Bread School
Last week I went on a cookery course, which my hubby bought me as a Christmas present. So, what is he trying to tell me here, I wonder? He quite fancied the idea of tagging along to Rick Stein’s fish school so that he could have lunch there, too, but as he’d left the choice to me, I picked a bread course. If it’s a choice between getting down and dirty with either fish guts or dough, then dough wins every time, for me. So I ended up at the Bertinet Kitchen for the day on an Introduction to breadmaking.
Things I learned:
- A baking tray makes a fantastic peel, as does a piece of plywood.
- A new way of working the dough. Note: not kneading as that isn’t what it is, oh no.
- Some people think they need to weigh everything down to the last gramme, even when the amount of flour involved is 2kg. OK, I probably knew that anyway.
- Fougasse is not artfully constructed from rolled out sausages of dough. It is just a lump of dough that is cut with a scraper. Maybe everyone else knew this, but I was completely in the dark and so had always skipped over these recipes before now.
If you want to learn how to slash dough (I did) then you need to do the more advanced French Bread course. Still, I bought a lame and I’m going to use it…