The Good, The Bread and The Ugly

Well, it had to happen. After more than a year, I was bound to find a bakeshop class, and a chef, that I hated.

So here it is. Specialty Breads.

I am in the Perfect Storm of Suckiness.

The evidence:

The Schedule: it’s a 0500 start time to class, which means that’s the time I’m in class, unpacked, in full uniform and putting the first of my day’s doughs on the mixer. This means I have to leave the house by 0430, which means I have to be up by 0300 to stumble Ozzy Osbourne-like around the house getting ready and getting Wiley walked.

Plush Smalls (a new nickname, combining two previous ones, Plush Mammal and Small Mammal) hated getting up at 0500 and hates 0300 even more. I don’t blame him. It’s the witching hour, when medical studies have shown a critically ill person is most likely to "pass on" and that even the pulse of a healthy heart slows measurably, regardless of whether the person is asleep or working the graveyard shift. All I know is, out in the woods where we live, at walkies time it’s pitch black and creepy, and my flashlight catches the eyeshine of multiple creatures just off the road. Sure, they’re probably deer and racoons, but all you need is one flesh-eating zombie out there and I’m in for a very ugly morning.

The Topic: breads. My least favorite topic of the whole program. I like eating bread, but I have no feel for making it and little patience with my lack of improvement.

The Class Setup: it’s a high production class, with each team making three or four different recipes all at once, so there is no opportunity for what I’ve heard called "teachable moments." It’s more like everyone running around with their hair on fire and not doing their dishes (though a few of us do keep up with ours) so that we all get yelled at for having a messy bakeshop. Also, because five or six different people will be shaping baguettes that all get tossed into a bin after baking, it’s impossible to see how the baguette you shaped turned out... was it the one with the lousy, too-tight crumb? The one that shrank in the oven? Did I do it right? We have daily production quotas and deadlines, similar to a "real" bakery, which is fine for training us for the real world, but not great for educating us in any great depth on the topic.

The Chef: Das Brotmeisterchen is really not an appropriate nomme de Net for him because it implies some level of cutesy charm. Instead, I’m going to call him Chef Khoi. If you speak Russian, you will understand. If you don’t speak Russian, well, there are some things best left untranslated. Let’s just say he is the kind of guy who, if someone walking ahead of him tripped and fell, would laugh and say "walk much?" He can’t walk past Mandilicious and me without making some kind of stupid, sarcastic comment. Darth Chocolate was sarcastic, but he was also clever, so going from him to Chef Khoi is that much more painful.

On the rare occasion Chef Khoi tries to give an attaboy or attagirl, it comes off as condescending and insincere. His lectures are mind-numbingly dull and confusing - I understood baker’s percentage perfectly (a whacky way bakers calculate formulas) until he lectured about it, after which I felt I lost 20 IQ points. In his endless PowerPoint presentations, his grammar, punctuation and spelling are consistently poor. While I understand if one of the foreign chefs has some trouble with English, a guy born and raised in St. Louis has no excuse for thinking you make nouns (and sometimes verbs) plural by adding an apostrophe and an "s."

The less said of him, the better.

Trying to focus on the positive, I’m teammates with Mandilicious again, which is terrific, because she’s a hard worker who handles stress well, but also because she is great at breads. And as luck would have it, the only two things she’s not great at, running the rack oven and scoring, happen to be the only two things I do well.

Also, we have an awesome teaching assistant named Lauren. I would work for her in a heartbeat, and that’s not something I say often. She’s calm and knowledgeable and never loses her patience. Without her, I’m pretty sure Mandilicious and I would be hiding in the proofer by now.

The best bit of all, however, was that Chef Khoi had to miss class yesterday and today to go to some family wedding back in Missouri, so we had a substitute teacher... der Brotmeister! He walked in, gave Mandilicious and me a hug and said "Ah! My favorite students!"

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

So the past two days were great, with der Brotmeister at the helm and Lauren backing him up. Mandilicious and I were in such a better mood that waking up at the height of night didn’t seem like that much of a pain (well...). Der Brotmeister was also much more laidback than he is in his class... he came over to poke our suspiciously wet and lumpy focaccia dough as we were folding it yesterday, made a face and said "vat dough is dat?" We told him and he raised an eyebrow, then smiled and said "Ah, I don’t care. It’s not my bakeshop."

Supervising us making croissants and then brioche, he rolled his eyes and complained about the way Chef Khoi has us do things. We offered to do it his way, and our croissants were noticeably flakier with better rise than those of any other team on previous days. Oh yeah.

Alas, the holiday is over. Monday, der Brotmeister goes back to working afternoons only. Chef Khoi and his dumbass frat boy idea of humor return. Or should I say, return’s.

So don’t expect funny stories or interesting photos until Breads is over. Specialty Breads is not to be enjoyed, it is to be endured.