Baking Course Day

Wednesday arrived and I had booked the day off, so a lay in started the day off nice and easy followed by tidying up the house. The baking course didn't start until 4.30 so I had plenty of time to potter round doing all sorts of odd jobs that I normally skip don't get the chance to do. So at 4.15 I promptly presented myself at Cinnamon Square, they were very nice and offered any refreshment I wanted. The course was run by an extremely knowledgeable chap called Paul who put us all at ease. Once the other attendees had arrived and sorted themselves out we got straight down to business. Paul took us through mixing the dough by hand using fresh yeast, something I hadn't used before. Having put the ingredients (flour, yeast, salt and some trex) into the plastic bowl provided, then adding the water, weighing it as it gives a more accurate measurement, we then started mixing by hand. Once the ingredients had all formed into a rough dough, we tipped them out onto the table and began to knead them. we kept this up for about fifteen minutes, stretching or slapping it onto the table as desired. The resulting dough was the best I had ever made, we formed it into a small ball and placed it in the plastic bowl, covered it in clingfilm and left it to rise. We then started on a second loaf using wholemeal four, following the same procedure as before, again some of the best dough I had ever made. We then broke for something to eat and a glass or two of wine.While we were eating we had to dash back to the table and knock back the first dough we had made earlier, putting it into tins to rise, the tins were placed into a plastic box and throughout the remainder of the the course we could see the dough rising, there was no need to place them in a warm room or cover them with teatowels just keep them in the box, I presume it stops drafts cooling the dough down in the tins. Paul had made some more dough for us while we had been stuffing our faces in the big mixer. We used this to create a bloomer and several platted loaves, I had no problem with the bloomer or the three strand platted loaf but the four strand got me all confused, fortunatley one of my fellow students had grasped the idea better than me and gave a helping hand. We had also shaped the wholemeal dough and placed it in tins as well. Then came the really fun part, placing our creations into the big oven, really quite straight forward apart from the bloomer, that had to be placed on a peel and slid into the depths of the hot oven, a mixture of ground rice and poppy seeds was used to stop the dough sticking to the peel. Twenty minutes later we were taking hot bread out of the oven, each one of us gasping with delight that what we had been making for the last five hours had turned out so well. we left them to cool down a bit before bagging them up and running off into the night with them, Paul had also given us a Sourdough bread to take home, that tasted even better than the loaves we had just made. So a big thank you to all at Cinnamon Square and especially to Paul for teaching us how to make such good bread. So here are the results!