Day 63: We Are Now Seven

We've lost two from our class and we are now seven. It was a rough start to the week, and I'm slowly getting back into the grove after last week's exams.

Today we are baking again and are making pies ~ strawberry rhubarb with a strudel topping banana cream and chocolate cream. Chef has given us the recipe for a pie crust bottom of 3, 2, 1, 1 ~ the ratio for flour, shortening, milk, salt. For today, we will be using 6 oz flour, 4 oz shortening, 2 oz milk, 1/8 tsp of salt to make our pie crust.

The fruit pies will have a strudel topping which is a mixture of sugar, flour and cold butter. To this you can add additional ingredients if you like such as rolled oats or chopped walnuts. The filling for the fruit pies ~ rhubarb and strawberries are macerated with sugar.

The cream pies are made using the pastry cream recipe and then adding mashed bananas for the banana cream pie and grated chocolate for the chocolate cream pie. When making my cream pies I added chocolate to my banana cream and so ended up with a chocolate banana cream pie along with a banana cream pie.

In preparation for tomorrow's baking class we made the dough for English muffins. The procedure for this recipe is somewhat complicated. Instead of adding the yeast to warm water, we added it to warm milk. To the yeast and milk, pastry flour was added to create a sponge yeast mixture which we put in a warm spot to proof for about 15 minutes. To make our dough for English muffins we used the electric mixers by first adding our two flours (pastry flour and bread flour) and baking powder, and then adding a water and salt mixture in stages until combined. Next the sponge and then the butter were added until a ball formed. The ball of dough was kneaded and then wrapped in plastic and put into the refrigerator to be used for the next day.

The day was wrapped up by a class discussion around the expectations for the semester. Chef will be quizzing us each day as well as asking us to do some research on various topics to prepare us for our final exams.