But first, I have to finish recording my experiences in California.
Day Four was a continuation of bread, but instead of baguettes, batards and other raised breads, we studied and learned how to make flatbreads. These are the breads first made by our ancestors, the closest cousins to the primordial breads made when someone decided to slap a boring glob of grainy gruel onto a hot rock, and realized that what resulted was a great improvement over the slimy stuff they had been eating for far too long. This class today focused on traditional breads from around the world.
It was interesting, but not nearly as fascinating to me as yesterday. I think this is mainly because the breads we made yesterday are considered the premier breads of our culture, and are certainly favored breads me. I don't think I'll be making many of the breads we studied today, but it was still enjoyable.
I was teamed up with two women I enjoyed working with quite a bit, Mary and Jennifer. Mary is a 50-something who loves being in the kitchen, and loves to teach others to cook. She's been giving classes in her own home for several years now, which I found very intriguing. She had a friend with what Mary called a "good mailing list," and so Mary mailed out 500 postcards advertising cooking classes in her home. She ended up with a good response, and so began several years of teaching occasional classes in her home. I think she's taking this class because she is interested in expanding her knowledge about baking and pastry, so she can pass her new skills onto her students. Jennifer is the one person in our class who's definitely planning to attend the CIA, and is starting this fall, in fact. She's very cheerful, and enthusiastic, and I found I liked her immediately. I think she'll do quite well in culinary school.
The three of us were assigned two different types of flatbread: lavash (pronounced LUH-vosh) and pita bread. Two teams were doing both breads, and so it was decided that our pita bread would be made with whole wheat. Everyone knows what pita bread is, but lavash was a bread that was totally unfamiliar to us all. It's actually really a cracker. According to Chef Brown, lavash originated in Armenia, but quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean and today still can be found across a wide geographic area. Despite the fact that it's a very thin cracker, the dough has yeast and needs to rise, which I found strange. It has a mix of flours too: bread, cake, whole wheat and durum. They all lend different properties, properties that seem to counteract each other, at least in my understanding. For example, cake flour is very high in starch, low in fiber and protein, which is the exact opposite of bread flour. It seems like mixing the two would essentially result in all-purpose flour, so when I make this again, I'll give that a whirl. The whole wheat gives some depth to the flavor of the cracker, and the durum flour is really what's needed to make this cracker "crack." It's quite hard, and it's the flour that's used in making pasta, which allows pasta to have the "al dente" character that we all find so desirable: a little bite, which gives way to a soft interior.
The lavash has a little bit of milk, honey and molasses, salt and yeast, besides the flours. It has to rise for about an hour, and then you have to roll it out to a miniscule thickness of 1/2 mm. This would be hard to do in a home kitchen, but here at the CIA, they have power tools for such mundane tasks as rolling out doughs. This appealed to the woodworker in me, and made me think of my planer back home. Basically what you have is a large, cloth conveyor belt which moves from side to side on which you place your hunk of dough. You pass it through the center, which is where the business happens. Essentially what you have are cylinders that exert pressure on the dough as it passes by, and there is a controller that determines the thickness. It's called a dough sheeter, and makes short shrift of the menial task of rolling out dough. I want one.
After you get the dough rolled out, you pop it onto an oiled sheetpan, cover the rolled out dough with olive oil, then sprinkle on your topping of choice. The toppings are usually nuts or seeds: sesame, pumpkin, pistachios, etc. Bake it off, and you have yourself a very, very tasty cracker. This is probably the one bread I'll see myself making in the future. It would be the perfect accompaniment to hummus--a perfect dipping cracker.
The pita breads...well, what can I say? Dud city again. Unfortunately, our team let them proof (rise) too long. This was largely because we were so consumed with all of the fun, exciting breads and baking techniques the other teams were using, that we ignored our boring, little pitas. They may not have done so well, but I certainly had fun working with the other teams on their breads.
Naans are flatbreads native to India and its neighbors. In Santa Cruz, several of us ate at a Sri Lankan restaurant, and we were served a cousin to naan, which made me look forward to trying my hand at this bread. It's a basic dough, with the addition of a little yogurt. It rises for a little bit, and then you knead and shape it by hand into a little pancake-sized piece of dough. The cooking is where the fun comes in. To cook a naan, you need a tandoor oven. Imagine a big box, about four feet tall and three feet wide. There's a circular opening on the top of the oven about half the size of the top of the box--the inside of the oven widens as it goes down towards the ground, so a tandoor oven sort of is like the Parthenon in Rome. At the bottom, you have your heat source: vents allow high powered flames from a propane tank to heat up the sides of the oven. Once it's heated, you reach your hands inside, with the dough attached to a piece of cloth, and slap the dough to the sides of the convex part of the oven.
The dough sticks to the sides, and starts baking away. When it's close to being done, it starts to pull itself away from the walls of the oven. Here's where you grab the tools of the trade: a little L-shaped skewer that you insert into the middle of the bread, and a scraper to help ease the dough off the side of the oven. Once you pull that puppy off, you dip it into some melted butter and you have an instant party in your mouth. At the Sri Lankan restaurant, they added garlic to the butter, which is a definite improvement. I enjoyed this bread, though I don't plan on buying a tandoor oven anytime soon, and think that baking bread on the side of my oven walls is a disaster waiting to happen. I'll leave this one to the Indians. (Please excuse the poor photo! I haye flash, but I thought you might find it interesting).Moving over to Arabia, we also made Khubs Zatar, translated as thyme bread. This flat bread is baked on top of a massive, circular griddle, so presumably it could be made at home quite easily, though it's only so-so. The bread gets its name from the topping, since zatar means thyme in Arabic. It was OK, but not nearly as good as the naan. I may try it sometime though, since I do think it would go well with hummus.
In a totally different direction, our class made pretzels. Pretzels originated in Germany, and as my teacher said, leave it to the Germans to invent a cooking method that requires the use of goggles and safety glasses. These are worn to prevent scarring from chemical burns. Yup, I said chemical burns. In order to give pretzels their traditional brown color and chewy texture, you must first dip them in lye. Yup, I said lye. This is where the goggles come in. I didn't partake in the dipping, but I did make a few pretzels. They're fun to make, and they were certainly tasty, though I'll leave pretzel making for the professionals.
From there, we headed over to Italy and made foccacia. This was my favorite bread of the day, for obvious reasons. This is something everybody likes, and the bread is very versatile. The team that made the foccacia made a delicious version with heirloom tomatoes, mozzarella, roasted garlic and fresh basil on it. Tasty! It appears to be a fairly easy dough to make, so I'm sure I'll be pulling this one out from time to time when company's coming over.
At the end of the day, we did evaluations. We evaluated some of the breads from the previous day, and I'm glad to say that our instructor told us that the ciabatta my team made was an excellent example of the style. That was good to hear, and I told him to remember that when he started talking about the pitas we made today. The chef also cut into the rosemary bread that had been made. That is the best bread of the two days, in my opinion. I thought it was a terrific bread--perfect crust and texture, and a nice touch of rosemary to add some great flavor. Half of the rosemary dough had the addition of olives, and this turned out well too. I actually could enjoy the olives in this bread, so perhaps there's hope for me in the olive department. This bread was also simply beautiful to look at. If you've ever been to an artisinal bakery, and seen round loaves of bread with a circular pattern on top, outlined in just a little bit of flour, you'll know what I'm talking about. To make this distinctive look, you proof the bread in cane bread bowls, which are made with a string of cane wrapped around itself. The pressure of the rising dough presses the bottom into the pattern formed by the cane bowl. When you bake the bread, you turn the dough over, so the pattern of the cane becomes the top, and is an essential part of the bread's form. They simply look fantastic. I'll be buying some of those bowls soon!
The lavash and foccacia were the hits of the day, at least for me, since I think they're the ones that actually could have some usefulness. I like pitas, but not enough to make them myself, and honestly, I don't think there is a notable difference between homemade and store bought. There's really not much there to begin with.
It was a full day, but more relaxed than the previous three days. I started the day actually at a food museum, called Copia. Very interesting place, for everybody, not just foodies. If you're ever in Napa, I'd add it to the trip.
Oh, and I forgot what we did at the very beginning of class. We made four different types of ganache in preparation for Friday's class, which is all about chocolate. A class about chocolate: I'm willing to do my homework.
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