Do you ever have a day when you do not feel like baking anything,
cooking anything, or doing anything? Somehow you just want the food to
magically appear on the table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with occasional
snacks in the middle somewhere. Today I want to talk a little bit about how I
handle those days, especially those days when I am alone in my home and no one
else is cooking for me.
Bread is my best friend. It loves me so much that it sticks
to my body long after I am finished eating it. This is why I try my best to not
eat too much of it on any given day. It is so difficult to do, especially when
it comes out of the oven and you get that smell. My mouth started watering as I
wrote those words. Not only does just
about everyone on the planet eat bread in one form or another, but it is made
from the simplest of ingredients and when done correctly, it produces one of
the most memorable experiences with eating one could imagine.
What I like to do is bake a loaf, or two, of bread and then
store at least half of it for later on in the week or weeks that follow. I find
that the easiest way to do this is by slicing the bread for storage and then
putting it in the freezer. I think bread in the freezer can last a couple of
months in a normal household. It never happens like that for me of course. In
fact, I do not think any bread has ever lasted more than two weeks, and that
was only when I was doing some testing and making a lot more bread. See, I told
you, I love bread.
The only downside to putting bread in the freezer is you
lose some of that freshness when it thaws out. I have two solutions for that.
The first one I think is obvious, put the bread in the toaster. When you toast
it, I am certain you will not know the difference. I never used to eat a lot of
toasted bread to be honest, in fact, I would not even buy a toaster for a long
time and forced myself to toast bread in a frying pan. But I since relented and
now have a nice small toaster that does two pieces at a time. It is perfect for
making an avocado and tomato toastada. The second way to refresh your bread if
you want that taste like it was when it came out of the oven is to put it back
in the oven. Wrap it up in foil so it doesn’t burn or dry out, but first, spritz
it with a tiny bit of water. A couple of minutes on a high heat in the oven and
that bread will be as soft as when removed from the oven the first time. I
suppose there is a third way, which is to use a microwave. I do not like microwaves
even though they work so well with melting chocolate and other things, but they
are also good at maintaining the moisture in bread while warming it up and
thawing it out.
The most important thing to remember is to slice the bread
before putting it in the freezer. It takes forever to thaw out when whole, and
never a good experience. But with slices, you can go from frozen to toaster
immediately.
If you are baking breads, you can also store the dough in the
freezer. Before we go any further, I want to make a small disclaimer which is
that I never let my unbaked dough sit in the freezer for more than seven to
eight days. Depending on who you ask, they will say the yeast lasts for two
weeks and others will say four weeks and once in a while you will see someone
say longer. I think it depends on multiple factors which include which stage of
the bread dough are you freezing it (before the first rise, molded after the
second rise, etc.) and what kind of yeast you are using and how new the yeast
is, fresh or dry. I have run experiments
with bread dough for up to two weeks and got lift, but this was only when
baking at home and trying different things. In my bakery the dough was always
made within 24 hours and never frozen, except for that one time when my refrigerator
decided to go to zero Celsius and everything turned into blocks. Maybe that is not true, I do not remember the
ketchup being frozen, then again, I didn’t check it to double check.
Given this information, one idea I have is that you could
make enough dough for three breads. Bake one of them, and freeze the other two
dough balls. The idea there would be that you take one out in a week and bake
it for that week, and then repeat again a week later. I would suggest if you can, do the first
ferment of the dough, then shape it into the final form before freezing it. That
will make life a lot easier and faster when you get to that day you want to
bake the bread.
Other things I like to include in the freezer are cookies.
It seems to me that a beautifully baked cookie can go in the freezer and stay for
some time as long as it is properly sealed to not get freezer burnt. In the
bakery when we had an overload of cookies that did not sell, we would freeze
them and then eat them ourselves, or, crumble them for toppings in other
desserts, like chocolate chip pieces on a cake or something similar. When
operating a bakery, you learn to not waste anything whatsoever.
I just realized that this conversation has evolved from a
lazy baker’s day to tips on storage. I think they are intertwined because those
lazy days I still want the goodies. So,
let’s continue…
I love cake. Do you love cake? Have you ever baked a cake
and realized you need to do something with it before you eat every last bite? I
have, many times!! Cake is a good to freeze and very easy. Just cut off what
you want to freeze, or eat, and put the rest in the freezer. I like to take
plastic wrap and put it up against all of the cake, the outside and the inside
to minimize any freezer burn. Cake can also be stored for a long time providing
how well you preserve it going in to the freezer. I have heard stories of
people saving their wedding cake for decades. That reminds me of the Seinfeld episode
where Elaine goes into Peterman’s office while he is out and opens a box and
takes a bite of a large piece of cake that was sitting in a pastry box, and
loves the taste. He asks her if she can keep a secrete and when she says no, he
proceeds to tell her that inside his “small college boy mini fridge, is my
latest acquisition. A slice of cake from the wedding of King Edward the Eight
to Wallis Simpson circa 1937. The price, twenty-nine thousand dollars.” Of
course, it is a story of the ages and the cake certainly would not last that
long, though it makes for some fun ideas.
Besides, who can keep a cake at bay for such a long time anyway? Not me.
Pastries freeze a lot like cake once they are baked. I have followed
the same rule for raw pastry dough that has yeast in it, like croissants. I never
want to run the risk of not getting a good rise from the dough through the bake
cycle. With croissants especially since that perfect honeycomb structure on the
inside is the final stage of many which all have to go perfectly, every time.
I have made pastry shells before and frozen them for longer
periods of time. They are not difficult to make but in quantities they can
become tedious. Preparing them and then putting into a container for storage always
allowed me to pull out a few when I needed them and use without worry. They can
be stored for months in theory, though I never had them last that long.
•
• •
There you have it, some short notes about how I prepare for
the lazy baking days when I have little to no desire to bake anything. I want
to point out, it is not from a lack of love for baking, but more from wanting a
rest from baking. When our bakery was running on full steam, I was baking seven
days a week, and starting at 4:30 in the morning most days. Have some fun with
baking and try to always make enough for multiple days if possible. I know it
is hard when you make a two-layer chocolate cake with an avocado mousse in the
middle, trust me, but you can do it. By the way, here is a photo of just that
cake.
