Baking and Pastry - Croissants, Danish, Focaccia, Sourdough Starter

My partner Dennis and I were off to a slow start this morning. Seems that we somehow missed the fact that we were to make the starter for the sourdough bread yesterday along with a sponge for the focaccia bread to be baked today. Oh well. We went ahead and made the focaccia sponge first thing and will bake it tomorrow. This could work to our advantage because tomorrow Chef Thomas is having the whole class come to his bakery at Half Moon Bay (Moon Side Bakery and Cafe) to bake our sourdough bread and croissants in his commercial ovens. How fun is this? A field trip! We will just pop our focaccia bread in there along with the sourdough and croissants.
Maybe it will turn out as beautiful as Glenn's pictured above. One of the day's few high points.

After our performance in the kitchen this morning I am surprised Chef didn't cancel the trip. We were a mess. After a demo on making focaccia bread he set us loose in the kitchen to make one focaccia recipe per team, put together our croissant dough, feed our sour dough starter and finish our final roll on the danish then form and bake them. Seemed easy enough.

What could I say. Dennis and I couldn't make our focaccia bread because we didn't have a starter to work with. We went ahead and put our croissant dough together and that was a disaster. There was some scaling trouble - seems we were missing about a pound of flour.
It's a good thing it came out well the second time around or I think Chef Thomas would have kicked us out of class.
He told everyone to make sure to use the dough hooks for the focaccia and maybe one person did. One team used their Blitz pastry for the danish and their danish dough for their focaccia bread. If there was a way to blow it someone did. Poor Chef. He was trying to be patient as he gave his demo on forming the danishes.



Dennis and I redeemed ourselves with some beautiful danishes (left) and a wonderful croissant dough (below) that we added our butter block to and managed to give it three turns before the day ended. You can see the three imprints for each turn.
I somehow managed to become "keeper of the doughs." I brought them home, all seven double batches of croissant dough and 16 quarts of sourdough starter to store, and will take them to Half Moon Bay in the morning. I was somehow reminded of when my kids brought home the silkworms from their classrooms to take care of for the weekend. At least I don't have to go hunting for Mulberry leaves!

Goodnight