Well, I just finished my first two weeks teaching at the Académie Culinaire 2008 day camp. Three afternoons a week, twelve new youngsters every time, and all are aged between eight and thirteen. Good times!
It has gone well so far. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how well suited I was for this kind of gig. As much as I love bread baking and feel it is a lot of fun, I also take it pretty seriously. In fact, my daughter says I can be a bit of a grump in the kitchen when we cook together…
This week, I figured out that you just gotta take it easy with the kids; school’s out and they just want to have fun. Are they there to train to become world champion bakers? Nope. They want to make bread they can bring home to Mom and Dad. Do many of them care about the action of the yeast on the starches or the rate of hydration? Nope. They want to make something to munch on. However, they want to bring home their own stuff, not the loaf kneaded and shaped by the kid next to them. I tried to get them to understand that a big part of bread baking is about working as a team; everyone should make the best possible dough and then we share the fruits of our labour.
As I was beginning to think they didn’t really care or want to get into the spirit of things, an enthusiastic nine-year-old girl said, upon seeing the first multigrain cranberry loaf come out of the oven, “Wow! It’s like real bread! Just like you see in a bakery!”
