final thoughts on my week at the Steiner Institute

As I hurriedly pushed out my post on croissants the evening before I headed home, I knew I would need another post to fully flesh out everything I wanted to share about my week at the Steiner Institute. (Sorry that it took me an extra day to get this posted though.) The experience of the bread class was amazing, and I'm thrilled to have had this opportunity especially under Warren Lee Cohen's knowledgeable and energetic tutelage. (You can see his summary of the class on his blog.)

I'm finding it hard to know where to start because there is so much of my experience that I can't put into words. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience at the Institute last year, but this year really felt different in such a positive way for me. The discussions about bread, it's history and physical connection to humans, both physically and spiritually; the camaraderie, through group kneading sessions, singing work songs, and constant sneaking back to the kitchen to monitor the process of our work; and always the lovely people who really make the Institute a warm and welcoming place for all, from my amazing teacher and his beautiful, sweet wife (and kids!) to the other fascinating and helpful members of my class (one of which even helped me make a wooden gift to bring home for Elizabeth. I'll share more about that another time.) Anyway, other than mention these experiences, I can't really share them with you in a tangible way except to say that if you ever have a chance to attend something like this you should jump in with both feet, arms open wide.

Part of our class time each day was spent painting, sometimes on collaborative efforts, sometimes on individual projects. It was such a fascinating way to process some of the topics we were discussing.

Here is our color study on wheat:

We had opportunities to hear musicians of every kind, from a Julliard-trained pianist to violinists, guitarists, fiddlers, homemade instrument players, an accordion player and a teen-aged bagpipe player. You should have seen the way the children gathered when he pulled out his pipes. I thought it was amazing how well many of the children there could play various instruments.

Another teen-ager saw me working on my knitting and brought her knitting to show me. Isn't this hat fabulous? She's also an amazing violinist who's spending this week at a music camp.

Once the puppeteering class was finished with their puppets, they put them on display for the rest of the crowd to admire. Such lovely handwork!

And there was the children's work. I'm always amazed at the beautiful artwork that flows from children sometimes. Aren't their pieces lovely?

These handmade books were also made by the children:

Lastly, I've gotten a few questions over the week about the breadmaking process. The number one question was to recommend a good breadmaking book. When I posed this question to my teacher, he hemmed and hawed (about the same as anytime we asked him about measurement). His typical answer was that sourdough especially, which is what he recommends as the closest to natural breadbaking, behaves differently in different environments and giving a recipe often dooms people to failure because they follow the recipe precisely but because their house might be warmer or more humid or higher in atmospheric pressure than the recipe author's house, the recipe doesn't work correctly. He thinks it's much better to experiment and get to know how dough behaves in your environment and adjust accordingly. With that said, he actually authored a lovely book, Baking Bread With Children, which I have raved about in the past, but it's so much more than just a recipe book with songs, poems, stories and information about building an earthen bread oven. Also in our class there was discussion from a few other books including Six Thousand Years of Bread, The Tassajara Bread Book, and The Bread Bible. I also purchased The Waldorf Book of Breads while I was at the Institute and I have to say that the Sky High Biscuits last night were fun for the kids to make and quite delicious. :)

baking bread, the pinacle

The pinacle of The Art of Baking Bread came this morning in the form of croissants. After just a few minutes of reflection on the cinnamon rolls of the previous day, we immediately set to work on our croissant dough. In preparation for the croissants, we pulled our starter from the refrigerator the evening before and added some white flour and water (slightly more flour than usual) to allow the starter to begin it's work. We also added some ice to the dough to keep it from growing too quickly since croissants need to start a bit denser than other breads. This morning we began with our large blob of dough and group knead.

Then we rolled our dough into several rectangles.

And added the chilled butter! Each rectangle was 1 kg of dough and to each kg of dough, we added 2 sticks of butter, sliced and placed over two-thirds of the dough.

The final third was folded over the butter,

And those two-thirds were folded over the final third and the edges were sealed with the dough (don't want to lose any butter!) We now have small rectangles of dough with 2 layers of butter.

After chilling the dough, we rolled it back into a rectangle in the opposite direction, taking care not to let any butter pop through the surface.

The dough was then folded in quarters toward the center (4 layers of butter).

And folded again to make a rectangle (now 8 layers of butter).

The dough was chilled then rolled out again in the opposite direction and folded in the same manner as before (making the desired 32 layers of butter). After another chilling, we rolled the dough into thin (1/4 inch wide) sheets.

Each sheet was then halved and cut into triangles to make croissant shapes.

Then rolled and placed on a tray.

Golden yellow and flaky. Magnifique!

Now, have you ever seen such a pretty croissant?

Look at all those layers. :)

I'll do my last post on my time here at the Institute tomorrow and try to answer some of your questions, including some information about my teacher and recommending some bread books.

Can you smell the cinnamon?

This morning in The Art of Baking Bread, we talked for a few minutes about the transformation bread has undergone into the Wonderbread-style of bagged sandwich loaves and how that process is performed. Just reading the ingredients list alone is pretty scary then think about the fact that the last thing done to the bread before it is bagged is the spraying of fungicide on the whole loaf and you may never touch the fluffy white bread again! We did though...touch it, that is, to examine, to smell and to shape it into snowmen.

And bricks!

Then we put aside the scary, spongy bread to dig our hands into some real bread. Sourdough spelt. We rolled it into a few rectangles for making cinnamon buns.

Then dabbed and spread some butter.

Sprinkled generously with cinnamon...

and sugar (both natural cane and brown sugar),

and generously sprinkled nuts and raisins (generously was the word of the day in our class!)

Then we carefully rolled the dough into a huge log (or a pregnant python, I think I heard it compared to).

And we sliced the log into dozens of cinnamon rolls.

What a delicious treat!

Everyone in the class has been enjoying the reflections on my blog and graciously offered to pose for a picture. Now you can see who belongs to all the hands covered in flour that have been appearing here over the last few days.

The fruit of our labors:

Sourdough spelt cinnamon buns! Can you smell the cinnamon?

baking bread, bagels!

Today we worked with commercial yeast for a bit, comparing and contrasting the smell, texture and complexity of the commercial yeast with the sourdough we used on previous days. I'm personally much more experienced with commercial yeast so I've really enjoyed working with the sourdough and I can't wait to try it at home. The group knead we did again today while singing was so enjoyable. We were each kneading a chunk of either rye/white or wheat/white bagel dough.

After some reflection on the previous day's experiences and discussion about bread and it's relationship to wine, we enjoyed a loaf of each the Country Hearth and rye from yesterday with wild raspberry jam made by our teacher. Delicious!

When the bagel dough had risen sufficiently, we rolled the dough out to shape the bagels.

We eventually made 4 pans full of bagels, enough to provide snack again for the entire Institute.

We boiled the bagels for about a minute each water with a bit of sugar for a nice glaze.

When the bagels were boiled to a nice chewy texture, they were brushed with egg to give them shine.

Then the bagels were sprinkled with chunky salt and sesame seeds.

Ready for the oven!

The end product, much mirroring the process, was delicious!

A beautiful bagel!

And since I'm doing a bit of knitting here at the workshop, I'll still show you my WIP Wed knitting. I began this sweater for Elizabeth as I was leaving for my trip. The pattern is one I've admired for a while, thinking it was so Elizabeth, and I'm knitting with a cotton/modal blend, very soft and with a lovely sheen.

baking bread, day 2

Today in The Art of Baking Bread class, we received instruction on making Country Hearth loaves and rye loaves with the sourdough starter we had left over from yesterday. The first step (aside from the additions of last evening to prepare the dough for this morning) was to remove a small amount to save as a starter. We added flour to make a nice firm ball of starter to save in the refrigerator until tomorrow.

Then we began the arduous task of mixing the very wet dough from last night with enough wheat flour to make 10 small loaves.

When enough flour had been mixed into the soft dough, we each kneaded our ball of dough for many minutes singing this traditional Hebrew song:

Zum, gali gali gali,

Zum gali gali,

Zum, gali gali gali,

Zum gali gali.

Let us sing with joy while we work;

let us work with joy while we sing.

Let us sing with joy while we work;

let us work with joy while we sing.

As our bread was rising, we took a few minutes in small groups to examine and discuss the characteristics of wheat.

Such a tall, frail plant with small seeds to become the sustenance of life.

When our loaves had risen, we gently pressed them down and shaped them into loaves for the oven, then rolled them in flour to produce a softer crust.

In the meantime, we mixed rye flour with the rye dough that had been sitting overnight to produce a much stickier, no-knead dough which rose in 4 loaf pans. Such a beautiful brown bread they turned out to be!

The kitchen staff here was nice enough to slice our bread loaves and serve them for the afternoon snack time.

Don't they make a beautiful presentation?

And then a lovely, summery gazpacho for dinner to beat the heat. We're fortunate to have wonderful food all around this place!

*some Tasha Tudor love over at The Book Children*