Artisan bread at the California Culinary Academy

I took an artisan breads class yesterday at the California Culinary Academy. It was very fun, and I picked up a lot of useful information.

One of the breads we worked on in class was ciabatta. I haven't made ciabatta before, so it was good to see what the consistency of the dough should be like. Here's a picture of the final product:

We didn't get a chance to bake the challah dough, so we got to take it home. I ended up with a little over 2 pounds of dough. Half of the dough went into a loaf pan:

I added chopped pecans and dried cranberries to the other half of the dough. I shaped the dough into 2 ounce knotted rolls and sprinkled the tops of the rolls with coarse sugar before baking.