WEEK 2: Bread-making Workshop

In this lesson, we are going to experience the process of making the bread. We are required to attend a bread making workshop at the School of Hospitality that is conducted by Chef Eddie. Before we started the lesson, he explain the few of the main ingredient and wrote down the ratios on the board of each ingredient, so that we know which ingredient are needed more than the others.

After briefly explaining the ingredients, we started on the baking steps.

1. Mixing progress

Chef Eddie mixed all the dry ingredients such as Flour and Instant dry yeast in the mixer for 5 minutes approximately. He then added in the cold water due to the temperature and mixed it again for 10 minutes. Next, the salt is added for flavouring and acted as a binding agent towards protein.

2. Fermentation process

The dough is taken out from the mixer and put on top of the table for it to ferment. We wrapped the dough to prevent the air from hardening the outside skin. While waiting, Chef Eddie tell us different stories and explain our questions about bread that could help us for our project. A few minutes later, the increase in size is more visible.

3 .Measuring and Cutting

Chef Eddie let us separated the dough into 400g each. First, we have to dust the table with flour so that the dough do not stick on the table. After that, we were taught how to mold the dough and it would be ready for the next process. All of my classmates participate in the activity of cutting and weighing the dough.

4. Molding

As Chef Eddie mentioned before, we have to explore different type of breads by the day, such as baguette, batard, boule and etc. He showed us the way of making different shape of the dough and let the students tried with them. After molding, he then putted the dough inside a machine to let it rise faster since letting them rest out on the table would take hours.

5. Scoring

Before putting them in the oven, Chef Eddie told us that all the baker used the scorer to make their own unique scoring method or pattern as the signature.

6. Baking

Before putting in the bread, we have to preheat the oven for 200c, then only baked them for around 20 minutes. The final outcome of the bread looked good surprisingly since this was the first time we did the whole process together. And came to the tasting session, we were all enjoy eating the bread with the butter that provided.

I would say this was a great experience to all of us because we were not only learnt this for our project but broaden our knowledge in baking. I'm looking forward to have more of the baking workshop for the classes in the coming days.