It’s been a wonderful week but it must come to an end. Today is my last day at SFBI’s Artisan 1 Bread class, and I must say.. I’ve learned a ton! I can’t wait to go home and apply everything that I’ve learned, not to mention actually using my at-home equipment, which is so different from the industrial versions that we used during the class.

We started the day with a little bit of lecture. We had made our pre-ferments on day 4 that we were going to focus on today. We made a poolish (named after the Polish, no less), and a sponge. We also did a pate fermentee, and I’ll talk about what happened with that later

The main difference between a poolish and a sponge is hydration.  Both were made with 100% flour, and 0.1% yeast, but the poolish had water at 100%, and the sponge at 63%.  Significant difference in hydration… Because of these differences, the poolish sat overnight creating lactic acid and lots of flavor, and the sponge sat overnight creating acetic acid and lots of flavor as well.   The pate fermentee simply means “old dough” and that’s exactly what it was.  It was a complete dough, in that included flour (100%), water (65%), yeast (0.5%), and salt (2%).  It was mixed the day before like the poolish and sponge.

Here are the pictures of the poolish, sponge, and pate fermentee, respectively:

The first thing that was noticed was the smells that they all had.  The poolish so closely resembled the smell of my sourdough starter, because I keep that at 100% hydration as well.  The texture was the same, too; super bubbly, just shy of foaming, and lighty and jiggly.

The sponge had a different smell, more astringent than the poolish.  That was because of the acetic acid that was dancing around within it.  Because it was less “wet”, there weren’t as many air pockets swimming around.  It was still quite light and fluffy.. just not as “jiggly” - very technical terms here 

The pate fermentee was just some nice dough.  Smelled like dough, looked like dough.  Smell was a little acetic…

Here was our schedule for the day:

So… the funny thing that happened came when we were mixing all of our doughs.  The poolish, sponge and pate fermentee mixes were all going to be compared to our control - the standard baguette.  Well, we mixed up the poolish dough just fine, and the sponge just fine, but when it came time to mix in the pate fermentee, we couldn’t find it.  We looked high and low for the missing dough without any luck.  We had an idea that it ended up in the sponge dough (somehow) because we had way more than 5 baguettes per person when it came time to dividing and preshaping.  Oh well.  Makes for a funny story!

At the end of the day, Chef Steven also gave us a hand mixing demo - that was so incredible to watch.  You see this mound go from a shaggy mass to a very cohesive, smooth dough that actually has a gluten window.  Incredible.

We ended the final day with some lecture on the preferments, and of course, some bread tasting.  I think we all were a bit carbed out, and barely tasted much of anything.  I know I would’ve traded any number of tasty baguettes for a salad and some fruit.

It really was amazing to yet again see the huge differences in what seemed like subtle changes to the bread. 

On the left is the standard baguette.  In the middle is the poolish version, and on the right is the sponge (and pate fermentee!) version.  You can see the difference in crumb and texture between the three.  There were definitely taste differences that were becoming less and less subtle after a week of the class.   The poolish, with its 100% hydration really gave some nice great uneven and large holes that made for a really beautiful bread.
I so highly recommend this class to anyone that is interested in learning more about bread making.  Even though we didn’t a regular kitchen oven or kitchenaid mixer, the principles are completely applicable to home baking.  It will just take a little tinkering to learn to use our home machines to get the same results.  The shaping, scoring, and basic bread info was fantastic.  The staff was always trying to see how they could help us learn more, and get more out of the class.  I definitely plan on taking Artisan II at some poin - I look forward to getting the same quality education and fundamentals when it comes to sourdoughs.

And my new favorite tool (the lame) that I had to put in my checked bags or I might not have made it home…