Cooking classes at Quarry Coffee & Cafe

Bread making in Lannon, WI

Earlier this week, my mom and I took a cooking class in Lannon — which sounds far away but isn't (it's in Waukesha county). The class was held at the Quarry Coffee & Cafe, run by chef Scott Mattfeld and his wife. They host a small-ish cooking class each month, and the theme is always changing — my mom went to her first class a couple of months ago when the theme was Spanish tapas. 

But this time, the theme was bread. We watched Scott demo how to make oatmeal bread (so tasty) and white bread (great for grilled cheese sandwiches), and I'm actually led to believe that I can recreate these in my own kitchen. It's all about not killing the yeast and not over-mixing the dough. Okay, so those two things aren't the easiest to achieve, but it's a shot worth taking.

While we didn't get to actually make the oatmeal and white breads (the dough needs to proof for 8 to 18 hours), we did each get to mix up a pan of 30-minute dinner rolls. It was, for lack of a better phrase, really neat. I've only attempted dinner rolls once and they were hard as a rock. So disappointing. These were easy to mix up and came out golden and perfect. Since my mom and I each made a pan, we stuck them in the freezer for Thanksgiving — perfect timing! 

Bowls of flour & salt + frothy yeast & sugar = dinner rolls!

In the end, we went home with four loaves of delicious homemade bread, two pans of dinner rolls, recipe print-outs, and way more confidence when it comes to attempting bread in the kitchen. 

Scott is clearly an expert chef and teacher. He worked quickly but practiced patience when needed, happy to remind us that there are no dumb questions. In fact, there's a group of ladies that keep coming back to his classes, and I don't blame them — at just $35/class, I might do the same myself. One of the first classes of the new year is "international pancakes" — sign me up!