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I baked my first loaf of yeast bread in November of 2006, and even though that loaf was far from spectacular, I realized that there was no going back. I've been known to bake eight loaves in the span of three days, and there are few things I love more than giving away all that bread. Most of my loaves are 100% whole grain - don't let them tell you that it can't be done!
Artisan French dough is an interesting animal. On one hand you have four - count 'em, four - ingredients. Not so hard, right? The thing is, it's not the number of ingredients, it's their proportion to each other. It's a very hydrated dough compared to the multitude of sandwich loaves I've posted here previously, yet many of the requirements are the same.
The tricky requirement here is the kneading. Yes, this dough is a wet, sticky monster. And yes, you have to develop the gluten yourself. You don't get to rely on a ridiculously long autolyze to do the hard work for you like you do in my much-loved no-knead bread (but it's worth it - the pre-ferment makes for a far superior flavor). So how does one get the gluten to develop?
Some of you may quickly point out that KitchenAid stand mixers are proof that a god loves us and wants us to eat good bread. But I'll point out even more quickly that the French have been making this bread before mixers were a twinkle in a baker's eye, so there has to be some way to do it. And being the do-it-yourself-er that I am, I'm going to teach you how.
Like I said, you obviously can't knead in the conventional fashion. Pushing, folding, and rotating translates into smearing, smearing, and smearing in the language of French dough. So instead of using force provided by your body, use the force provided by gravity to stretch, relax, and align those gluten strands and turn that yucky, sticky mess of flour and water into a ball of stretchy, supple, super-soft dough. Here's an illustrated guide for how to do it:
Lay the heels of your hands on the dough, both thumbs pointing to the left (or the right, if you like. Just be consistent). Be sure your hands are positioned so that your thumbs are close to the edge of the dough and there is plenty of dough visible on the other side of your hand. Get your fingers underneath the dough.
Pick up the dough with your thumbs now pointing up instead of to the left. Allow the dough to hang down and let gravity stretch it out.
With a little flip (and without letting go of the top half of the dough), put the dough on the counter so that the side of the dough that was facing you when it was suspended in mid-air is now in contact with the counter. The upper half of the dough will still be in your hands.
With another flip, fold the dough in half and let go. You've just completed on knead. As you become more practiced it will become a more fluid motion. Continue to work the dough until it is smooth, elastic, supple, and less sticky than it was originally.
None of the photos of the fully kneaded dough turned out, but the photo on the right shows it mostly kneaded, becoming smooth on the surface. Notice the huge difference between this and the shaggy unkneaded dough on the left.
During the kneading process, resist the urge to add too much flour to the countertop. The dough will still be a sticky mess and will get all over your hands, but only add more flour a tablespoon at a time if the dough is totally unworkable. Without a very wet dough you can't get the irregular, beautiful open crumb that is the hallmark of a good artisan bread.
After kneading, the dough will rise several times. This is another time when you don't handle the dough in the same way as a sandwich bread. Do not punch it down or deflate it. Instead you will stretch the dough out between your two hands. When you see this in pictures or on video it looks impossible, like no dough should be able to do that, but after a properly kneaded dough has risen for a little while it will be incredibly soft and elastic. It's very easy to stretch the dough out as shown below:
Once the dough is stretched, fold it into thirds like a business letter. Rotate the dough packet 90 degrees and stretch and fold as before. Return the dough to the bowl and continue with the recipe. Best of luck to you!
Many thanks to my Mom for taking these photos while I handled the dough. This tutorial wouldn't have been possible without her help.
For more fantastic information on baking artisan breads, buy the King Arthur Flour Baker's Forum DVD.
"Ugh! I hate Italian pizza! It's so gross! It's not even Italian, it was invented in New York! Let me eat the pizza at Boston's, it's so good!"
Wait for it....
KA-BLAMMO!
Yep. That was my head exploding.
It exploded not for just one, but three very good reasons.
1. Hating Italian pizza is impossible. The ingredients are so fresh and the results so simple that it's quite simply easier to divide by zero than to hate it.
2. I'm not a food anthropologist, but I'm gonna call shenanigans on pizza originating in New York. The research I've done shows that it in fact came from Naples. It's funny how a place can do such great things (invent pizza) and such monumentally stupid things (like stop collecting all the garbage so it piles up to third story windows). But I digress.
3. Boston's pizza (god, I feel dirty typing in that URL for that link) is disgusting. You all know that I get pissed about paying good money for bad food, and not much makes me angrier than having to go there and pay the bill. In fact, the first time I ever went there (my bosses love it so we go there all the time for working lunches, much to my chagrin) I was sitting across from someone who had just read a few of my thoughts on restaurants and he could tell on the look on my face that I was livid about paying seventeen bucks for a shitty meal that I could have made one hundred and twenty times better by just lifting a finger and giving a shit about the food I was preparing. Anyway, their pizza is even worse than that first meal - a salmon caesar salad - that I had: the cheese was laid on way too thick and rubbery as only really bad American-made mozzarella can be, the crust suffered from being stuffed with ten times as much yeast as it needed to rise which made it utterly bland and sour, and the basil - this was supposedly pizza Margherita - was DRIED. DRIED, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???
*steps aside to breathe for a moment.... long deep breaths....*
Ok, I apologize for that "Oh FUDGE!" moment there. I just get sent into spasms of anger when I think about that place. Let's get back to my happy place, and for me right now, that happy place is homemade pizza, even if, no matter how hard you try, it's not quite like the Italians make it.
For some reason I don't make pizza as much as I should. There's really no reason not to - I have a wealth of dough recipes whose prep times vary from 24 hours to 90 minutes. My pantry is always stocked with the requisite ingredients for the crust and toppings. I even have two 8-inch pizza stones, perfect for a cozy binge-free pizza night. But for some reason, I just... don't.
Well, I had been craving good pizza for a couple of weeks and last Friday it because wholly apparent that that night was the night. The stars were aligned - the grocery stores were hemorrhaging fresh (FRESH! Not DRIED!) basil, I had plenty of fresh mozzarella in my fridge, and I had made a batch of marinara the night before. All I had to do was find a dough recipe.
So I called up my Mom. When I talk to him on the weekends, it's not uncommon for my Dad to give me a rundown of the pizza my Mom made the previous Friday and for him to gush about how her pizza gets better every single week. No dice on the recipe from the Mom front though - she was really busy with some elderly relatives, no big deal, it's not like she's the sole source of pizza dough ever (though I still want her recipe!). So at one point, needing to get my current events fix, I brought up NPR and lo and behold, on their rotating blurbs about featured stories, was a Kitchen Window ad, whose topic just so happened to be pizza. It was like the skies had parted and I was sitting in my own little personal ray of sunlight. I was fated to make pizza that night. The gods had willed it to be so.
So when I got home, I got to work on my pizza. After the dough was done rising, I attempted to get the dough nice and thin, but the thing about kneading is that it make dough very elastic. Every time I stretched out the dough it just shrank right back up. I eventually adopted the mannerisms of a, well, special Italian, trying to toss this tiny disc of dough up into the air, catch it on one finger, and let gravity do the work. It certainly worked better than countertop stretching, but clearly, my method needs work if I am to continue to aspire to Italian-standard thinness.
Thicker-crust-than-desired aside, this pizza was marvelous! I loved the warm, garlicky, basily sweetness of the sauce, topped with just a bit of mozzarella a plenty of fresh torn basil, all atop a crispy, grain-flavored crust. That pizza was not long for this world, and though I expect that it would have made a mean cold pizza breakfast, it never got the opportunity to prove itself. But even though I loved the process, the experience, and the taste so much, I think the best thing that came out of it was the inspiration to try again with a myriad of toppings. That's one of the best things about pizza - almost anything is a choice candidate to grace your pie, so you're only limited by your imagination.
And if you still think the pizza from Boston's is better than this, well, do us both a favor and don't ever talk to me about food. Unless, of course, you like watching my head explode.
Click here for the recipe for "Pizza Margherita, take due" »
Tonight was Cooking Binge Night (bread, muffins, sandwich meat, chicken cacciatore, minestone soup, oatmeal...). I'm going to be starting a very unpleasant work week tomorrow night and will have zero time for cooking so I had to get it all done tonight.
Last night I was supposed to start a batch of bread and let it do its twenty-four hour thang. But sleepier heads prevailed and I went to bed without so much as pulling the yeast out of the fridge.
Y'know, it must be a pretty sweet life to be yeast. Just think about it: you're born, you go to sleep, then you get woken up with huge feast and you eat like crazy for a couple of hours, and then you die. Along the way, it's not only normal and accepted to, well, burp and fart, it's required.
Yep, those little critters have it pretty good. Don't let anyone tell you that being a single-celled organism is dull.
But I digress.
So I finally got around to starting the bread tonight. I had forgotten to put oatmeal or any other grain on so that was right out and needed to find a recipe make. I was tempted by my herbs de provence loaf but realized that the only blend I had on hand was the one with anise. Yuck. So I took a page from L'Aroma and settled on a rosemary loaf.
As I was kneading and shaping (and waiting) I was thinking about how I would post this (I know, I'm such a nerd). I was originally going to post it as a variation on the herbs de provence loaf, but....
See, the loaves came out of the oven, and they were exceptional. They rose impossibly high - so high that the bread was so light that I had to slice very carefully so I didn't smoosh it. And the flavor - I can't believe it, it's so delicious. The wheat brings out the best in the rosemary - even though I used a very heavy hand with the herb the flavor is well-rounded, delicate, and almost sweet. I never thought I'd say it, but I think my version is way better than L'Aroma's Pan Marino. Theirs is a white bread with sea salt sprinkled on top and I really think the rosemary needs something more than refined flour. Rosemary is a fantastic herb, but really, it's not that good on it own. It needs something to support its flavors. I've known that for a while, but I never would have guessed that whole wheat would be the perfect complement.
Click here for the recipe for "Whole wheat rosemary bread" »
There is something about baking a pastry - a real, from-scratch, layered bit of flaky dough - that makes you feel like a total badass.
Let's face it, pastries have a pretty formidable reputation. They're certainly not in the "if you can boil water you can handle this" category. I've always had a huge soft spot for croissants, but there is another indulgence - the humble Danish pastry - that has a special, sentimental significance to me.
If there was ever a recipe for me to cut my pastry chef teeth on, this one had to be it.
See, this is another recipe that is near and dear to my heart. Like beef burgundy, my family has been eating these delicacies around holidays since I can remember. Perhaps even more significant, my Mom has been eating them ever since she can remember. When she was a kid, her next-door neighbor (the eponymous Mrs. B) would bring them over each Christmas Eve so that their family could chow down on them the next day. Before my parents' wedding my Mom had a kitchen shower where the guests brought treasured recipes to give to her. Mrs. B brought this.
So when, as I mentioned earlier, Cory and I were in the midst of forging our own traditions, these little gems were so in. I made my very first batch sans supervision this last Christmas (my previous foray being the year before when my Mom was visiting for Thanksgiving) and on the morning of Cory and I ate like royalty, feasting on the light, fluffy, and delicate (both in flavor and texture) yumminess.
I will warn that this is not the easiest recipe I've ever posted. In fact, if you lack the proper patience it's probably actually the hardest I've shared thus far. So with that in mind, use a light hand when folding the dough - you don't want to tear it. If it happens, don't hesitate to pinch the dough closed and put the dough in the fridge since it will start oozing butter. So take your time, enjoy being a real-life badass pastry chef, and enjoy the end result even more!
Imagine 100% whole grain bread bought from the grocery store: bland, bitter, gross.
Now, I'd like you to completely forget that.
Instead, I'd like you to imagine a bread that's fluffy, tender, mellow, rich, and complex.
That bread is also 100% whole grain. The difference? It's been made by hand with a secret ingredient -- cooked oatmeal. This bread is outstanding for all purposes but makes a singularly spectacular sandwich -- especially when paired with homemade roasted chicken, red leaf lettuce, and tomatoes.
As I write this, there are a couple of loaves rising in the kitchen. I practically start to salivate when I think about the utter sensory bliss that this bread will bring about. I often wonder why I bother making any other recipes at all -- this one is that good.
I first got trapped in this recipe's tractor beam one day while flipping through my favorite baking book, Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. Here's what the author has to say about this particular bread:
"When ... made with rolled oats, the bread is light and bright; it has a rich creamy flavor -- very subtle, but with great warmth... You get bread good for toast, good for any kind of sandwich. We consider this one of the best basic breads for everyday eating."
Hear, hear! They speak the truth -- this bread performs as advertised! Let me know if you need convincing... you may just end up with a loaf or two on your hands.
Click here for the recipe for "100% whole grain oatmeal bread" »
This bread is one of those jewels in my culinary collection: impossibly simple to prepare yet impossibly delicious, it's a great recipe to pull out when you want to serve homemade bread so fresh it's still crackling from the oven and impress your guests with your bread-baking prowess. One of the reasons this bread is perfect in this role is because when you're attempting to impress guests with the previously mentioned baking prowess, you're likely trying to impress them with other aspects of your general kitchen prowess and don't really have time to mix and knead and ferment and deflate and knead and rise and delfate and shape and proof and bake your bread. Count those steps! Just count them! While perfectly reasonable for your weekly or bi-weekly sandwich needs, it's a bit excessive when you're simultaneously trying to prepare a four-course authentic Italian meal for seven guests.
In steps the Magic Bread: the bread that has much more flavor than its four-ingredient recipe would imply and that gets those amazing "look at me and how much I rise" holes in the crumb without you ever so much as flouring a countertop or stuffing in two tablespoons of yeast. As an added bonus, the fermentation time is flexible. I often let the dough sit for longer than the recommended time, which is something you can get away with even better if you put it in a cooler place.
So, in short, this is a bread to impress. I recently served it at a dinner for friends, and one of my friends was amazed at the artisanal crust. "How did you get your crust like this?" he asked.
"Oh," I said, "I put it in a Dutch oven."
And let's just say that when your friends haven't ever heard of the cookware made famous by Le Crueset but they do associate the Dutch oven with the famous method to terrorize your spouse in bed via olafactory means, that is the most impressive answer of all.
Since I've discovered all of the wonderfully yummy things you can do with bread, making plain ol' whole wheat just seems so... blasé. You can add herbs or bulgar wheat or seeds or oats or hundreds of other things. So when I got back from my honeymoon I wanted to make something delicious, but since I was tired I didn't want it to be too taxing. I was looking for the ease that comes with familiarity with a recipe.
I first gravitated towards an herb bread I've made before. That particular recipe is labeled as a good soup bread because it will rise and bake and give you a wonderfully high-rising loaf in about the time it takes to make a pot of soup, but there was so much yeast in it (how else could you get such eye-pleasing results that quickly without it?) that it was very sour and not very yummy.
So, I'll admit it -- I took the basic whole wheat bread I've posted here and just added herbs to it. There is something special about it though -- this bread is the first I'd used the long-rise methods with. I was simply amazed with the results! Allow me to extoll the virtues of long-fermented bread once again:
The dough was a joy to work with. It was soft, supple, contained plenty of air to press out during deflating, rounding, and shaping, and shaped more easily than any loaf I've ever formed. It also filled out the loaf pan completely -- all the way to the corners -- something no yeast dough of mine has done before.
In short, this loaf defied my already raised expectations. I had looked forward to a loaf with superior flavor but stiff dough and a lackluster rise. Instead, I feel like I'm eating bread like it is supposed to be now -- light, airy, wholesome, with great texture, flavor, and shape. Consider me a long dough convert! (A note: my bread-baking methods have improved considerably since this picture was taken -- I now achieve oven spring with each loaf. Next time I bake it I'll post a new picture of the impossibly high-risen loaf.)
Click here for the recipe for "Whole wheat bread with herbs de provence" »
Bread baking has become a bit of an obsession of mine. As I mentioned in my writeup for The Herbed Bird, I started doing it around Thanksgiving when I got really, really tired of store-bought bread and realized that I could probably do a much better job myself.
Well, I turned out to be right. Since I had never kneaded before and didn't have anyone to show me how to do it, it took me a couple of months to really figure out what the heck I was doing. My first couple of loaves were, well, bricks, but they were much better tasting bricks than the stuff you buy from the grocery store! I probably wasn't doing myself any favors by skipping the refined flour either -- ask just about anyone who bakes bread and they'll tell you that whole wheat bread is much more difficult to make. I didn't care -- I was going to make delicious whole wheat bread and that was final.
I did see many improvements in my bread over time, as my mom came to visit and showed me how to knead, as I read more on the subject, and finally, as I bought the cookbook that taught me just about everything that matters about whole-grain bread baking, Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. The acquisition of my Kitchen Aid stand mixer might have something to do with it too. Once all that came together, I started making what I would consider very good bread.
About a month ago though, I started making what I would call outstanding bread. I credit this entirely to the low temperatures long-rise method outlined in the book mentioned above. By letting the dough ferment for 24 hours instead of the usual 3, you get incredibly light dough whose flavors have developed marvelously without any of that sour taste that is so often found in bread. Let me assure you that you do not need to stuff two teaspoons of yeast into your dough to get your loaf to rise! I also find it much easier to fit this rising-deflating pattern into my daily life. I can make bread any day of the week with this method because I do not need to block off six hours to attend to dough that must be deflated every hour or so. Another bonus: for reasons that I can't explain, the loaf is more nutritious and keeps longer than its rushed cousin.
So what are you waiting for??? Go make this loaf! I find it's perfect for anything from sandwiches to toast to eating with soup to dipping in olive oil. You (and anyone you bestow this magnificent loaf upon) can thank me later.
