Baking School Diaries #11
Two words: laminated brioche.
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!
Our chef’s favorite saying—“no fat, no fun”—applied this week in spades.
When we talk about rich breakfast pastries, the croissant is usually the first item that pops into mind. And while that’s true (croissant dough is, after all, wrapped around a solid block of butter), the dough itself doesn’t contain a ridiculous amount of fat.
So this week, we upped the ante.
We took ultra-rich brioche dough laden with all the good stuff—eggs, sugar, butter—and wrapped it around a butter block, resulting in a fabulously decadent creation called laminated brioche. I genuinely believe that the term “melt in your mouth” was invented to describe this stuff.
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 recap of my high tea (with pastries by Chef François Perret!) at the Ritz’s Salon Proust. 🥂
On to today’s letter!
Like I said: Laminated! Brioche! We made plain and chocolate versions of this glorious dough, turning into braided knots and swirled loaves. To gild the lily, we filled each iteration with things like white chocolate and lime ganache, caramel, praliné and gianduja sticks studded with toasted hazelnuts.
Croissants and pain au chocolat…with a less-than-pleasant twist. This week, someone accidentally put salt in multiple sugar bins; the first batch of our croissant dough was a casualty. On the bright side, we learned a lot about bakery detective work. (More on that later.)
Lots of filled pastries. We filled triangles of croissant dough with apple compote and topped them with streusel, following that up with baked ganache and hazelnut nougatine, then pear custard cream with chocolate nougatine.
Restaurant breads. To be honest, I don’t love making millions of small-format breads, but you can’t argue with the tastiness of the results. We made pain de campagne au levain, “fingers” olives-herbes de Provence, pains aux algues (seaweed), pains aux champignons (pan-fried mushrooms with shallots, garlic, and parsley), fusettes de tradition française, fougasses provençales, torsades lardons-échalottes (twists with creamy shallots and bacon), vegan brioche (the secret ingredient: pumpkin purée), and a rich, savory spin on kugelhopf that included dried tomatoes, sliced olives, Comté, chorizo, and lardo di Colonnata.
The first trial run for our final projects. As the culmination of our program, our final exam will involve making two original recipes using brioche and croissant dough. This Friday was the first trial run of our creativity projects; I hope to share a more in-depth look at this process in a separate, future post!
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
Behind the scenes at a boulangerie. Our language teacher was kind enough to take us on a field trip to Bulle Boulangerie, a gorgeous spot in the 19th owned by former students of hers. We had a long, informative Q&A session with co-owner Jules, toured the back of house, and snagged a ton of treats to sample afterwards.
Taking the first baby steps toward my internship. After our program ends, we all have the option to pursue a two- or three-month internship—called a stagiaire, or stage for short—at a bakery in Paris. I’ve been tasting my way through the city’s boulangeries trying to identify my dream workplace, and this week, I heard back from them! I’m keeping those details under wraps (don’t want to jinx anything, of course), but I’m looking forward to my in-person meet-and-greet next week.
The hard stuff
Enter: Murphy’s law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, right? This week, it felt like Mercury was in retrograde. On the day that we laminated more books of dough than ever before, the pastry class borrowed one of our two dough sheeters, so we had to roll out almost everything by hand. (To add insult to injury, they took our coffeemaker that day, too! They’re lucky we like them all so much.) Many of our classmates were out sick at various points. Classes ran late…and a tad chaotic. Our group got behind when the gluten never formed in our croissant dough. Immediately afterwards, someone else spat out her salty coffee—turns out there was salt in the sugar bin! The next day, when we realized that not all the salty sugar had been thrown out, a second crisis was averted…but narrowly.
Lessons learned
There’s no substitute for tasting. We tried to figure out why our dough wasn’t coming together by talking through the many options, but it wasn’t until someone tasted the raw dough that we came to the obvious conclusion: our dough had way too much salt in it. Sometimes, the most obvious path to diagnosis is the easiest one to overlook.
How to make apples more apple-y. One of my tasks this week was babysitting a particularly glorious apple compote made with caramelized sugar, plus a secret ingredient—Calvados—that took it from good to great. May I never get over the magic of using Ingredient B to make Ingredient A taste more like itself…and may I also never get over the magic of setting Calvados on fire.
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.
"no fat, no fun" is essentially how I approach all my meals haha
Calvados is my all time favorite addition to apple pies!