How to Shape an Épi | Rouxbe Cooking School Lesson

An épi is a loaf of bread that has been specifically shaped to represent a stalk of wheat. Though this may look somewhat intimidating, you will be surprised at just how easy it is to create this rather impressive-looking bread.

In this follow-up Rouxbe Cooking School lesson, we are going to demonstrate how to shape an épi. Consider this lesson your homework assignment from last week's lesson on The Stages the of Bread Making. This is a great way to put your newly-learned breading making skills to the test. Plus, it's a pretty cool way to impress your friends and even yourself

Happy Bread Making!

The Rouxbe Cooking School Team.

Tagged as: [ bread making pastry rouxbe ]

The Stages of Bread Making | Rouxbe Cooking School Lesson

There is something magical about combining the simplest ingredients and kneading them together with your very own hands to create a beautiful, rustic loaf of crusty bread.

No matter what type of bread you choose to make, all yeast breads go through the same main bread making stages. In this Rouxbe Cooking School lesson on The Stages of Bread Making, we will walk you through these stages, using the most basic dough - a lean dough - as our example. Artisinal breads are much more difficult to make and require precise understanding and methodology, which we will get into down the road. The goal with this lesson is to get people baking bread. We are trying to get those people who have never made bread before - which is actually the majority of people out there - to learn how to make bread by hand?from scratch, using the most basic ingredients and equipment (their hands). So, for now, let's start with the basics. You might find it useful to review the lesson on Wheat & Gluten, as well as the Basics of Bread Making before you get your hands dirty. Rouxbe Facts about this lesson that you may find interesting:

• Over 12 hours of footage was recorded.
• 500 additional shots were captured (in addition to the 600 that were captured for the previous lesson).
• 23 batches of dough had to be made to capture all of the different stages of bread making for this lesson and the last lesson.

Happy Bread Making!

The Rouxbe Cooking School Team.

Tagged as: [ bread making pastry rouxbe ]

How to Make Bread | Basics - Rouxbe Cooking School Lesson

While there are endless types of bread that one can make, in order to make a basic loaf of bread, a beginner baker must first understand the functions of the fundamental ingredients. Once these concepts are understood, working with additional ingredients and more complex techniques will be much easier to understand and execute down the road.

 In this Rouxbe Cooking School lesson on How to Make Bread | Basics, you will learn about flour, yeast, water and salt and their functions in bread making. You will also learn about the necessary tools required for making basic bread. In the next lesson, you will learn about the stages of bread making, so you can bake crusty loaves of bread in your own kitchen. Rouxbe Facts about this lesson that you may find interesting:

• Over 15 hours of footage was recorded.
• Over 600 shots were captured.
• 23 batches of dough had to be made to capture all of the different stages of bread making for this lesson and the lesson to follow.
• This does not include the many days of pre-production it took to research, write, shop and organize the lesson before cameras even began rolling. It also doesn't include the time required to edit, critique, record voice over, develop the quiz, and all the other things it takes to make a lesson go live.
• And, of course, during filming, we couldn't live on bread alone, so we always have to think about lunch. When we think about lunch, we think about the following things: 1) it needs to be fast, or better yet, it needs to be prepared ahead of time; 2) for this lesson, it couldn't take up oven space; and, 3) most importantly, it has to be delicious. Here is what we made the day before the shoot - Puerco Pibil. Yes, of course, we took pictures (click here for the Puerco Pibil recipe).

Hope you enjoy the lesson and Happy Baking!

The Rouxbe Cooking School Team.

Tagged as: [ bread culinary rouxbe ]

Sourdoughs Need Love and Attention

Chef Marco introduced us to his “pet” sourdough when we started our bread series. His sourdough (like all sourdoughs) needs special care and attention. Sometimes it travels with him on vacation but if he is forced to leave it behind, he has someone look over it, feed and talk to it, and make sure it stays healthy. ;)

When Chef gave all of the students some of his sourdough starter to begin making sourdough loaves, my partner in class and I decided to call our new “pet”, Frankie. Ingredients were added to part of Frankie to bake off some loaves and the rest of him was divided into containers, which we took home with us. We needed to treat him well and make him grow for future Frankie sourdough loaves.  


If sourdoughs aren't babied they will DIE. The natural yeast inside starters needs three things to survive and multiply: food, warmth, and moisture. If you don't provide these things to your sourdough, society (fellow bread-makers) may label you as being abusive.

I remember the first day I brought Frankie home and placed him with care in the refrigerator to slow his growth. I fed him equal parts of flour and water every few days, worrying if I was feeding him too much or too little. I let Frankie out of the fridge every so often and forgot about him one night on the countertop but he was ok. He warmed up and started to multiply more rapidly. Another time when I took Frankie out of the fridge, I thought he didn’t look very bubbly, so I fed him a little onion slice to make his yeast activate. At first, he liked it.

A few days later, Frankie was drowning in a yellowish liquid that didn’t smell the greatest. I was worried about my little baby and thought I’d take him back to school for a check-up. Poor Frankie was dead.

During the course of the feedings, Frankie’s PH level became out of whack. The onion didn’t help things either. I got a little confused. The addition of an onion was for another recipe (a grape sourdough starter). I either underfed him or overfed him or gave him too much water and slowly killed him.

I felt horrible that Frankie had to be washed down the kitchen sink and couldn't bring myself to take a picture of what remained of him. I'm moving forward though. Chef gave me another lot of sourdough to try again. This time I have placed an automatic reminder in my calendar to let my new little friend, Franklin, out of the fridge twice a week and feed him properly with only flour and water. No onions this time.

Tagged as: [ baking bread natural nwcav pastry sourdough starter yeast ]

A Sticky Dough is a Happy Dough

I like the fact that in class we are not using Kitchen Aids for the mixing and kneading of doughs. By doing everything by hand, we are learning to identify when a dough has been kneaded enough just by feeling it. When people move on to using machines in big production kitchens to make large quantities, they will be able to look and touch the product to determine when it is done. What has amazed me most during this past week of bread-making is that most of the doughs that we have kneaded by hand are extremely sticky initially but then come together as they are kneaded more. Even the end result is something stickier than I'm used to. The home baker will undoubtedly feel the urge to add additional flour at the onset to make the dough more manageable to knead?but this is actually the worst thing they could do.

There is a lot of science behind bread making and I have a greater appreciation for the artisan baker. Formulas were created to calculate the Desired Dough Temperature (DDT). This is the precise temperature that dough should be at after kneading and before resting. It is not something that is found in recipes on the web or in many cookbooks but rewards professionals with excellent results. Accurate gluten development, hydration, fermentation, and proofing times have to be understood to create an optimal product.

For most lean doughs (ones that have very little or no fat in them), the DDT is between 75°F to 80°F (24°C to 27°C). For enriched doughs (ones that have more butter, milk, eggs, etc.), the DDT is slightly higher to keep the fats soft while kneading.

So how do you find a DDT? The only temperature you can control in a recipe is the temperature of the water that you are adding. To find the DDT for a dough, you have to calculate the sum temperatures of certain factors: room temperature, flour temperature, mixer friction (the heat generated by mixing/kneading)¹, and pre-dough (sour dough, etc.). If your recipe includes 3 of the aforementioned factors, you multiply the desired dough temperature by 3. If there are 4 factors, multiply by 4 and so on. Once you have multiplied the factors, you subtract the sum temperature of the room, flour, mixer friction, pre-dough, etc. The value left is the temperature that your water should be at when adding it to your recipe.

It is quite amazing that when you follow these calculations, and after kneading for the appropriate amount of time, that the DDT will be spot-on. The benefit of having a DDT is that the yeast will be most active during this resting period and will produce gases which will be trapped between the network of gluten strands, creating a beautiful rise in the oven.

To calculate DDT (example):


What is also interesting to me is that you can take roughly the same ingredients (flour, yeast, water, salt, butter) and form such incredibly different products from the same things just by altering the amounts, the proofing time, the baking technique, etc. Click here for more pictures of the finished products.


¹ To calculate mixer friction multiply the total kneading time by 2 (when kneading by hand). Fahrenheit should be used when calculating DDT.

Tagged as: [ baking bread ddt dough gluten kneading temperature tips ]