Baking School Diaries #3

Naked hazelnuts, pain au lait, and my first brush with a dough sheeter.

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!

Hello, gorgeous: chocolate-hazelnut twisted pain suisse

We had an inexplicable day off on Monday, which seems to be par for the course in France. But if you think that’s a complaint, you’d be wrong: the pace of life here is something I could most certainly get used to!

Still, even though this was a short week, we packed a whiplash-inducing amount of learning into it. 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:

• 🍴 Melt-in-your-mouth boeuf bourguignon and elevated rice pudding,

• 💐 Stained glass and tulip heaven on an island in the Seine, and

• 🥖 A full-on boulangerie crawl featuring five women, five bakeries, five bread options…and (gulp) twelve pastries.

On to today’s letter!

Poppy seed and rolled oat baguettes. We used the same baguette dough we’ve been using, but brushed the shaped baguettes with water, rolled them in various toppings, then sliced them up using our bench scraper and a pair of scissors into edible works of art.

Tarte flambée, also known as flammekueche. We took spheres of baguette dough, rolled them out into very thin rounds, then topped them with crème fraîche, buttery sautéed shallots, and lardons. We had them for lunch together as a class, snipped apart with scissors and devoured greedily at our workstations. (It brought me straight back to my year of pizza!)

Pain au chocolat. For two days this week, we worked with a new chef who had especially exacting standards when it came to viennoiserie. Those exacting standards paid off deliciously, both in our V1 pain au chocolat, but also when we gave them their second life by whipping up a batch of almond cream, dousing our sliced pastries in syrup, filling them with almond cream, topping them with slivered almonds, and baking them again.

Twisted pain suisse with hazelnut pastry cream, toasted hazelnuts, and chocolate chips. These treats—which we decorated with hazelnut powder and confectioner’s sugar once they’d cooled—were so self-explanatorily fabulous that all I need is to point you to the ingredient list above.

Pain au lait. I loved this dough, which was enriched with milk and butter, even though it was a bit fussy (we had to keep it very cold to keep it from getting super-sticky).

The shaping was actually the best part, as we made a showstopping crown, braids, little buns and baguettes, and a flat disk dotted with butter and sugar called tarte sucre. Everything got egg-washed twice, snipped with scissors for visual interest, and most got topped with rock sugar as well—you know, to gild the lily.

More baguettes and dinner rolls—a lot of them. You’ll notice that this will be a theme in the coming weeks (and probably months). After all, we’ve got to practice our shaping and scoring!

“Mistake” baguettes. This is one of my favorite aspects of baking school. Instead of taking assertions like “don’t under- or over-knead” at face value, we actually run experiments with under-and over-kneaded dough. And since all of our extra bread and pastries get donated to charity, everybody wins!

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.

Looking at croissants with different lamination patterns

The great stuff

• Learning how to use a dough sheeter. After the large-format stand mixer, this was next on my list of “commercial baking equipment I want to get comfortable using.” And while I can’t say I’m comfortable yet, I finally got to use one this week! A dough sheeter (or laminator) rolls out large quantities of dough with ease, allowing bakers to skip the rolling pin. There’s definitely a learning curve, though—and I’ll need lots more practice to attain mastery.

• Using the deck ovens all by ourselves. One day this week, Chef Vincent told us that we were on our own with the baking process. That meant we’d need to position our bread onto each deck oven’s canvas before maneuvering its loading system into place, then retrieve our loaves once they were done. We’d done this many times with supervision; still, going it alone was nerve-wracking. (And, of course, ultimately empowering!)

• Dissecting croissants for theory class. For one of our theory classes, our chef baked twelve croissants using four different lamination styles. Laminating dough with butter can be done using two types of “folds”: either a letter fold (single fold), a book fold (double fold), or some combination of both—and each style imparts a different number of layers, which results in different characteristics. This particular class let us do a side-by-side comparison to discover how different lamination decisions affect the final look and taste of a croissant.

  

  Proofed croissants getting ready to bake for theory class

The hard stuff

• Skinning hazelnuts. These little $*&%ers are lucky they’re so tasty, because removing their skins after toasting is not for the faint of heart.

• Getting flustered. Our lab sessions are often fast-paced, which means we might be listening to someone give us instructions in a heavy French accent while also doing the thing…so it’s only natural to miss details here and there, even if you’re paying close attention. Unfortunately, missing details can have a detrimental effect on the final product. Plus, the French manner of instruction isn’t the same “everyone gets a trophy” style that Americans are used to. Frankly, that’s a change I appreciate! Still, it’s taking my nervous system a second to catch up. In those moments when I’m the last to finish something, struggling with a new skill, or when I’ve missed an important detail, I’m retraining myself to not get flustered in response. If there were a perfect moment to get over my perfectionism, this is it!

Lessons learned

• Tasting your creations gives you buckets of energy. One of my fellow classmates was looking for a running buddy, and this week, I accepted the challenge. Neither of us is in great running shape, but as we set out for a chill three-miler that turned into a snappy five-miler, we both realized that our inadvertent carbo-loading was having fabulous effects on our athletic performance. More of this, please!

• High standards are fantastic…and draining. As I mentioned earlier, working with our second chef was great for the quality of everyone’s viennoiserie. When it comes to rolling out a perfect rectangle of laminated dough, his attention to detail is on point—meaning we had to up our game, too. At the end of that session, I was surprised by how tired I was! It wasn’t physically demanding, but my mental wheels hadn’t stopped turning all day. The only solution: extra time to recuperate, which is a directive I’m honoring.

• Don’t be so timid. A chef from another program came in to visit this week. In one memorable moment, he prodded my baguette dough and told me in a kind but matter-of-fact manner that my shaping was “timid.” And he was right! From then on, I started noticing timidity in all its other forms—like when my classmates and I responded to a directive quietly or meekly. Of course, timidity is understandable (and often appropriate) for beginners; still, I’ve resolved to shed some of mine by the time I leave Paris. Wish me luck!

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 Tuesday through Friday (or, more accurately, du mardi 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.