Week six - Salt of the Earth

French country bread


Chocolate Bread



Today, Team France covered the beautiful world of artisan breads. We baked a Hungarian potato bread, a chocolate bread, a beautiful French country bread and Chef demo'd a ciabatta bread for the class.




Let's first focus on the ingredient salt in all the formulas covered today.




The foundation of civilization was salt's ability to preserve food. Salt eliminated man's dependence on having to eat seasonal and allowed food to travel over long distances. However, to0 much of this seasoning will cause you to say yuck, your mouth to pucker, and you will instantly remove the bread from your mouth. Quick tip: adding too much salt in a formula will kill yeast. We had a problem with salt in our formula for our Hungarian potato bread this week. After careful review I came up with the possible culprits to the salt problem we had.




Student error in scaling - I scaled the wrong amount of salt called for in this formula - 1 1/2 oz.





The formula called for potatoes that we mixed in this formula. However, we didn't taste them prior to putting them in the recipe. They could have been loaded with sodium and so we would have had to adjust the formula.



Chef has used these formulas before so they have been tested and are all kosher with the amounts called for in the formula.

Hungarian Potato Bread:

2 lbs bread flour
11 oz mashed potatoes
1 pt 2 oz water
1 1/2 oz yeast
1/2 oz paprika
1 1/2 oz salt

Next we covered the chocolate bread.

Chocolate Bread:

Pre- ferment

4 oz bread flour
1/2 oz yeast
13 oz water
1/2 oz salt
1# bread flour
4 oz cocoa powder
1/2 oz yeast
12 oz yeast
1/2 oz salt
5 oz chocolate chips
2 oz walnuts
1/2 oz vanilla

Straight mix method

Then we covered a country French bread called Pain de Champage:

Pre- ferment

bread flour 1 lb 4 oz
instant yeast 0.5 oz
water 13 oz
salt 0.5 oz

Dough:

preferment 2 lb 2 oz
bread flour 1 lb 2 oz
dark rye 2 oz
instant yeast 0.5 oz
water 13 oz
salt 0.5 oz
soaked flax seed 3 oz optional
walnuts 8 oz

Ciabatta

30% Pre-fermented flour

Pollish 0.025 oz compressed freash yeast

27 oz bread flour

27 oz water

Mix well and cover ferment at 70 degress for 12 - 16 hours.

Dough:

54.025 oz sponge

0.5 fresh yeast

4 lbs bread flour

2 oz salt

2 oz wheat grem optional

47 oz water

This was the best of the batch in my opinion. Artisan bread is a labor of love very individual to a particular region or baker. I enjoyed making artisan breads because it felt like a reflect of me. It's an art and a science...wow dude so deep.

As a part of my cooking skills development, I volunteer for various non-profits across the country to cook lunches or dinners for them. I can accommodate up to 15 - 20 people and use this as a learning tool to hone my skills as I grow as a cook. I featured the above breads that I baked in class and served it with a simple all vegetarian minestrone soup and fresh salad greens from the Phoenix Farmer's Market for the Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic ( RFB&D). It was a real pleasure to cook for these fine people that give countless hours back to the community.

Next week on the menu: pie dough and sweet dough.