Pretzels & Beer Barms & Bries, Oh My!

Hello folks  =)

Apologies for the late update, I had myself a rather lovely weekend in Manchester with my little brother, & I must admit rather a lot of wine was consumed!

Wednesday saw us baking the last of our world breads, pretzels & panmirino's, & free styling the world breads we're thinking of baking in our assessments.  In my case, this was a traditional English beer barm bread  =)

First up though, pretzels!

This dough was fairly easy to mix, & was a fairly strong dough, requiring little in the way of folding.  Once it was divided, it was pre-shaped into balls & left to rest, before being rolled out & shaped into that distinctive pretzel shape.

These were shaped on the baking sheet, rather than the lifting & flipping technique I've seen on the TV, but it worked just as well.  I chose to leave two plain, with just a sprinkling of sea salt, & the other two were sprinkled with poppy seeds.

These were baked off in the oven, rather than using the slightly more volatile caustic soda method!

We made panmirino's next, two varieties, one with raisins & rosemary, the other just with rosemary.  This was a really soft dough, & needed quite a few folds to get the strength into it, but it actually baked off quite nicely.

Here are mine, waiting to go into the oven... The cuts on the round loaf, the panmirino with rosemary, were sprinkled with sea salt before baking.

And here they are fully baked & drizzled with olive oil  =)

Finally, my beer barm breads!  These were quite fun actually  =)

In order to make a beer barm bread, you need beer barm, so, Tuesday afternoon I wandered across the yard to the Welbeck Abbey Brewery for a pot of their finest yeasty, foamy loveliness  =)

I combined the beer barm with some malthouse flour & water, & left them to ferment overnight.  The dough was quite unusual really, soft & flowing, but strong at the same time, with a really great structure.  It was quite a pleasure to work with really  =)

I divided & shaped the dough into three pieces & placed them in banatons to prove.  Once they were ready, they were turned out onto the peel, & instead of being scored with a blade, a stencil was laid on top & the surface dusted with flour.  I used two different sorts; one with malthouse flour, the other two with standard white flour, to see which effect I preferred.

Now, originally I wasn't going to be allowed to post a picture of the finished breads, simply because the stencil I used was designed for Wayne to use in a top secret project... Now, I'm fairly certain he later said he wasn't going to use it & so I could keep it, but I'm not 100% certain, so I'm still not going to post a picture!  (Don't want to jeopardise my final marks now do I!)  ;)

I will say that they rose beautifully, & that the stencil worked well too, especially with the white flour.  The malthouse blended into the crust a little, so it didn't stand out that well. 

Flavour-wise, it's okay, but the level of pre-fermented flour was only 13%, so no great depth of flavour from that.  I think that if I do use a beer barm bread in my assessment (& I think I will) I'll need to up the pre-fermented flour, give it greater depth of flavour.  I also think I might use a different blend of flours, maybe throw some malthouse flour into the final dough, along with some wholemeal flours... Who knows, I might get crazy & experiment with a seeded beer barm bread!

Thursday was Dairy!  First time back in there since coming back from placement, & we were trying out the soft cheese recipes again, after our first batch sadly died...

Hopefully this time the cheeses will be more successful, but we'll have to wait & see!  The milk was a little more acidic then we would have expected, but everything else seemed okay so we carried on. 

All was going well until we added the rennet.  For a soft cheese, you want the curd to begin to form within 8 minutes (ideally) of the rennet being added; for our first batch of milk it took a staggering 31 minutes!  We increased the amount of rennet in the second batch, so that only took 18 minutes, but still a lot longer then we'd have liked. 

But still, curds did eventually form, so we cut, stirred & moulded as usual  =)

So now all we have to do is wait!  They should be safely tucked up in the maturing room now, so hopefully in won't be too long to go!

It's going to be rather quiet on the blog front for the next couple of days.  We're not actually doing any baking until Thursday when we have Flour Confectionery.  Today & tomorrow we're confined to the resource room doing research for our world breads assessment, then Wednesday we've got a field trip.

We're going to see the 2008 Bakery World Champion, Christophe Debersee, demonstrate a variety of breads.  It should be an interesting day & hopefully I'll have some pictures to share too  =)