My 12-step program for making it through pastries
Pastry, pastry everywhere
I’ve been secretly dreading my six-week pastry course due to a deep-seated fear that I will end up looking like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. He’s got the full-blown chef’s toque and I only have my stub of a hat. But my elastic waistband trousers and a billowy white coat, I fear, have enough expansion capacity to accommodate daily temptations like sweet and savory knotted rolls, warm French bread, buttery croissants, Linzer Torte, Genoise cake, Crème Brule, handmade crepes, chocolate lava cake and frangipane tart, to name only a few things on the menu.
I know your hearts bleed for my trials and tribulations. But I seriously need a game plan for maintaining a healthy weight that is not solely rooted in the notion of will power. That particular trait doesn’t seem to make the journey to west to Pittsburgh with me each Monday morning.
Luckily, as a gift from the bakery gods (I couldn’t find the name of any actual gods; St Honore is reportedly the patron saint of bakers and confectioners), there is a 12-step program for dough production that can loosely double as a set of guiding principles to curb my glutenous (get it?) desires.
The trusty kitchen scale
Step 1. Scaling ingredients
This one is all about accuracy in weighing everything that goes in. In the kitchen it means meticulously calibrating the kitchen scale and painstakingly weighing every single ingredient in the formula — they don’t call them recipes on this side of the house, as there is no room for error here. But in my battle against the bakery bulge, this step means that while it’s legitimate to remove most articles of clothing before getting on the bathroom scale, I do need to wear my glasses so that I can’t misread a zero because I think it used to be an eight.
Step 2. Mixing
This mixer cost $25,000, and it was a refurbished one.
The professional stand mixer in the bakery kitchen is half my size, but its hooked arm is at least 50 times as strong as I am. That’s motivation, right? If a stand mixer can do 900 rotations in a minute, maybe I can just work out alongside it, cradling a second batch. Since the dough for the lean Southwestern cheese rolls we made yesterday was mixed for 8 minutes, and since my maximum knead rate is about 60 per minute, I could achieve the same doughy results in just two hours. Taking the math out further to incorporate a random number I found on the Internet for calories burned per hour of baking (471), if each roll is 200 calories, that means I could eat four without remorse and have 142 calories to spare.
Step 3. Fermentation
This is the step in the dough process in which the yeast feeds on the sugars and starches in the mix to produce gases and alcohol. I think this is the step in my process which clearly gives me the green light to have that second glass of red wine. After all, it will help cut through the cholesterol in all the pastries I’m consuming.
Fermented dough, before the punching
Step 4. Punching
Technically this process does four things to the dough. It expels the carbon dioxide, redistributes the yeast, relaxed the gluten and equalized the temperature across the mass of doughy product.
Sounds a bit like plastic surgery. I hadn’t considered a tummy tuck until this very moment.
Step 5. Scaling (again)
The second time you pull out the kitchen scale, you do so to make sure all of the pieces of dough you cut with your pastry scraper are uniform in weight. But get this: when you figure out the desired weight, you have to account for a 10-13% weight loss due to evaporation during baking. I’d be willing to sit in an oven for a bit for that double digit deletion from my bottom line.
Step 6. Rounding
Here you take the scaled dough and, cupping your hand over it on the stainless steel workspace, you form it in a smooth ball. This makes it easier to shape the dough later in the process. It’s during this tedious process that you get sick of the dough (we had to do this for 186 individual pieces of scaled dough) and so there is at least a slight hope that you won’t feel like eating it, ever.
Rolls on a bench
Step 7. Benching
It’s appropriate that on the seventh step, the dough rests. So, too, should I take a break from my thoughts about weight gain – or perhaps hit the bench press in the weight room.
Step 8. Makeup and panning
At this juncture you shape the bread into, well, whatever shape you want. We rolled it in about 10-inch strands and wrapped them in single and double knotted rolls. Breads are made in so many shapes and sizes, and everyone thinks they are beautiful. There is surely a Marlo Thomas album or self image lesson to take away from that.
Step 9. Proofing
Inside the proof box – a slightly heated (between 70 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit), slightly moist, stainless steel box of racks into which trays of dough sit nicely — the shaped dough is once more allowed to expand. Hmm, sounds cozy, but it initially seems to run counter to my anti-expansionist plan relating to my midsection. Further thought on the subject keeps circling back to the proof-in-the-pudding cliché and reminds me that there is a chocolate cream pie on the menu for Day 14.
Step 10. Baking
This step is an obvious one, but there is an element to baking hard crusted bread that tips things in my direction, so to speak, if I twist the evidence just a bit. You have to score a hard bread – a French baguette, say – in order to let it expand properly in the oven. Shouldn’t that apply to the baker learning the craft? Perhaps it’s not about the cook constraining herself in constricting clothes. Perhaps it’s OK to slit the waistband of your trousers to accommodate your own expansion in the field?
Step 11. Cooling
You’ve got to rapidly cool baked goods to allow the excess moisture and alcohol created during the fermentation process to escape. But in my case, I’m not sure those are things I want to escape in the usual ways, and certainly not with anyone watching. But perhaps a nice solo stroll into the walk-in fridge.
Step 12. Storing
If you are going to eat the product within 8 hours, just leave it on racks. It will be fine. But if you need it to keep longer, you have to wrap it tightly in plastic wrap to keep it from getting stale. As for me, I can wrap myself in plastic. That will help, right? – especially since I’ve learned I can, in fact, stand the heat.
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