The little darlins coming out.

You might wonder what I’ve been up to since the whole “preferments and degas” tomfoolery. Well, more pre-ferments and de-gassing. We in HRM-201 Intermediate Breads have spent our first month of Wednesday labs making biga, then pate fermentee, then biga, then pate fermentee…then biga… well, you catch my drift. This might lead you to think making biga and pate fermentee are hard. Au contraire; they’re not so hard. It’s everything that comes after that’s the trick: the shaping, the scoring, the steam injection.

Well, the steam injection is no big deal. It’s really the shaping and the scoring. That’s hard. So we did that a few times and while you think that would make me better at it, it didn’t. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

We ended with a look-see at baguette just to make us feel even lamer about our shaping skills. But, as the French say, c’est la vie!

Here’s my first month of bread making in review.

Week one: Meet my new friends biga and pate fermentee. Weeks Two and Three had nothing much of note, except a little shout-out to the Kitchen Aid we killed (RIP, mon frere), and some fancy shaping. But Week Four! The shaping! The flouring! The bannetons! The mess!

And, for the finale, le baguette. Just click on a photo if you want le slide show.

Next week, Soakers and Flatbreads!