Baking School Diaries #2
Flan parisien, croissant dough two ways, and baby’s first baguettes.
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!
I had a terrific few introductory days at school last week, but in truth, this week was the one I’d been waiting for…because we actually got to start baking.
Below, you’ll find:
🥐 Mouthwatering details about everything I baked,
🇫🇷 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:
🎨 The special way I honored the second anniversary of my mom’s passing,
🥂 My first apéro with classmates (with its surprise Emily in Paris tie-in), and
🥖 My bakery haul from the winner of 2024’s “best baguette in Paris” award.
On to today’s letter!
As will be the case during each of the coming weeks, we spent half our time baking bread, and the other half crafting viennoiseries. So far, that’s felt like an ideal balance.
First up: baguettes. We used a low-hydration dough made with dough improvers, so the dough was easy to handle; we’ll move on to more challenging recipes later, once our shaping skills have improved.
We got practice shaping baguettes for the first time, loading them into the deck ovens, and applying steam at the beginning of each bake.
We also did a side-by-side comparison of baguettes without steam applied, with just the right amount, and then with too much. This variable made a big difference in the finished product!
Pain viennoise. We used this enriched bread dough to make mini-baguettes (a great way to practice new scoring techniques and egg-washing) as well as a batch of hilarious animal-shaped rolls.
We mixed chocolate chips into part of the dough, and it was a fun challenge to try to knead and shape that dough without melting any of the chocolate!
Dinner rolls. We mixed up another batch of the baguette dough and made four styles of dinner rolls—the fancy ones you might find in a hotel restaurant’s bread baskets.
Pain de mie. We took this sandwich bread dough and divided it in half, baking it into perfect rectangles in lidded Pullman pans—and making seeded burger buns, too.
Chausson aux pommes. We hand-laminated puff pastry—for now, we aren’t using dough sheeters to do this work—and sealed in spoonfuls of apple compote.
Flan parisien. We had extra puff pastry that we turned into flan parisien, a vanilla custard tart with a pastry crust. A+ use of leftovers!
Pain aux raisins. Our first croissant dough got spread with vanilla pastry cream, then dotted with rum-soaked raisins, coiled into a log, then sliced and baked into very delicious spirals.
Pain suisse. Our second croissant dough also got the pastry-cream treatment, but it was sprinkled with chocolate chips and folded into neat rectangles.
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
Feeling like my at-home practice paid off. Late last year, I took a short lamination class at King Arthur’s in-person baking school. We went in-depth on the fundamentals of croissants, danishes, and puff pastry, which I really came to appreciate this week. The pace is much faster here, and doing my “homework” ahead of time meant I was able to keep up (and understand what was going on!).
Making friends with the pastry school students. During our mid-morning break, they came over to grab a few baguettes, and offered us a tray of their creations. First up: choux pastry filled with crème chantilly!
Teamwork. We’re working in three teams of four, primarily because our mixers make larger-than-individual portions of dough (though we do eventually portion this out and shape the dough on our own). It’s instilled a convivial atmosphere where we all help each other out—grabbing, say, oven racks or parchment paper or ingredients for everyone in the group, not just ourselves.
The hard stuff
French class. We were all supposed to take a placement exam to assess our level of knowledge, but our teacher quickly realized we didn’t even know enough to take the exam. This was humbling!
Portion control. When I last worked in a bakery, I had to get over my scarcity mentality around baked goods. It was easy to take home all the leftovers out of sheer excitement, only to realize that no single person needs to have eight cinnamon rolls “for snacking.” I’ll have to relearn that lesson here—fortunately, all leftover baked goods are donated to charity.
Feeling awkward. When it comes to handling dough, that is. Since I haven’t handled large quantities of dough before, it only makes sense that I don’t move confidently through this task. Still, nothing prepares you for the moment when your chef screams “EET’S A BABY!” from across the room, as if watching you manhandle baguette dough is actually causing him physical pain.
Lessons learned
Use the right tools for the job. There’s a reason we all have stuffed-to-the-brim toolkits! There’s no reason to use my hands for a task when I have a bench scraper right in front of me—and what’s more, “making do” with the wrong tool is actually counterproductive.
Doing something that’s hard in the moment usually pays off. At the end of each day, we hose down the entire room, scrub and squeegee the floors, clean the drains, take out the trash, and polish every surface until it’s gleaming. At the end of each week, we also clean out the fridges and cabinets. After a long day on your feet, this isn’t always fun! But there’s no better feeling than walking into a clean workspace every morning, ready to face the day ahead.
Making mistakes is the best way to learn. It’s a cliché for a reason! You simply don’t internalize lessons—even ones you’ve heard and written down—until you’ve screwed them up and gotten (gently) corrected.
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 Friday (or, more accurately, du lundi au vendredi!).
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.
I think I speak for all of us that you need to keep taking baking classes.
This paragraph made me laugh so hard!
"Feeling awkward. When it comes to handling dough, that is. Since I haven’t handled large quantities of dough before, it only makes sense that I don’t move confidently through this task. Still, nothing prepares you for the moment when your chef screams “EET’S A BABY!” from across the room, as if watching you manhandle baguette dough is actually causing him physical pain."
Reading this brought to mind a quote James Clear posted about mastery:
“Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work.”