Critic-Turned-Cook Gets Flour Power
Working the bench at Tom Douglas Bread Bakery in Seattle. Photograph courtesy Tom Douglas restaurants
I’m a decent home cook, capable of rummaging through the pantry to throw together a quickie dinner or, on a quiet Sunday, searching my considerable cookbook collection for more elaborate recipes.
Yet when it comes to any combination of yeast and flour, I’ve always been a hopeless failure. Even when following the no-way-you-can-blow-it no-knead recipes, I flop.
So, I was nervous about working in the bread department of the Tom Douglas restaurants on my journey from critic to cook. Veteran baker Gwen LeBlanc seemed to sense my fear.
“Don’t be scared,” she said soothingly while showing me how to arrange ficelle on a loader, a contraption that looks a little like a hospital gurney, which deposits dough in the red-hot oven.
Like a baton-wielding maestro, Gwen waved a razor blade gracefully to demo the right way to score the perfectly formed lumps of dough: You want to go straight down the middle. Picture a rectangle and stay in the box. Cut smoothly and swiftly. Relax your wrist. Don’t overthink it.
Great. Kind of reminded me why I gave up golf. So many little details to try and commit to sense memory.
Funny thing happened in front of that massive oven, though. After a few hours, it all began to jell. Like a rare drive straight down the fairway.
Maybe I could really do this. It helped that Gwen and her small crew – Wendy Scherer, Darren Morey, Devon Deardorf and Nikki Leigh – were so encouraging. Even when I screwed up. Like when I failed to click the dough loader into place and a batch of rolls tumbled into a row of baguettes. Oh man! Rookie mistake.
Wendy was nice about it. Sometimes, you just have to let it go, she consoled. Miraculously, the rolls weren’t a total loss – just not as pretty as the others.
I felt bad because I had seen the Herculean effort involved in getting the rolls ready to bake, the measuring and mixing and shaping. I learned the importance of pre-shaping step to let the glutens relax, making it easier to get the proper tension in the final shaping. Pushing dough against the bench – the huge wooden worktable where all the shaping was done – was downright therapeutic.
I don’t know why it has always freaked me out. If cooking on the line is one big adrenalin rush, baking bread seems like a brisk walk in the cool woods on a sultry summer afternoon. (Where I might find some of my errant golf balls, perhaps.)
I later learned that it’s rare for cooks to cross over to baking. When one cook came to cross train in Gwen’s flour-y world, he didn’t last a day.
I was pleasantly shocked, though, to feel so much at home. I wasn’t afraid anymore.
Anybody care to share their crossover success story or bakery battle scars?
About the author: Leslie Kelly is a Seattle-based freelance food writer whose work has appeared in the (now defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, and the Spokesman-Review. She's currently working in the kitchens of Tom Douglas restaurants and blogging at Whining & Dining.
Add a comment:
Previewing your comment:
HTML Hints
Some HTML is OK: <a href="URL">link</a>, <strong>strong</strong>, <em>em</em>
Comment Guidelines
Post whatever you want, just keep it seriously about eats, seriously. We reserve the right to delete off-topic or inflammatory comments. Learn more at our Comment Policy page.
If you see something not so nice, please, report an inappropriate comment.
5 Comments:
You just have to shift the way you think when you bake. Tasting, changing, adapting, adjusting gives way to methodical measurements but weight not volume. You try to be methodical and meticulous and use a digital scale and once you put it into the oven, you pray to the bread gods that everything turned out ok. I love both types of cooking because they hit different areas of my sense memory. I love a roast chicken for a slightly different reason than a freshly baked baguette. The no knead method to baking literally changed my life.
wazup1999 at 8:59AM on 04/20/09
I don't mean to sound like a commercial, but I couldn't bake a decent loaf of bread until I bought a KitchenAid mixer. Seems so easy now. And the almost no-knead bread recipe from Cook's Illustrated...I rarely buy crusty artisan bread anymore...it's that good.
kalajo at 10:38AM on 04/20/09
I'm in training as a baker at Panera, where the size of the bake is measured in the cost as sold of all the breads, bagels, and sweets that we bake. Under $1600 is slow and easy. Above $2000 keeps ya hoppin', especially since it's usually just the one baker working overnight to bake off almost all the product (souffles and baguettes are the exception - they're prepped to be baked off by the day crew). We're production bakers: the dough is prepped daily at a central facility, and rests as it gets delivered to each store, where we form, proof, score, and finally bake the bread. And since there's so much responsibility and time organization necessary, training takes 5-8 weeks. I worked at Panera in the day crew for 4 1/2 years before that, and worked as a baker and crepe chef, too. The closest thing my Panera baker experience can be compared to is a mad dash 8-9 hour mise en place (since you don't have the pressure of service time; all the pressure is internal), and then sometimes some down time in the end when you know you're gonna make it, you've done all the prepping and all that's left is oven management. I love it.
alexholyk at 12:04PM on 04/20/09
For me, I think of baking as more of a hobby and cooking as more of a necessity. Again, this is just personal preference, but on the weekends, I like to bake something to take my mind off of work/school/etc. I seem to almost get lost in the melodic sounds of baking - pounding sounds of kneading dough, the vrrrrm of the mixer, and smell of the baking product. On the other hand, when I cook, I have to be completely focused, and, I admit, I sometimes get stressed out that it won't come out as I had planned. I don't know, maybe cooking as a "necessity" is not the right way to phrase it...perhaps a better way to say it is baking is my depressor drug and cooking is my stimulant :P
pastry262 at 1:01PM on 04/20/09
I'm one of those people who does both. I love to cook, but I went to school (and am currently externing) for baking. The key is to relax, like Gwen said. Just because it takes precision and focus doesn't mean you can't be relaxed. That takes time and practice, but if you stress out too much, you'll screw up even more. I'm learning that right now with cake decorating and I just have to constantly tell myself to relax, take a second and then just go for it. You can do it!
meem21 at 2:03PM on 04/20/09