Baking School Diaries #10

Tropeziennes, rye tourtes, and homemade praliné.

The Baking School Diaries is a series about my three months as a student in the Intensive Professional Program in Bread Baking & Viennoiseries at Ferrandi Paris. Bienvenue!

Mesmerizing rye tourte

This week, each of us got up in front of the class and presented our ideas for the final exam: a creativity project that will require us to develop two unique recipes (one savory, one sweet), bake them, and then present them to a panel of judges. Next week, we’ll actually test these recipes out for the first time.

This is all to say: things are getting real around here.

Below, you’ll find:

• 🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked this week,

• 🇫🇷 The highs, lows, and takeaways from this week’s classes, and

• 🎬 Daily video updates for the full play-by-play.

On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. This week, that includes a dispatch from Monet’s home and gardens in Giverny. 🪷

On to today’s letter!

Rye tourte. This twice-kneaded dough was almost impossible to work with—there was so little gluten that you couldn’t even look at it without it falling apart. At least it was as tasty as it was infuriating to handle!

Pain de mie au levain. This bread, made with milk sourdough, had an extremely pleasant and subtle tang.

Pain blanc au levain liquide. We compared a batch of dough that was shaped on the first day with a batch that got an overnight rest before shaping. No contest: extra time equalled extra flavor here.

Pain polka. So named because of the polka (cross-hatch) scoring.

Chocolate-hazelnut babka! Cinnamon rolls! Cardamom buns! Simply the best.

Tropeziennes. We filled these brioche rounds with all kinds of incredible toppings and fillings. There was cocoa, orange, and coffee syrup; streusel, cocoa crumbles, rock sugar, and chocolate craquelin; mascarpone chantilly, homemade praliné, coffee-infused crème diplomate and hazelnut crème mousseline. Basically, everything was over the top in the very best way.

If this week’s bakes sound appealing, check out the videos below! They offer a look into each step of the process—including the finished product. Plus, they offer extra context, like how we structured our mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking schedules each day for maximum efficiency.

The great stuff

• Making nostalgic treats. Filling and twisting cardamom buns brought me right back to my Friday baking sessions with the folks at Midsommar Bakery. That meant reminiscing about the jokes we told and the music we blasted; it also meant enjoying a little bit of muscle memory for this particular baking task, which was a welcome reprieve after so (!) many (!!) weeks (!!!) of feeling like a beginner at making French baked goods.

• Thinking about our future selves. On Tuesday, we had extra time on our hands, so a classmate suggested that we start on the next day’s tasks. We were much less rushed on Wednesday, and all because someone took the initiative to think about Future Us.

The hard stuff

• Low blood sugar. I eat a full breakfast before heading to class each morning. Still, on the rare day when we haven’t baked something to snack on, I’m starving by the time that lab ends—and it affects my energy for the rest of the day, even after I inhale lunch. It took me a while to understand that standing up all day and doing physical work had greatly increased my caloric needs…even though my body had been sending me signals (read: mid-morning hunger pangs) all along.

• Realizing what we’d been missing. We switched out our razor blades this week, and learned that we weren’t so bad at scoring after all! We’d just been using dull blades. We also realized other, less positive things that we were missing: cocoa powder in our chocolate craquelin (whoops) and yeast in our chocolate brioche dough (double whoops).

Lessons learned

• How to adapt our recipes. When we return to our home countries, we won’t have access to the beautiful French flours we use each day in class. So this week, we got a few helpful hints about adapting our class recipes using the flours we’ll find at home, based on their protein levels and ash content. We’ll still have quite a bit of experimentation ahead of us, of course, but now we can make more educated guesses about the starting points.

• The power of observation. I asked a classmate to walk me through a coil fold—a skill I’d been struggling with for weeks. I also asked our chef to walk me through the process of making praliné, taking lots of videos and detailed notes along the way. Feel like a beginner all the time is starting to wear on me, but when I stop to appreciate how much talent I’m surrounded by, it shifts my focus from overwhelm (and intimidation) to gratitude.

Every school day, I’ve been posting a video recap as a Note on the Substack app.

Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school vlogs from Monday through Thursday (or, more accurately, du lundi au jeudi!).

And with that, it’s on to le weekend!

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.