A LONG week in the bread rotation...

Hello,

 I apologize for being away for so long. This last week has been kind of super busy. I started back at my old bakery job, and the bread rotation is....interesting. It takes up a lot of time. We are usually the last group to leave the kitchen. You can only work so fast in bread, with two proofs, then rolling and baking. Takes lots of time, especially when you are making 6-8 different kinda of breads at a time that you have never done before.

 Working in our lab is a joy. The pastry lab has 99% of everything we need, so we don't need to go in to the cooks kitchen for much of anything. The cooks however...they come in our kitchen a lot. We had a very rough week with the cooks. Somehow a butt ton of salt got dumped in to our huge sugar bin, so the pastry group had VERY salty buttercream and cakes. We had salty cinnamon buns. We had to get Chef to try all our doughs before we made them to make sure the salt balanced out.
 They use our proofer as well. After they were done with it, they turned it off.  With our product still in it. *grumble*
 They used our scale and it always stays on KG for us. They changed it to LBS and we didn't notice (so its half on us I guess) so we screwed up our measurements.

 A few other things happened but I've started to block out the bad that happened lol. Not worth the stress.

 I mean it was just a horrible week. We had some tension in our group which makes for a super rough day. Everything got sorted out, which takes a lot of stress away. I hope next week will be better. Due to the snow day we had on wednesday we will be continuing bread next week. ....yay....

 Now that I'm done complaining, we did actually make some very yummy breads.

We made pretzels. Jogger bread. english muffins. Potato bread. hungarian twist. Rye rings. Gibassier. cinnamon buns. sour dough. tea biscuits and white and whole wheat rolls.

 Most of the bread was really fun to make AND quite yummy!

Gibassier:

 I liked this bread. It had anise seeds (black liquorish flavour) and candied orange peel. Then we shape them and when they come out of the oven we brush them with butter and dip them in sugar.

 I don't have any pictures of the english muffins, Jogger bread, potato bread, or the sour dough. Those were pretty busy days where pictures just didn't happen.

The hungarian twist was really fun to make. I loved that bread. We did dough plain and the other dough we added cocoa powder. It doesn't taste like chocolate, I think it just added some colour and maybe a little sweetness.
 We cut the dough in to 100g pieces and we rolled them out in to skinny logs. Then Chef showed us how to braid them. Left over right, Left over right, right over left. I'll never forget.

The rye rings were also fun to make. We got to use our elbows! It's very exciting when you get to use something other than your hands to shape bread. You roll your piece in to a ball, then flatten it a bit, then use your elbow to make a hole in the middle then roll it in to a ring. You need to make sure your ring is big enough though so when it proofs it doesn't expand to much and you end up having a piece of bread that looks like a butthole. teehheehee. Butthole bread.

On Friday Chef gave us a break. There was no restaurant service so we didn't have to rush to get anything out. We just had to make 4 breads for the cafeteria. We made focaccia, sour dough, two different types of tea biscuits and jogger rolls. We also got to dip and finish our chocolates we started in the decor rotation.

 We made all our dough and while we were waiting for it to proof we dipped our chocolates. I went in and grabbed the tray that they were on. I looked at mine..."hmm..I made 24...I have 14. What the hell!?" So I showed Chef and I accused the Cooks (they always eat our chocolates!) And he says "oh yeah. Thats my bad. I ate those. They are so good!" "You ate 10? haha holy crap. Why couldn't you of reached in a little further and eaten someone else's? I only have 14 left. *evil glare*" 

 He was right, they are so friggen good! They were a hazelnut ganache with a cracklin base, dipped in milk chocolate and drizzled in dark chocolate. I ate 4. I can see why he ate 10.

The inside 

 

 Then he wanted us to make tea biscuits. I love tea biscuits! One of my favourite things to make. He wanted us to come up with some different ones. We made bacon and cheddar  and sour cream and chive with a sour cream and cream cheese topping. *drool*

We also made pretzels! Loved these too. They weren't like the ones you find in the mall. These had chew to them. Didn't like the texture at first, but it grew on me as I nibbled on it. Davin loved them. We made salted, cinnamon and sugar and poppy seed. Delish!

I'm sure more has happened this week that I wanted to tell you about, but this is a start. Starting a new week tomorrow. Very excited.

 Have a wonderful Sunday evening.

I can smell the spaghetti and meat balls my hubby is making and I'm so excited!