Bread Making is Hard.

Really hard.  Like doing math hard.  Actually, math is involved, so it's double hard.  And it involves patience, so you can imagine how hard this actually is.  Geez.

Last night Alice and I took a bread making class at Kitchen Conservatory taught by the genius (and patient and math-smart) chefs at Companion Bakery.  If you are in St. Louis and have not checked out Companion Bakery, you are so missing out on the best bread in the city.  Anyway, I was SO excited about this class.  I've never made bread, or even tried to make bread, so I thought it'd be the perfect introductory course on the science art of bread-making.  I mean, it's yeast, flour and water.  How hard could it be, right?  Wrong!  Whoa, bread-making is hard!

I was basically at a loss from the get-go in this class because I didn't understand the terminology.  There's like a whole other language that revolves around bread-making.  They were throwing around terms like pre-ferments, hydration levels, leavening process, sponges, wheat varieties, gluten formation, semolina, proofing, scoring, oxidation.  What?  At one point Alice leaned over to me and asked if we were in chemistry class by mistake.  We were both baffled.  What do you  mean wheat flour can be white?  What the hell is rye anyway?  Semo-whata?  And then you start throwing around numbers and percentages and my head is spinning.  Believe me, lawyers don't do numbers. 

But we were patient.  We listened to everything they were saying like it was the gospel.  We asked questions.  Took notes.  Asked more questions.  Took more notes.  The whole process was really amazing!  It was so cool to watch the chefs work and create incredible looking (and tasting) dough.  I was so impressed with them both - they were knowledgeable and funny and approachable.  It made for a really great class.  I learned SO much.  I'm absolutely overwhelmed with how much I learned!  I was so interested in listening to them that I didn't even take any pictures! 

So, even though bread-making is hard, I'm going to give it a shot.  I'm definitely intimidated, but determined to try out all my new scientific baking knowledge.  Trial and error, error and trial.  The class was definitely worth it - I'm really happy with everything I learned.  Maybe it was good that I didn't have any previous experience, because I have no bad bread-making habits to overcome (right, I'm trying to be positive here).  Plus the class was really fun.  And in the end, we got to eat a shit-ton of bread.  Really really good bread.