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There is science and there's also arts about baking.
When apprentice comes to Poilane,
we train them for nine months.
And at the heart of hearts, what we
teach them is how to attune their five
senses to their environment, to the ingredients, to the dough
they're baking that day.
We have very little measures in the bakery.
We use our hands, which are some of the most sophisticated
tools.
Using your five senses is something
that's absolutely key at Poilane to bake
a consistent, perfect loaf.
At home, it's your gateway, the way
you're going to start baking without feeling daunted
by the scientific numbers, without being
daunted by the artful talk.
The five senses approach is a way
of opening your senses to what is the right sound, what
is the right sight for a well baked loaf, what
is the right smell for a starter or when
that starter has gone off.
What is the feel of a loaf?
Does it crackle in the right way?
And of course, taste.
Baking for me is a sensory experience.
And I will be walking you through how
each sense is engaged in different stages of baking.
Once your loaf is baked, I like to think that there's
four stages of freshness.
The first is the ultra fresh loaf.
It's the loaf you cut through that's cooled down,
but it's still moist.
It's still full of life.
And it's the one you want to bite into right away, maybe
not even putting butter on it.
After 24, 48 hours, it's fresh.
It's not at its freshest, but it's fresh.
And you want to put a little butter on it, a topping.
It makes for the perfect sandwich.
A third stage is when the bread starts becoming dry.
At that point, you start wanting to eat it by toasting it
or transforming it.
Because on its own, it's a little too dry to bite into.
And then, the fourth stage is when the bread is stale.
When your bread is stale, when it's
so hard that you are having a hard time cutting through it,
you definitely don't want to bite into it.
A lot of people tend to discard the bread,
but if it gets to that stage of dryness,
then you can use it to transform it into bread cooking material.
And I'll show you some of the ways
you can cook with bread in the second half of the class.
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Bread has very little ingredients--
water, flour, salt, and a rising agent.
Most people use the word "flour" quite generically.
I like to describe the grain of the flour
because flour is just a word to describe a grain that's
been ground so finely that it becomes that texture we
associate with the word flour.
I love to use stone ground flour because it
keeps its natural oils.
Whether it's a flour of wheat, rye, corn, or whatever grain
you're using that day, you must buy quality flour
without any additives, without any whitening--
pure grain flour.
If you're in the US and you don't
have a small mill or a bakery that has some freshly ground
flour that you can store at home,
then I like to go for King Arthur's flour or Bob's Red
Mill.
Butter-- I am very lucky to live in France
and have fabulous butters.
You want to have the best quality butters.
Ideally, it's a raw milk butter because throughout the season,
it changes in flavors and in tastes.
And that adds some specifics to your bakes.
I like to use Amish butter, and that's the one
that I've been testing most of my recipes with.
If you don't have access to raw milk
or Amish butter, a high quality, high fat butter will do.
The legends that water makes a difference in your bakes
is false.
It should be drinkable water, and it
should be water that doesn't go into any extremes,
whether it's too hard or too soft.
While quality of ingredients matter,
the love and passion you put into your loaf
will make a difference.
So care for your ingredients because from soil to your home,
there's a whole value chain here that
needs to be fed, maintained, and kept.
And that will also make a difference in your bake.
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When you're baking, you start off
with mixing the ingredients.
So some bowls are really helpful.
A standalone mixer for some recipes
is really useful as well.
Those tools are the basics, how you're
going to bring the ingredients together.
Once you've mixed your dough, to let it rest, using some cloth,
you'll be able to cover the doughs and avoid them crusting.
When there's a second proofing stage,
then you want to use a basket.
Proofing baskets are typically wicker baskets
covered in linen or cotton.
But if you don't have either of those, you can use a colander
and use another linen or cotton fabric.
Once you're baking the bread, some breads call for mold.
You can use typical kitchen molds that are open on the top.
And if you want a flat top and you find it easily,
you can use this more professional material.
A baking sheet to put some loaves and a Dutch oven,
a cocotte that will give an additional boost to your loaf
as you start baking them.
That is a great tool to have.
Then, as you're putting the bread into the oven,
we're going to draw the scoring, the designs
that you can see on these loaves.
For those, you need a pair of scissors.
It should be pointy, and it should be sharp.
And the other great tool is to have a razor blade.
There are different types of razor blades to score breads.
The ones that are slightly rounded
are less practical, but just as good
if you want to work with those.
At the bakery in the bake house, we
tend to use ones that are straight
A few other pretty obvious tools when you come to baking,
brushes are really practical to brush the inside of molds.
Dough scraper is also quite practical
to scrape out the dough, but you can use your hands as well.
Parchment paper to avoid anything sticking,
and once your dough is ready, once your bread is baked,
a cooling rack.
Another tool that's really useful
is a food processor or a food blender.
Those are really practical to break down bread
into breadcrumbs.
There's always a fine line between my world
of baking, science and art, feeling and precision.
Here in home baking, especially because we're
baking one loaf or two loaves at the time at most,
we want to err a little bit on measurements
and on the scientific side.
I highly recommend that you use a digital scale
to weigh your ingredients instead of measuring them
by volume.
And so, a good scale, maybe even a temperature probe
will be useful.
But know that at the bakery, because we work daily
and because we have other sensory tests and probes,
we don't need those tools.
And in time, I reckon that you will probably also develop
that understanding.
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Your environment does influence the way you bake.
And this is why attuning your five senses is so important.
By learning and experiencing different bakes,
different seasons, different environments,
you build a mental library of how the dough reacts,
how your ingredients react, how you react to that environment.
I have a simple scale to adjust to the environment.
It's about how hot or cool it is, how dry or how humid it is,
and whether it's the dough or the bread you've baked.
You have to learn how to adjust.
When it's super cold, the dough you
will want to cover it and make sure that it doesn't crust.
Conversely, when it's super hot, the dough
will tend to grow much faster.
When it comes to dryness or humidity,
if it's super dry out, your load will tend
to dry out and become stale.
Conversely, if it's super humid, your bread
will become very moldy because it just absorbs
the humidity like a sponge.
When it comes to the dough itself,
a very dry environment will tend to help the rise of the loaf,
whereas a very humid environment will tend to plump it down.
And this is the balance we're always
trying to strike between these four elements.
We'll revisit all these details throughout the class, so don't
worry about memorizing.
Some ovens react differently than others.
And so, your initial bakes will be a good test
to say if one gas mark or one degree
is accurate for your oven.
I discovered recently that my oven consistently
is a little overpowering, so I've
come to learn how to reduce my oven for certain bakes.
To accumulate your knowledge, to not waste a crumb,
to help you build that mental library,
take a nice little book that you want to feed and write into
and start logging.
It's about realizing what are the different effects,
the trends, what are things that are specific to your kitchen.
Then that log is a good way to remember
those environmental factors.
And in time, it will develop your mental library
of how to react to them.
But you have the basics here.
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