Baking School Diaries #5

Cheese-stuffed baguettes, pre-ferments, and levain de lait.

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!

Pain aux graines crumb shot

This week, I hit my stride…and it felt good.

My sunny mood is partly thanks to the fact that we baked the tastiest breads of our curriculum so far, but also because I rose to the challenge (no, that’s not a yeast pun) at a moment when it counted the most.

For the past few weeks, my workstation has neighbored our chef’s—so when he’s busy with another task, I’m the closest person to ask for help. Usually, that means something as easy as setting a timer; other times, it’s something more intimidating.

One day this week, he asked me to turn out a gigantic tubful of very sticky seeded baguette dough and perform a series of stretches and folds, then return the dough cleanly to its tub. (Someday, this will become a basic, no-brainer request. But right now? Most of us haven’t handled this much sticky dough all at once.)

The rest of the class came over to watch me, and there was a bit of ribbing as I started, which made me flustered. But by the time I finished the task with something approaching grace, the jokes had turned into cheers. Success!

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:

• 🥐 Some tasty research for my class’s final “creativity project,” and

• 👗 A jaw-dropping display of fashion as art.

On to today’s letter!

Pain aux graines. This was the bread I stretched and folded as my classmates watched! We started by making an autolyse, which involves mixing flour and water together before adding the rest of the ingredients, then turned this seeded bread dough into baguettes.

Pain rustique. We mixed this rustic bread dough by hand on our countertops, much like you’d mix a homemade pasta dough: as a mound of flour with a well in the center where the wet ingredients get placed, then gradually incorporated. It was a very fragile dough that we shaped into a twist—and it baked up as my favorite of the week.

Pain de campagne and cheesy demi-baguettes

Demi-baguettes stuffed with cheesy goodness. We mixed up a pain au tradition with a 4-hour poolish—more pre-fermentation techniques this week!—and shaped some plain baguettes, then folded the following ingredient combos into the rest:

• Goat cheese and figs,

• Emmental and lardons,

• Cheddar and hazelnuts, and

• Blue cheese and walnuts.

Brioche with chocolate chips and pink pralines folded in

Pain de campagne. A country-style bread, some left plain, some with walnuts.

Croissants and pain au chocolat. My croissant-shaping skills improved mightily this week! My pain au chocolat skills could still use some work.

Pain rustique and tricolor burger bun dough

Tricolor seeded burger buns made with milk sourdough. After our chef mentioned something called “levain de lait”—a sourdough starter made with milk, rather than water—we asked so many questions about it that he (graciously) offered to add this recipe to our agenda.

After mixing up a dough with the levain de lait and a buckwheat tangzhong—a mixture of flour and liquid cooked on the stovetop—we made yellow, red, and black burger buns by mixing in slurries of cream and three other ingredients: curry, paprika, and activated charcoal.

Brioche à partager

Brioche. This dough was so soft I couldn’t imagine how we’d shape it. Thanks to the magic of refrigeration, we were able to make:

• Small and large versions of brioche à tête,

• Brioche à partager topped with a hazelnut-almond macaronade, slivered almonds, and powdered sugar,

• Navettes with marzipan and almond pralinette,

• A braid topped with dry macaronade, and

• Brioche dough folded with chocolate chips and, separately, pink pralines.

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

• Leaving my flat each morning excited for the day ahead. I may be waking up before the rest of the world, but I’m jazzed about the work ahead of me, and my short walk to school is perfection: no more chill in the air! Birdsong! The smell of bread as I pass the closest boulangerie!

• Baguette breakthroughs. After some recent disappointments, my shaping and scoring abilities have improved! I enjoyed a great moment of analysis with Chef Vincent where I presented him with a sliced-open baguette and he…didn’t have many bad things to say about it. Victory!

• Allll the nerdy viennoiserie details. From using liquid sourdough starter in our croissant dough (which really helped with extensibility) and learning new techniques for keeping our laminated dough rectangular, I was here for all of it.

The hard stuff

• Feeling like bread “just isn’t for me” on Monday. But then of course, by Tuesday, I was daydreaming about finding a job or internship where I could continue to make bread each and every day, because the emotional rollercoaster is real.

• Prioritizing sleep, fitness, and self-care. This is a physical job that requires waking up early—usually very early. So, more than any other job I’ve had, it also requires you to put your energy on a pedestal. That means there’s very little room for error when it comes to sleep hygiene, hydration, fitness…and general sanity. Still, all these things are healthy self-care forcing functions, especially as a recovering people-pleaser who’s now getting a crash course in saying “no.”

Lessons learned

• “Don’t flour like a Dalmatian.” I’m still working on my flouring-the-bench technique more than a month in! One of our chefs said this to me on Thursday, and while I couldn’t help but laugh, I knew he was right. Imagining Cruella de Vil when I dust with flour will (hopefully) help me correct the error of my ways.

• Bakery life is a juggling act. As we incorporate more pre-fermentation techniques into our recipes, and more recipes into each day, that makes our entire workflow much more complex, too. So far, I’m thriving on that complexity—but I also recognize how much help we’ve had from our chef in managing that in a school setting. In the real world, it’ll all be on us.

• The fridge (and, in certain cases, the freezer) is your friend. We learned about “methods of organization” in bakeries this week, in which some degree of chilling is used at various points along the baked-good timeline to make bakers’ lives easier. (Although here’s a fun fact: in France, freezing your products is verboten for any boulangerie or pâtisserie that wants to keep calling itself artisanale.)

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.