...a good knife and a cool uniform to be a chef... oh yeah, and a sexy pair of black clodhoppers. Apparently chefs are known to be really big people that one should not offend, (they do carry large knives after all!), because the uniforms are HUGE! I do not consider myself an extra-small human being, but my chef uniform is size extra small and it's still too big! The darn things come in extra extra extra small all the way up to quadruple extra large. Clearly they want us to feel smaller than we really are. Oh well, at least it makes me feel like all this working out and eating well has been paying off. But i digress... many people have been asking about school and how it's going, so i thought i'd give you the low down.
I'm heading into week 4 in Toronto, and amazingly i have my final Artisan Bread Theory class tomorrow night. I can't believe i'm already finished my first course! It's been an interesting one. A bit of bread history and lots of bread science and math. You know, stuff like the composition of grain, the ins and outs of gluten development and fermentation, the effects of various ingredients, temperature and saturation on bread development and so on. We were put in groups of four to do a group project and i got teamed up with three rather interesting dudes. When i say interesting... well, really i mean odd. Nice odd though. Anyway, we each had to bake 4 loaves of bread using different water temperatures for each loaf recording the kneading time and fermentation times, measuring how much each loaf grew during fermentation etc. Tomorrow night we present our results. I'll admit it's tough to make this sort of presentation exciting but since we're all a bunch of "bread heads" at least we can count on the audience being keen.
My other class is Rustic Artisan Breads and it's a lab class, which means we have to show up in full uniform and we get to bake stuff in the bread lab. Yeah! I love this class. Every week we make 2 different kinds of bread and whatever preferments we need for the following week. So far we've made Portuguese Corn Bread, Altamuran, Straight and Poolish Baguettes. This week we are doing Sweet Rolls and a Tuscan Loaf. I'm learning the proper way to knead dough (no punching, knuckling or adding additional flour as you knead people!), how to use industrial mixers, stone and conventional ovens, and how to get dough in and out of the stone oven on the wooden lifter thingy without ruining your perfectly formed loaf in the process. This is tricky stuff. The hardest part is waiting for the bread to bake while we smell the heavenly aromas wafting through the room. We always have a tasting session at the end of class, and we always eat the Chef's loaves so that we can take ours home intact.
This means i get to jump on the streetcar at 10:00 pm with hot bread in my arms... i meet a lot of strangers this way. ;) Last week we made 2 kinds of baguette and i brought 4 loaves home. My end of the streetcar was smelling mighty fine let me tell you. Now you would think my housemates would be super happy to have all this yummy bread hanging around, but no... it seems that they have all decided to cleanse for a few weeks... and as for me, I have been playing this "game" with my friend Kristy that forbids white bread so, as of right now i have a whole lot of bread sitting in the freezer waiting to be devoured the minute we are free of our current eating restraints. For me, this is tomorrow (heh heh) and there's a beautiful loaf of Altamuran in there with my name on it! (see photo above!)
A final note on bread... did you know that humans have been eating bread made primarily with wheat in it's various forms (spelt, kamut, einkorn etc.) since before the first civilizations? Back in those days we were a bunch of nomadic tribes boiling up grain and water over a fire. At some point some of it splashed on hot rocks and cooked and this sparked the idea of baking it. This would suggest that our digestive systems should be well evolved to deal with wheat and all it's cousins.
You know, there's something primal about bread. The aroma of baking bread triggers something within us that makes us feel good. Safe. At home. Cared for. Loved even. It's in our blood, our history, and has been a part of our culture since time immemorial.
So, it makes me wonder... what's all this fuss about bread being bad for us? Personally, I think it's a big over generalization and perhaps a factor of extremes. Unfortunately, with industrialization came heavy processing, and along with that white bread came to represent wealth and prosperity because the lower classes couldn't afford the highly processed flours. The trouble is, these days most white bread has been stripped of nutrients and fiber leaving little to fill you up. The stuff that's left is quickly converted into sugars by our bodies, and if not burned up by activity is stored as fat. So, with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles white bread may not be a good choice. Fortunately, there are many delicious breads made with whole grains and those are good for you. Just the other day i bought a spelt sourdough boule with walnuts at our local artisan bakery here in Leslieville that was absolutely yummy! And hey, if you're an active person i don't see a problem with the occasional loaf of white bread... especially if it's an Altamuran or Tuscan loaf baked in a stone oven... or baguettes lovingly shaped by hand...
(Can you hear me justifying my addiction?)
No comments:
Post a Comment