As predicted, as soon as I got very comfortable with the 12 step process of making bread, we have moved on. Not before making a last few delicious loaves and learning how to formulate our own bread recipes though.
A couple weeks ago we made our own "wild yeast" starter. Every time I mention this to people they like to picture me lassoing yeast with a very tiny lasso (now you can picture it too). There is yeast all around us so as long as you are willing to put in the time (6 days or more) you can lure them out of the air to make a starter for bread. This starter works especially well for sourdough breads. We made sourdough, rye sourdough and marble rye sourdough with ours. The marble rye was beautiful which means I forgot to take a picture of it.
Now we are on to laminated doughs. So far we have focused exclusively on puff pastry. Puff pastry can be a tricky little expletive to work with. It is kind of a messy business, you can only work with it for a few minutes every half and hour and if you don't do it just right your puff pastry won't rise evenly or your butter will leak out and it won't rise much at all. Classic puff pastry requires you to roll it out, fold it a specific way and then chill for a half hour. Then repeat four more times.
Despite the tediousness of puff pastry, it is fun to work with and there is a huge satisfaction when you finally get to bake it and it rises correctly. We have made a variety of puffy good so far and they have all been tasty. The prettiest was probably the napoleon pastry but I didn't take a picture of it before I fed it to my book club (shock!). If you google it that is pretty much what mine looked like.
Puff Diddy. Puffalufagus. Puffasaurus Rex 2000. I'm also picturing sending dough through the laminator that's sitting on my desk.
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