stacey . smoore . the staceyfish . 
Life in a Northern Town: the exploits of an ecstatic Alaskan
Lens: the adventures of a girl and her camera
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!
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!
Right now I've got bagels for the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge retarding in the fridge, but I decided that I'm kinda overdosing on all that white flour and it's high time that I posted a whole grain bread. This particular bread is one of my favorites for its challenges, its fun, and its textures and I can't believe that it's taken me more than two years to get around to sharing it.
First, its challenges: this bread contains a lot of chewy, delicious bulgar wheat berries. However, all those grains can really get in the way with the formation of long gluten strands. As a result, I don't usually achieve the humongous rise that my basic whole wheat and oatmeal loaves have spoiled me with, but really, it's ok - the flavor more than makes up fr it! Also, this dough is very soft and slippery (more on that later), which means that if you start daydreaming while you're supposed to be focusing on push, fold, rotate, push, fold, rotate, then it could end up shooting across the room. Now, the last challenge: occasionally the dough will tear, freeing an avalanche of bulgar across the kneading board. Not to worry, you'll learn soon enough how to poke the grains back into the dough, conceal the tear with a couple of folds, and keep kneading like a pro. Crisis managed!
Secondly, this dough is a lot of fun. This was my first truly enriched bread and it uses a novel way to incorporate the butter into the dough: you smear it across the board and let the dough soak it up as you knead! It's pretty ingenious, and if it wasn't for the bulgar dotting the surface of the dough it would be the poster child for satiny and supple. It also makes the dough very soft, so if you're looking for the culprit causing the above challenges, look no further.
Thirdly, the texture of this bread is just out of this world. In addition to the butter doing marvelous things to the taste and texture, the buttermilk acts as a dough conditioner, making it even lighter, more complex, and more delicate tasting. Throughout baking, the bulgar keeps its toothy texture and it even makes me want to nibble at the bread little by little, picking out the grains so I can eat them separately. If you can tear yourself away from eating it plain, it's pretty devastating on a sandwich piled high with some home-roasted chicken and some fresh produce.
So if you're in the mood for a whole-grain bread that is still wholesome and delicious but puts a new spin on the old formula, try this recipe on for size. It's well worth the effort!
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.
Ain't life grand when you have the luxury of throwing a pizza in the oven on a Friday night? And isn't it even better when that pizza is homemade? We definitely hold by that line in our house.
I've always eschewed the line "Even when it's bad, it's still pizza" (quit rolling your eyes, I know that comes as no surprise whatsoever if you've even spent two minutes reading this blog) and I take great joy in making every component for my pizza that I can. Really, it's the only way you know you're going to get a good one.
I love to use pesto as a base for pizza, especially in the summer. Few things give me more pleasure than shearing my basil plants (Fred has recovered from his confined-to-a-pot days and is loving all the room he has to stretch his roots, for those of you who had met him when he wasn't looking so hot), bringing the green stuff inside, and pulling the leaves off the stems. It fills the kitchen with a wonderful aroma!
The only problem with fresh pesto is that it's really easy to overdo it on the garlic, especially if you're like me and habitually triple - at a minimum - the amount of the tasty stuff called for in a recipe. Luckily, I ran across a technique with which you toast the unpeeled garlic cloves on the stove to mellow out that bite it's known for. It works like a charm and I no longer have to work about whether or not I'm going to OD on garlic. You just have to make sure to toast up enough so that you have extra to put on top of the pizza!
The only thing left to do is to load it up with other high-quality ingredients. Once you've done all of this, you'll have created a pizza night to remember!
You may be sad because summer has come to an end, taking with it delightful foods like nectarines, plums, berries, and locally grown vegetables like greens, cauliflower, chard, beets, and carrots.
But don't fret! Fall has its place in a foodie's heart because it brings delights like root vegetables, butternut squash, pumpkins, an untold number of apple varieties, Bartlett pears, and pomegranates.
I recently celebrated fall by having a harvest dinner (suggested by my most wise and venerable husband). On the menu was a roasted pear salad with candied walnuts, blue cheese, and homemade balsamic vinaigrette, cabernet-glazed shallots, butternut squash risotto with wilted spinach and toasted pine nuts, sauteed pork tenderloin with an apple-sage sauce, and stuffed baked Jonagold apples with vanilla bean ice cream for dessert. I love this menu -- it's so autumn-y with its warm, subtle flavors and unifying themes. Sage and apple are present in many of the dishes but are different and subtle enough to not get old or tiring. And as my guests pointed out last night, there's plenty of booze in every dish! So dig in and get to love autumn as much as I do, and share it with some good friends too.
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, minestrone 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. It's even better when you use fancy leftover oatmeal that's been cooked with cinnamon and buttermilk - the cinnamon complements the bread in a savory way somehow and manages to not remind you at all of sweet cinnamon raisin bread, and the buttermilk conditions the dough to give it a special tenderness. It's just utterly fabulous and unique - you won't find anything like it in a bakery!
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.
