stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
The Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge is a quest to bake every bread from the seminal bread book The Bread Baker's Apprentice. Breads undertaken as part of the challenge will appear in this category. I will not be posting recipes because a) I want to encourage people to buy the book, read it thoroughly, and keep it as a reference, and b) the time involved would quickly make this project infeasible. Thanks to Nicole of Pinch My Salt for the idea, organization, and inspiration!
Flour. Water. Yeast. Salt. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? In fact, when you're talking bread, it doesn't get any simpler (unless you're in Tuscany, of course).
But ingredient lists can be deceiving.
So it was with not fear, but a healthy dose of respect that I approached my seventh Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge bread: ciabatta. This is one of the wettest doughs out there - it has to be because that's where the beautiful, big shiny holes come from. I know from experience that working with a rustic dough like this is a challenge. I'm not saying it isn't fun - sticky, wet, messy fun - but it takes a certain amount of patience and an understanding of what you're getting yourself into. Even then, I'd never worked with a dough quite this wet. I came in with high hopes yet a full understanding that I probably wouldn't end up with cookbook-worthy holes the first time I tangoed with ciabatta.
In this recipe we're given the option to use either a biga or a poolish as a starter. The poolish seemed lower maintenance since it's essentially a dough the consistency of pancake batter so I mixed up my poolish two nights before. I hadn't realized that it would take 3 or 4 hours to ferment at room temperature so I got started a little later than I would have liked. After a couple of hours, nothing had happened in the dough so I heated up the oven and put the poolish on top, hoping that the heat coming off the oven would help the starter along. I checked it on a regular basis, hoping to catch it right as it was foaming and bubbling so I could put it in the fridge in time. Unfortunately, I think it went from totally asleep to POOLISHZILLA in the span of about thirty seconds because the final time I checked it it was trying to push the lid off its bowl. But even worse, I thought I detected some boozy off-aromas. However it was too late to fix it and I had wanted to be in bed for the last two and a half hours so it went into the fridge until I was ready to use it.
Now, the day of: the instructions call for mixing the dough without using your hands (i.e. a spoon or stand mixer). However, as I've said, I have experience handling these kinds of doughs and I was eager to try the technique out again. I figured that if stuff starting going to hell in a handbasket I could always dump it into the mixer. I'll admit it: my mixer and I are on the rocks. More on that later. I just wanted to say that yes, there are reasons beside my foolish pride that are spurring me on down the hand-kneading path. So I pulled out and measured the flour, water, salt, and yeast, poured in my bubbly intoxicated poolish, and mixed for a couple of minutes, adding several more tablespoons of water as I went. After it was fairly well incorporated into a ball, I let it sit for a 20 minute autolyze (pronounced ow-toe-lease) and then started to knead it in the gravity-assisted method that's so well suited for very wet, sticky doughs.
I think that the biggest secret of hand-kneading these slack rustic doughs is acceptance. There are other important things like learning that flick of the wrist as you fold the dough or grabbing your dough with quick confidence off the countertop so that it comes off cleanly, but none of these things will be learned if you haven't just accepted that this is going to be a sticky mess, that there will be dough all over the place, including your hands, and that this is ok, it is the way it is supposed to be. Just work with the dough and before long the dough will be working with you too.
After working for the dough for about 25 minutes the dough had lost its shaggy disorganized appearance and looked quite smooth (I really wanted pictures of all of this but I was flying solo while The Hubs was at work and my hands were completely sticky - it just wasn't gonna happen). When I picked it up to let gravity stretch it out the aligned gluten strands were easy to see in the dough. It was still very sticky so I decided to let it rest for about half an hour before doing the first stretching and folding step prescribed in the Bread Baker's Apprentice. The dough ended up not stretching out quite as prettily as shown in handling artisan bread dough article I've already linked a couple of times, but I was still able to get some good stretches and folds in. So I let it rise for the full time suggested in the book, preparing my stiff baker's linen (a couche, pronounced koosh with a the oo sounding more like boo than wood) towards the end of the fermentation period.
Now that the dough was fermented, it was much smoother. It helped that my hands and the countertop were now clean of sticky, sticky dough that had been marring the surface of the dough when I was kneading it.
I had decided to make two loaves because frankly the idea of moving just one proofed ciabatta to a baking peel was causing my blood pressure to spike - why would I want to do it three times??? So, using a bench scraper and the least-aggravating touch possible, I divided the dough and rolled it around in the flour a little bit before shaping it and putting it on the couche to proof, arranging the stiff fabric walls around the dough to act as walls to prevent it from spreading during this pre-baking stage.
Forty-five minutes later when I peeked under the towel cover I was so excited to see that the dough had swelled beautifully and, after a nail-biting session of transferring the dough to the peel while attempting to leave every precious air bubble intact, was ready to go in the oven. (I really tried to get pictures of this but I was racing the clock at this point and the camera wasn't cooperating, even though The Hubs was home by then. To transfer the dough, slide the bench scraper under the dough and tilt it up. Slide the baking peel in under the bench scraper and then pull/nudge the dough onto the prepared peel.)
This time I remembered to prep my oven ahead of time, so my implements of Steam Making were ready to go. Good thing, too - it's so important with breads like ciabatta because if the crust stiffens while the yeast is still alive it will impede the rise and you won't get the holes in the crumb that we are all so desperately striving for. This day the baking stone did its job of slamming a lot of hot hot heat into the bottom of the dough and the boiling water that I poured into the lava rock-filled cast iron skillet (preheated with the oven) produced so much steam that the bread rose like crazy during its oven spring! That combined with the intoxicating smell had me jumping up and down around the kitchen, so excited, happy, and grateful to have gotten my ciabatta so far on my first attempt.
I kept the bread in the oven perhaps a bit longer than suggested in the book, but I was holding out for the rich dark golden red-brown that is so appetizing on a good artisan bread. Thanks to Mr. Reinhart, I had learned that you really don't have to worry about the bread drying out in the oven, so when you're working with a lean rustic dough that relies entirely on the starch in the flour for caramelization (instead of any sugars or fats that are added to the dough), just leave it in the oven until it's the color you desire.
Once it got to the point I pulled it out of oven and began one of the most impatient 90-minute periods of my life. I wanted that bread to cool down now so I could slice into it! To distract myself, I took about a million pictures of the bread while I waited for it to become totally cool to the touch. I also ruminated on my loaves: I decided one looked like a slipper, the bread's namesake (pictured on the left in the couche and above once baked) while the other looked more homey (pictures on the right in the couche and below once baked). I also had plenty of time to think about what the interior of the bread looked like. After all, that's the whole point of the ciabatta: getting fantastic flavor is easy (thanks to the poolish), but getting big shiny pretty holes is much less so. I had great hopes for the interior of my bread because it had swelled so nicely on the countertop and it had risen so spectacularly in the oven, but again, I was trying to temper the enthusiasm by remembering that this was my first attempt, it probably wouldn't be perfect, and that I would have lots of fun perfecting my technique down the road.
Finally the moment arrived: my slipper-shaped loaf was cool! Without wasting even a moment I sliced into it and was only very slightly disappointed with the state of the holes. But whatever the crumb looked like, the bread was delicious. It had all the tangy complexity that a good artisan bread should have and was fantastically complemented by a good fruity olive oil (try Lucini, my favorite supermarket EVOO) or an almost room temperature eggplant caponata (recipe coming soon!). As The Hubs and I ate our way into the loaf I was happy to see that, even though they weren't completely consistent, there were bubbles scattered throughout the loaf, bearing at least a few those trademark ciabatta holes.
So imagine my excitement when I sliced into the second, more homey loaf last night and saw honest-to-god big holes!!! It goes without saying that they weren't as spectacular as the ones pictured in the Bread Baker's Apprentice, but they were there!!!
I was so excited that I grabbed the slice, ran into the other room where The Hubs was, and started jumping up and down, brandishing the bread, and squeeing about how this bread was a totally success! It was a good moment. I took several of those slices and put them away (going so far as to literally save one of them from The Hubs' jaws) to save for photographing today when there was some natural light to do the bread justice. As we sliced our way through the second loaf, we again found that the bubbling was a bit inconsistent, but I was very encouraged by what I had accomplished so far on my first try.
But Stacey, you might be asking, what about the drunken poolish? It's true, I was worried when after its initial fermentation I smelled boozy aromas - aromas that strongly intensified during its 36-hour nap in the fridge - but I detected no trace of off-flavors in the finished bread, even when it had aged one or three days. I'm not sure why I got off scott-free, flavor-wise, but I'll take it. I will be more careful in the future with my pre-ferments though.
So, now the moment of truth: will I make this again? Absolutely. There's something great about a slack rustic dough like this: it feels very elemental because you're working with a stripped-down ingredient list and it's all about you and the flour, doing a dance with time to extract every last bit of flavor out of the grain. These types of bread are, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful. I love the rich color of a caramelized crust and the contrast it makes with the flour that's clinging to it. Let's not forget that it's also super-fun to have an excuse to get sticky and dirty like you do when you're kneading this dough. And it's so exciting to see how much oven spring you can get out of a super-hydrated dough like this! Plus, if you're a bread nerd like me, you get to really use your toys to full effect in a recipe like this. Finally, practice makes perfect: I can't wait to see how much air I can trap in the crumb of this bread after I have a couple more batches under my belt!
See also: Heather's ciabatta.
Up next: cinnamon rolls, a holiday treat.
A couple of years ago, several great friends from college came to visit me in Alaska. Back in those days I was always cooking for myself, so whenever I had guests I tended to go a little overboard because I was so excited to a) feed mouths other than my own and b) eat with friends. One of the meals I remember best from their visit was the morning we decided to make French toast. At the time I lived across the street from L'Aroma bakery so Jeremy and I wandered across the street while the other three folks were still asleep. The bakery had challah (pronounced 'hallah') that day and as we ordered the loaf one of the other employees ran across the store, raised the roof, and yelled "CHALLAH!"
Ahh, L'Aroma. You just don't find quality people like that everywhere.
So when all my Thanksgiving baking was done (and really, it was pretty epic), it came time for our sixth bread in the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge and I was pretty excited. Not only could I make this awesome bread myself, but I could also recreate that scene in my own kitchen without humiliating myself in front of several dozen strangers at the local bakery in Tucson. I was also excited to find out that this bread is nowhere near as bad for you as I thought. I had imagined challah to be a very close cousin of brioche, but in reality this bread uses only about an eighth of the fat (and that fat is vegetable oil instead of butter) and fewer eggs. So what's not to love?
Not a whole lot, apparently, because in addition to the fantastic yumminess and the far more heart-friendly ingredients, the process is pretty attractive too. This was a straight dough (a first thus far in the BBAC) so there was no starter to fuss over - just mix the ingredients and go. After the mixing I let it sit for a 20 minute autolyze before kneading and let me tell you, I've never seen a kneading go so fast. I let the mixer go at it for a couple of minutes but when it quickly became apparent that the dough was creeping up the hook again (stay tuned for more on that), I cleaned off the counter, dumped out the dough, and within three minutes had an utterly supple and smooth ball of dough that passed the windowpane test. I was a little concerned because the dough seemed dry - it wasn't sticky, but it wasn't even tacky like most fully-kneaded standard doughs are - but I decided to proceed anyway.
The dough rose a little ahead of schedule but it wasn't a problem because I had been checking it early and often. I noticed as I was kneading the dough to degas it that it had a lot of air bubbles in it, but they seemed to get worked out as I worked on the dough. I set it up for a second rise, and again it finished just a bit ahead of schedule.
Next came the shaping. Because I can tend to be on the overambitious side, I decided to ignore the fact that I hadn't ever done a braided loaf before and opted for the double-decker celebration loaf. Yes, that's right, two braids, one stacked on top of the other. I also decided to ignore the fact that this loaf would be, ah, difficult to store. So having thrown all caution to the wind, I divided the dough into three bigger balls and three smaller balls and set them to rest before attempting to do any shaping.
Here's where I started to have problems. Not only was my dough infested with air bubbles, but the gluten was super uptight and refused to relax. After trying a couple of times to roll a ball into a strand only to have it spring right back, I covered it with a towel and walked away for another ten minutes. After the second rest I was able to work with it a little better and figured out that if I worked a little on one strand, then a little on the second, and next a little on the third and so on, that the other strands could be resting while I was shaping. I had work on each strand at least twice (a few of them needed a third time around) but finally they were ready for braiding (though I hadn't been able to exterminate all the bubbles). After getting it braided I was really wishing that Peter Reinhart had included instructions for how long each strand was supposed to be because the loaf was so long that it didn't even fit along the diagonal of my sheet pans! I crammed it into the corners, took a few seconds to admire my handiwork, and covered it for the proof.
Here's where I made my second mistake: I forgot to preheat the oven. The dough was almost fully proofed and the oven was still off, the cast iron skillet and lava rocks still cold! So I covered the dough back up and hoped that it wouldn't over-proof in the time that it took for the oven and my steaming implements to heat. They heated a little more quickly than usual and my dough was just getting to the point that it was too delicate to take an egg wash - it deflated a bit as it got brushed all over. Ah well.
Despite the short preheat, I got some good steam when I poured the kettle into the skillet and it definitely helped: when I looked at the loaf ten minutes later it was as though BREADZILLA had moved in and was threatening to bust open the corners of the sheet pan, so clearly the bread didn't over-proof badly, otherwise there wouldn't have been much growth in the oven. I was watching the baking dough carefully because Heather said hers was done really fast, but I was holding out for a really dark crust. I forgot the first egg wash that was supposed to happen before proofing, so maybe that's why the crust was nicely dark - but not quite was I was expecting - before the bread got to the right temperature.
I had some difficulty transferring it to a cooling rack because the hot loaf was so large, long, and unwieldy, but with the help of Sous Chef Hubs I got the bread moved without incident, though it was trying to separate along some of the braiding seams. After the loaf was completely cool, I couldn't resist it any longer and I tore off a chunk, totally amazed at how you could see the plait of the strands in the interior of the finished bread (which is something you don't really get to see if you take a bread knife to the loaf).
Even though it is beautiful, the bread is tasty but it's not really what I hoped. I think a big reason is that the dough was a too dry - I only added the minimum of water - and so the bread is a little chewy and not as tender as it should have been. It's definitely not a dealbreaker though: it'll be great as traditional toast or even made into French toast! Like I said though, the loaf is huge - but storing it won't be a problem if we eat it fast enough! I'm sure I'll make this again - challah is such a good alternative to brioche French toast and making it is so much fun.
Now lemme hear you: CHALLAH!
Next up: the wet, sticky beast ciabatta.
Continuing in the vein of brioche variations , today's Bread Baker's Apprentice bread is casiatello, a sort of savory Italian brioche with meat and cheese stuffed inside.
I'm not gonna lie: I'm kinda overdosing on all of these ridiculously rich white breads. I'm a whole-grain kind of girl and doing these white breads is certainly fun, but it's not how I like to regularly cook and eat. Add on to that the fact that I'm not a big meat-eater (especially processed meats - I never eat them!), and it's no surprise that I came into this bread a little under-enthused. Regardless, I decided to just go ahead and do it and get it out of the way because baby, challah and ciabatta are next! Think of casiatello as an investment. I'm sure there are those of you out there who are less Type A and are like "Uhm, Stacey, why don't you just skip this one if you don't wanna do it?" Because that's not how we do it in the BBAC! It's every bread in the book, in order! Those are the rules and even though there's no one enforcing them it would really chafe me to break them. I come from a long line of anal retentive people so you can imagine my horror when my Mom told me she's going to go out of order and she suggested I do the same. I may have to turn her in to the Bread Police.
Anyway, that whole paragraph was kind of one huge digression, so I'll get on with it already.
When it came to ingredients, I stuck with an Italian dry salami like suggested but I couldn't find a decent provolone so I went with a gruyere instead, despite some misgivings about how incredibly salty this loaf was going to end up being. The assembly of the dough was pretty straightforward after having done brioche just a few days ago. The sponge was very different from the others we've put together - much more soupy - and nowhere near as cool as the sponge I got so attached to from the brioche. I had to give this sponge a little extra time and it still never sighed when tapped on the countertop (most likely because it was too slack to really sigh the same way). The rest of the dough assembly was very similar to the brioche and, like the brioche, needed no hand-kneading. The big difference here was that there was a single room-temperature fermentation - no chill in the fridge here, which was nice because I seriously doubt I could have found room for a sheet pan.
Once the fermentation was done it was time to shape the dough. When I first started reading over the recipe I was delighted to see that, compared to middle-class brioche, there is relatively little butter - but then I remembered the salami and cheese that are added and quickly realized that my arteries, oh, they will curse me so. I was really not relishing the idea of having a couple of pounds of casiatello hanging around yet I was loathe to give it all away without tasting it, but then I had a sudden inspiration. I pulled out one of my mini loaf pans that's equivalent to about 1/3 of a 9x5 loaf pan and decided it would be the perfect portion to keep for Cory and me. The rest went into the springform cake pan suggested by Mr. Reinhart and that loaf is destined for Cory's office!
I eyeballed a portion that I thought would fit the mini loaf pan, chopped it off with my bench scraper, formed it into a rough little loaf that looked a tad too small, took a bit more dough from the mother loaf, then a little more, and finally was satisfied. I had a bit of trouble shaping both the mini loaf and the larger dough into a boule because the salami was disrupting the otherwise smooth gluten surface. Once I finally got a result I was semi-satisfied with I set them to proof. When I came back an hour later I was pleasantly surprised by how much they grew in the pans but I may have let them go a little too long (especially the mini loaf) because they didn't spring back at all when poked. Despite that setback, they had great oven spring and grew quite a bit more in the oven (I credit the boiling-water-poured-over-a-preheated-cast-iron-skillet-filled-with-lava-rocks trick for this success) but they never really browned the way I'd hoped they would, despite reaching the right internal temperature. Even stranger, they didn't really smell that great while they were baking. I never really smelt the bread itself - just the salami. Every other bread I've baked so far in the challenge was intoxicating, present a real challenge to the "Thou shalt not cut into the loaf until completely cooled" commandment, but I wasn't particularly tempted by casiatello.
When I finally sliced into the bread the next day, I was impressed by the exceptionally tender crumb and the nice cheese flavor. The flavor was salty but not unpleasantly so: it was like the saltiness of a yummy hard cheese (no surprise since that's what's in there). I was actually thoroughly enjoying myself until a couple of bites later when I got to the salami. Yep, I could definitely do without that. Other than that though, it's a pretty good bread. Definitely decadent - don't forget that this is a cousin of brioche.
Will I make this again? Maybe for special occasions or if there are going to be a lot of dudes around. It definitely strikes me as a Man Bread. I'd definitely consider using a different meat and if I still had access to reindeer sausage I'd use it in a heartbeat. In the variation vein, I've seen several posts from fellow BBACers who made vegetarian versions with things like sun-dried tomatoes so I will keep that in mind if I want to go the vegetarian route, but, well, sorry Mr. Reinhart, but I think I will skip your suggestion to use toasted tofu.
See also: Heather's casiatello.
I'm taking a bit of a bread from the BBAC this weekend. I'm going to Texas for a quick visit with the folks and my Mom and I are taking a bread class! It's all about artisan breads and seems to focus on pre-ferments. It'll be fun to hopefully make some more rustic lean doughs!
When I get back, next up: Can I get a holla? Challah!
This week the Bread Baker's Apprentice challenge brings us a concoction that I had really been looking forward to trying out. Brioche has a decadent reputation: it's known as the butteriest of breads, more similar to pastry than even, say, challah. Be it due to its reputation or its availability, to the best of my knowledge, this bread had never passed my lips.
The book offers three variations: the rich man's (in which the butter is a whopping 87 percent of the flour's weight), a poor man's (the butter is a scant 25% of the flour), and the middle class brioche (where the butter only matches half of the flour's weight). Having heard about the utter decadence of the rich man's version - and knowing/fearing my self-control around freshly baked bread - I opted not to go that route. That said, I still wanted a real brioche experience, so treating this as a special occasion, I settled on the middle class bread. Plus, I figured, since I made this on my birthday, if I happened to over-indulge I could just skip dessert after dinner. Awfully fitting, since Marie Antoinette is rumored to have actually said "Let them eat brioche" instead of "let them eat (birthday) cake!" I'd rather have bread than cake any day anyway.
So last night I mixed up the sponge and this little guy turned out to be my favorite sponge so far. I think it made a huge difference that I mixed it mechanically (because - brace for how much of a loser I am - I actually mixed another sponge today while the light was good so I could get a photo, but mixed it by hand, to far less spectacular results) because it was smooth, bubbly, gluten-y, and collapsed when tapped on the counter right on schedule.
I mixed up the dough, thoroughly lamenting the loss of my scraping paddle attachment, and though the dough didn't look so nice where it was sticking to the bowl, when I stopped to scrape it down it was satiny smooth. Declaring the dough done (sadly, no pictures - the sun sets early in Tucson in the winter) I spread it on the baking sheet and popped it in the fridge.
Today I pulled it out and found it to be the consistency of semi-hard Play Doh. Shaping it into something uniform and symmetrical just wasn't going to happen - the only thing that would accomplish was getting my hands buttery - so I pulled out the rolling pin, which worked like a charm. I used half the dough to make a brioche a tete (using the first shaping method) and the other half went to eight petites brioches a tete, using the second shaping method. I didn't have the traditional fluted brioche pans and I didn't want to buy them because I didn't know if I would ever make this again, so I just decided to go free-form.
The shaped dough proofed beautifully and right on schedule, so they got a gentle egg wash and were popped into the oven.
They smelled intoxicating while they were baking and had great oven spring, growing even more than they had during proofing and actually melding with some of their neighbors to become pull-apart rolls. Once the time was up, I was satisfied with their color and the instant-read thermometer was satisfied with their internal temperature, so out of the oven they came!
And here's where I share one of my baker's secrets with you: bread really is better when it's been completely cooled before being cut into, but really, and I mean this super seriously, where's the fun in that??? The bread has been mocking you by proofing beautifully and by smelling so fabulous while baking: do you have any idea how much willpower it takes to resist the stuff? So rather than cutting into a loaf that's been out of the oven for 45 seconds and ruining the whole thing, I opt to make some rolls and some large loaves. You can bet that Cory and I were chomping on some of that brioche right out of the oven, leaving the rest of the bread intact to cool so that the flavor could finish maturing.
Meanwhile, the large loaf had finished proofing so it went in the oven next. Here's where I learned a lesson: you can get away with doing the little guys free-form, but the big guys, uh, not so much. The dough was so soft that it couldn't support its own weight and had actually started to sink and spread out a little during proofing, but once it got into the oven and the butter heated up there was nothing to hold it up and it slumped over like a narcoleptic pile of dough.
On the plus side, you could see that the dough had fantastic gluten development and it tried really hard to prevent the slumpiness. Besides, I'm sure it still tastes fine and it is actually easier to store in the freezer until the Appointed Time Of The Making Of The French Toast.
But here's what really counts: the flavor. No joke, the bread is decadent. It reminded me very forcefully of a croissant (flavor-wise, not texture-wise). It does pull apart the way a pastry does, with a light, airy crumb that really melts in your mouth. Will I make this again? Most definitely, but even though it is a Special Occasion bread, I'll be sticking to the poor man's brioche in the future, unless the bread is strictly being used as a gift. I've also heard that this bread makes superb cinnamon rolls, which may make an appearance this year at Thanksgiving, as the in-laws are huge fans. However, I'll probably make an effort to use a premium butter (wooo! Even more fat!) instead of a common brand so that the flavor will be even better. But for now, I'll just gaze longingly at the petites brioches a tete on my counter and dream about the day that I finally get to have my brioche French toast!
See also: Heather's brioche!
Next up: Casiatello!
Why do seagulls fly by the sea?
'Cause if they flew by the bay they'd be bagels!
*Crickets*
Ok, so it's not funny, but it's a fitting introduction to this week's bread in the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge. When I was younger, I was a huge bagel fanatic: I got introduced to good ones at the Chesapeake Bagel Bakery when I was a teenager living in Yorktown, Virginia, and once I discovered them I ate them all the time: for breakfast, for snacks after swim practice and during meets, and most especially as the outer layer of sandwiches. One of my most potent high school cafeteria memories is the day I brought a green bagel in my lunch on St Paddy's day - that got quite the reaction, and I think someone even wrote about that event in my yearbook.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and when I was fifteen we left Virginia for the Pacific Northwest. I didn't take easily to the uprooting, and one of the items on the list of why Vancouver/Portland Was Far Inferior To The East Coast was the lack of good bagels (I've since done a 180 in my opinion of the Pacific Northwest, but I still maintain that the bagels were inferior). So, really, it's been about 12 years since I've been all "yay bagels!" so I wasn't super excited to try them out this week. But I'm committed to the cause, so I rolled up some sleeves, bought some malt powder, and looked at this as an opportunity to try something that I wouldn't have made otherwise.
The recipe was very straightforward: sponge, final dough, resting, shaping, retarding, boiling, baking. There is no critically-timed rise, no fingers to poke into fermenting dough, and perhaps best of all, this bread won't tie you to your kitchen all day! So I got started in the late afternoon, not really thinking about how I needed to cook dinner too (oops) and as a result, I don't have any pictures of the first day: nothing of the sponge that I got really attached too, no evidence of the stiff but amazingly smooth and supple dough, not a shred of evidence of the cute little rolls, and nada of me shaping the bagels themselves. And, thankfully, nothing to show of my near temper-tantrums as I attempted to wrap the baking pans in plastic so I could refrigerate them. Me and plastic wrap, we're not such good friends. I suspect that it knows about my tree-hugger tendencies.
So this morning, I set a stockpot to boil, readied some toppings, and finished up my first batch of bagels. I decided on four plain (really a tragic misnomer, for they were quite delicious!), four sea salt and black sesame seed, and four cinnamon sugar. Aside from their refusal to brown, I'm quite pleased with the result: they're chewy the way I remember from the CBB (and now I know why the later bagels I tried were inferior: they weren't boiled!), flavorful thanks to the sponge and malt powder, and fairly tender and open on the inside. Now I'm looking for a New Yorker to test them out on, to see how they compare to those epic bagels, since in my infinite wisdom, I tried to eat healthily during my 36 hours in NYC two months ago and opted for a low-fat buckwheat veggie quiche instead of more stereotypical fare.
Will I make these again? Probably, especially since there are so many ways that you can dress these up. Aside from the marathon kneading (like I said, this dough was really, really stiff - so stiff it broke my paddle attachment - not the solid metal one, but a third-party scraper paddle that I loved), this recipe was really quite simple and would be great for a brunch party, since all you have to do the day of is boil and bake. Who knows - I might even make some green ones!
See also: Heather's bagels.
Next up: Let them eat brioche!
Today's post from the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge brings you Artos, a Greek celebration bread. The book includes three versions - the standard bread, a Christmas bread, and an Easter bread. They all use the same basic enriched dough recipe that is flavored with spices, zests, and extracts, but the holiday-specific breads include fruit and nut embellishments that are specific to the season. The Easter bread even features red-dyed eggs atop the loaves.
Even though the rough goal of this group is to do one bread a week, when I realized that I don't have to work today and that I probably have a lot of trips coming up that will preclude any bread baking at all, I decided to go ahead and press on to bread #2, even though I just baked anadama bread yesterday. The loaf offers you the choice to either use a sourdough starter or a poolish. I do indeed have a cute little seed culture named Zeke that will one day be a starter (stay tuned for that!) and if I had waited to bake until this weekend he could have been used, but since I was feeling antsy I had to go the poolish route. Poolishes are really simple - the hardest part was scaling the 23-ounce formula down to 7 ounces. This is one of the things that I really like about using starters - they offer such a huge flavor payout for what is essentially zero extra work. All they require is a bit of planning ahead and then you let the enzymes and the yeast do all the hard work making your bread delicious!
So an hour before mixing the dough, I pulled the poolish that I made last night out of the fridge and mis en placed (no, it's not a verb, but I like to wordsmith) everything and began. I've been baking so much these last couple of days that I actually ran out of bread flour, so I threw in a couple of teaspoons of wheat gluten and rounded out the flour's weight requirement with all-purpose. Disaster averted. But, alas, here's when things began to get... sticky.
I am normally a pretty tolerant and patient baker, but as I was kneading this dough (or, more accurately, smearing it across the countertop) I kept thinking that a more accurate name would be Greek Frustration Bread. One of the reasons I start out my knead in a machine is so that I don't end up adding too much flour to try to make up for the stickiness of a freshly-mixed dough, but as I watched the dough resolutely refuse to form into a ball and instead just creep up the hook every ten seconds, it became clear that I was going to need to add more. So I added a little, then a little more, and then before long I was adding amounts of flour that I've never had to add to a dough before. The stand mixer was doing such a miserable job of kneading that I honestly thought the dough would be ready faster if I threw the hook across the room, so I took it out and started kneading by hand with a lot of flour, my bench scraper, and a temper that was barely kept in check. I was pretty furious with myself for skipping the autolyse, but it's pretty clear to me now that even if I had waited 20 minutes after mixing to start kneading, I still would have had to battle sticky, sticky dough.
After kneading for about ten minutes (and adding even more flour), the dough still stuck to my hand when I picked it up and inverted my hand - no gripping involved! This was just the sticky mass of goo resisting the force of gravity - that's how sticky it was!. Oh, Internet, I tried to get pictures of that for you, but it didn't work out this time. Before you complain, next time you're up to your elbows I'd like to see you get this shot without assistance! But I digress.
After adding my entire supply of sprinkling flour (I keep one of those parmesan/crushed red pepper shakers you see in restaurants filled with bread flour for sprinkling the stuff on the counter - makes it so much easier!) the dough finally became merely tacky instead of sticky, meaning that when I pressed my hand on the dough and lifted it off, the dough would very briefly stick but my would hand came away clean. At this point it passed the windowpane test, so an hour and ten minutes after I initially mixed the dough, I declared victory and squirreled away the dough to ferment.
Keeping in mind yesterday's over-ferment, I checked the dough often, but it went the full 90 minutes suggested in the recipe before testing done. The dough was so tacky, however, that it was difficult to test for doneness - if you poked even a wet finger in there, it stuck to your finger when you pulled it out. Now for shaping. The loaf looked huge - and almost every blogger out there commented on its enormous size - so, keeping storage in mind, I decided to divide the dough into two equally-sized boules. The dough shaped beautifully, the top never tearing now matter how tightly I stretched the gluten, and, again, was fully proofed at the end of the recommended time. The dough, covered only in damp kitchen towels, already smelled intoxicating, so I couldn't wait to find out what it smelled like as it baked.
Sure enough, before long, a delicious aroma wafted through the house. It reminded me not so much of bread as it did of Danish pastries, which surprised me not at all because of the common flavors within: nutmeg, lemon (zest in the bread, extract in the pastries), and almond extract. Not that I minded: on the contrary, since Danish pastries are one of my all-time favorite foods, both for taste and for sentimentality's sake. Because of this delicious smell, I had a very hard time not cutting into them right away, and was able to wait less than two hours before I had to put some of it in my mouth!
The loaves browned beautifully. I opted not to put a glaze on them, wanting to taste the flavors of the dough alone, and looking back, I'm glad that I didn't make one of the fancier variations. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! The bread is unquestionably delicious, perfect as a dessert or, toasted, as a treat with coffee. It would also be devastating as French toast! I'll definitely be making this bread again. Just, y'know, with more flour next time.
See also: Heather's Artos.
Today is the first official day of our Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge! Today Heather and I bring you Anadama bread, a traditional bread from the northeastern United States, reportedly named after a colorful epithet uttered by a jilted (and hungry) husband.
With this in mind, I decided to attempt to make my bread a little more colorful than the typical loaf. Anadama bread isn't so different from most basic sandwich loaves: the only big difference is that it features the addition of some cornmeal. I decided late last night to start the bread and the only cornmeal I had on hand was blue (it really does make the best-ever southern cornbread!), so I decided to make do.
This bread was a first for me in two ways: it features both a soaker and a sponge. A soaker is a sneaky way of coaxing more flavor from grains: water activates enzymes in the grain, which on a molecular level start to peel away the protective coating that hides the really tasty bits that are lurking in the flour or meal. This soaker, just cornmeal and water, couldn't be simpler, but it does need to be assembled the night before. The sponge is a quick pre-ferment, wetter than the final dough, which lets the yeast and enzymes get started doing their thing a bit ahead of time. My sponge took a little bit longer than I expected though, or maybe I was just expecting to see more bubbles than there were. Either way, when I added the rest of the flour after 70 minutes of sponge-ing, it visibly sighed and deflated. I'll have to do some research to figure out whether I let pre-ferment for too long and if maybe that's what caused my problems later on down the line.
I was surprised by how much yeast the recipe called for. 2 teaspoons of instant yeast to 4.5 cups flour is quite a bit! It's so much, in fact, that this is the other prime suspect in the problems I go over later. I thoroughly mixed in the remaining ingredients with the sponge, covered the bowl for 20 minutes (I'm a big fan of the autolyse), then kneaded with the stand mixer for 4 minutes before continuing with my hands. There are plenty of opinionated people on each side of the line in the debate of man vs. machine when it comes to kneading bread, but I tend to take a balanced view of it. I like to let the machine do its thing initially, but I always finish my doughs by hand. It allows the mixer to do the dirty work when the dough is really sticky and it also kneads very thoroughly and efficiently. Finishing manually allows me to feel the dough to make sure it's not getting overworked and it lets me take advantage of the joys and benefits that kneading has always brought me.
I had to knead this dough for longer than I thought I would. The dough was pretty sticky so I had to keep adding a bit of flour to the countertop and I was never truly satisfied with the stickiness vs. tackiness. I eventually got the dough to pass the windowpane test, but I expected the dough to be much smoother. Perhaps it was just the cornmeal making it look less smooth than it really was.
The dough was incredibly soft (maybe this is normal - I'm not sure because this was my first 100% white sandwich loaf) and flattened out under its own weight when I rounded it into a ball before fermenting.
Though the formula called for a 90 minute fermentation, I checked the rising dough at 70 minutes and it had already over-fermented - when I poked it it sighed and sank. Knowing that I was racing the clock now that it had fermented too long, I gave it a quick knead, hoping to re-distribute the nutrients to the yeast but noticing a faint boozy aroma (damn it!), hurried through dividing, gave it a minimal rest, and shaped the dough into loaves and put them in the pans covered with damp kitchen towels (the tree-hugger in me won't let me use plastic wrap!).
The formula called for a 60-90 minute proof, but I was taking no chances this time: I checked at 30 minutes, noticing the loaves had already crested the tops of the pans, but was relieved to see that the dough sprang back when I poked it. When I came back ten minutes later the loaves tested ready, so I prepared a hot kettle, spritzed the loaves, dusted them with cornmeal, slashed them (not strictly called for but with the way this stuff was rising it needed it), popped them in the oven, and poured the hot water into a pre-heated cast-iron skillet with pre-heated lava rocks in it (best method I've found thus far for creating good steam). The bread baked right on schedule, and in less than an hour I had freshly baked loaves on cooking racks, aroma-ing all over the place.
The loaves had excellent oven spring and grew quite a bit in the oven. The slashes opened up beautifully - so beautifully, in fact, that I was wondering why the formula didn't call for it. Surely the forming crust would have inhibited the growth of the loaf. The thin crust stayed fairly soft and it's possible that the top of the loaves shrank a bit as the air within cooled. The loaves were about the same size as my 100% whole-grain sandwich loaves typically are, but with only 75% of the flour.
After waiting a couple of hours, I finally got to slice into the bread! It was delicious, not boozy at all like I had feared, but I think that if it didn't have molasses and butter in it you easily would have been able to tell that it had been over-fermented. Then again, it could be that the soaker and sponge really did their jobs in terms of flavor enhancement! This really is an ideal sandwich bread, since the crust is tender and the crumb is so soft as to be downright squishable. However, you can tell that one of the loaves proofed just a smidge too long since there are overly large air pockets in some sections and the bread is unstable. Despite the deliciousness, I don't know if I will make it again because I really prefer my sandwich bread to be whole-grain, but it was fun this time around!
The next day addendum: I pulled the loaf out again today so I could take photos of the slices since the sun had already gone down by the time the loaf was cool. The taste had changed fairly dramatically: yesterday it was sweet and somewhat creamy on the palate, but today I picked up off-flavors that had developed. They were a mix between boozy and yeasty, so at last, I'm paying the price for the over-fermentation. However, I stuck those slices in the toaster and made some cinnamon toast (a treat I hadn't had in years!) and of course the off-flavors were completely masked. I still think it's exactly what most people think a sandwich loaf should be, but personally, I find it too sweet for sandwiches. Then again, I've already found my perfect-for-sandwiches loaf, and even as good as the anadama is, it's really not fair to compare it to my oatmeal bread. So, again, delicious bread, but best for out-of-hand eating or toasting.
See also: Heather's Anadama bread.
Next up: Artos, Greek Celebration bread.
If you're a bread baker, you know that there are reams upon reams of bread books at any given bookstore. The question will inevitably arise: which one is your desert island bread book? Which book can catapult your bread baking up to the next level without having to spend hundreds on classes? Which book is the definitive bread book for serious home bakers?
For many, many bakers, the answer is The Bread Baker's Apprentice. My mother-in-law gave me the book some time ago, and I had opened it often, ogling and drooling over the bread porn, but as of yet, I still haven't made anything from it. I know, travesty!
So, thanks to a fabulous idea from Nicole of Pinch My Salt, I am going to take the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge! I'll make every recipe in that venerable tome in order and, of course, will document it here! I've also recruited my mom Trisha and my Alaskan friend Heather, both formidable bread bakers, serious foodies, and super fun folks all-around.
If you'd like to join our small band of yeast enthusiasts, go buy a copy of the book, read the first hundred pages on deconstructing bread, and then roll up your sleeves and dive right in with anadama bread!
