Week 6: Bread

This week we did something different, we moved away from sweet things to bread!  We learned how to make different types/styles of bread with the same dough.

To make the dough, we used fresh yeast, something I'd never seen before.  It has a crumbly, slightly gross texture that comes in blocks like butter and smells not so pleasant.  This yeast can be found at many bakeries, but not readily in grocery stores.  Fresh yeast has a better flavour than dry yeast, but they can be substituted for each other using a formula.

To keep the yeast alive, it's important to add the right temperature warm water and have some kind of fuel for it, in our case, sugar.  Once the dough was mixed, we kneaded it for a while and covered it with plastic and a metal bowl to seal in all the warmth.  Once the dough had doubled in size, we pressed some of the air out, cut it up and formed it into balls.

We then used about 7 of these balls to make cheesy monkey bread :)  This is done by placing the formed balls in a greased cake pan, covering it with cheese and herbs, proofing and then baking.  It bakes together but pulls apart easily.

With the remainder of the dough, we made various rolls.  We learned how to make buns, knots and braids.  Since these were smaller and were going to be baked individually, they didn't need to be proofed and went straight into the oven after a covering of poppy, caraway and sesame seeds.

There's a lot of ways to experiment with this dough and mix it up to make different flavours.  It can be made savoury with cheese or sweet with cinnamon sugar.  Lots of different things to try :)