Hoisted by your own Batard

Hearth, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

Abigail and I took the Artisan Breads class at the Culinary Institute of America. Deciding that it was just silly waking up at 6am to drive to a 9am class, we stayed again at the splendiferous Quality Inn (formerly, and by formerly I mean last month) the Super 8 motel. There is much less "falling asleep at the wheel" when spending the night in Hyde Park before a class, I highly recommend it.

I'm still in love with taking classes at the CIA, though this was a topic I picked mostly so that I'd be able to take it with Abby, the house baker. While I do in fact adore Artisan Breads, I'm not sure that Culinary is utilizing the same definition of artisan I am. Mine doesn't involve multi-thousand dollar ovens that feature sliding bread racks (so that you can drop in row upon row of bread in perfect rows) or walk-in bread ovens that rotate racks full of bread rolls. Nor does it feature a stand mixer the size of three neatly-spaced Oompa Loompas that mixes bread fifteen pounds at a time.

My version of Artisinal Bread involves a charming, petite and rusitc boulangerie in Paris on the banks of the Seinne owned and operated by an equally charming, and stunningly attractive French woman (perhaps just a tad past her peak, but in her day "zoot alors!"), hand crafting loaf after loaf of small breads, with the most perfect crusts and delicate and fluffy insides serving a customer base of equally charming and aging French, who arrive each day, complain about the continued use of English slang words like "l'Internet" and "Le Big Mac" and then wax philosophic about the role of France in World War II and how the world was better when Francois Mitterand was in office, and what a lovely/horrible job they did on the restoration of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

(To be fair though, I did look up the definition of Artisan and it's a bit more vague than I would have thought: artisan |ˈärtizən| noun a worker in a skilled trade, esp. one that involves making things by hand. Maybe it's my definition that was off.)

We made about eight different types of bread: sourdough batards, sourdough bagettes, ciabatta, whole wheat, multi-grain, foccacia and soft rolls. We only did one thing by hand, utilizing a terrific system that replaces kneading, and I'll happily show anyone who is even the least bit curious.

Having a Certified Master Baker as an instructor is great, there's something amazing about watching a man who knows dough so confidently, who can touch a small piece of a mixing dough and tell if it's right just from the feel of the strands through his fingers. You just don't get that level of experience when watching Rachael Ray

There's also a smell in the halls of the CIA, part cleaner, part cooking, part learning that I love. It was heavily in the halls during the Italian Boot Camp, and now it reminds me of that first class, my first trips into a pro kitchen, and the renewal of my love of being a foodie.

We left class with something that felt like three-hundred loaves of bread, but certainly couldn't have been. Each person gets to take an enormous amount of bread home with them, and since Abby and I were going to the same place, we got twice as much as a single-household would usually have. We donated huge loaves of bread to the children-having neighbors around us, and then watched as Sheryl and Foster happened by at the end of a walk and shoved massive pieces of buttered bread into their faces.

Comments

[DW]

That is SO funny!