Brioche

Because of the snow we got on Sunday night, we did not have our Food Basics class, so there is no blog for that. We are making it up on Friday though.

We started the baking class with our usual lecture. The past few weeks we had been starting our dough first, then having lecture. With Brioche, you have to let it do a slow rise in the refrigerator overnight, so we used dough made from a previous class and we would repay the favor by making the dough for the next day's class. Lecture was extremely quick since we only had to learn what makes Brioche Brioche since we already know that 11 steps to bread making. The recipe I was given was Twice Baked Brioche. I didn't care for it because it had an outer coating of almond paste...almond paste is one of the worst flavors on the face of the earth. I think I only tried a tiny bite of mine just to taste the brioche. I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to tell you about 'crashing' the dough. You essentially pound the dough into the table by lifting it over your head and slamming in down. The tables in the kitchen are all stainless steal, so everyone had a headache by the time we were done. We had dough all over the kitchen because you have such a loose, sticky dough that it will fly off of itself when you are crashing it. I am extremely happy to have not have been the one that had to clean the floors!

We got out of this class quite early, which sucks because I am stuck there for the seminar anyways. In the downtime I went upstairs to the library to check my ServSafe score. I got a 93! I can now serve food to the public. How exciting!

This week's seminar is still butchering. Tonight, it was fish! We had striped bass and flounder. We had an extra special treat of the striped bass not being gutted, so we got to do that!!! It was really cool to get to play with the guts and fish heads! The flounder was also not gutted, so when chef pulled out the stomach of his flounder there was another fish, whole, in the belly!!! He must have just eaten! After we had finished with the fish, we cooked up some fish sticks and fish with a lemon-parsley sauce. It was pretty good! As soon as I got home I had to wash my clothes because they smelled so bad! Ollie liked it though!

Today's Recipe:Chicken with Wild Mushroom Sauce, Saucisson en Croute, Brie in Brioche, Cheese Twists, Nanterre, Pizza with Brioche Dough, Apple, Apricot and Dried Cranberry Strudel, Pecan Sticky Buns, Brioche Tart with Secret White Sauce (tee-hee), Twice Baked Brioche