So, that title is not exactly correct. Actually, yesterday was my second day at Johnson and Wales, the culinary school that I just started attending. However, the actual first day was mostly lecture and introduction (which I totally appreciate don’t get me wrong!); it’s just that the second day was awesome, crazy, hectic, and thus it is much cooler to talk about in this post and imagine as my “first day”.

We were thrown into production the second day of class, which at first was nerve-wrecking, but once I got into the rhythm it was surreal how organized it all seemed. Of course, I had a team of four other girls (because boys practically don’t exist in baking and pastry arts classes) to help me out with our team’s production responsibilities. We made both polish baguettes and baking powder biscuits..and boy they are DELICIOUS. The biscuits looked gorgeous when they came out of the oven, golden brown with delicate layers of dough that I could almost imagine melting in my mouth.The main rule for these guys was to touch and knead the dough as little as humanly possible. Even when rolling the biscuits out the dough was very shaggy and you could still see the flat butter disks (that we made when rubbing the butter into the dough) in layers throughout the dough.

I know that the above picture is hard to make out, but I just had to show you all a picture of the bread while still in the oven, which by the way has me drooling just as much as the biscuits. It had five decks with separate temperatures and it could be programmed to release steam into the deck for a certain amount of time to help create that golden, crunchy crust on the baguette. I mean with a name like Matador it had to be something impressive, right?

Overall, I had such a fun lab class! And if you’re wondering how we got all of this done in one class, let me tell you that labs are 6 hours long…yes, I know it sounds daunting, but believe me it is so worth the time and hard work. Just look at those beauties in the picture above! I’m sure most of my posts from now on are going to focus on the things I make at school, so be prepared for both successes and failures.