This post will be mostly baking photos so that I can get the last bit of the Bread Section recorded in here.

The last bit of the Bread Section (Part 1) at The Culinary Institute of Vancouver Island had us repeating, for the final two weeks, the several areas we had been through during the first six weeks, except we hit each station for just two days. Sort of a “Rapid Fire” version of the original stations which wasn’t actually that stressful as we already “been there, done that” just a short while before.

So here are, not necessarily in chronological order, a whole bunch of photos from theis Bread Section for your visual enjoyment.

Here’s Kevin, my “partner in crime” for this Bread Section, readying a recipe.

And (finally) I managed to get a snap of Angelique, the bakery department’s Assistant; she’s the one who knows where everything is, orders stuff for us and is generally the “power in the background” that makes the whole thing run smoothly. She was a student here a couple of years back herself so she also has a few tips on how this all works.

Pita Breads in two varieties, getting baked.

 The white breads are made using Peter Reinhart’s Lavash Crackers recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. the recipe includes a little honey and veg oil, so the bread is enriched and softer than it would be with a straight, flour-water-salt only dough.

The whole wheat ones are made using a basic Whole Wheat Bread recipe we use for, well, plain ol’ whole wheat breads. This would show that pretty much any decent dough can be used for pita breads. This is the same whole wheat bread we used in the loaves at the very top of this post (beautifully slashed, I’ll add, by Chelsea who was on Ovens that day).

The bread disks are put in a very hot oven where they puff up very quickly. They are removed once puffed and flipped over so the opposite side faces the hearth or top. Watch out for steam escaping from the very hot interior of the bread, though, and act fast. Once they puff up once more, they are taken out and stacked as shown to cool; stacking them this way helps them deflate before they harden and keeps them from drying out too fast. The whole baking process takes just a few minutes from raw dough disks to finished bread cooling off.

Danishes

For the Danish station, Kevin and I came up with these Passion Fruit danishes, based on this recipe from chef Eddy Van Damme – his original was cassis based but we had none available. Passion fruit tasted amazing, even if it don’t have the “pow” of the purple cassis, visually.

Bialys two ways

Well, sort of two ways: we’re looking simply at the finish here.

I was assisting Andrea and Nicole with their special bread, bialys, when Mr Barnet came by to indicate that these would next be finished by egg washing and sprinkling with poppy seed.

“Gasp!” said I. That isn’t the “traditional” way of making bialys. So Mr B suggested we do it both ways and see which came out best.

The one on the left is filled with a little of the roasted onion/poppy seed mix, then the filling spoon was wiped atop the bread’s surface, leaving the crust to brown up a little and tasty remnants of onion and poppy seed delicately spread about. Now if this had been my take completely, the onions would have been more of a paste than diced and would have given a better coating to the top of the buns. But I was working with Mr B’s onions & poppy mix here so this was what I could do.

On the right: Mr B’s version, using the same bread disks and a somewhat more hefty amount of onion filling, but finishing up with a coating of egg wash and a sprinkle of poppy seed to the tops. This gives the breads a more golden baked finish.

Who’s is more “correct”? Not easy to decide. First, my version should have stayed in the oven a bit longer – they’re looking very anaemic. Second, it’s likely true that today’s consumer would prefer the “nice golden” even look of the egg-washed version. But if one goes by the bialys produced by places like Coney Island Bialys and Kossar’s Bialys, both New York bakeries that have been making bialys since the 1920s or 30s, just before all Jewish bakeries in Bialystock, Polland disappeared (a travesty of pre-WWII activity): there’s no egg wash used.

Left: Coney Island Bialys. Right: Kossar’s Bialys. Note they are both baked a little deeper than mine had been allowed to.

So here’s my friendly argument with Mr B’s technique: should we be messing with tradition? I think in some case, like these, no. These are the sorts of ‘tweaks’ to classic methods that eventually lead to the soft, fluffy, uninspired bagels that can be found in stores everywhere these days, not even close to what an original bagel should be like. The original bialys – whose actual name is bialystoker kuchen - taste great, have an interesting texture and a bit of history. They can and have stood on their own this way for nearly a century. Is it really necessary to “update” them?

Post your own view below.

Final Exam for Baking Section 1

During the last week , we needed to produce a set of baked items to be marked for our mid term exam. These were:

• Challah breads: 2 loaves, 12 buns
• Empress Hotel Scones
• Tart shells (buttertart filling supplied)
• Muffins of our choice
• Piped Shortbread Cookies

I volunteered, as did three others, to be the first set of people to do this bake-off. We had from 6 am to 11 a.m to make all of the items from scratch.

You can see my finished products in the photo above. Although we still haven’t received our final marks (there is also a written test we did a few days later), Mr B’s comments were fairly positive, although I did do some miscalculations reducing the original scone recipe down to the dozen required here. Not enough sugar. This was clearly an error on my calculations since the original recipe makes 24 and the task, in part was to cut the recipe to 8 so I only needed to reduce all amounts to 1/3. Urgh, a silly mistake that should have been obvious.

The other thing he mentioned was the cookies were slightly underbaked – there was a wee little taste of slightly raw dough noticeable. Another minute or so would have done the trick.

Otherwise, it all turned out quite well. Now I have an idea of what all those “Top Chef” type show contestants feel like when there’s a clock going and a pressure to excel. Timing is everything and part of the issue with the cookies. With four of us baking while the kitchen was doing it’s normal routine as well, I was shut out of the oven until the very last minute so I jumped the gun a bit to get my presentation done. My problem, though. We were also marked on our Mise en Place, which included the logistics of when to make what in order to simultaneously make and bake five different items. Other than the oven bottleneck, I think I did pretty well.

I didn’t get the other folks layout photographed that day (sorry!) but I did snap some pics of the batch from two days later:

Mr Barnet tasting and marking the goods. There’s Kev and Sara’s output.

And while people were taking their tests, we were still pumping out the normal lots of baked goods…

The first photo is of a set of baguettes Kevin and I made up a few weeks before. Note they’re somewhat odd shaped and poorly slashed.

Next, we made baguettes on the last day and this is the new batch of dough, slashed and ready for the oven. Below that, the same baguettes baked and ready to be sent up to the Culinary class for sandwiches. There’s much improvement in the slashing and shaping. The bottom two are my slashes and they should have been a little less diagonal, I think. You can’t really see much “gringe” on these, either.  Still, not a bad batch at all. We didn’t get to cut them open to check the crumb or taste them as the Black Hats (cooking students) were there to pick them up the instant they came out of the oven.

Sourdough Bagel Fail

The day after my exam, I made up a batch of sourdough bagels using “Lucy”, the class white starter. With only two days at our disposal, it was sort of imperative to get these going as quickly as possible before the end of our station and, in fact, of Bread I section. I had fed Lucy the night before but she had just come out of the refrigerator and wasn’t, in reality, up to snuff. Another feed or two and she’s have been going gangbusters. Alas, not the case. What we ended up with was bagels that just wouldn’t bulk proof and, in spite of forging ahead to beat the clock, when we tried to boil and bake them the next day, they sank like lead rings in the malt water. We baked a dozen to see if they could at all be rescued but… no. Tasteless. Really tasteless, no flavour at all. Not even “bad” flavour. I hope the other class get to give these sourdough bagels (I used the Mike Avery recipe you can see here) another, less frantic go and start to produce these really tasty bagels on a regular basis. The ones we make now are ok, but these, when made right, knock them out of the park effortlessly.

Pro Tip: Never rush a sourdough starter; you’ll simply be wasting your time, energy and ingredients.

I also made a batch of 40% Rye Bread with Caraway that very last day with “Roland”, the class rye starter. This one I had taken home a couple of days before to get going properly. These turned out rather nicely and tasted great. But then I’m a bit of a rye fan. I even made another batch at home when I had finished this loaf. MMmmm rye bread…

And there you have it, end of the first half of the Professional Baking course. The following week, we start on Pastries II where we are to get into more intricate deserts. Midway through this section, we’re heading out to paris for Europain, back for the last  three weeks of Pastry II, then into Bread II until May. At that point, we are to be doing a Parcticum while working in a real live bakery for a couple of weeks, then it’s graduation.

Good grief, time flew by fast!!

The Handmade Loaf becomes our Group Baking focus

With Jeffrey Hamelman’s wonderful “Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes” now completed, the Mellow Bakers have chosen to set their collective sights on Dan Lepard’s highly praised book, The Handmade Loaf available from Amazon UK here. Elsewhere, it is available as  “The Art of Handmade Bread” and in Spain, a translated version titled “Hecho a Mano“.

With over 80 bread recipes in this book, we are looking forward to a great variety of new challenges each month as we proceed through The Handmade Loaf, baking as many loaves as each member feels is warranted for their personal situation. Bake as many – or as few – of each month’s selected breads as you think makes sense for your household. The group name “Mellow Bakers” is not accidental. We strive to keep the group baking process as user-friendly as possible, so there really are no expectations or requirements to join in. All you need is the book, a desire to make a variety of bread and sharing the results with your fellow Mellow Bakers. Having a blog to show off your baking results is a bonus but not required, the forum platform lets you post and, if you have them, upload your own photos.

The main goal is to build up our skills as we attempt breads we might not otherwise have given a try to and to share our baking experiences with fellow bread heads. No matter where you feel you are on the bread baking path, we welcome everyone old-time bread heads and brand new novices. If you’re just starting out, this is a fine way to get a lot of bread experience under your belt in a supportive, friendly atmosphere. Old hands will appreciate the variety and challenge of making loaves they might have otherwise passed over.

Dan Lepard, author of The Handmade Loaf, is an accomplished photographer and award-winning baker and writer who has worked for great chefs all over the world. His latest book is Short and Sweet, a compilation of over 200 various recipes. He is also the writer of a regular column, “How to Bake” in the UK’s The Guardian newspaper. He also has a popular website, DanLepard.com with recipes, reviews, a blog and an active forum.

If you’d like to join us as we bake our way through The Handmade Loaf, hop on over to MellowBakers.com and check us out! Jump in (and out) at any point, too – we aren’t limiting this group to only those who start baking from the beginning or agree to do the entire book; that just wouldn’t be Mellow!

The group bake is slated to start in April, 2012 although we’ll be discussing some of the details ahead of that so everyone’s input is more than welcome.

We look forward to seeing you!

At last, we’ve gathered up the courage to make macarons, these delightful little meringue-based almond cookies that are currently extremely de rigeur in the classiest of places. Reading up on them, however, may made you a little daunted because of the aura of finickiness that seems to be placed around their construction.

Fear not, for there are a few things you can learn that will make creating macarons much simpler than is usually shown.

This is the third part of a series showing how I made my very first batch of Macarons. Previous entries were:

Making Swiss Meringue Buttercream (great for cookies or cake)
Making Almond Flour

The following pictorial step-by-step is based on the macaron recipe found on the awesome blog BraveTart.com where pastry chef Stella Parks guides you through the process, eliminating much of the hocus-pocus typically associated with making these cookies. Her view, basically, is this: They’re just cookies. Yes, there are steps peculiar to this style of cookies, but there are specific steps for many other cookies too and this doesn’t elevate them to near-ritualistic requirements.

As noted in a prior post, two things you will want to read – and possibly print out – before we get too far ahead are:

1. The Ten Macaron Commandments
2. Ten Macaron Myths Busted

Some of the things we’re told we can be less fussy about: perfectly aged egg whites and their temperature, drying the piped cookies, drying the almond flour, using cornstarch-free powdered sugar, being super-duper careful with the meringue. Let’s just follow Stella’s simple recipe and get us some nice macarons, shall we?

You may also want to print out this template I made for piping out macarons in either PDF format or as a PNG image. It will fit a typical (US) home sized baking pan of 16″ x 10″ under a silpat type silicone liner or parchment paper.

Simply print out TWO copies at full (US 8.5″ x 11″) page size, tape the open ends together and trim. Each baking sheet will then give you a total of 32 circles (for 16 finished cookies), optimized for the standard macaron size of 3.5 cm with 2 cm space between each. Just remember to pull it out from under your parchment or silpat before putting your piped macarons in the oven!

Alright, let’s gather our ingredients and make some macarons!

Our Macaron Ingredients

The following should be enough to make about 40 finished cookies, so 80 macaron disks.

Equipment:

• At least two 16″ x 10″ sheet pans with silpat liners or parchment
• Large piping bag with plain round tip
• A stand mixer (preferrably)

Preheat the oven to 300 F (150 C)

Macarons Directions

The following is based on the recipe posted on the BraveTart site; the main difference here is simply the inclusion of step-by-step photos. This recipe forgoes many of the usual “tricky bits” of making macarons.

Put your egg whites, sugar, salt and, if using, the scrapings of a vanilla bean (don’t add any extract yet) into your mixer’s bowl. Using the whip attachment, whip this mixture for 3 minutes at speed 4 on Kitchenaid (med low otherwise). At the end of the 3 minutes, the resulting mix won’t look like it’s done much, which is correct.

Increase the speed to 7 and whip for another 3 minutes, then up again to speed 8 for 3 minutes more. Stop the mixer. The resulting mix will now look like proper, rather stiff meringue. Scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula.

At this point, add any flavour extracts and, if used, colouring of choice. I use AmeriColor Soft Gel Paste, available at good baking supply stores or online. Wilton brand would work as well, available at  Michaels Craft Stores. Last choice would be grocery store colours as they are very “wet” and not terribly concentrated and therefore may add unwanted moisture to your meringue.

Now give your meringue a good whipping at top speed (10) for a minute to get all the colour ad flavour dispersed and get that meringue good and stiff. When you lift the whisk from the meringue, there should be a big glob of meringue stuck in the center; you can knock that out by tapping the whisk on the bowl’s side. If there is NOT a glob in the middle, your meringue is still too soft. Give it another minute at top speed. Check the stiffness again.

Once the meringue is the right stiffness, dump in all your dry ingredients at once. The next stage is part of the “hocus-pocus”…

The Macaronage

Fold the dry ingredients into your meringue using a rubber spatula. For the uninitiated, “Folding” means scooping from the bottom and in a smooth sweep, dropping the results on top. It is a smooth, rhythmic motion: dip deep down, smooth stroke up (along the side of the bowl) flip spatula over when you come up, dropping the bottom stuff on top; give the bowl a 1/6 turn, repeat. The pont in this motion is (normally) to gently mix the ingredients into the meringue without beating out all the air you meticulously added while whipping.

Except with macaronage, we DO want to deflate the meringue a little bit.

So we change the motion a bit: We scoop in, gently scrape along the bowl’s side as we move up, dump the scoop on top, then press that spatula down onto what we just brought up, squishing it onto the side of the bowl. This last extra move will knock a wee bit of the air out of the stiff meringue. We’re still gently incorporating the dry stuff into the meringue but adding a small bit of controlled deflation.

You’ll start with what looks like a big mess and eventually end up with a slightly glossy, softer but still a bit stiff batter. To get there, do the following:

Count your scoops. As you reach scoop 25, stop. Take a little of the batter and drop it down onto the rest. You are now going to watch what happens in the next several seconds. If it stays where you dropped it and never incorporates back in, it is still too stiff.

Give it another two scoops, then check again. At some point, likely 15 extra scoops, you will note that the glob you drop back down stays up but in a few seconds begins to “melt” back into the remainder. After 15-20 seconds, it should have levelled out considerably, yet still be a soft blob. You need to check like this for the first few times you make macarons only, by then tyou’ll start getting the “feel” and know when it’s done.

If you go too fast and too far, your batter will become too soft, the glob you drop back will almost immediately smooth itself out to invisibility. At this point, you’ve lost the game, you’ve deflated the meringue too much. Start over from scratch; this will not make macarons.

See the photo on the right above? I went a tad too far here and passed the “perfect point” by a couple of extra scoops. Not so bas as to be unusable but I would have been better off holding back a bit earlier. On my next batch, I did much better.

BTW: In case it’s not clear, I’m doing this step-by-step on my own First Ever Attempt, so you get to see me making mistakes and, hopefully, this will help you avoid too many of your own. However, I contend that doing everything perfectly the first (few) time(s) is a bad way to go – you learn a LOT by making mistakes. 

The goal here is to get a batter that is the right consistency so you don’t have it running out of your piping bag and/or once piped in your little circles, spreading out into flat puddles. Your circles need enough body to maintain some height yet soft enough that the peaks will level out slightly after about 20 seconds.

Piping Macarons

OK, so your batter is at the right consistency (or close to), now it’s time to make your little meringue disks.

Fill a large piping bag bit more than half-full. You don’t want to fill to much or the bag becomes hard to handle and the pressure you get is difficult to control. The tip should be a large, plain round tip.

Slip your template sheet under your parchment or silpat liner on a baking tray and let’s start piping. The circle size should be about 3.5 cm (a smidge under 1.5 inches), and spaced 2 cm apart (a hair more than 3/4 inch). The template shown at top is designed to get the most cookies out of a standard North American home baking pan. You will want to maintain your piped circles a fraction inside the actual circle as the meringue will spread a little after you’ve piped it.

Above is my original attempt to “eyeball” the size and placement (I made the template after this, for obvious reasons) and as you can see, there was a definite lack of continuity. I also didn’t get as many cookies as possible from each pan. My second batch, with template, were much more even sized and better distributed, getting 32 cookies where the tray on the right above got only 20, and the tray on left got 33 but much too close together.

Serious case of “Do as I say, not as I do”!

Once your circles have been piped out, take the tray and, warning anyone nearby, give it a couple of good, hard smacks on the counter top. This will help to get those little “nipples” to disappear somewhat and also knock the bigger air bubbles out. Turn the tray 1/4 turn and give it a couple more smacks.

Baking the Macarons

Put the trays of macarons in the 300 F oven and bake for 16 – 18 minutes or until you can peel the parchment/liner away from a sacrifice macaron easily. If they come apart when you try to lift them, it needs more time.

Once they are baked, put the full trays on a rack and let the macarons cool completely. Lift off the macarons carefully, using a metal spatula if needed (metal spatula is good and thin).

The two trays of pink macarons from my very first attempt: one had mostly successes, the second had a lot of cracked shells. These were much too crowded. The two trays from my second attempt, below, were almost all good. They also rose up more with better “feet”.

Note in this close-up  that some of these cookies have a strange, dull looking raised spot on them. This is because I followed a small trick suggested on some macaron sites to finish up the piped disks and get rif of the remaining nipple “bump”: you use a wet finger to tap the little nub down. What this causes here, however, is a damp spot on the otherwise drier, slightly shiny cookie top and when baked, this spot gets a spongy look and rises a bit more than the shell around it. This is strictly a visual issue but one I would suggest not be done to the cookies. Improved piping skill and the right consistency plus good tray whacking should get rid of the little lumps.

Once all the cookies are baked and off the liners, start matching them as pairs based on size and prettiness. Even cracked, odd shaped cookies will taste great. The perfect ones can be for guests.

Fill your (cleaned up) piping bag with the filling of choice. Here I’ve used the milk chocolate Swiss buttercream I made previously. To one of each pairs of disks, apply a dollop of filling, about the size of a quarter and generously enough, then place the top on the cookie.  In the sample above, I was just a little shy on the filing, not yet knowing if the buttercream would go far enough to do all the cookies. Which, obviously, it would have and this is how I know 2 cups of filling will do 40 filled cookies quite nicely.

Veronica, a blogger who attended a macaron class at Pierre Hermé in Paris (they have stopped giving these now) reported that their filling quantity is equal to the weight of the two cookie halves. If two shells weighed 11 grams, there should be 11 grams of filling. I didn’t weigh the shells so I have no idea what the average weight would be. Next time I make these, I’ll check that.

In this second phase of our Macaron process, we pick up a neat little money saving tip (who doesn’t like to save a little money, raise your hand… and send it to me). You have an urge to make macarons but have no ready source for almond flour or you’ve seen it on the store shelf and the price made you swoon.

Not to fear, you can make your own almond flour and be whipping out macarons in no time at all.

Here’s what you’ll need to make almond flour:

• 115g blanched almonds (whole, slices or slivers, doesn’t matter)
• 230g powdered sugar (confectioner’s)
• A food processor and a sieve.

Note that this quantity is the amount needed to make the Macaron recipe listed here. You’ll also note that the sugar is double the almond so adjust as needed.

Directions: Put all the almonds and about half the sugar (doesn’t need to be exact) in the food processor with the blade attachment. Process for about 1 minute, keeping a watchful eye so you don’t get almond butter (the sugar should help prevent this). Sift the resulting product through a standard sifter into a bowl.

Take the remaining larger chunks and put them back into the processor with the remaining sugar and give them another minute of processing. Sift again into your bowl . By this point, you should should be down to maybe a tablespoon or two of slightly coarse nut bits left. If this is all you have left, toss it into the main almond flour pile. If ti’s much more, give that a third whirr.

That’s it. You’ve got almond powder ready!

This process is based on info from BraveTart.com

You can also follow this same process if you want to make your macarons with different types of nut: hazelnuts, pistachio, whatever you prefer.

ProTip: Store your almonds (or any other nuts), whether ground, whole or pieces, in the refrigerator so the oils don’t start to go rancid. If you buy a fair amount when they go on sale, you can have some on hand at any time the macaron bug hits.

Next: Making Macarons
Before: Making Swiss Meringue Buttercream 

Whether used for cakes or cookies, this Swiss Meringue Buttercream is light, not too sweet and pretty straight forward to make. Swiss Meringue differs from Italian Meringue by the fact the egg and sugar are heated up together (145ºF minimum) before whipping, where Italian Meringue cooks the beaten eggs whites by adding very hot (245ºF) sugar syrup. Both of these are used to make buttercream frosting. A third type, French Meringue, is simply egg whites beaten with sugar, what most cooks would put on their lemon pies then bake.

Swiss Meringue Buttercream basic recipe

* 4g is about 1/2 teaspoon. Only add salt if you use unsalted butter (recommended). If you use salted butter, leave the salt out.

You can use either fresh eggs or the pre-packaged carton stuff, both will work just fine.

Equipment: You will need a mixer (or whisk and strong arm) and a thermometer.

The full sized batch will give about 10 cups or 2.3 liters of buttercream. You can freeze any extra and use it later; just let it warm to room temp them re-whip it. For the Macaron recipe, the 300g, 1/5 size batch, which I made below, will be plenty for 40 cookies.

For the milk chocolate version (full size batch), cut the vanilla in half and use 225g milk chocolate chunks plus 140g dark chocolate chunks. For the 1/5 size shown above, I reduced these to 45g milk and 28g dark.

If you don’t know what the baker’s percentage means, simply ignore this column.

Swiss Meringue Buttercream Directions:

Prep: Get butter out early and cut it into 2 inch cubes and set aside to get to room temp. Measure out your egg whites as well so they get to room temp too. Clean your mixer’s stainless steel bowl and whisk impeccably to get rid of any trace of grease or your meringue will fail; use a little vinegar on paper towel if needed.

Once you’re ready to start, add the egg whites, sugar, salt (if needed) and vanilla (if needed) to the stainless steel bowl of your mixer. Give the mixture a little whisking. Place this on top of a pot with an inch or so of water, heated to just steaming. You do NOT want it boiling or even simmering or your eggs will cook. Nor do you want the bottom of the bowl in the hot water, merely over it.

Use your candy or instant-read thermometer to watch the mixture’s temperature. Whisk a little every now and then. Your desired temperature is between 145ºF – 150ºF which is the safe temperature for egg whites. This will only take a minute or three so don’t go anywhere. If you used eggs right from the fridge, it may take a minute or so more.

Once you have reached your desired temp, remove the bowl from the pot and place it on your mixer.

Whip the egg whites on medium-high until they are doubled and snowy white with a medium peak. This will take a few minutes. Then turn the speed down to low and mix until the temperature of the bowl/meringue is cool. Test the bowl with your hand, you want no trace of warmth. For this reason, you do not want to use a glass or ceramic bowl as they’ll keep the heat and continue to cook the meringue.

Chocolate version: While the eggs are beating, put your chocolate chunks in a microwave safe bowl (I recommend a cup with a handle) and heat it in 30 second sessions. Stir the chunks with a spatula after each session until they are almost all melted. It only took me two full 30 second goes to almost melt my chocolate. The bowl I used got really hot; too hot to handle, ergo the cup recommendation. Note there are still a couple of small chunks left not fully melted. Stirring got these finished up nicely.

Next: don’t do what I did. Instead, slowly add the softened butter to the meringue, a chunk or two at a time, mixing at med-low, until it is well incorporated. Scrape down the sides often, continue until all the butter is added. If you are making plain vanilla flavoured Swiss meringue buttercream, taste the meringue and, if needed, add a few drops more vanilla to taste. Then you’re done at this point. If you are making other flavours of Swiss meringue buttercream, you would add this now, generally as follows:

Now you can add the chocolate (I added it before the butter – still worked out ok but..). The original recipe says to turn the mixer to low and add all the chocolate at once. You may want to stop the mixer and take the bowl off to add the chocolate (or other flavour component) directly into the meringue, avoiding it getting onto the cold bowl where it will seize. Use your spatula to get most of it incorporated, then pop it back on the mixer to whip it in well at med-low speed.

Once the chocolate is well mixed in, you are done! The 1/5 batch I made here gave about 2 cups.

And there you have it: Light, creamy Swiss meringue buttercream for your macarons or cakes!

Other flavour variations for Swiss meringue buttercream:

Dark Chocolate: Same amount as the milk chocolate version except the whole 365g  is dark chocolate (~75g for 1/5 batch).

Caramel: Melt 20 oz caramel squares (4 oz for the 1/5 batch) before you start and let this cool to room temperature. After the butter is mixed in, whip at low speed while drizzling the caramel in. Whip until completely mixed in.

Peanut Butter: Measure out as much peanut butter as there is butter. Once all the butter is mixed in, add the peanut butter, a little at a time and whip in at med-low speed, until it is “to taste”. You may well not use up all the peanut butter, depending on how deep its flavour is.

Look on the interwebs for other flavour possibilities.

STORING: Swiss Meringue Buttercream freezes well. Just be sure to thaw it out before use and give it another run in the mixer. It may look like it has “broken” at first but keep beating it and it will come together again nicely.

Want to Print this Recipe? Easy! Click the handy “Print friendly” button below to get a cleaned up version of the page, edit out superfluous yakking and get a tidy end product!

This recipe is based on the Swiss Meringue Buttercream from BraveTart.com

Next: Making Almond Flour
Then: Making Macarons

Macarons. Little almond/meringue based cookies with creamy fillings that seem to be all the rage these days or for the past several years at least. There are elite shops set up that sell just macarons in all varieties of flavours and colours, the most famous of these being Pierre Hermé (left and center pics below) and Ladurée, both out of Paris, natch.

Researching these cookies, one is left with the distinct impression that they require not only skill of the highest degree but intricate steps and rituals known only to the anointed.  Mere mortals can expect endless failure, best to leave it to the pros, kids.

And at prices tipping the $2 – $2.50 mark per cookie, it’s understandable that those who make them want to keep them pretty exclusive. It would, for example, cost you about $700 for the cookies visible in the photo of the display case seen above. Of course, you’re also paying for the high-brow location, the perfectly appointed stylish shop (yes, it is lovely), extra fancy packaging and a fairly large dose of lah-dee-dah.

Inspiration for Macarons

Enter Stella Parks of BraveTart.com and pastry chef at Table 310 in Lexington, KY. Her viewpoint: They’re just cookies, people! There’s nothing magical about them (although they are pretty damn tasty) and you don’t need to set up a sacrificial altar to the macaron gods to make them successfully.

And Stella knows what she speaks of. She makes these by the hundreds each week so has developed a very successful process that knocks out all the finicky, excess steps. And best of all, she shares her recipe and tips on her blog: Basic Macaron Recipe here, the Ten Commandments of what you must do here, and lastly, Ten Macaron Myths Busted here.

Naturally, I decided to give these little goodies a try. In fact, two tries at this point.

What I’ll do is break the process down into three parts:

1. Swiss Meringue Buttercream
2. Almond Flour (pretty simple, really)
3. Making Macarons

I’ll give each of these their own posts so it doesn’t turn into a ginormous long essay and you can print each process out individually, using the very handy PrintFriendly button below every post on the blog.

Speaking of, did you know you can nab a bookmark bar button that lets you print any page easily without lots of excessive info and graphics? Check out the PrintFriendly page for details and add it to your browser(s) now. It will make grabbing recipes and info SOOO much simpler for you! Do it before you hop over to Sally’s pages, too.

Alrighty then, let’s get going on these babies, shall we? Next up: Swiss meringue Buttercream!

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And into the third week of the Bread Baking section here at VIU, we enter the Wood Fired Oven station. This is, undeniably, one of the stations I have most been looking forward to. I have it somewhere in my brainpan that when I get a bakery going, one thing it will have that helps differentiate it from most other bakeries, and most certainly from grocery store bakeries, is the use of a wood fired oven.

Although I doubt it would be wise to use this sort of oven exclusively because there will be many things that a bakery pumps out that will need a very regulated temp and it would be really unwise to forego the use of a more standard oven completely. Patisseries, for example, would be a lot more difficult to produce in a wood oven, needing to have the timing just right to catch the heat as it passes through the temp range pastries need. However, it could be a wise move to make use of a wood oven for a bulk of the bread baking.

So there we were, well before the crack of dawn, getting the oven started for the week.

After beginning a small fire with some small scraps left over from the week before, Kevin tackles the chopping of the firewood. Over the next two days, he filled about 6 crates full of small kindling to fair sized pieces of wood, as seen in the two different crates in the bottom right of the photo.

Setting a pile of kindling alight, a few larger pieces were placed in the opening, near the fire, in order to help dry out the already seasoned but slightly damp wood before moving it onto the fire.

Not to long after this, several more pieces join the flames and the lot get pushed further back into the oven.

This, by the way, is a design based on the Allan Scott plans and it has a cavity of about 4 ft by 6 ft so there is a fair bit of space in there, needing a fair bit of heating up to get it up to temp. There are two probes in the base if the stove to indicate what the temperature is right under the fire and a few inches below this. A heat sensor gun give us info on the inside of the cavity. Eventually, we would get the heat on the ceiling to about 1000ºF while the flames were burning strongly, as in the photo at right.

After several hours and stoking with more firewood and sawdust briquettes, we had a large bed of hot coals keeping the ceiling temp near 700ºF with a floor at 500ºF. The probes, however, noted the insulation base was hovering in the mid 300 ºF range. It would take a fairly long time for the mass there to get very hot and maintain that heat.

On day one, we were able to get the wood oven hot enough to handle a batch of bagels wich the team of Taina, Andrea and Paul C produced. Kevin baked these off beautifully while I was prepping the veggies and other aspects of the lunchtime pizzas. These, however, would be done in the deck oven as we did not need to temp the baking gods and mess up dozens and dozens of pizzas.

And that, in effect, was basically our duties for the week: in the morning, fire up the oven for a couple of hours (for the next few days, already hot from the previous day), clean out the coals and ash, bake up bagels and whatever bread was headed to the wood oven, prep all pizzas for the 11 a.m. lunch crowd, including making the dough, dividing and rolling out 30+ small pizza shells, top said pizza shells with prepped veg and and bake. This would get us from 6 a.m. (or earlier) right through to noon when the class would head off for Theory and the pastry class took over the bakery.

I actually managed, with some help from Taina, to get a fair number of photos of the pizza making process. Wanna see? Of course you do.

Each day, we prepared all the condiments needed and made a selection of Meat Lovers (sauce, ham, salami, mushrooms, green onion, pineapple and cheese mix), Vegetarian (sauce, green onion, mushroom, olives, roasted red peppers, topped with feta , Parmesan and mix cheeses), pesto (pesto sauce, feta, mushroom, onion, black olives, chopped tomato) and a “special” which was up to us. We fire roasted some eggplant and later in the week, Mr B roasted some chickens so those were the main components of our “specials” this week.

Here, Kevin is ready to start loading the oven with some of the just prepared pizzas. Next, I am helping get a batch of baked pizzas into the pans.

Some of our pizzas baking in the oven. Although not at the highest possible temp, these pizzas bakes in about 5 to 6 minutes. In an oven that is dedicated to pizzas, you would keep a small fire going to one side and your temps would hover in the 900 to 1000 ºF range, where you could cook the pizzas in about 1 to 2 minutes.

Here we have brought the hot pizzas inside and are slicing, plating and about to deliver them to the lower caf (directly behind us) for the hungry folk waiting.

During this week, we also had a few catering orders come in (it’s getting to holiday time now so I am guessing there are a few staff parties going on in the University) and we had to produce some 30 large size pizzas for different department. I am pleased to say that Mr B was told by the Dean that the pizzas Kevin and I made were excellent. I have to assume that this means we did a better than normal job to warrant a special note back from the Dean to say so.

I even bought one (pesto) myself. We do pretty darn good pizza!

We also had to produce some 120 par-baked pizza shells for another special order, dunno who needed that many. But that was an interesting experience on its own. The bakery isn’t a mass production sort of place, most everything is done by hand with a little mechanical assistance, so pumping out that many shells, on top of what we are expected to make each day on TOP of the 30 special order large pizzas, was an interesting trip into high gear work.

Fortunately, we do have a big ol’ machine that helps with the shaping of loaves, an Acme Molder. Although the one in the photo isn’t ours, it is the same big-ass machine as ours. Connor and I spend a good couple of hours feeding dozens and dozens of little dough bals into it (Kevin was tending the oven outside and making bread). After just a dozen or so, we got the hang of it and were able to pump out nearly perfect sized round(ish) circles of dough. Connor is DA MAN!

That’s about it for Wood Fired Oven week for Kevin and I. It went incredibly fast and, in fact, this Bread Section is wipping by at a crazy pace; we’re already halfway through our stations! Next week, we do Ovens, meaning baking everything that needs baking in the deck and convection ovens, making sure the morning deliveries are ready to go out and all special orders are being attended to. It will be a little crazy because it’s the last week before holidays so a lot of extra stuff will come in.

And speaking of other stations, here are some shots of the work done by the other teams.

Taina and Sandie work on braiding a few loaves. Happy braiders!

A few of the breads made by the yeast teams, including a braid-on-braid loaf (bottom right) from Andrea. I baked these in the wood oven myself; it only took about 20 minutes for them to get to 200 ºF inside!

You know how I noted that I didn’t get any photos of our doughnuts in last week’s post? Well, I’m going to vicariously enjoy these photos of doughnuts, produced by the Sara, Alexis and Ally team – and I think it’s fair to say Ally is the mastermind in the doughnut department here. Hers are obviously very festive, something I had thought of doing but passed on last week, as we were still in November. Nice job, ladies! Enjoy Wood Oven next week! (They follow Kevin and me.)

Connor (Mr Dang Helpful Dude), helps with pizzas. Shay is part of the Oven team this week, along with Josie and Leah, and are the team Kevin and I follow.

I may have mentioned this before but Connor is always trying to avoid being caught on camera and here Paul is trying to help him get over his camera phobia. Not sure if it’s really helping much.

Josie “eats the evidence” of a failed chocolate dipping while some decorated gingerbread cookies await packaging for another special order.

Paul C displays a nice Pullman loaf (a.k.a. Pain de Mie), heading soon for the slicing machine.

Lauren, Andrea and Sara help pump out more holiday treats for special orders, while Alexis and, way in the back, Ally make fondant decoration for some christmas cakes.

Part of the Holiday Treats brigade: Lauren, Sandy, Andrea, Sara and Josie.

Chocolate dipped shortbread cookies wrapped with a bow and candy canes, and chocolate truffles rolled in chocolate and white chocolate shavings (I think).

And that does it for this week’s activities!

This weekend, Mr B has invited everyone to his house for a Sunday get-together before he heads out Tuesday for his vacation to Australia!!! Standing in for the remainder of the week will be Chef Gower. That will be our last week for 2011 and we’ll return Tue January 3rd.

But I may well have a post or two in the meantime so don’t go too far, hear?

Oh, and because someone (Taina) was saying I’m never in the pictures (being behind the camera seems to do that, doncha know) here’s a shot Taina took of yours truly:

In this second week of the Baking 101 segment of our course, Kevin and I entered the Sweet Yeasted 2 station which involves, primarily, making doughnuts (making the dough, rolling and cutting, frying and topping) and cinnamon buns (dough, rolling, topping, slicing).

The photos you see for this segment all came in on the last day as I had, again, forgotten to take pictures all week. Above, for example, are the cinnamon raisin rolls we had made and were heading into the freezer for the next day’s bake. They look a lot better baked, I can assure you but I hadn’t got any pictures of that stage all week. I’ll try harder to make time.

Here’s the breakdown of he schedule: Pull doughnuts from the freezer in the morning, let warm up while we each make the 7.5 pounds of cinnamon roll dough which is actually a sweet brioche dough. While that’s proofing, we do a MEP of doughnut dough, about 10 lbs.

Once these two things are done, the doughnuts are usually warmed up enough we can pop them in the proofer and start up the big fryer at 360ºF.  While that takes 15 minutes to heat up, we get all out toppings ready: chocolate dip, bun icing, sugar, cinnamon sugar, custard cream to fill, sprinkles, roasted almond, hazelnuts and so forth.

While one of us is on frying duty (1 minute per side for the plain ring doughnuts, a bit longer for the solid filled ones and 1:45 for the apple fritters) the other gets creative on topping the hot doughnuts.

I do wish I had photos to add here, they came out pretty darn nice.

Once doughnut duty was done and all the racks and toppings are put away, we mix the MEP doughnut ingredients and set it aside to proof. We then use the sheeter to roll out the cinnamon bun dough, spread it with custard and add cinnamon sugar. Now and then we get to switch one of these up; I did a lemon sugar and cranberry and a cran-orange version.

Above left, Kevin spreads custard to a cinnamon roll sheet. Right: Raisins are included in the dough for this batch. Below: Cranberry Orange rolls are ready to proof or freeze.

In addition to these standard items our station produces each day, we also had to make a specialty bread: Stollen. Again, no photos. Maybe I can get a few next week when the second batch get baked up. In spite of lack of pictures, I can assure you that these came out really nicely. I was actually pleasantly surprised. I’ve had Stollen before and was unimpressed with the dry, mealy texture. But the ones we made this week were tender, moist and full of rum-soaked raisins, candied pee and almond slices. We also stuffed the crescent shaped loaves with Frangipan, a mixture of (in part) ground almond, butter, sugar and egg. Deeelicious! These cakes, once baked, are coated in sugar and wrapped in festive cellophane bags with a red ribbon. Not only tasty but visually enchanting as well.

On our last day in this section, we also had to make 60 mini burger buns. Not exactly challenging but interesting to make any way.

We used the divider to make two batches of 36 balls, rolled them, proofed then flattened them again, applied egg wash and lightly seeded with sesame, proofed a little more then baked. They came out very nicely.

Finally another extra product we made was a Lemon-Poppy Seed Butterfly. Let me pull up the photos first.

These started out similarly to the cinnamon rolls: make a sheet, spread the filling (butter, poppy seed butter and a good splash of lemon juice) roll and cut. Mr B explained the “butterfly” process by saying that you then take the sliced piece and, using a wooden dowel, press it down across the top until you reach the bottom, making a deep divide. He then went off to help the next person but didn’t actually show me how this was done. So I did what you see above: pressed right down the middle until I had divided it very well. Once I had done a tray full, I looked for him to ask how tightly together these should be placed since unlike cinnamon roll  that can touch their neighbours, i presumed the shape might get lost if these butterflies were too close.

“Well, that’s a new way to do things” he said when he came to look at my work. Turns out that I was supposed to take the long, snake-like roll of dough, slice each piece and without flipping them on their side, press down thoroughly on each piece’s edge. Like so:

Having just a couple more rolls left undone, I set these on a small pan along with the remaining wrongly made ones. We’ll have to wait ’till Monday to see how these turn out.

The really sad part of this is that Mr B showed us how to do exactly this design back in week three of the course and I even have photos. D’oh!! What tripped me was when he specified to “dust the tops” then press the dowel down. “Top” for me registered as the top of a cinnamon roll we had been doing all week, not the top when they were still on their sides. Ah well. They’ll taste good regardless!

On to week three of the baking 101 section: Wood Fired Oven! Am I “stoked” (har!) for this one? YOU BET!! I just need to wear dark clothes as Josie, who’s team we follow in rotation, was basically black with ash and soot all week. Playing with fire week: how fun will that be?

Here, to close these last two wekks’ reviews are a couple of snaps I have of the other teams.

Paul C, Josie and Andrea have a chuckle.

From the previous week: Chelsea pipes some of the 200 mince meat pies we made
(as well as several types of bars and cookies) for a special order.

And that’s about it for this week. Hopefully, I can get a bunch of good pictures of the wood fired oven and maybe catch some of the Stollen, baked cinna-rolls and finished doughnuts to flesh out this weeks’ products.

See you in a bit!

We recently completed the Pastry 101 leg of the Professional Baking and Pastry Arts course here at the Culinary Institue at Vancouver Island University, and at this writing, have begun the Baking 101 segment and are actually done with week two. Time for a course update!

Probably first on the list of changes when starting this new section is that we have been put into new teams. And because we have 17 people in class, there are five teams of three and one of just two. That happens to be Kevin and me. We both seem to like being just two, we communicate well and don’t need to adjust everything three ways. On the other hand, some of the stations, most likely Oven Duties, may be a little strenuous as this seems to be the biggest workload. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here as that won’t happen for two weeks yet.

The six Stations we’ll rotate through are:

1. Oven: Proof & bake, manage oven, garnish, check and send catering orders, etc..
2. Yeast Breads 1: Mix 75 lb Challah dough, make White bread, Pizza rolls, Foccacia, Dinner buns
3. Bread 2 & Fancy Buns: mix several doughs, make whole wheat, Honey Seed breads, Bagels, Pita, Pretzels
4. Sweet Yeast 1: Croissants, Danishes
5. Sweet Yeast 2: Doughnuts, Cinnamon buns, Coffee Cake, Raisin Bread
6. Wood fired Oven: Pizzas (make & bake) Granola, Gluten Free breads, attend to Fire

Kevin and I were starting our rotations at Station 4, Sweet Yeasted Breads 1. These stations were end-capped with a week of Orientation at the start and Review/Catch up week at the end. So pretty much the same deal as the Pastry section we had just completed.

Week One of Baking 101 was supposed to be Orientation and Mr B had each team do what they were going to do for Week Two as a warm-up week. As we were scheduled to do Sweet Yeast 1, that’s what we went into for orientation. Likewise all the other teams went ahead “testing out” their next week’s station.

Sweet Yeast 1 involves making laminated doughs for both Croissants and Danishes and when completed, making several varieties of croissants and danishes for sale in the cafeterias. Each day, we had to make three heads of dough for croissants plus one for the danishes.

A “head” in baking terms refers to a large ball of dough, in our specific case, three heads of 16 pounds each, a total of 48 pounds of croissant dough each day.

The process for building the laminated dough is the same for both Croissnat and Danish doughs although the recipes are slightly different in that the Danish dough has a couple of spices and gets only tow rotations. Since I have no photos of these steps and it would take many complicated paragraphs to explain, I’ll let this video from chef Ciril Hitz show you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The daily process basically went like this:

Give each of the three croissant doughs made the day before a final rolling to get about 16 inches wide and around 72 inches long. Then using the croissant roller, cut the dough into about 60 croissants. Then add the required fillings (ham & cheese, pesto & cream cheeses, sundried tomato & cream cheese, spinach & feta) and roll these up. Lastly, apply egg wash, proof and bake. These last steps are done by the Oven team who are timing everything to fit their production and oven space needs.

 
Left: Sun Dried tomato & Cream Cheese croissants. Right: Just some of the piles of Ham & Cheese croissants we made every day.

Next, give the danish dough from the day before two stages of lamination and produce a few dozen danishes in different styles.

 
Left: Mr B shows us (Kevin here) a few neat Danish styles. Right: Diamonds with mixed berries and apple Bear Claws. These now get an apricot glaze to make them shiny and delicious.

Then start building the next day’s doughs and laminate the butter in three stages (or two for danish dough). This meant scaling and mixing the doughs, mixing and setting up the butter blocks and giving each head their full shaping and laminating so they’d be ready for their final roll out the next day.

At the end of this first week, Mr Barnett proclaimed that our class had advanced so well during what he had expected to be a challenging “trial” orientation week that we would move forward to our next stations the following week. Woot! (with an extra big “Woot!!” from the Oven team, Paul Conway, Andrea and Nicole who wouldn’t have to do that station two weeks straight.)

What happens to Orientation week now, since we all nailed our first station weeks? We’ll finish all stations with two weeks to spare which we can then use to focus on those things we choose to re-do and get more experience in. So basically two weeks of Review & Catch Up with space for further experimentation.

So ended Week One of Bread Baking. How was this compared to Pastry? Personally, I’m in heaven here. Although we are more into “production” in baking – focussing almost entirely on putting out large quantities of products for the cafeterias and special orders, it felt more comfortable to do. Kevin and I seemed to have done a pretty good job of our croissants – which Mr B specifically commented on – so that felt great too. We can only hope we continue to produce as well for the next several weeks.

And it was a hella fun to boot.

OK, bring on Sweet Yeast 2!

What would happen if you ran out of bread flour but still wanted to make bread? Or the store had an awesome sale on cake flour which you were tempted to use instead? Flour is basically just flour, after all, no? There’s not much difference between Pastry and All Purpose, besides a bit more protein, right?

As an experiment, the class did a test this week to see what each of four types of flour could make, using the same recipe for each and changing only the type of flour used. The recipe was put together by team of Chelsea, Connor and Lauren.

We tested simple panned bread loaves made from:

1. Organic Bread flour
2. All Purpose flour
3. Pastry flour
4. Cake flour

Each batch were made with the exact same ingredients except for the flour, in the same quantities and mixed in four identical 10-quart mixers. Each mix made four identically sized loaves and baked for the same amount of time. Although not under strict laboratory controlled conditions, these were, in effect, identical breads.

One difference was allowed: the higher protein flours, Bread and All Purpose, were given a little more mixing time. This is because their higher gluten content needed more kneading in order to be developed properly. The lower gluten flours developed their lesser gluten amount faster.

Once mixed and bulk proofed, the doughs were divided into four loaves and panned then given a final proof.

The cake flour didn’t fare very well even in these early stages. As you can see in the photo, the structure of the dough is terrible. Cake flour is an extremely finely ground “soft flour” as it has such a low protein (gluten) level, about 6 to 8%. Having very little gluten development, it was unable to form a mesh of stretchy ‘fibers’ to trap any of the gasses given off by the yeast. The gluten structure there was simply tore. In a cake, this is a valuable aspect since cake batter traps only tiny bubbles of gas from (usually) baking powder. Low gluten means a softer, more tender finished cake. But in bread, these are not desirable traits. Further, the cake flour is very white, being well bleached, a very unappetizing looking dough, even before baking. Note that this cake flour is not “self-rising” – it has no chemical leaveners in it.

Next we have the Pastry flour dough, clocking it at around 9% protein. This has a small amount more protein than the cake flour but still not a lot. It was able to orm enough structure to not tear across the surface but you’ll note it is extremely shiny which indicates what gluten development has occurred gone past it’s maximum mixing. At this point, the gluten is no longer able to hold the water in the dough which gives it that wet, shiny look. You can see this wet, shiny surface in stronger doughs too, if they are allowed to be overmixed, again breaking down the gluten which can no longer trap the water.

Here we have the All Purpose dough – in Canada, that is generally in the 11.5% protein levels. This dough shows a much better surface due to its higher gluten development. It was able to trap the yeast’s gas and has clearly expanded considerably more than the two previous doughs were able to do.

Although this dough seems to be doing well here, it is not the best choice for making bread as that 11-12% protein is not optimal for the structure of the bread. Generally speaking, “all purpose” flour is not used in bakeries since it’s neither best for bread or pastries, falling somewhere in the middle of the two.

Lastly, we look at the Organic Bread flour dough at about 13% protein and can see readily that it has risen even better than the All Purpose flour dough. Its gluten development is stronger and was able to stretch and still contain the gasses. The surface is markedly better than the Pastry and Cake doughs although not notably different from the All Purpose – the improvements between these two will occur more during the baking stage. One aspect that is evident here, however, is that the dough colour is noticeably more golden than the All Purpose, which has a whiter tone.

Next: the doughs go into the oven for a bake.

These breads were all baked in the same oven at 180°C until the internal temperature reached around 93°C.

Needless to say, the Cake flour loaf is a total failure. Not only did it not rise, it failed to even brown in spite of being in the same oven as the other loaves. Why? There is a lack of natural sugars in the dough and sugar is what caramelizes to give the golden crusts seen in the other loaves.

The Pastry loaf looks slightly better but was still unable to increase in size enough during baking as it’s gluten had pretty much maxed out during mixing.

The All Purpose faired a bit better although not as well as the organic bread. It shows it’s bleached aspect in the lighter crust although the fermentation process was able to convert the starch in the flour to sugars and allow a somewhat reasonable amount of browning.

The Organic Bread had no bleaching to hinder it’s colour and supplied plenty of sugar for browning. The gluten structure shows excellent expandability.

Slicing the breads, we look at the crumb. Obviously, the Cake flour bread is cakey in texture. There’s no discernible expansion, it is dense and heavy, having held much of the water. The colour is also rather unappetizing and the slices break apart easily. All the things that make poor bread would make a good cake however, using the right recipe. And the bread had an unpleasant scent, as well.

The Pastry flour bread is a slight improvement on the previous one. The colour of the crumb is much better although the texture is still somewhat tight. The loaf has no spring and when pressed doesn’t come back much.

Both of these loaves are clearly lacking gluten and are not meant for bread making. They are, on the other hand, superior at what they are meant for: delicate cakes and pastry where bread flour would fail just as badly at those tasks.

Next, we look at the All Purpose bread. The crumb here is very white due to the flour being bleached. The development of the dough is an improvement from the previous loaves although the texture is still on the tight side. OK but we can easily do better.

The Organic bread crumb is, for a sandwich loaf, lightest of all and the loaf does bounce back when pressed. This means the gluten is well developed and the starches have set nicely. The creamy colour of the crumb indicates the flour is unbleached and will have a better taste. This slice of bread will toast better than the other breads, imparting more flavour. And you get more bread volume for the same weight of flour.

Although none of the above results are really surprising – few people would expect cake flour to make good bread – it’s good to see what happens and really know what the results are. This also visually demonstrates the benefits of higher gluten in making a good loaf of bread, even an enriched sliced sandwich loaf like these.