On Sunday May 13th, our 32 young bakers welcomed at our baking center French Chef, Romain Perrigot from Grands Moulins de Paris. In Shanghai for Bakery China exhibition, Chef Romain kindly gave of his time to come for one full day of training for the students. Chef Romain gave a first training to the students in November and coming back in May for a second training was a real value added for the students. Most confident after few months, students were really excited to practice with a professional baker and were eager to ask for more technical questions or techniques.
Grands Moulins de Paris, a leading French miller, has been SYB’s sponsor since 2011. Through its distributer in China, Sunway, Grands Moulins de Paris provides SYB will all of the flour needed for its baking centre. We are extremely grateful for this support, as flour is a critical ingredient to bake most of our products. Sunday’s training was organized to offer students an opportunity to learn more about the high-standard ingredient they work with on a daily basis. By watching Chef Romain bake a range of recipes, they learned an array of new techniques and discovered the specificities of each type of flour used in the baking centre. Over the course of the day, students learned how to bake the following products: Viennese bread, Sourdough bread, Seeds bread, Ciabatta and Pizza base.
The first part of the training focused on preparation. According to each recipe, chef Romain showed students how and when to incorporate various ingredients, how to blend the dough, and how to shape the dough. When baking, preparing each recipe can take a long time, because it is important to let the dough sit in between the various stages. Therefore, the recipes’ preparations overlapped throughout the day. The Young Bakers were extremely attentive to all the instructions given by Chef Romain, and were excited to take part in the process every time they were offered the opportunity.
For lunch students prepared pizza using the pizza base they shaped in the morning. Pizza is part of students’ curriculum but it was really interesting for them to bake pizza with a different recipe. It was an occasion for them to extend their technical knowledge and to compare various methods.
Once the dough for each recipe was prepared, Chef Romain showed the students how to shape the various breads and viennoiseries. Students were particularly eager to learn different shaping techniques. They all took turns cutting through the dough to make sure it looked professional after being baked.
In November, students realized the extent to which flour was more than a basic ingredient. They managed to decipher the differences between types of flours, and acknowledged the technical components of each recipe. This time, students using some English managed to better communicate with chef Romain and really refined their knowledge. Chef Romain confided me that students made a lot of progresses and that two month before graduation they are ready to be professional bakers.
On behalf of SYB, I wish to thank Chef Romain for taking the time to share his valuable knowledge with our students. We greatly appreciate his enthusiasm and dedication to teaching our students insider tricks. We are also very grateful for Grands Moulins de Paris and Sunway’s durable support, which have enabled our students to bake delicious products over the past 6 years.
