As much as I enjoy it, it's not easy running around a kitchen for 5 hours and then going to work every day. I have about half-an-hour between when I get home from school and when I have to leave to walk to work, and every day I say to myself, "Why can't I just stay home and take a nap?!"
Breads are in full-swing right now at school. Today alone we made loaves of ciabatta, foccacia, fougasse and then each team made a pizza that we shared with the culinary kids for lunch - it's all so good!! Ciabatta, literally translated from Italian means, "carpet slipper" because that's what it supposedly looks like - a slipper. It's more of a slack dough, and you actually dust it with extra flour right before sticking it in the oven - weird! Our foccacia came out fine, if a little flat. Plus, I think that we wrapped it too soon when leaving class because my half was a little soggy when I unwrapped it at home. Oh well.
The fougasse is actually pretty cool. When you break it down - it's basically the same dough that's used to make baguettes, just shaped very differently. While baguettes are rolled into long loaves with tapered ends, fougasse loaves are much wider and most resemble a cross between an oval and a rectangle. What makes them really interesting though, is the way you cut them. Most low-fat breads are scored in some fashion, using a lame (pronounced, "la-may"), to release steam while baking. However, with the fougasse you actually slice the bread straight through several times, with the classic pattern resembling a stalk of wheat carved into the bread.
Lame's are tricky little buggers. They're incredibly sharp, and you have to be very careful while taking off the blade protector or you'll slice your finger open - and it will not be pretty. I'm desperate to avoid being the person to cut themselves with the lame (Brooke Safety!), maybe I should start wearing hockey gloves during the bread module to protect myself. Sounds like a winning idea to me.
Tomorrow we're going to be working with more rich-doughs, like brioche, butter rolls and challah - holla! Am I too white to get away with saying that, or just white enough? I can never tell with these things. Needless to say, Dave is readying his stomach for challah-goodness.
So while we were in class the other day, Chef Katie mentioned in passing, a "baguette" joke that seems to only be funny to her. After much cajoling, we got her to share this joke with us. Now before I share it with you, I have to tell you that this experience reminded me of two people - my friend Monica and my former coworker Meghan. Monica - because it's such a ridiculous joke, that I could see her telling it. After all, my favorite Monica joke is, "What do you call Cheese that doesn't belong to you?" Answer? Nacho Cheese! It's all in the delivery folks. And it reminds me of Meghan because, while Chef Katie was telling us this joke, she couldn't stop laughing. Like serious laughing. Laughing so much that her voice became a whisper and she was shaking and at one point, she started snorting. Meghan is the queen of the snort-laugh. We used to always see if we could get her to laugh to the point she would start snorting - definitely breaks up a long day at work (Hi Meg!)
So without further ado, the joke that only my teacher finds hilarious:
So this guy goes to see his doctor, and he says, "Doc, I've been having these really bad stomach pains, what do you think I should do?" The Doctor tells him that he thinks he has a tapeworm, and that for the next 3 days, every morning he should bend over, and using a hammer to push, stick an avocado and then a baguette up his bum. The guy seems skeptical, but the Doctor assures him that this is the right course of action to get rid of the tapeworm. So Every day, for the next 3 days, the man bends over and hammers an avocado and a baguette up his behind. After the third day, he's so uncomfortable that he calls his doctor saying, "I don't know what to do - this isn't working at all, in fact, I'm in more pain than I was before!" The doctor listens to this and says, "Okay, tomorrow, instead of using an avocado and a baguette, just use an avocado." The man agrees to this change and so the following morning, he braces himself and sticks an avocado up there and waits. About a minute later, the tapeworm pokes itself out and says, "What, no baguette?!"
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