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This page will is basically the instructor's blog for the course. It will provide notes and comments about the class. In standard blog fashion, entries will be made in reverse chronological orders, i.e., the most recent entry first.
February 3: Final Numbers
| Count | Items |
| 442 | Cookies and bar cookies |
| 134 | Muffins, biscuits, scones & sweet rolls |
| 12 | Fried Pies |
| 13 | Pies |
| 35 | Loaves of bread |
| 15 | Cakes |
| 116 | Laminate Pastries |
| 75 | Breadsticks, rolls, bagels, bialys, crumpets, pitas & naans |
| 4 | Focaccias |
| 51 | Pizzas and Calazones |
| 3 | Cheese Cakes |
900 |
Total Items (about 56 items per person) |
February 1: Some thoughts on Pizza
Don't obsess over perfect circles. It is more important to get a consistent thickness. When making pizza at home, I will intentionally make oblong pizzas so I can fit two on my pizza stone at the same time, something difficult to do with perfectly round pizzas.
Be sure you cover the dough completely with plastic before you refrigerate it. The dried edges we saw on a few of the dough balls create problems when shaping the dough.
Please watch the workflow around the oven. When a pizza comes out, you should quickly slice it and move on. Don't dawdle around the cutting board waiting for the pizza to cool.
Pizza coming out of the oven has priority over pizza going into the oven. Stand clear.
We had a couple of near misses removing pizza from the oven. It is okay to remove the parchment before you remove the pizza from the oven. In fact, it is desirable. It will easily slide out after about three minutes. If you only have the pizza on the peel, you are less likely to drop it when removing it from the oven.
January 28: Blog Entries
The blogs look great. When all is said and done, you should eventually have the following entries:
1. Getting Started: Cookies & Bread
2. Pastries
3. Cakes
4. Pies
5. Quick Breads, Biscuits, and Muffins
6. (By Friday) Cooking with Chocolate
7. (By Monday) Miscellaneous Breads and Pizza
8. (Optional but encouraged/by next Wednesday) Class Wrap-up
January 25: Today's Chocolates
Today's chocolate came from http://www.chocosphere.com/cgi-bin/webstore/web_store.cgi. We tasted the Canerero Superior, the first six bars described on this page.
January 25: Honor's Project
Just a reminder—honor's projects need to be completed by this Friday! Be sure to let me know your cooking schedule and any ingredients you will need.
January 25: Being Bound By Recipes
You'll hear a lot of talk about not being bound by recipes. You should learn to relax and let your creative side take over. Be a free spirit.
While there is an element of truth to this, there are also times when you should suppress your creative urges as well. One of the banes of cookbook authors is the cook that loosely follows a recipe and then complains it doesn't work. The author will trace back through the recipe with the cook only to head something like "I didn't have any evaporated milk so I used condensed milk" or "butter is so unhealthy I substituted canola oil". While there are numerous substitutions that you can make in a recipe, you really need to know what you are doing.
Ideally, the first time you make a recipe, you should follow it exactly as written. If it doesn't work, you know there is a problem with the recipe. If you make substitutions, you can't be sure if it was the recipe or the substitution. You'll need to either give up on the recipe or risk failing a second time around.
In general, cooking is not a precise activity. It doesn't matter if you use more broccoli in a stir fry or if you substiture shredded cabbage. Unlike cooking in general, baking is a precise activity. You can't substitute baking power for baking soda or bread flour for pastry flour without making other changes.
In this project we have had a few free spirits that want to let their creative energies flow. This can potentially create a number of problems. First, they may use equipment or supplies needed by others. "Where is the bread pan?" someone ask. "Oh, Guido decided to bake his cake in it." Or "Where is the orange I'm supposed to zest?" "Ivan thought it would be a good addition to his cake." Both experiments may be reasonable and interesting, but I don't buy an excess of ingredients for experimentation. We'll exit the kitchen in another week so extras won't get used eventually. (Improvisations can also screw up the schedule throwing everyone behind.)
We are doing a number of different recipes with the idea of exposing everyone to a larger number of differnt products. The hope is that you will eventually try some of these other recipes armed with an idea of what to expect. But if some free spirit has changed the recipe, you probably won't know this. So if you attempt the recipe later, you won't understand why your product turned out different.
So, all you free-spirited, snuff-dipping, minicooper-driving, mac users—please stick to the recipes as written. In a few days Interim will be over, and you can let your creative spirits flow to your heart's content. I'll be waiting to hear how your croissant made with canola oil turn out.
We all seem to be falling behind in blogging. Over the next couple of days I'll try to add some of the things we have been talking about (but the dates for the entries won't correspond to when we actually talked about the topics.)
Please keep in mind that blogging is a requirement for the course. This is a participation course. While everyone is doing great on the cooking, please remember to do the reading, blogging, watch the videos, etc. The penalty is writing papers. Let's be honest, you don't want to write them and I don't want to grade them.
For more information of linking to the W drives, go to my.wofford.edu, login, select the “Technology" tab, and then read the appropriate tutorials under “Network Storage”.
Quirky Dozen Link: http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2001/11/the_quirky_dozen
The Recipe Writer's Handbook by Ostmann and Baker, Wiley, 2001.
January 15: Cinnamon
I hope each of you tried the different cinnamons on Friday. The samples included:
Ceylon or Sri Lanka Cinnamon: This was very mellow and fruity with no bite. Botanically, this was the only true cinnamon or canella in the group. The rests were cassias.
Vietnamese or Saigon Cassia: The one with the strong bite.
Korintje Indonesian Cassia: This is the probably the type of cinnamon that you grew up eating. It had a fairly smooth taste. Think Cinnabon cinnamon (although Cinnabon is said to be spiking their cinnamon with Vietnamese cinnamon now.)
China Tung Hing Cassia: This a rich, sweet, spicy cinnamon somewhere in between Vietnamese and Indonesian cinnamon. This is often the preferred cinnamon for baking.
Internet sources that I have used: http://www.penzeys.com/ and http://www.thespicehouse.com/ You can also find out more about these and other spices at these websites.
January 13: Measurement
There are a few thing to remember about measurements in baking. First, some measurements are crucial for the chemistry to work out, some aren't. If your recipe for cookies calls for 1tsp of baking powder, that's part of the chemistry and you need to measure accurately. If it calls for 8 ounces of nuts and you only have 7 ounces, that isn't going to cause a noticeable problems. Crucial items include flour, leavenings, fats, eggs, water. Noncrucial are the inclusions like nuts or chocolate chips. Still don't get carried away with changes to inclusions or you will have structural problems.
Second, keep in mind the difference between liquid and dry measures. A cup is still a cup with either, but you are more likely to measure ingredients correctly if you use the proper measuring cup. Still, weighing is usually a more accurate option and you'll have to clean up when done.
Finally, there has been a lot of nonsense written about the one correct way to measure flour---sift and measure, spoon and sweep, dip and sweep, stir first and then dip and sweep. If you want to reproduce a recipe, the one correct way to measure ingredients is to use the same technique that the author used to develop the recipe. Julia Child used a stir-dip-sweep method. Alice Medrich uses a spoon and sweep. America's Test Kitchen uses a dip and sweep. Joy of Cooking sifted first. Use whichever is appropriate.
(Also, make sure you use the right kind of flour or the all the measuring is for naught!)
Please don't mistake my suggestions as criticism. You ALL did great work on Friday!
1. Be sure you read and understand recipes before you begin. Ask if you have a question.
2. Think about the order things need to be done in and work as a team.
3. Create a time-line for your project.
4. Weigh rather than measure ingredients when you can.
5. Be careful where you put hot pans and warn others they are hot.
6. When chemistry is involved, measurement must be exact (baking powder), but measurements can be approximate with inclusions (chocolate chips or nuts).
7. The oven door should be closed as quickly as possible.
8. Think about rotation of pans, position of pans in oven.
9. Learn the oven!
10. Use stiffer scrapers on bowls.
11. Keep cleaning in perspective. How clean does a bowl have to be if you are using it to make a second batch of brownies right after the first batch?
12. Use "Mise en Place".
13 Put ingredients away. (Butter scraps)
14. It's an open question of whether to measure over a bowl of ingredients.
15. Watch sanitation!
16. You can use the thermometers to check the temperature of the butter.
17. Go around the room and look in each draw and each cabinet to see where everything is.
Practice. Learn the recipe. How many of you think you could go back into the kitchen and do a better job today?
New Safety Slides
Microplane graters (particularly the box grater) and food processor blades are extremely sharp. Treat them like knives.
If you drop a knife, don't try to catch it. Stand back and let it fall.
Beware of hot pans. Warn others if something is hot.
Steps in Making Bread
Mixing preferment
Prefermentation
Mixing
First Fermentation
Dividing & Preshaping
Second Fermentation
Shaping
Third Fermentation (proofing)
Baking & Cooling
Please familiarize yourself with the kitchen. Make sure you understand appropriate work areas and where equipment and ingredients are stored.
Report Injuries: Should you be injuries, please report or have someone report the injury to the instructor as soon as possible. However, please keep in mind that with a serious injury, appropriate treatment takes first priority.
Report breakages: From time to time equipment may inadvertently be broken. It is important that you report anything that is broken so that it can be replaced in a timely fashion.
Report shortages: Please inform the instructor when ingredients are low, particularly if you use the last of any ingredients. You should also report any questionable ingredients. For example, don’t use milk if you think it may be spoilt.
Clean as you go: You are responsible for cleaning any dishes you dirty and any messes you make. However, feel free to help others. If we all pitch in, the course will run much more smoothly.
Report anything that you feel uncomfortable doing: Please let the instructor know if you are uncomfortable doing anything. This extends to both techniques and equipment. For example, if uncomfortable using a chef’s knives or lifting a heavy pot or a hot pot, let the instructor know.
Taste food with disposable spoons: Discard used spoons.
Follow appropriate sanitation practices: Hot food should be kept above 140° F and cold food below 40° F.
Please wash your hands thoroughly when appropriate: Wash before you begin preparing any food items, after handling raw food, sneezing, using the toilet, etc.
Wear disposable gloves or use utensils to handle any food that is ready to eat. (It is not necessary to wear gloves if the food will subsequently be cooked.)
If you are feeling ill, please talk with the instructor.
Wear appropriate clothing: Shoes, yes. Loose clothing or jewelry, no Hair restraint, yes.
Ingredients are here to cook with, not to snack on.
Please turn off any cell phones or other electronic devices that may distract you or others. It is important that you give you full attention to what you are doing in the kitchen. If you must use your cell phone, please step out of the kitchen to do so, and make sure you are not throwing anyone off schedule when doing so.
Use common sense and have a good time.
I'm pretty much assuming most people are going to shoot for a grade of passing. (I have been forced into awarding a failing grade but that has been very rare.) The key thing required for a passing grade is participation. If you come to class and do the work you will pass.
There is a third possible grade—Honors. As I mentioned on the Detailed Description page, "Students desiring a grade of Honors will be given the option of completing additional projects." This has been a fairly standard offer for my last few Interim. On rare occasions, a student has expressed an interest in "honors" but that has been as far as it has gone. Still, this remains a possibility so I wanted to take a few minutes and address the issue.
The real issue is how to distinguish one person from another in a participation course since I expect everyone to participate. The idea I can upon several years ago was that of an extra project. Exactly what an extra project should be is really open to discussion. One possibility would be for a student to take on a "product" that we won't get to or will only touch upon and research and expand upon the product. For example, it is very unlikely that we will get to strudels in class. If a student has a particular interest in strudels, then for a grade of honors that could take on strudels as an extra project. (Phyllo is another possibility.) A student might research recipes for strudels, try two or three of these recipes, and perhaps making a presentation to the class or document their efforts on their blog with photos, a discussion of recipes, and their results.
As for the choice of product, that is something we could talk about but IT WILL REQUIRE PRIOR APPROVAL. I would expect you to do something different or beyond what we are doing in class. It should be something that you have not made before. Of course, no two students would be able to take on the same product as an honors project.
So, if this sounds of interest to you, please let me know. This is something we should be able to chat about sometime when we are in the kitchen.
The new year is here and the mad rush to get ready for Interim is intensifying. I bought most of the equipment we'll need apart from a few odds and ends.
I'm pulling together recipe lists. The schedule page now reflects the general topics and the probable days we will be working on them. All this, however, may change depending on the requirement of the individual recipes. Moreover, please keep in mind, the recipe lists are not etched into stone. If there is something you'd rather do or learn about, please let me know. In general, I'm selecting recipes because that illustrate basic principle or techniques, show relationships between different products or techniques, or because they are in some sense "classic" or fundamental recipes. Still there are many recipes that fall into these categories and substitutions can be made. However, logistics are a key consideration. For example, on the day of cooking, we won't be able to change recipes:
(Nor am I inclined to make changes base on whims.) But if you do have a reason for a change let me know. Clearly, the key to making a change is planning ahead. So the sooner you express your preference, the better.
Ideally, there will be a method to the madness in recipe selection. Finding this method is what I'm struggling with right now. Over the years, I'm made a wide variety of different products—pretty much everything I'll ask you to make and, more often than not, several variants of everything you be cooking. But like most bakers, there hasn't been a pedagogical pattern to my baking. While I have worked through a couple of bread books baking every recipe in the book, I haven't done this with most products. Typically, like most bakers, I've baked what I felt like baking. While this is fun, patterns are slow to emerge when you take this approach. If we can identify patterns, we will be able to learn much more quickly and we will be able to generalize and understand better what we have learned. Right now, I'm slogging away trying to pull together recipes that will make such pattern more self evident.
An example might help. There are a number of different type of cakes but cakes typically fall into two basic categories. With cakes, we want a light, fluffy structure. Basically, the structure of a cake comes from the proteins in eggs and flour. These proteins have been inflated and are set by baking. The inflation is created by one of two basic techniques. We can cream together sugar and butter. The sugar cuts the butter introducing small bubble of air that expand as the cake bakes. Or we can beat eggs incorporating air in the beating process. This divides cakes into two categories. We can continue the process. For example, angel food cakes, chiffon cakes, génoise cakes, and sponge cakes are all foam cakes or beaten egg cakes.
So the idea is to select a few recipes that illustrate the difference and similarities between the cakes, to show where recipes like layer cakes fit in this scheme work, demonstrate basic techniques, add in a few other topics like the translating between cup cakes, sheet cakes, layer cakes, etc, and, to have some fun along the way keeping in mind that I'm still figuring out some of this for myself.
In this course, we will be producing, in baking parlance, a lot of "product". Certainly, you will have ample opportunity to sample everything we make in class. But, as this is very much a hands-on, experience oriented course, this will still leave a fair amount of excess "product". Some of this you will be able to carry off, but some of it I would like to see redistributed as gifts.
There are several reasons for doing this:
While all of these are good reasons, there is one more. Cooking at some very fundamental level is about sharing. It is about bring people together. Ultimately, this may be the most important aspect of this course.
Assuming I interpreted everyone's comments correctly, here are the results from the voting:
The real winners seem to be cookies, pizza, cakes, pastries, pies, and chocolate. There are no real surprises here.
I was really disappointed that there were so few votes for no knead breads. I suspect that most folks just aren't familiar with these. They produce really remarkable breads that are extremely easy to make. While we won't devote a day to these, I'm going to try to find a way to work them into the schedule, perhaps as yeast breads.
It looks like ethnic/celebration breads and student selected are off the schedule as well. A few of the egg products can be merged into other categories. We can include chocolate souffles under chocolate, pastry creams with pastries, and custards as custard pies. Finally, I'll look at ways of merging sourdough and whole grain breads or merging biscuits/quick breads with fried/griddle breads.
One other observation, the more I look at pastry recipes, the more it looks like this may need to be split into a two-day session.
The next step is assign topics to days and select recipes. These are intertwined since recipe selection may dictate multiple days to a topic. I will try to alternate between sweet and savory.
To summarize, it looks like the topics are, in no particular order:
I'll leave this at nine topics for now. There will be more on scheduling in the near future.
It is very tempting to think that writing a schedule isn’t very involved. Pick topics, assign them to the available days, pick a few recipes, make a few guesses about the time required for each and we’re done. In practice, it is much more complicated for a variety of reasons.
First, I’d like to maximize the number of recipes you are exposed to. We could take the approach everyone doing the same thing in each category. On cookie day, everyone would make chocolate chip cookies; on cake day, everyone would make angel food cakes; eight loaves of white bread; eight apple pies, etc. There are several problems with this approach. Foremost are the pedagogical. Each person would come away from the class with the same nine or ten recipes—at most. And if they already knew how to make chocolate chip cookies or a loaf of white bread, that day of cooking would be wasted on them.
Although there will be exceptions, my hope is each group will make something different on most day. At the end of the month, you will walk away with ten recipes they’ve made, but will also have sampled and have a pretty good idea of how to make another 60 or 70 recipes. And you will have some choice in what you make and should be able to avoid recipes you are already familiar with.
There are also logistical considerations. One example is what I’ll call the Angel Food Cake Problem. Angel food cakes are bake in tube pans. The cakes need to cool completely in the pan before being removed. This takes several hours at a minimum. (Some cooks recommend leaving them in the pan overnight.) The problem with angel food cakes is that once you make one, you can’t use the pan for anything else while the cake is cooling. isn’t much of a problem for a home baker since one cake at a time is generally enough. But in a class this is a different matter. If we bake eight angel food cakes, we will need eight tube pans, pans that we would probably not use again. If we bake a variety of cakes, then we can use a variety of pans, and in some cases, reuse pans. And, of course, different recipes have radically different preparation and cooking times.
Another issue with scheduling stems from my desire to get feedback from you about what you would like to learn about. This has delayed any specific scheduling until after I’d gotten feedback from all the students in the class.
Once the individual topics are selected, the next step is to selecting individual recipes. First, I want a diverse range of recipes that illustrate a number of different cooking issues and principles. For example, with cakes, we might include foam leavened cakes such as angel food, chiffon, and sponge cases as well as butter/creamed cakes like pound cakes. Individual recipes have to be selected. Next, I need to order the recipes looking at logistics such as the amount of preparation and baking times, the equipment needed (remember the Angel Food Cake Problem?), and ingredients needed. Some recipes will need to be started the day before, some will need to be started first thing, and some can be safely put off until the last minute. Once all this has been done, I can begin to pull together a rudimentary schedule.
Of course, this is still just a general outline for a schedule. We still need to get together and assign specific recipes to teams of individuals. Until this has been done, it is impossible to say who will need to come at what time, or whether a particular team will need to come the day before or not.
While the actually process of assigning a student to a recipe or time slot is open to discussion, it is very likely that specific recipes will be tied to specific time slots for logistical reasons (the Angel Food Cake Problem). Student will then be given the opportunity to select a recipe/time slot combination. Selection will probably be done on a random draw basis, but I’m open to other suggestions. It would be nice if we could work out a selection process that gives precedence to students trying to fit classes into a work schedule.
At this point we have a working schedule for one day. That is, until something changes or goes wrong and the process starts all over again.
December 14: Schedule Confusion
The seems to be some ongoing confusion about the schedule for this course. In a nutshell, there isn't a hard and fast schedule at this point. The schedule wilI be developed as the course progresses!
I have tried to be very clear about this point. In the email I sent out after registration for Interim I stated (emphasis added):
I anticipate that we will be in class or cooking about three hours per day on average. (You may also anticipate up to an hour of assigned reading each day.) This should leave you with a lot of time to pursue other activities during the month. However, because of the nature of baking, the time required may be spread out over the course of the day. For example, when baking bread you may need to prepare the dough, allow it to rise, form loaves, allow it to rise again, bake it, and then allow it to cool. While none of these tasks take very long, this whole process can be spread out over a number of hours. You won’t need to hang around while the bread is rising, for example, but you will need to return at the appropriate times during the day. Similarly, because of limited kitchen space, baking will be done on a staggered schedule with different students having access to the oven at different times during the day. At the end of a day of baking, we will usually reconvene as a group to sample the items prepared during the day. As such, this project will demand a fairly flexible schedule from those enrolled in it. (There is also the possibility of flu outbreaks and severe weather complicating the schedule.) Please be advised.
On the Description Page of this website I state:
We have used this cooking model in the past and it works well. It ensures that each student is able to actively participate. I will try to make all reasonable scheduling accommodations, but student taking this project should have fairly flexible schedules.
On the Schedule Page of this website I state:
The first few days and the last day will be atypical. Apart from these days, typically we will alternate between cooking one day and having class in the morning of the next day. However, until we have an explicit schedule for a day, everyone should consider themselves "on call". We will be filling in the calendar as the course progresses.
I realize this is problem, particularly for those of you who work. Missing an afternoon of work to attend a 30 minute session will be extremely frustrating. I too would prefer a nice predictable schedule. But it is the nature of what we are doing that dictates the schedule. That said, I will try to make accommodations for those who work, but I can make no guarantees. I apologize if I have contributed to this confusion, but I have attempted to clearly state the issues.
I'll try to explain the scheduling process and give you an update of where we stand in another post in the near future.
Last modified: January 18, 2009
Contact: Joe Sloan, sloanjd@wofford.edu
© Joe Sloan