Freezing Bread Dough (was Re: SC - Bread Soup Bowls)

[Bonne of Traquair]

Lady Jocetta speaks of her bread wishes for her upcomeing feast:
>Decent tasting commercially baked bread blows  my
>budget out of the water.

>(bread has been the) weakest point of every feast I've cooked and I'd 
like to change this.
>
>Bread from scratch is _much_ cheaper and usually tastier.  However 
trying
>to produce enough for a feast on that day without tying up the kitchen 
or
>exhausting the cooks  (I am NOT a morning person) has just not seemed
>feasible. (This time I'm delegating bread to a moring person.)  I know
>bread dough will freeze, but how much has to be done to it afterwards?

It has to be thawed completely, to come to room temperature internally 
and then to rise, then bake.  A lump of frozen bread dough from the 
freezer section at the grocery takes about 4-6 hours from freezer to 
table.  I've always been nervouse about freezing dough just before that 
final rise.  I don't know if there is some secret to it, like extra 
yeast or something.  Probably it needs to get frozen faster than my 
standard issue kitchen freezer can manage. 

I agree wholeheartedly that bread has been a major let-down for at 
feasts I've eaten. But then, I'm very picky about bread.  My 
suggestions:

1) find out what last weeks cook did to get bread from the Big Sky 
Bakery in Raleigh.  That bread was a definate improvement over the 
grocery store french bread we usually enjoy.  

2)For my feast, I've been mulling over a letter to send to the local 
bakeries requesting donations to us as an educational organization, or 
perhaps donation of time/equipment to do our own baking on a grand 
scale.  We could try this for yours first. 
 
3)(very small voice) I'm a baker, though never on quite such a scale as 
Ymir will demand. I'm even a morning person, though less so when 
sleeping in the high volume cabins at Camp Kanata. 

It seems to me that baking for an event would require planning 
everything else around it and keeping kitchen time/space needed by other 
dishes to an absolut minimum. The night before and morning of the event 
the kitchen would have to be committed to baking. The slicing, dicing 
and mixing that usually takes place on site would HAVE to be done in 
advance.  At Kanata, having the pig roaster for the meats would free up 
all the ovens for baking.  Between the two convection ovens and the 
other ovens, it could work.

Bonne



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