Baking School Diaries #9

Sandwiches, sandwiches, and more sandwiches.

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!

Like I said: sandwiches galore

Man cannot live on bread alone, I’ve been told. And that, my friends, is why my classmates and I made seventeen kinds of sandwiches this week! (Yes, literally.)

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:

• 🌸 An urban oasis for peaceful reflection amidst spring’s cherry blossoms, and

• 📚 The city’s most awe-inspiring reading room.

On to today’s letter!

Sandwich prep. From Monday through Wednesday, we prepared for our end-of-week sandwich-making extravaganza. That meant baking (and par-baking, then freezing) a variety of different sandwich bookends. On Thursday and Friday, we’d finish the baking process…and have fresh, hot bread at our disposal.

This first stretch of the week saw us making some “international” bread varieties we hadn’t tackled before: bagels and pretzels, wraps, ciabatta and focaccia, and something called polar bread (this was new to most of us).

We also made pain de mie in loaf, breadstick, and burger bun formats—the last version got mixed with a charcoal-and-cream slurry to turn it inky black—as well as croissants, pain de moule, and demi-baguettes.

The sandwiches themselves. Thursday and Friday served as the main event: wild mornings of mise en place and cooking our sandwich fixings, then putting everything together for a 1pm lunch spread (to which we invited other programs’ students, as well as their chefs). On Friday afternoon, we even popped a few bottles of champagne!

I won’t list all seventeen sandwich varieties here lest your eyes glaze over, but they included everything from figs, prosciutto, and goat cheese on ciabatta to a truly mouthwatering duck banh mi.

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

• The little things that felt like big things. One of our chefs arriving extra-early to feed our sourdough starters and make us coffee—two tasks usually reserved for students. Giggling with one of my classmates while we pan-cooked what felt like a trillion sandwich wraps. Feeling, at various points throughout the week, like our class was moving as a unit instead of as a dozen individuals.

• Getting a taste of the cuisine program. This week, even though bread was our canvas, our tasks required skills from the cooking world. So I learned a million tips and tricks from my classmates who’d been through various French cuisine programs: how to properly caramelize onions and make mayonnaise, how to hold limes against a Microplane for maximum zesting efficiency, and—of course!—all the knife skills.

The hard stuff

• Being left wanting more. Making a slate of “international breads” this week left me realizing how many amazing things we wouldn’t be tackling, from injera to roti. There’s a big world of bread out there, and I want to explore the diversity of options! But with a limited amount of class time, baking school isn’t about building the entire house; it’s about pouring concrete for the foundation.

• Recovering from the time change. I’ve heard the annual tradition of “springing forward”—ugh—described as a hate crime against bakers, and whoever said that…is not wrong. (Also, here’s a fun fact: the French daylight savings shift happened three weeks later than the one in the States.) I was recovering more slowly from workouts, was more affected by stress, and required extra quiet time each evening.

Lessons learned

• Recognizing, diagnosing, and fixing defects in bread. In one of this week’s theory classes, we identified problems by looking at photos of baguettes, boules, and croissants—from improper scoring to lack of volume to a dull crust—then told our chef what might be done to solve each issue. All without ever eating the bread in question, or seeing it IRL!

• Disorder, meet order. On Thursday morning, a gigantic food order arrived for nine of our sandwich recipes. Immediately, one of my classmates took out nine trays and labeled each one with a different recipe name, which helped us sort the incoming ingredients with ease. In life, you can’t always organize your way out of chaos…but in a bakery, sometimes you can.

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.