Tomorrow we make about 15 more baguettes, as we discover how the different mixing methods affect the taste and structure. We’re told that we’re going to get quite comfy with the baguette. This is because its a very good teaching bread. Good for learning the basics since we’re only using the basic four ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast). Good for learning shaping. Good for learning slashing. Good for eating with wine and cheese – my own personal favorite. Good for experimenting in general!

Stay tuned to hear about the next 4 amazing days!