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Brioche

Naramata Blend launches cooking class series…Brioche!

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If there are no cooking classes in your area … you just start one yourself! In what I hope will be win/win/win/win Naramata Blend is launching a series of classes that will:

  • give our local chefs and food gurus an opportunity to diversify their businesses
  • provide some income and awareness for the Naramata Centre
  • meet my needs to learn hands-on from some of the best
  • offer that opportunity to anyone else with a keen interest in learning how to make magic with what we grow and produce in the Okanagan Valley.

For the first class, Chef/ Proprietor of Joy Road Catering Dana Ewart will show us why we need brioche in our life – just in time to amp up our holiday baking.

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We will learn how to make this buttery rich yeast dough that is so tender that it walks the line between bread and cake. It will be fun to enjoy some mulled wine, sample what we bake and take home the recipes after the afternoon class.

With this amazing French dough as our base Dana will teach us how to make these brioche treats flavoured with:

  • Cocoa
  • Candied orange peel
  • Savoury herbs

IMG_8033This versatile dough will also be made into Joy Road’s famously delicious pull-apart cinnamon buns shaped into loaves and elegant small buns meant for classy desserts like baba au rum.

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If you are in my hood and want to buy a ticket go online and learn more at Eventbrite.

I’m talking to chefs and gathering ideas for upcoming classes in the hope that my instinct that cooking classes are a perfect fit for Naramata is on the mark. Send me a comment if you have ideas for other classes… preserves, chocolate, fancy eclairs, bread…

 

 

 

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A Julia Child Throw Down or 10 reasons to tackle a 21-page recipe with four ingredients

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Don’t be intimidated, make Julia proud

Julia Child was the rocket scientist equivalent in the cuisine world. Every ingredient, every step of every recipe was researched, tested, re-tested for, “those who like to cook and/or want to learn, as well as those who are experienced cooks, including professionals,” Julia said as she slaved for years on her cookbooks. “So we have to keep the dumb debutantes in mind, as all as those who know a lot…” (I land somewhere in the middle).

 

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As you can see, I’m a bit of a Julia Child freak

Her biggest challenge was the French bread recipe that takes up 21 entire pages in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume Two. My throw down to you is to give it a whirl. Here’s why:

IMG_85071.You need Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume Two if you don’t already have it in your cookbook collection. You can’t claim to be into cooking without it.

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2. You need a peel. It’s handy for pizza too.

IMG_86673. Bricks are cheap.

4. Julia and her husband Paul spent more than a year to perfect a French bread recipe that could be duplicated at home with American ingredients.  The couple used 284 pounds of flour to develop the master bread recipe in countless experimental batches.

IMG_86815. French bread has these four ingredients: Flour, salt, yeast and water. Julia and Paul experimented with fresh and dried yeasts, various flour mixtures, rising times and trickiest of all, how to get moisture into the oven to simulate a French baker’s oven and to give it the right golden colour and crispness of French bread.

IMG_86926. With the help of Professor Raymond Calvel, the head of the state run École Professionnelle de Meunerie in Paris, the world’s leading authority on French bread, they cracked the code. A brick in a pan filled with steaming water coupled with a pre-heated clay (or pizza) stone to cook the bread on were the winning techniques. Lucky me, with my new wood-fired oven, I just steam it up with a spray bottle and pop my loaves onto the hearth and no longer need the brick trick.

IMG_86827. The directions in Mastering Vol. II are unbelievably detailed and include little sketches of exactly how to shape the loaves.

IMG_86868. Julia and Paul did all the hard work and loaf burning for us. See my post…Things I lost in the fire…so we don’t have to. If you follow the supremely clear and detailed directions your loaves will turn out…perfectly.

IMG_8693IMG_86409. You will get so cocky you might even make brioche.

10. What better way to honour Julia’s legacy than bringing out three, golden, fragrant, perfectly crusty loaves that are even better than boulangerie bread. You can do this even if you are a dumb debutant. Pretty good bragging rights re the 21-page recipe as well.

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