Nina Antonovna has been baking bread for over 25 years. He says it all started with a few orders for weddings. Then there were so many applicants that the bakery added the product to the assortment. Now they bake from a bun for a family feast to a huge, multi-tiered one in Dozhinki. Only she is engaged in such creative baking at the bakery: the question is painfully delicate.
- Mom instilled a love for dough. She is my jack of all trades. And she drew, embroidered and baked … -war period was not easy, remembers Nina Vasilevskaya. – There was no such choice in stores as there is now. We lived in the village, what can I say, even the mobile store did not always come. But thanks to my mother, we always had delicious cabbage, buns, shortbread on the table…
Nina Antonovna can easily bake bread weighing up to five to ten kilograms, in two or even five levels
The baker perfected the knowledge acquired in the family at the school of food workers. Nina Vasilevskaya was advised to go there by her older sister, who saw the cooking potential in her. After graduation, she was assigned to a bakery No. 3. At first she worked in a gingerbread shop, then she mastered all the processes and became a mess. Work was away from home. In order to devote more time to children, I had to go to bakery college as a teacher. It was there that she became interested in baking breads.
… At 06:30. Nina Vasilevskaya is already at work. The whole process – from kneading the dough to decorating a loaf – above:
– I’m making an infusion. While she walks around for an hour and a half, I work on the ingredients (sugar, milk, egg powder and margarine). Everything is strictly according to the recipe. I mix the dough and let it rise for another hour. Then molding – and again in the oven. Why stir several times? Yeast dough should acquire the desired acidity, the bread will not crack when baking. This is important, because there is a sign, supposedly a crack in the bread, to a split in the family.
The next step is cooking. Much depends on the size of the loaf here. Products weighing from one to three kilograms are in demand. They spend 40 minutes in the oven. There are also specific orders – up to 50 kilograms. There is a special approach for these breads. They can have two or five levels. The lower ones, for example, brown a little more so as not to sag under the weight of the upper ones.
After the room has completely cooled, the most interesting thing begins – the decoration. Create, as long as skill and imagination are enough, Nina Antonovna shares her method:
- When there was no Internet, you had to improvise. I invented everything myself: flowers, frills, figurines… The decor I use depends on my mood. Although the theme, of course, is present. I add swans to the wedding bread, and spikelets and cornflowers to meet the delegations. I can “draw” anything with a test. I create many figures in advance so that they dry for a few days. If done immediately, they will lose their shape and the drawing will not play.
Fashion for jewelry is changing, but flowers and swans for decoration are still popular. Although some ask not to decorate bread with roses with thorns – a bad sign. Some masters color the dough, but Nina Vasilevskaya believes that the bread should be natural and clean. It is believed that young people should start life from scratch, so there should be no foreign impurities in the dough. For the same reason, toppings are also not placed in a wedding loaf. In the past, we added almost no salt to it, so that young people cried less in their lives, but we softened it in particular so that marriage would be like that. In wealthy families, silver or gold coins were placed in the dough – for house money.
When the work is done, the muffin goes into the oven for seven to ten minutes. It is poured with sugar syrup – the bread is ready! Fragrant, crunchy, full of warmth, it’s ready to decorate someone’s wedding. By the way, such products are almost not stored at the factory, they are immediately sent to the customer on the day of cooking. During the summer, the master makes up to 50 loaves. And at this rate, he always has a blank in reserve. Just in case, Nina Antonovna smiles:
- Once, in the turmoil of marriage, young people forgot to order a loaf. They come running in the morning in a panic. Of course, saved guys.
For those who want to try their hand at baking bread, Nina Vasilevskaya advises not to be afraid:
- The main thing is to approach the topic with good humor and a pure heart. It’s living dough, it smells like everything. From time immemorial it was believed: the higher and more magnificent the bread, the happier the family.
