Lamination!

We attempted lamination this week, with promising results! Lamination, for those of you unfamiliar, is the process of layering fat (in this case butter) & dough through a series of folds to produce a flaky, rich pastry. To break it down: Create a simple dough, roll it out into a rectangle, and fold it around a pliable slab of butter. This gives you 2 layers of dough with a layer of butter in the middle. Then roll this out and fold it like a letter, therefore you have 9 alternating layers of dough and butter. Do this a few more times, depending on the exact type of laminated dough and voila! You've got a delicious pastry. Some examples of products made with lamination are croissants, danishes, bear claws, and puff pastry (used to make napoleons, palmiers & certain galettes).

We were lucky to have a cooling trend to help us out this week, as laminated doughs are rather fickle when it comes to temperature. Our first task was the elusive croissant which, while easy to find, is rather difficult to make well. A great croissant is flaky & well caramelized on the outside, and light & moist with an even, open crumb on the inside. We'd heard rumors that our oven was great for baking viennoiserie, and turns out they were true. The recipe still needs some work on flavor, but appearance was all we had hoped for.

Next we attempted some palmiers and galettes. Palmiers are little butterfly shaped cookies made of puff pastry that has been rolled out in sugar. When the palmier bakes, the dough puffs outwards and becomes extraordinarily flaky & the sugar turns to caramel on the outside of the cookie. All around a great concept! Galettes after that, using puff pastry as opposed to pie dough (see previous post), topped with golden nectarines and sprinkled with raw turbinado sugar. Feast with your eyes, my friends, these items will definitely end up on the final menu!

Up Next Week: Further development of croissant with traditional fillings (almond, ham & cheese, chocolate), equipment repair (no more lost eyebrows & traumatized squeals) & tarot card readings (if leaving things up to fate, its best to catch a sneak peek).

And So It Begins

What optimistically began as recipe development in the Proof Bakery kitchen soon transformed into antique equipment capability testing. In other words, an abrupt tutorial in how not to lose your eyebrows while lighting a 90 year old oven (pictured below). You see, the bakery was originally founded sometime in the early 1920's and much of the existing equipment was purchased in the following two decades. This is excellent news in relation to the two large Hobart mixers because as they say, "they don't make 'em like they used to"; however when it comes to our gas powered equipment, its a bit more of a challenge for those of us raised in the time of the electric pilot ignition. Long story short, any fears of fire or explosion are quickly being overcome.

As mentioned above, our oven is estimated to be about 90 years old, and charming as that may sound, it does come along with a few challenges. The oven is a revolving oven, which means it has multiple long trays which rotate in a similar fashion to a ferris wheel. While it is common to find this style of oven in older bakeries, it is rare to find one so old (the doors open and close using the pulley & weight system). While the oven does work, it bakes quite differently than more modern ovens, and at times can be quite intimidating due to its mere breadth. Thus recently the challenges have been relearning to bake as they did early last century, and allowing our oven to determine our menu.

Our first week we experimented with the basics, as well as with heatstroke. The first real heatwave of the summer coincided with our first full week in the bakery, and as ventilation is limited, and the oven relentlessly emanated heat, temperatures quickly reached sweltering. We took advantage of the many, many Farmer's Markets in the area and can officially announce that stone fruit season is upon us! We made some classic plum frangipane tarts, as well as vanilla bean nectarine and red plum galettes (rustic freeform french tarts).

We had some moderate success with meringues, though our experimentation with flavor the following week produced much more palatable results. Additionally, we experimented with various brioche recipes.

We threw in some dark chocolate hazelnut biscotti & a bleinham apricot chocolate tart experiment for good measure. Yum!