Just a quick question for you
Just wondering since I'll be doing a giant posting spree tomorrow: would you rather have one recipe per post or all of the recipes I did in class in one post?
It really doesn't matter to me.
Bread Type Things
Alright, back in the saddle and going strong with the 3rd day of bake shop. This one was a lot of fun because we made 3 things. At this rate we'll be making a ton of stuff at the end of the semester. Somehow I don't think the linear growth pattern will continue. And I might stop acting like such a nerd.
Anyway, let's take a look at the Blueberry Streusel Scones first.
Ingredients
- 260 grams All Purpose Flour
- 65 grams Granulated Sugar
- 10 grams baking powder
- pinch of salt
- 85 grams Chillled, unsalted grated butter
- 150 grams blueberries
- 1 large egg lightly beaten
- 5 grams vanilla extract
- 4 ounces milk
- 55 grams brown sugar
- 35 grams All Purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 30 grams chilled, unsalted butter cut into pieces
Directions
- In a large bowl sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
- Add grated butter, blend together
- Gently toss in blueberries
- Combine the cream, beaten egg, and vanilla. Add this mixture to the flour mixture and stir just intil 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 4-5 times and pat the dough into a roughly 7 inch round, 1 1/2 inch thick circle. Cut in half and cut each half into 4 triangles.
- Place the scones on the baking sheet. Brush the tops of the scones with a little cream or milk.
- 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 until nicely browned, about 18-22 minutes at 400F
Notes
There are about 28 grams in an ounce. Or you can just use a digital scale and make things easy. All of my bake shop recipes will use weight anyway. So I hope you haven't been getting fluid ounces of the liquids.
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.
Next up, buttermilk biscuits.
Ingredients
- 1.5lb All Purpose flour
- 2oz Granulated sugar
- 1.5oz Baking powder
- 0.25oz Salt
- 8oz Butter (cubed and COLD)
- 1lb buttermilk
- 2oz egg (We just used 1 egg, but if you're going to scale up the weight might work better)
Directions
- Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt
- Add the butter and rug together until the mixture looks like cornmeal
- Combine the egg and buttermilk into the flour mixture
- Knead gently until the mixture hold together. Just like always, don't over mix
- On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough to about 1 inch thick and cut the biscuits with a 2 inch cutter. You can reroll once to get more biscuits but starting with a 2nd reroll they start to get tough
- Place the biscuits on a paper lined sheet pan and lightly brush with egg wash
- Bake at 425F until golden brown, around 15 minutes
Notes
If you don't have buttermilk just make some with regular milk and an acid like lemon juice or vinegar. For every cup of milk add 1 tablespoon of acid. Let it sit there for about 5 minutes and sour up, and you've got buttermilk.
These were amazing. And so simple. Bring them to a family gathering and I promise you won't have to bring any of them home with you.
Finally, we made sweet potato biscuits. Which weren't as good but I'm sharing the recipe anyway.
Ingredients
- 12.75oz All Purpose flour
- 1 Tbs baking powder
- 1.75 tsp baking soda
- 0.5 Tbs salt
- 0.5 Tbs sugar
- 7oz cold butter
- 1.5 cup sweet potato puree
- 2.5oz heavy cream
Directions
- Sift all dry ingredients together
- grate cold butter, then work into dry ingredients
- Barely combine the sweet potato puree into the flour/butter mix
- Add heavy cream, knead just until incorporated
- Roll out to 1 inch thick and cut with biscuit cutter
- Bake at 400F until golden brown
I'm sorry I don't have a time on this one. But they're really bland and I don't think worth making.
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.
Quick Breads
Next we learned about quick breads and different mixing methods[1].
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.
Ingredients
- 10oz Eggs (Chicken eggs are usually between 1.5 and 2 ounces each)
- 7oz Oil (We used Canola and were specifically told not to use olive)
- 18oz Granulated Sugar
- 1/8oz Vanilla Extract
- 20oz Grated Zucchini
- 5oz Pecans
- 1/8oz Cinnamon
- 1/8oz Salt
- 1/8oz Baking Soda
- 1/8oz Baking Powder
- 14oz All Purpose Flour
Directions
- Measure all ingredients
- 2 Sift the dry ingredients together with the sugar
- 3 Combine the liquids together with the sugar
- 4 Mix with a plastic spatula
- 5 Add the sifted dry ingredients to the liquids
- 6 Add the zucchini and the pecans until just combined
- 7 DO NOT OVER MIX
- 8 Place 24 ounces in each of 3 2 pound aluminum loaf pans
- 9 Bake at 360 for 30-45 minutes (or until it springs back to the touch)
Ingredients
- 16.5oz Granulated Sugar
- 4.2oz Room Temperature Butter
- 11.1oz Ripe Bananas (If not ripe then make sure to cut or mash them up first so they'll mix in well)
- 1 Eggs
- 16.5oz Milk
- 9g Salt
- 11g Baking Powder
- 7g Baking Soda
- 22oz Bread Flour
- 2.75oz Chopped Waltnuts
Directions
- Cream sugar and butter
- Add bananas
- Add eggs and milk, then combine
- Add salt, baking powder, baking soda, and flour, then combine
- Add walnuts and combine
- Fill loaf pans with 24oz of batter
- Bake at 365 for 30-45 minutes
- 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
And with that class was on. I was told that the first day would be nothing but getting the syllabus and leaving. Which totally contradicted being told that I had to be in uniform.
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.
Ingredients
- 8.5oz Room Temperature Butter
- 8.5oz Sugar
- 4oz Eggs (Chicken eggs are usually between 1.5 and 2 ounces each)
- 10oz Sour Cream
- 1/8oz Vanilla Extract
- 8oz Variation (Chocolate chips, blueberries, anything really)
- 11oz All Purpose Flour
- 1/8oz Baking Powder
- 1/8oz Baking Soda
- 1/8oz Salt
Directions
- 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 (1/2 dry then 1/2 sour cream then rest of dry finally rest of sour cream)
- Add the vanilla
- Add any variations
- Portion and bake at 350F until light brown and set, about 30-35 minutes
- Allow to cool and remove from pan
Notes
Dry ingredients are the salt, baking powder, baking soda, and flour
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. [↩]