The Bread of Life

Each week at the castle we have a visiting chef, a specialist in his field (bakers are always always men in France) each with a unique treat to teach us. This week we had the bread man. Chef Alain (said baker) has therefore brought us the art of the croissant, pain chocolat, and every French person's all time favorite, the baguette. We began our lesson with a brief history of French bread. Before giant mixers with huge dough hooks, people actually had to knead massive amounts of dough by hand or in this case by foot. Yes its true, the French love to step on their food - thus the creation of wine, cheese, and even bread. The laminated dough used to create a croissant, for example, should be exceptionally firm to the touch, the gluten web created by the flour and the yeast should be particularly strong so the many layers of dough rise instead of collapse. So in the early days the French stomped on the dough before shaping it. But due to these modern times of course, we used "la patron," or "the boss" of all mixers - basically just a giant kitchen aid. For all those home cooks who attempt to make croissants, this is one reason they never turn out perfectly right... next time try using your feet.
We began making croissants after the dough had been cooled in the freezer for a good 15 minutes. We used a special type of French butter that is higher in fat content then what you can buy in the store and thus much drier, more mailable, and less likely to melt. The dough and the butter must always remain cold so as to insure that the layers remain intact, thus after every fold made one should immediately put the dough back into the freezer. To soften the butter we beat it with a rolling pin, making it soft but not warm and then placed it inside a folded piece of parchment paper so that we could roll it out to a thin sheet. After this and the dough had cooled we brought the dough out and folded the butter into the dough, being careful to keep all of the butter contained within the dough. Back to the freezer and then repeated a number of times before finally rolled out into a large rectangle.
We used half of our dough to make pain chocolat and the other half for the croissants. The only difference between the two was that with the "chocolate bread" we rolled them with sticks of 55% cocoa chocolate instead of cutting them into triangles and rolling them into spirals. These goodies are then put into a proofer, a sort of humidity box that helps the dough rise at rapid speed. When the croissants and pain chocolat were finally put into the oven the many layers of butter evaporated all of their water content, pushing the layer above the butter up and thus creating a puff pastry. After only 4 folds we created about 1000 layers. Cool, huh?
The finished product was AMAZING! So tasty, so buttery and crisp, and completely created by yours truly. Good times.
The baguette is a French tradition, but was originally created in Vienna by the Austrians. But if you ever told a French person that you may be slapped, so maybe keep this one to yourself. To create a perfect baguette one has to constantly take the temperature of the dough and add ice water if its too hot. Yeast is very picky and the light and airy texture of a baguette is surprisingly difficult to achieve. For the perfect baguette you also have to have a speical deck oven, a particularly hot oven that creates steam. You bake them at 205 degrees celcius, about 400 degrees Fahrenheit and the steam insures that the crust rises and sets before hardening the inside of the bread, creating a lighter loaf.

One of the best parts of the school is that everything we make is served in the restaurant (unless its horribly disfigured in which case it usually just gets tossed). So for lunch today, alongside my lamb and Mediterranean veggies I had a hunk of my, fresh from the oven baguette. Yummy.