Mm

... as well.

Um, and then the next step that affects crispness, believe it or not, is fermentation.

Fermentation affects it because what we do is we have you do a bulk mix, the dough rests for an hour, then you round it, and then it sits for eight to 10 hours, whatever it is, a long time, and it relaxes.

It relaxes, right? And so that allows you, at the shaping phase, to get this nice thin dough, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so if you look at many of the recipes in the book, what we've built in is a timeline which will accommodate or facilitate an easier shaping experience, right? So after the initial period of bulk, one hour in the case of our, like New York style dough, the dough is rounded, it's put into containers, it rests at ambient condition, right? Room temperature, eight to 10 hours, and then it's chilled for up to several days.

And during that time period, the gluten that we've developed and, you know, relied upon as being, you know, coming in from the bread flour that we've prescribed, uh, has a chance to relax.

Can you tell us a little bit what that means? And if you have, quote, "the wrong flour" for a recipe, are there ways you can adapt, adjust, or you just gotta go buy that flour that the recipe calls for?

Yeah, that's a great question.

You know, a few years ago we started talking about flour IQ, and it was really something that we were trying to do to just bring awareness to folks around the idea that protein content in the US is what we're using as the largest metric to determine sort of grades of flour.

Like, beyond just sort of all-purpose and whole wheat, um, within the all-purpose varieties or the white flour varieties, um, we have these sort of gradations of protein content.

And the best way that I can sort of describe that is to say that if you think of protein as sort of building material, like it's the thing that we're gonna use to build our skyscraper in the case of something like a nice big sourdough loaf or, you know, we're gonna build something nice and low, which needs less structural integrity, right?

Mm.

And so when we remove the gluten, which is sort of the structural material, right? That we're literally using to build this like bread skyscraper, um, things get challenging.

Things do get challenging.

[laughs]

You make it anywhere, right? Um, so I feel like before we even get to your question, I feel like you should reach around, you know, to your back and give yourself a pat because getting to the top of that is no joke.

You know, it means that you've worked hard.

So in terms of what are some additional things that you can do with laminated doughs, I mean, in bakeries, the way that we look at laminated dough is sort of as a foundational item.

So we have our, you know- Mm-hmm ... we have our lean doughs, we have our baguettes, we have our sourdoughs, we have our laminated doughs in the form of what we call viennoiserie.

And we will make base doughs.

We'll make, you know, big batches of that sort of croissant dough, and then we'll use it for literally a thousand things.

Mm.