What's on the Menu?

Hello Everyone,
Sorry that it has been quite sometime since I blogged last, I have been distracted due to a death of a really close friend. Dealing with this loss absorbed a lot of my time, energy, and focus on anything else. But I am doing my best to remain strong, and keep my head up, but the pain is still present.
Moving onto a much brighter subject I have enjoyed working in the bakery on Friday and Monday. Monday was a very fun, floury, fondant kind of day.I started my day working with Steve, portioning out multi- grain oat bread dough into 24 oz, as I was portioning he was doing all the hard work by rounding the dough. Once all the dough was portioned Chef Robert Min, showed me how to operate this monster of a bread machine, which shapes the dough into a "log" similar to the shape of a French Baguette. The following is my nontechnical interpretation of how this machine operates. So you have your rounded dough that has been benching, you stretch the dough out (doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it doesn't look like a ball), you feed this large hungry beast your dough, the machine eats it in one bite. Just like that POOF GONE!!!! if you aren't careful he'll want dessert and not think twice about eating your arm. Lucky for you there is an emergency button. Anyways you wait for the machine to send the dough through it's "stomach" and drop out the bottom. What is fascinating is while the dough is in the "stomach" the machine shapes the dough. So once the dough comes out the bottom, my job was to tuck the ends in, find the seam, and place the dough into a well oiled bread tin, seam down. Then place the panned dough onto a rack and place in the proofer. Behold the monster:

After all the dough was panned, I went back to work with Steve, and he allowed me to scale out an entire bread recipe by myself, along the way he would give me step by step insight. I found this very useful, because he would explain to me about the ingredients, for example the conditioner, is used because it takes away a step of proofing. The dough we scaled out and made was for bread sticks, I got to use the dough rounding machine, and the monster bread machine on this project.

My next task was to stand in the walk-in cooler and cut sheet trays of cookie dough into dices. The cut dough will be sent over to the Dairy Barn to be used in their Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. After lunch was over, we got to decorate large cookies, and I had fun making roses. Donna allowed myself and the other interns to play with fondant aka adult play-dough once we were done with our cookies. I started off trying to make a creepy creature out a book, but eventually gave up, then tried making a duck, realized that wasn't going to happen, so I went back to the basics and made a bird with teeth. This was a blast to create and play around with, Donna added a small detail to the bird, and if you were in the bakery you all know what that detail was....
Time to talk about the menu and what is all on it, but unfortunately we have four more items to deal with before we can unroll all the details. Myself and the other interns spent the entire day with Chef Robert Landolphi going over menu items. Gretchen and I had an idea of what foods we wanted on the menu, so our goal for today was to sit down and talk with Chef Rob. Well the good news is, we did just that, Chef Rob helped to find recipes in FoodPro, also make adjustments on some of our food items, so that we could use the recipes that are in FoodPro. We went through each station and found recipes, it was a very productive day. There are still a few things we need to go over but overall we got a lot accomplished. Gretchen and I sat down and typed out the menu, all we need to do is adjust fonts, styles, and play around with it some more.

Brittany