Check Twice ~ Perform Once

This past week in class, my group was assigned baguettes to make during production.  We made the preferment on Tuesday and scaled the dry ingredients first thing Wednesday morning. We started to mix in the spiral mixer when Chef came over to us. He looked at the dough and asked us how many times we multiplied the recipe. We said we only made one batch, but when we looked at the production schedule, it said we were supposed to make 1.5 times the original recipe. Not that it is an excuse, but the original production schedule was altered so when we transferred the information, we just wrote "baguettes." It is EXTREMELY important to make sure you don't make that mistake. If it were a real bakery, we would have been in major trouble. If there is an order for a certain number of baguettes, you need to make sure you have that amount. Our batch only produced 13, where the desired batch would produce 16 or 17. 

Besides production, we were also working on our rooster showpieces. Mine was a south pole theme with penguins and a lot of snow. The dough we make and call "white" isn't really that white, it is more like tan. To make everything look like snow and ice, I turned to the WhiteWhite to solve my problem. There are many different things you can do with it in order to get the color you want. First, I mixed some WhiteWhite into the dough. This made the base color more white, which I used for my snowballs. The second technique I did was paint the dome of the igloo with it before it went into the oven. The third technique I used was parbake the tunnel for the igloo, paint it with WhiteWhite, and bake it again. Lastly, as I was gluing the showpiece together, I wanted my base to be white. I painted it with the WhiteWhite even though it wasn't going to be baked again. Everything I did was very risky. I just went for it, all in. If it didn't work out, I was screwed. If you were to try a new technique, you should always test it first. Cut a random piece of scrap, try the technique, and see how it reacts in the oven or when sprayed with shellack. The WhiteWhite could have changed colors in the oven on my igloo pieces, or make it softer and less structurally stable. The WhiteWhite I painted on the base could have had a negative reaction with the shellack since it wasn't baked. You never know what can happen. I was extremely lucky that all my pieces turned out the way I wanted them to. 

Moral of the story: make sure you check everything before you commit to it. Double check the production schedule to make sure you are making the right amount of everything or see if there is any special change needed. And test new techniques before you do it. If you don't your one shot could get messed up and backfire. It is a lot harder to try and fix a mistake after it happens to your key components than it is to spend the extra couple of minutes testing it before you execute it.