The pastry chef who used a thermometer on my dough last Tuesday
I walked into the prep kitchen at our place in Austin last Tuesday and saw our new pastry cook checking my croissant dough with a meat thermometer. He told me it was 74 degrees and that I should have proofed it longer, which was wrong because I had already accounted for the warm corner near the oven. Has anyone else had to explain why a thermometer read doesn't beat feel and timing after 10 years on the line?
And yeah, that new guy is going to learn the hard way that dough has moods, not numbers. The thermometer tells you a fact, but it doesn't tell you what the dough has been through all morning. Give him a few months and he'll start trusting his hands again, or he won't, and then you'll be back to training someone else.