DoughGirl

How did I celebrate the end of Specialty Breads class? By waking up at 0300 on Saturday, on purpose, and heading back to campus to bake more bread.

Yeah, that’s right. I went in on my own time for nearly seven hours on Saturday, one of my few precious days off.

Why? Because I found I have a weird obsession. You know how some people fixate on one small piece of their world, whether it’s the placement of the stapler in their office cubicle or getting the cheapest price for gasoline, which will send them 20 miles out of their way to save a penny per gallon?

Well, I am, to my amazement, kind of obsessed with French regional bread shaping.

Now, there is nothing I like better in breads than scoring, slashing that soft dough with a lame (pronounced "lahm"), a fancy French bread-slashing razor. But close behind scoring is shaping dough into the traditional forms which, back in the day, indicated the town of origin. Bakers’ apprentices had to master the form for their town as part of their training.

Earlier last week, I asked Chef* if I could come in on a Saturday (yes, it was my idea) to do the shapes I didn’t get to try in class, as well as repeat ones I had done. He said it was okay, because the teaching assistant is in Saturday mornings baking bread for the restaurants anyway.

So I showed up at just after 0500 (slacker) and helped Lauren (the TA) and a couple student workers shape brioche and prep couches and divide rolls until my dough was ready. It was a regular lean dough recipe, the same we use every day for baguettes and the rolls served at the French restaurant on campus.

I did a few 1.25 pound rounds in various traditional shapes:

The one on the left is not a traditional shape, but a supercool variation Lauren showed me, where you work a mixture of olive oil, lemon zest, rosemary and thyme into the dough while shaping.

I also did some larger shapes, including my biggest (and most inexplicable) obsession, the crowns... In front and on the left are Couronne Bordelaise, from Bordeaux, and in back and on the right are Couronne Lyonnaise, from the Rhone Valley:

I also did the uber-classic Pain des Vendage, traditionally made to symbolize the harvesting of grapes, though I didn’t dust it with flour, which would be truly traditional:

Part of me wished I slept in (a big part of me), but the weirdly obsessive part of me hasn’t had this much fun since reading up on the discovery of colossal squid. I can’t explain it, but I really, really dig the regional shaping. I’m guessing because it’s a little piece of history that has survived into the Post-Industrial Age of Global Sameness.

There was a last minute bread order for 40 people, so the bread I made was actually served, except for the more photogenic of the Couronne Bordelaise I made. It’s sitting double-wrapped in my freezer right now, waiting for an occasion worthy of it.

*as a postscript of sorts, Chef Khoi was really nice to me the last week or so, leading me to assume that either he is reading the blog or der Brotmeister had a word with him. Or perhaps, as Mandilicious put it, "either the Yankees won or he got some from his wife," because he was noticeably less obnoxious to us both. Perhaps it was just that all his frustration was directed at Zesty, who left the salt out of the bagel recipe, put her croissants in the proofer instead of the refrigerator and spent about half an hour looking for raisins one day.

In any event, I tried to get over my initial urge to whap Chef Khoi upside the head, especially after he was encouraging about the regional breads, but I never quite managed to do so.

And yeah, I corrected his grammar mistakes on the final.