Baking Class

Today was the bread baking class in Paradise I signed Mum and I up for as a birthday gift to Mum. One of my co-workers, Sherry, teaches bread baking classes at her house up in Paradise every other weekend and she's actually booked solid through the end of October. You learn how to make sourdough bread and make homemade pizza for lunch and an apple stromboli for dessert. Plus she's got tons of snacks out like fresh bruschetta with homemade baguette slices (of course), a blue cheese and butter spread, wild salmon spread, and an olive spread. And a wonderful iced tea made with a mix of plain tea and a couple bags of Good Earth tea heated with a bag of cloves. So, when we first got there we learned how to "feed" the sourdough starter, which we would each be taking a portion of home. The starter's name is "Eduardo" named after the handsome baker Sherry met at a baking conference she went to a couple of years ago. We are NOT allowed to rename the starter under penalty of punishment.
You feed it equal amounts of flour and warm water (equal to the weight of the existing starter) once a week. If it's starts to be too much, you can give some away or just throw some out.

After a basic feeding lesson we got on to the business of pizza dough making.
I didn't spread my dough out as thin and large as others because I like a thicker crust. Once we'd rolled out our dough, we lifted it on to wooden peels liberally covered in semolina flour (finer cornmeal) so that it would slide off easily in to the outdoor hearth. Outside was a buffet style table set up with ingredients to make margherita pizzas. There was homemade red sauce, shredded and sliced fresh mozzarella, basil, sliced roma tomatoes, gorganzola cheese, sun dried tomatoes, red pepper flakes and oregano.
Once we made our pizzas, we gave them to Sherry's husband, Glenn, who was the official baker. This is my pizza completing it's 5 minutes bake off in the hearth oven at about 650 degrees!
Doesn't it look fabulous?
Sherry also whipped up a salad to go with it (as if we needed it)! Once lunch was over we got to shape some dough Sherry had make at the beginning of the class. We learned how to stretch it out, tuck the sides into the middle and flip it over, making a taut ball that you shuffle around in a circle continuously tucking the sides under. Then you take it to your round bread basket that has been liberally floured with white rice flour and put the dough in smooth side down. Then you have to take the tucked in underneath and make sure it's pinched together enough to stay put, then you sprinkle some more rice flour on it and cover the basket. They have to rest for an hour before you stick them in the fridge for 24 hours. Thankfully, Sherry had already made and prepped a batch for baking the day before. So she took us outside and showed us how to turn them out on to the wooden peels for Glenn to bake (and us to take home).
You have to make sure to slash the tops before you bake them or they will burst!
By now the hearth had "cooled" down to 500 degrees which is the perfect temp for the bread. It also allows you to bake it in the oven, too. Another trick is that you have to mist the top with water before you stick it in the oven, and again in 5 minutes. Then you leave it alone for 20 minutes.
Then they come out to cool. While they were cooling (and the hearth), we went back inside and made our apple stromboli. We took leftover pizza dough and and rolled it out in a big circle and then cut out the four corners to it was shaped like a cross. The two sides were then sliced in to 5-6 slits. Down the center of the dough Sherry put a cream cheese mixture (cream cheese, egg, almond extract and bakers sugar) topped with a can of apple pie filling. She covered that mixture with lots of cinnamon, sugar and nutmeg. Then she folded the top and bottom of the center section of the cross over the filling. Then you "braid" the side strips down the center. Then she covered the whole thing in an egg wash and topped it with lots and lots of the big, coarse, decorating sugar. Once the hearth got down to about 375 degrees Glenn popped it in there for about 25 minutes. This is Mum and I waiting for the stromboli to bake.
The end result was to die for! Mum was too full from the pizza, but I'm not one to let sweet pastries and ice cream go to waste.
The best part is that the class included a giant syllabus that has numerous recipes for our sourdough starter and this is one of them. So I can make it again and again.

On a side note, one of the participants in the class was Fred, an elderly (75) neighbor across the street from Sherry and Glenn. Absolutely fabulous and funny man. He brought a bottle of home brewed wine to the class which we enjoyed with our lunch. It was a peach sauvignon blanc and it was like candy, it was so good. We all loved it so he said we could come over for a tour of his "winery" at the end of the class and he'd give us all a bottle of it. He can't legally sell it because he's not a licenses winery, but he can give it away.
Besides making wine he also collects old tractors (his winery is called "Old Tractor Winery") and shows them.
These outdoor ones (more were inside the garage) were actually lines in red and green christmas lights that he turns on every evening. Too cute. He told Mum she could bring Mr. A. over anytime to see them, too (he's an old tractor driver from one of the Dakotas).

With our bottles of wine in hand, we went back to Sherry's and loaded up our sourdough loaves, containers of sourdough starter, framed group photo she printed off for everyone while we were at Fred's, instruction booklet, leftover pizza and whatever else we had. Pay attention, this is the best part: I helped Mum load up all of our loot in the backseat of my car completely forgetting that I had placed my bagged sourdough on the roof of my car so that I could open the door. It wasn't until we got to Mum's and I was getting her stuff out that I realized my sourdough wasn't in the back seat and it struck me that I never took it off the roof of my car. It blew off somewhere on Pentz Rd. I literally was ready to cry. I love sourdough and this was my own loaf and I hadn't even got a bite of it yet. I don't have enough starter yet (need to feed it for another week or two) to make another loaf, nor do I have all the tools (peels, baskets, clothes, bread flour, etc). I could just scream even thinking about it. But besides that, I had a good time.