Buttermilk Biscuits
Before we get started, there's no reason to buy buttermilk if you don't think you'll use it up. Just put some lemon juice (or other acid) in regular milk and let it sit for a bit to sour up. A tablespoon for each cup of milk will do the trick.
| Buttermilk Biscuits |
- AP flour 1 lb. 8 oz.
- Sugar 2 oz.
- Baking Powder 1.5 oz.
- Salt 0.25 oz.
- Butter, cubed and COLD 8 oz.
- Buttermilk 1 lb.
- Eggs 2 oz
- Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
- Add the butter and rub together until the mixture has the appearance of cornmeal.
- Combine eggs and buttermilk and add to the flour mixture.
- Knead gently until the mixture holds together. Be careful not to over mix.
- On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough out to about 1-inch in thickness and cut out biscuits using a 2-inch cutter.
- Place the biscuits on a paper lined sheet pan and lightly brush with egg wash.
- Bake at 425F until golden brown, about 15 minutes.
Blueberry Streusel Scones
Anyway, let's take a look at the Blueberry Streusel Scones first.
| Blueberry Streusel Scones |
- Scones
- AP flour 260 grams
- Granulated Sugar 65 grams
- Baking Powder 10 grams
- Salt Pinch
- Chilled, Unsalted Butter, grated 85 grams
- Blueberries 150 grams
- Egg, lightly beaten 1 large
- Vanilla Extract 5 grams Milk 4 oz
- Topping
- Brown Sugar 55 grams
- AP flour 35 grams
- Ground Cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon
- Chilled Unsalted Butter, cut into pieces 30 grams
- In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
- Add grated butter, blend together.
- Gently toss in the blueberries.
- Combine the cream, beaten egg and vanilla. Add this mixture to the flour mixture and stir just until the dough comes together. Do not over mix the dough or the scones will be tough.
- Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and knead the dough gently four or five times and then pat the dough into a circle that is about 7 inches (18 cm) round and about 11/2 inches (4 cm) thick. Cut this circle in half, then cut each half into four pieshaped wedges (triangles)
- Place the scones on the baking sheet. Brush the tops of the scones with a little cream or milk.
- For the Streusel Topping: In a small bowl whisk together the sugar, flour, and cinnamon. Add the butter, mix until crumbly. Top each scone with streusel. Bake the scones at 400F until nicely browned, about 18 - 22 minutes.
Technically a pinch is an actual measurement. Something like 1/16 of an ounce. But in reality, just stick your fingertips in there and grab some.
These are rather messy so don't wear your good clothes when making them. Or make sure you have an apron that covers you really well. But it's totally worth it. I got blueberry on my jacket and it came off pretty well.
Sorry For The Delay
Due to some family health problems I haven't been able to keep up with this like I would like. Hopefully that will be over with soon.
At least it's relatively easy to go back and know what I did in each class since so far it's pretty much been do the recipe or prep for Trident Tech's giant fundraiser extravaganza.
The Other Two Classes, Again Combined
For those of you keeping score at home, that's two classes we've covered so far. That leaves us with two more to introduce. Sadly, neither of them really had anything to talk about.
The first was Intro to Culinary Arts. Again, it was a class of introductory stuff that just really has no reason to be here since it's entirely pointless unless you're in the class. And if you are in the class and need to come here to read about what happened then we have bigger things to worry about. Honestly, I'm thinking right now that we won't see much from that class anymore here. But I can be wrong.
The second was Sanitation and Nutrition. Same story there. Except there might actually be some things that pop up on this blog from that class. The most exciting and relevant thing for you is probably that the first half of the class is spent on the sanitation portion and the second half on the nutrition portion. Nutrition will have recipes. Sanitation will have how to not get DHEC to come shut down your kitchen.
On a related note, I did write a few parody songs that sort of go along with the sanitation part. The salmonella one is really under developed. The E. coli one is a lot better and might actually be recorded just so I can be a giant nerd.
Two Days of Basic Skills
Normally I'll keep two days of a class as two different posts since we'll be doing different things. But since I'm behind anyway, and we didn't really do all that much different stuff on the first two days of Skills I I don't think it will be a big deal to combine things just this once.
On the first day we sat around, talked about the class. Then we cut some mirepoix for stock. That's just 50% onion, 25% carrot and 25% celery used in a stock or soup.
The next day we cut some more vegetables with the intent of having them be certain sizes. I need to work on getting some of my sizes right. But since I already knew that it's not a big deal.
It was a fun couple of days to actually be there. I really like cutting things. But not too much fun to read about.
Banana Nut Bread
| Banana Nut Bread |
- Granulated Sugar 16.5 oz
- Butter (room temp) 4.2 oz
- Ripe Bananas 11.1 oz
- Eggs 1.4 oz
- Milk 16.5 oz
- Salt 9 g
- Baking Powder 11 g
- Baking Soda 7 g
- Bread Flour 22 oz
- Chopped Walnuts 2.75 oz
- Cream sugar and butter.
- Add bananas.
- Add eggs and milk and combine.
- Add salt, baking powder, baking soda and flour ad combine.
- Add walnuts and combine.
- Fill loaf pans with 24 oz of batter.
- Bake at 375F until firm and dry on the top center.
Nuts can be left out if you don't want nuts for some reason. This recipe switches to grams because you need a tiny amount of those ingredients.
Zucchini Bread
In quick breads the levener is the combination of baking powder and baking soda. When combined with moisture and heat the bread starts to rise. These are quick to prepare and bake since you don't have that hour or so of sitting around waiting for your dough to be ready.
We did two breads in this class, zucchini and banana nut. Both of them turned out really well.
Also, sorry for having this post take so long to get up. The combination of work going crazy and me trying to find a different recipe plug in that would let me have multiple recipes on a page are not things that go well together.
| Zucchini Bread |
- Eggs 10 oz
- Oil 7 oz
- Granulated Sugar 1 # 2 oz
- Vanilla Extract 1/8 oz
- Cinnamon 1/8 oz
- Salt 1/8 oz
- Baking Soda 1/8 oz
- Baking Powder 1/8 oz
- AP Flour 14 oz
- Zucchini (Grated) 20 oz
- Pecans (Chopped) 5 oz
- Measure all ingredients.
- Sift the dry ingredients together with the sugar.
- Combine the liquids together with the sugar.
- Mix with a plastic spatula.
- Add the sifted dry ingredients to the liquids.
- Add the zucchini and the pecans just until combined.
- DO NOT OVER MIX
- Pan up in 2# aluminum loaf pans at 24 oz each.
- Bake at 360F until springs back to touch.
Dry ingredients here are cinnamon, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and flour.
I'll get to the banana bread in the next post.
- And I learned that I really need to make sure I have paper with me so that I can take notes instead of using the back of the sheet I printed so I could put my name on my name tag. [↩]
This Is a Bakeshop, Not a Kitchen
Yeah, there was all the first class procedural this is how we wash dishes and where to take out the trash kind of crap. But then we actually baked. Which was awesome. The chef is pretty cool too so this class seems like it will be a lot of fun.
And fattening. But that's an entirely different animal that I'll worry about later.
As for the recipe, here it is. The sour cream didn't do what I was expecting at all. You get the creaminess of it and not really the sour cream taste. It's there a little bit but not much at all. Definitely at the point where if you have someone who doesn't like sour cream, you can just not say that the muffins have sour cream in them and you'll be fine. Also, we took ours out a bit early. They appeared to be set, and pretty much were, but they hadn't really started to brown yet. Still tasted good though.
| Sour Cream Muffins |
- Butter (room temp) 8.5 oz 240 g
- Sugar 8.5 oz 240 g
- Eggs 4 oz 110 g
- A.P Flour 11 oz 310 g
- Baking Powder 1/8 oz 4 g
- Baking Soda 1/8 oz 4 g
- Salt 1/8 oz 6 g
- Sour Cream 10 oz 284 g
- Vanilla Extract 1/8 oz 5 ml
- Variation (Chocolate, frozen blueberries, etc.)
- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs, incorporate.
- Stir the dry ingredients and sour cream, alternately, into the butter mixture in 2 additions.
- Add the vanilla.
- Add any variations.
- Portion and bake at 350F until light brown and set, about 35 minutes.
- Allow to cool and then remove from pan
Think of This as the Prologue
First day of class, and I'm all excited. It's Intro to Baking and Pastries today. This should be a lot of fun.
To start things off right, and to get rid of some apples that we had sitting around, I tried to make myself some apple juice. It didn't turn out like what I expected at all. But I'm happy with it.
Let’s Learn Some Culinary Stuff
I know there's at least one person in the world[1] who wants to keep up with my culinary school stuff. I'm pretty sure she's jealous to the point of offering me a waffle iron in exchange for my place in class.
Sucks for her, that won't happen.
Instead I offer a look into my culinary school adventures. Not every detail, I tend to cut myself a lot and I'm pretty sure y'all will get tired of hearing about that. But all the important stuff will be here.
Class starts tomorrow. We'll see how things go.
Classes start tomorrow.
- Who doesn't live with me that is. [↩]