Our 4-lesson Foundation in Bread-Making course has come to an end last Sunday (20 April).
In our last lesson, we learned to make four more types of bread – wholemeal sandwich loaf, bread bowls, American Chewy Bagels and French Walnut Wheat Country Bread. It might appear that we would be kept very busy during the five hours but it turned out that this was a very relaxed lesson, as compared to all the previous weeks.
This was an important step in making the bagels chewy before baking them.
Our instructor explaining the difference between well-baked and not so well-baked bread loaves. Can you tell the difference? Fortunately, the not so well-baked loaf was not ours 😀
My bread bowl dough before proofing. My instructor said that they were well-shaped. 😉
With the end of this course, DS and I are glad that we have basically picked up some of the fundamentals and techniques in bread-making. This basic knowledge and all the recipes provided are certainly good enough for us to start producing home-made bread! However, we were hoping that there would be even more theories that helped us better understand the science of bread-making. We thought we would be able to come out with our own bread recipe by the end of the course. Perhaps we were expecting too much! We thought it would also be great if amongst the various groups in the class, we were tasked to produce same type of breads of different proportion of ingredients in order that we could appreciate better the impact of the ingredients on the texture and flavour of breads. Of course, we could attempt to do so at home but this would take many trials and be very time-consuming.
For the bread bowls that we took home, instead of eating them in a traditional way (with creamy soup), we ate with home-cooked Japanese curry instead. That was a good try. Japanese curry rice or noodles (udon) are common but I wonder if there is any restaurant here that serves Japanese curry in bread bowls?
It is time to put what we have learned into practice. We think that we have a relatively good oven at home. So far, we have been pleased with our 3-month old Sharp Healsio water oven which is not just user-friendly, but also has a function for Proofing the bread which I didn’t even realise until I started to bake my bread! 😮 It has a variety of functions including steaming, grilling, roasting, proofing, baking, etc.
My first attempt at home two days ago was raisin bread which turned out successfully except that the surface of the bread was a little bit more brown. I think I will just need to make some slight adjustment to the temperature and baking time the next time I bake.
My first home-made bread. This bread contained about 60% of raisin and it meets American’s standard! I have also added sunflower seeds. The bread was delicious. We finished it within a day! 😉
QING Moments 