It has been a crazy busy week at school seeing as it is our last week and exams are going on. So I'm a little late in posting Monday's lab day work, so  will do that today, and then Tuesday's lab tomorrow. This entire week we worked with commercial bread mixes. Basically, companies sell bags of bread mix so that all you have to do to make delicious bread is add flour, water and yeast (usually...sometimes there's more to add depending on the recipe). Many bakeries nowadays use these mixes for several reasons, mostly because they're cost effective, they contain many different ingredients that you would otherwise have to scale out yourself, and the bread has a longer shelf life. Monday, we made three different breads with three mixes: a mix called Easy Sapore to make two white vienna loaves, a mix called Heartland 9 Grain to make two boule loaves, and a mix called Easy Portuguese Corn Bread to make two more boules (this isn't the southern cake-like corn bread we might be used to, but more of a corn based loaf). With the majority of these, the ingredients I mentioned before were the only things that needed to be added. The mixes were fairly easy to use and looked pretty good! It didn't take much work to make these loaves seeing as there's minimal scaling to be done, and they're formulated to be tolerant to any mistakes you might make. Basically, they're fool proof. We mixed the doughs, let them rest, rounded the doughs, benched them, and shaped them before proofing. Once proofing was done, we baked them and they came out looking fantastic! I would even say that my vienna easy sapore loaf was one of the best looking loaves I've ever made! The other loaves looked very good too. My instructor seemed happy with my product and even said that I could sell my vienna loaves no problem in a store! YAY! That felt good. Plus, that loaf tasted AMAZING! It was super crusty and crunchy on the outside, but soft and delicate on the inside. Yum.
Here they are!
PS: It seems as though I forgot to take a picture of the corn bread since it came out of the oven at the very end of class. All it looks like is a boule loaf that's yellow!