breadbasketcase

Cream Cheese Cinnamon Buns

2012-01-09T20:04:00.000-06:00

This is the 15th year we've invited people in our neighborhood to casual coffee-and-doughnut hours on Saturday mornings in January. We have pots of coffee, juices for the little ones, and platters of doughnuts. I usually make something homemade in addition to the doughnuts, and last Saturday it was these cinnamon rolls, courtesy of King Arthur's web site.

The cream cheese isn't added to the dough, and it's not in the frosting. Instead, it's layered on the rolled-out dough (letting it soften at room temperature for at least two hours is an excellent idea).

Then it's folded, business-letter style, and rolled out again. This process is repeated again until the cream cheese is more or less absorbed into the dough. (I thought it could have used another turn because I could still see a layer of cream cheese, but I was afraid it would toughen the dough).

Here comes the filling. Either something called Baker's Cinnamon Filling, which King Arthur will be happy to sell you, or your own mixture of butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon. (The Baker's Cinnamon Filling has shortening instead of butter). I used butter. Finally, sprinkle both chopped walnuts AND pecans over the filling, and roll 'er up.

The recipe is supposed to make nine rolls, which you place in a 9" x 9" baking dish. I put nine in an 8" x 10" pan, which, if my math skills are at all accurate, is almost exactly the same area. I don't think it gave them enough room to expand properly because they looked a little squinched when they came out of the oven.

I still had three left over, and I put those in a little round casserole.

A basic powdered sugar/milk glaze is not really very exciting, but it added just the right touch of sweetness. Despite all the brown sugar in the filling, the rolls were not very sweet, and needed just a touch of the frosting that can sometimes be cloyingly sweet. Just a drizzle is enough.

The rolls were still just the slightest bit doughy in the middle, meaning they should have either had more room to spread or I could have baked them just two minutes more. The most heavenly part about these rolls is the crusty corners, which are flaky and tender at the same time. With the nuts, extravagant amounts of butter and cream cheese, and brown sugar, these are like the best parts of both sticky buns and cinnamon buns, rolled (literally) into one delicious treat. And the nice thing is that you can make them at night and simply take them out of the refrigerator, let them warm up a bit, and bake them in the morning. When guests open your front door, they'll be hit with the welcoming scent of cinnamon rolls. They'll be your slaves.

Rustic Dinner Rolls - and a New Year's Eve Dinner

2012-01-01T17:05:00.069-06:00

I've started watching America's Test Kitchen, and I'm fascinated by its best-recipe, try-it-again approach to cooking. It's fascinating to me because it's the opposite of the way I cook. Once I finish a recipe, I don't think about how to make it better; I think about what I'm going to try next. This is pretty obviously not the superior method since it means I never perfect anything. But I do get a lot of variety.

Because I was assigned the salad course (more on that later) for our annual progressive New Year's Eve party, I wanted to make a bread or roll that would be a good accompaniment. I'd seen one of the cooks on ATK work her little heart out on these rolls, so I figured they'd be just the thing. I also liked that they were made with a wet dough that, unlike Norm's Onion Rolls, would not burn out the motor of my new KitchenAid.

The rolls, titled Rustic Dinner Rolls, are pretty straightforward, although they do have some typical ATK quirks, born of their obsessive testing and re-testing.

For example: 3 tablespoons of whole wheat flour, no more no less. This is supposedly just the right amount to get a "nice earthiness." If I were an obsessive tester myself, I'd try again with no WW flour and once again with a half-cup. They had a good flavor, though, so maybe there's no point to further experimentation.

The biggest quirk of this roll recipe is starting them out in round cake pans, so they grow together in their first ten minutes of baking.

Then, lightly browned, they come out of the oven and get turned over on a baking sheet, until they're cook enough to be separated. This initial baking is done at 500 degrees, to increase the amount of oven spring. Then another 10-15 minutes at 400 degrees.

To my surprise, because of the trust I place in ATK, mine didn't spring very high. They actually look a lot like the photo that shows what happenes to a roll when you don't give it that burst of intense heat: they're flat and hockey-pucky, not tall and springy. In ATK's defense, I think this may have happened because I ran out of bread flour after measuring out about a third of the flour. (How does it happen that a bread blogger runs out of bread flour?)

Because these rolls were almost perfect, I'll admit that I'd kind of like to try them again, using all bread flour this time. But I already have a full list of breads to try for the first time, so I don't know when, if ever, I'll return to the rustic dinner rolls made with three tablespoons of whole wheat flour.

Some readers, who have been reading this blog for years (people, don't you have anything better to do with your time?), may remember that our New Year's Eve tradition is to have a neighborhood progressive dinner. When Jim remembers, he photographs the courses. I think he's only remembered once.

This dinner started out at the Niemiecs' house for appetizers. Appetizers are my downfall (I probably should say one if my many downfalls). I love having a little savory bite, or, let's face it, a lot of largish savory bites. Joan made a platter of crisp vegetables,

smoked salmon with onions and capers,

and spinach balls.

Then we moved to the soup house, which belongs to the Beiers. Master soup-maker Betty B. made leek and mushroom soup topped with brie toasts.

The third course was at our house. In addition to the rustic rolls, I made a fennel, watercress, and blood orange salad with champagne vinaigrette.

The piece-de-resistance was Beef Wellington, by Laurel Deloria, who has never found a recipe she's afraid to tackle.

She was also not afraid to tackle a Madeira sauce (delicious).

The Papanicolaous thoughtfully provided bowls of beautiful vegetables, so that we could delude ourselves into thinking we were eating healthily. (There was also an unpictured bowl of green beans).

Jim got a new timer for his camera so that he could take a picture of the whole group, including himself. However, he neglected to read the directions, and he never did get it to work, so he finally gave up and took a picture of everyone but Jim.

Unfortunately, he was so flummoxed by this photography failure that he completely forgot to take a picture of the dessert prepared by Doug Logeland: lemon tart with chocolate crust. Too bad, because it was a memorable finale to a great dinner.

And a happy new year to you all!

Norm's Onion Rolls

2011-12-05T21:23:00.000-06:00

My friend and (sometime) fellow blogger, Chris from Rhode Island, recently asked me if I knew about The Fresh Loaf.
Well, in fact, I do know about it, but Chris's note reminded me that I hadn't visited the site for many months. So visit it I did, and came away with this recipe for Norm's Onion Rolls.

People on The Fresh Loaf raved about Norm's Onion Rolls. And I'm going to rave about them too, but I will say that Norm could write clearer recipes. And if I were a good and responsible blogger, I would make these several more times, and I would edit the recipe until it was understandable. But I'm not good and responsible, so I will link to the recipe as is, and if you make them, you'll probably have the same questions I did, but since mine came out just fine, I'll bet yours will too.

This makes a very thick dough. In fact, my trusty KitchenAid stopped dead in its tracks. I quickly turned it off, hoping that it would recover. I haven't re-tested it yet.

Oh, this is bad. After I wrote that sentence, I decided I couldn't keep myself in the dark about whether I had a working stand mixer. So I went to my kitchen to try it out. It's not working well. Now I've put Jim in charge of seeing if he can use his duct tape method of repair to fix it right up. Otherwise I might have to tell him that he'll be getting a new Kitchenaid for Christmas. (I already have my presents picked out, so I'm afraid it will have to go on his list. That's what happens when you're slow to make your list).

But before you get to the dough-rising stage, you have made the onion mixture. Oddly, you don't want to use real onions. Instead, you buy a jar of dehydrated onions, which you would probably normally not consider using in real food. At least this is what Norm recommends, and so it's what I did. You soak the dried onions for a while, then drain them, reserving the onion-soaking water for the bread dough.

Then you divide the dough into 3-oz. or 4-oz. balls, depending on how big you want your rolls. Mine were in the neighborhood of 4 ounces, and I got 13 rolls. At this point, the recipe got a little unclear. You make mini boules, and, at some point, you let the dough rest again. I couldn't tell whether Norm wanted me to let the dough rest before shaping it into boules, or after, or at what point he thought I should cover the dough with the onion-poppy seed mixture. I shaped them first and let them rest for 20 minutes or so.

Also, the recipe says to use your thumb to make a dimple on top of the rolls. I thought that meant I should put the filling inside the dimple. But I think I was supposed to flatten the dough while pressing the roll into the onion mixture and then make the dimple. I now believe that the dimple actually has no utilitarian value (such as serving as a nest for the onions)--it's just the way it is. But I could be wrong. Perhaps if someone who is familiar with these New York-style rolls reads this, they can give me some advice, preferably not beginning with, "Breadbasketcase, don't you know how to read?"

This is what they looked like going into the oven:

And this is what they looked like coming out:

These are not ladylike rolls. Even if you made them smaller, there's something very hefty and satisfying about them. If I had flattened them more, and pressed the onion mixture into the top of them, they would have been perfect for sandwiches. But as long as I didn't wonder how they compared to Norm's rolls, which have reached a nearly mythic stature among readers of The Fresh Loaf, I liked them exactly as they were--round, savory, and toothsome.

Grape Focaccia

2011-10-16T19:19:00.000-05:00

Time sure flies when you're not baking bread. I could not believe the last date on a blog entry--it couldn't possibly have been nearly two months since I made the Pan Cubano! And this bread had been on my radar ever since I saw the recipe in the New York Times on September 28, 2011. I picked some wild grapes in anticipation of baking this focaccia from a friend's vacation house, but they withered away in the refrigerator. Then I picked some Concord grapes from the same neighbor's city yard, and they too wrinkled and dried. Finally, I bought some red grapes from the grocery and made the bread the same day.

Really, there's no excuse not to. You're likely to have almost everything you need on hand: olive oil, yeast, flour, cornmeal, and sugar. You may, if you're lucky, have pine nuts in your freezer and fresh rosemary in your herb garden. If not, pick them up when you buy your grapes (or snitch your neighbor's grapes, if you're more organized than I am and you pilfer them at the appropriate time).

First, you gently heat some fresh rosemary in 72 grams (about 6 tablespoons) of olive oil. If you absolutely have to, you could use dried rosemary, but it won't be the same.

Then you simply mix everything but the toppings in a mixing bowl and knead for about five minutes, using the dough hook. Feel free to knead by hand if it makes you happy, but it's easier to knead this wet dough with a hook. You can take it out of the bowl and do the last minute or so of kneading by hand, making sure that you don't add too much flour.

Let it double in size. If you use all the yeast (two teaspoons) and let it rise in a warm place, it takes only about an hour. You can decrease the yeast and let it rise longer, or even let it rise twice. You'll get more flavor from the dough with less yeast and longer rising times, but it doesn't matter much in this focaccia, which has a lot of strong flavors--not just the grapes and rosemary, but also the cornmeal and sugar add different elements not usually in a flatbread.

Shape into a rectangle. No need to measure--this is supposed to be rustic.

And make sure you've dimpled the dough! Don't actually make holes in the dough--you don't want to break the bottom layer. Then scatter on the grapes, pine nuts, the reserved rosemary, a little sugar (I used turbinado), and sea salt. Then drizzle with olive oil (don't be chintzy with the oil), and bake on a parchment-lined pan. Hopefully you've remembered to put a baking stone in the oven and to preheat the oven to 400.

This bread didn't match Rose's rosemary focaccia, the gold standard of focaccia-ness. It was quicker and easier, though, and had a nice sweet/savory balance. The cornmeal was a good addition, and the big grains of sugar and salt made a fascinating mouth crunch, giving out big hits of sweet and salty in the same bite. I started making the bread at 3:15, and took it out of the oven at 5:20, just minutes before people started arriving for a Friday afternoon TGIF gathering. Cheetos and beer for one half of the block; wine and grape focaccia for the other. Who says we can't all get along?

Pan Cubano (Cuban Bread)

2011-08-23T20:07:00.000-05:00

Although I definitely haven't committed to making bread from every country in the world (in fact, every time I think of it, it seems to be a crazier idea). But I've noticed that ever since my friend David suggested this as a project, I've been drawn to any recipe with pan, pane, brood, pain, or brot in it. Luckily, I don't know how to recognize the word for "bread" in Russian, Arabic, or a host of other languages, so I haven't gone crazy. So far.

There are a couple of things about this bread that are unique, at least to me. First, it's made with lard, instead of butter or oil. The word on the label is actually "lard," not "ard." I checked all the dozen or so containers of lard to look for one that didn't say "ard," but I searched in vain. Apparently Clancey's printer doesn't do ls.

When I read the recipe for Cuban bread more closely, I saw that the recipe is actually for pan de manteca (lard bread) instead of pan de agua (water bread). Apparently pan de agua is more commonly sold in bakeries, but since I'd already bought the manteca, I was certainly going to use it.

Most of the 4 tablespoons of melted lard is mixed in the dough, but a bit is put on the top of the dough when it's put in a bowl to rise.

It's an enthusiastic riser, and takes only about an hour for it to double in size. Its second rise, done after it's shaped into loaves, is only 5 to 7 minutes--really a rest rather than a rise.

Unlike a ciabatta with poolish, say, this bread has no pre-ferment and short rising times, which makes it a good recipe to know about when you have a mid-afternoon urge to make bread and you want it for dinner.

Another thing that makes this bread unique is its decoration with bay leaves, tucked in the slashes. If you don't have bay leaves, you don't have to run out and buy a jar--they're not essential to the success of the bread. But if you have them, you might as well use them, especially if you suspect that they've been lolling around on your spice rack for years and it's probably time to replace them with leaves that smell like bay.

But the most unique thing about this recipe by far is that it starts in a cold, but steamy, oven. That's right--no preheating. Just a pan full of boiling water. For some reason, starting the bread in a cold oven makes it so steamy that the door is covered with condensation and you can't see in the oven. I'd love to know why the Cubans, unlike everyone else in the history of bread, decided to start theirs in a cold oven. Maybe this is just an eccentric recipe, but I'd rather think that there's a good story behind this method.

At some point in the afternoon, it occurred to me that if I had two loaves of Cuban bread, I should use at least one of them to make Cuban sandwiches. I sliced part of a loaf in half (sans the bay leaves), spread mustard on each half, and layered ham, roast pork, baby Swiss, and sliced dill pickles on the bottom half.

I was going to use my almost-never-used panini maker, but I read someplace that a true Cuban sandwich should never be made in a panini maker, so I put it on a griddle and weighed it down with a heavy pan. Then I put another heavy pan on top of the first one. Then I put my tea kettle on top of the second heavy pan. Definitely not authentic, but it worked, although I don't understand why the panini maker is verboten.

This sandwich was so good, and so easy to make--assuming you have all the necessary ingredients, it goes together in no time. It's an odd combination of ingredients, but it works. I like to picture the same Cuban grandmothers who decided to bake bread in a cold, steamy oven, also standing around arguing about what to put on the bread. I think that they couldn't agree, so they each just shouted out their favorite food: Mustard! Pork! Cheese! Then they stuffed it in their just-baked bread, heated it up, and ate it. They were in hog heaven. Or, as they say in Cuba (maybe), paraíso de los cerdos.

Ciabatta with Poolish

2011-08-14T13:56:00.000-05:00

I made another version of ciabatta about two years ago, when I made a very similar recipe from the same book: Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman. Two years ago, I reported this conversation:

Jim looked at the cookbook and asked me if I was making ciabatta with poolish. "No," I said, "I'm making the one with the biga." "What's the difference between biga and poolish?" he asked. "Ummm," I said, "well, you know." "No, I don't," he said. I didn't want to admit I really didn't know the difference myself. I searched my memory. "Well, you ferment them ahead of time and add them to the dough. And poolish means Polish. I think." I finally looked it up, and there's not a huge difference, except that a biga is a more generic term for a pre-ferment and can be soft or stiff in texture, and can be refrigerated up to three days, whereas a poolish is never refrigerated.

So this time I made ciabatta with the non-refrigerated, soft poolish. It was very good. But I see that I reported that the ciabatta made with stiff biga was also very good. This made me realize why I'm not a true baker: I'm not scientific. I don't keep at a recipe until I've perfected it. I'm haphazard. I make ciabatta when I feel like it, which seems to be about every six months, judging by a search for "ciabatta" on my blog. On the other hand, I get to make ciabatta when I feel like it.

Please don't be intimidated by the foreign, exotic-sounding poolish, or by the make-ahead nature of it. The poolish could not be easier to make: you mix up water, flour, and a smidgen of yeast with a wooden spoon. Then you cover it with plastic wrap and go to bed. (You actually don't have to go to bed. You just have to leave the poolish alone for 12 to 16 hours, so if you are younger than I am and have more entertaining things to do with your time on Saturday night, feel free. I went to bed). When you get up (or get home, if you've had an exciting time of it), the poolish is bubbly and ready to go.

And don't be intimidated by the rest of the bread dough; that's simple too. It's just mixing the poolish into more bread flour, water, and yeast. If you want to be intimidated by something, you can worry about working with the outcome of the easy mixing: a very wet, very sticky dough, that is, according to Hamelman, so delicate that it might collapse if you sneeze. Now those are words to intimidate.

And you get plenty of opportunity to handle it. The first rise is about three hours, but you're supposed to take it out of its bowl, watching it slowly and silently plop onto the counter, and fold it into thirds, then carefully put it back in the container.

Next in the process--shape it into the typical oblong, flour-coated ciabatta loaves. The home version of the recipe makes three loaves. I cut the recipe in half, but made two smallish loaves. I should have made 2/3 of the recipe, but dividing by 3 is harder than dividing by 2, which was already taxing my limited math abilities.

What with the stickiness of the dough and the dire warnings about collapsing, I'm always surprised that the dough manages to shape itself into loaves that more or less look how they're supposed to look. It helps that they're supposed to look kind of rough-hewn.

If you want a super-crispy crust, you can do some kind of steam contraption. Depending on my mood, I toss ice cubes on a preheated cookie sheet, pour boiling water in a preheated cookie sheet, or use my steamer. I always use a baking stone when making a rustic kind of bread. Even if you don't want to do those things, though, I think the bread would still taste better than almost anything that you can buy, which is good because it goes stale very quickly.

Here is the recipe. As I mentioned, I divided it in half and got two rather small loaves. If you make the whole recipe, I recommend either giving some away or freezing at least one loaf because it just won't be as good the second day:

Ciabatta with Poolish
from Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman

POOLISH
9.6 oz. (2 1/4 cups) bread flour
9.6 oz. (1 1/4 cup) water
1/8 tsp. instant dry yeast

DOUGH
1 lb. 6.4 oz. (5 1/8 cups) bread flour
13.8 oz. (1 3/4 cups) water
.6 oz. (1 T.) salt
.13 oz. (1 1/4 tsp)instant dry yeast

1. POOLISH. Disperse the yeast in the water,, add the flour, and mix until smooth. Cover the bowl with plastic and let stand for 12 to 16 hours at room temperature.

2. MIXING. Add all the ingredients to the mixing bowl, including the poolish. In a stand mixer using a dough hook, mix on low speed for 3 minutes. Finish mixing on medium for 3 1/2 to 4 minutes, until gluten development is evidence. The dough will still be loose and sticky, but should have some "muscle".

3. FERMENTATION AND FOLDING. Put the dough in a mixing bowl sprayed with baker's spray. Fold the dough twice, after one hour and again after two hours.

4. DIVIDING AND SHAPING. Flour the work surface copiously. Invert the dough onto the work surface and pat out the larger air bubbles. Lightly flour the top surface of the dough. Cut the dough into 3 rectangles, weighing about 18 ounces each. Gently shape into rectangles. Place the dough piece onto floured bread boards (I used floured parchment paper). Cover the shaped dough with baker's linen and then plastic.

5. FINAL FERMENTATION. About 1 1/2 hours.

6. BAKING: Preheat oven to 460 degrees.
To transfer the proofed dough to a baker's peel, spread the fingers of both your hands. With a quick, deft stroke, invert the dough piece so that the side that was touching the bread board is now on top. Place one hand at each end of the dough piece, bring your fingers underneath, and pick it up. Here you will slightly punch the dough for easier transport; there should be wrinkles in the center of the loaf as the transfer it to the peel. [I just picked up the parchment paper and put it on top of a pre-heated baking stone--I'm using his instructions here just to show why I think they're hard to understand.) Fill the oven with steam, load the ciabattas, steam again, and bake for 34-38 minutes. (I used the steam machine; otherwise you can use either an ice cube or boiling water method to get steam. Hamelmans thinks you should use all three: ice cubes on a heated skillet before the bread goes in, boiling water on a heated pan when the bread goes in, and spritzing with water too). Lower the oven temperature by 10 or 20 degrees if bread is taking on too much color, but be sure not to underbake.
Remove the bread from the oven and let cool on a baking rack.

Cottage Cheese Dill Bread

2011-07-26T19:39:00.001-05:00

The first bread I ever baked was Dilly Casserole Bread, the winner of the 1960 Pillsbury Bake-Off. (This was back in the day, when contestants actually baked things from scratch instead of using cake mixes).

And when my daughter asked me for an easy bread recipe, I found the Dilly Bread recipe for her, because I knew she'd want something 1) with an interesting flavor and 2) that was dead easy to make. So naturally when I saw this slightly more sophisticated (that is, with 8 times as much butter) version of the original recipe, I wanted to try it.

Still dead easy. In fact, if you use instant yeast (a better invention than sliced bread), it's even easier because you can eliminate the process of proofing the yeast in liquid and can just dump everything in one bowl.

My current recipe, taken from Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland, by Beth Dooley and Lucia Watson, uses fresh dill (although you could also use dill seed). The fresh dill gives the bread a cleaner, livelier flavor than the dill seed. Even using 1/4 cup of fresh dill, I could see only traces when I sliced into the bread, but the taste was distinctly there.

The dough takes only about an hour and a half to rise; then it's flattened out, where it rests under a towel for about 20 minutes.

And shaped into a loaf. Maybe if I bake bread for another 20 or 30 years, I'll finally get the knack of making them level. I certainly won't be entering any listing loaves in the State Fair.

Jim asks me why I always want perfection. In turn, I ask him why he doesn't. It's just how marriages work.

I liked the dill taste, although it does limit the number of things this bread is appropriate for. (Breakfast toast with strawberry jam? Maybe not.) We ate it fresh from the oven with slices of cheese and sweet cherries for a mid-afternoon snack. I think it would be a dynamite base for egg-salad sandwiches, and would be good, if unusual, if shaped into dinner rolls. If you don't like dill, of course, you'll just want to move on to the next recipe.

Cottage Cheese Dill Bread
adapted from Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland,
by Beth Dooley and Lucia Watson

1 scant tablespoon instant yeast
1/4 cup (30 g.) warm water
2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup (225 grams) small curd cottage cheese
1.4 cup chopped fresh dill
1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter, softened
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking sodea
1 egg
3 cups (375 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour

Mix all ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the bread hook. Knead for about 8 minutes, until the dough is soft and smooth.

Put the dough into a greased bowl and cover loosely with a towel. Let it rise for about 1 1/2 hours, or until doubled in size.

Put the dough on the counter. Stretch into a rectangle and give two business-letter turns. Let rest for 10 minutes. Shape and place into a lightly greased 8- or 9-inch loaf pan, and let rise for another 30 minutes. Put the bread in a preheated 350-degree oven for about 40 minutes. Take the bread from the oven and let it cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a wire rack to cool.

R'ghayef (Moroccan multi-layered breads)

2011-07-12T21:32:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of my planned trip to Morocco in November, and with a bow to my friend who suggested that I bake a bread from every country in the world, I tried my hand at r'ghayef, a Moroccan layered bread. Apparently, this bread is a traditional street food in Morocco. If it is, good idea! I hope to look for it when I'm there, although, as Jim pointed out, it might be helpful for me to learn to pronounce it.

Not only is this bread mighty tasty, it's also the quickest yeast bread you'll ever make. So quick that we're missing a few process photos. Jim kept wandering off with his camera in tow because he expected he wouldn't have to take a picture for another hour or two. Little did he knew that this bread happens fast.

It's one of the few breads I've made where I didn't bother to get out my stand mixer, or even my food processor. Instead, I stirred the few ingredients together (AP flour, semolina (or durum) flour, yeast, and water; kneaded it for a few minutes, and topped it with the mixing bowl to give it 15 minutes to rest.

After it rests, you divide it into four pieces. (I halved the recipe so I could make just enough for dinner. They're best when they're just off the griddle). The pieces of dough rest while you're making the filling.

Since I'd already made the filling, I didn't let them rest. This was a mistake, since the dough is much more malleable after it's rested for about 10 minutes. So even if you're itching to get going, take a deep breath and go cut a bouquet of flowers or something. If you don't wait it out, the dough won't stretch nicely and will tear.

After it's patted out into a thin, oiled circle, put a dab of filling in the middle. The filling is made with chopped onion and parsley, cumin, paprika, red pepper flakes, and salt. I found that the dried spices gave the filling a raw flavor, and I think I'd substitute harissa for the spice mixture next time. But the flavors were great (and hot! I was liberal with the pepper flakes), and the onions (be sure to finely dice them) and parsley tasted fresh.

You fold the sides over so you have a rectangle, and then fold the top and bottom over to form a square.

Then you flatten them quite emphatically. You want them very thin because they're only going to cook a few minutes. They're ready to fry in a frying or griddle pan at this point, but I had to let them rest while I grilled some yogurt chicken with Moroccan spices. No harm seemed to come to them by their 10- to 15-minute rest.

These little breads are amazingly quick to "bake." They're cooked for a minute or two on each side in an oiled frying pan on medium high heat. They rise and bubble just a tad while they're cooking, and should be eaten as soon as possible. They're crisp, chewy, spicy, and absolutely delicious. While I served them with Moroccan-style chicken, they would pair with something less spicy--a quick summer salad with feta and olives or a winter vegetable soup. And they'd make toothsome appetizers too. You could certainly pare down the heat level by lessening or eliminating the red pepper flakes--I didn't measure, but I'm pretty sure I used about twice the recommended amount.

When I'm in Morocco, I'll have to make it my mission to search out various r'ghayefs and see whether mine came close to the authentic thing. I do love to have missions that involve tasting food.

R'ghayef (Moroccan Multilayered Breads)
--from Savory Baking from the Mediterranean, by Anissa Helou

Dough
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
1 cup unbleached AP flour (120 grams)
1 cup semolina (or durum) flour (120 grams)
1 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons warm water

Filling
1/2 onion, very finely chopped
1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (more or less, to taste)
Salt

Combine the flours, yeast, and salt in a large bowl andmake a well in the center. Add the yeast and mix with the flour until you have a rough, sticky dough.

Remove the dough to a lightly floured work surface. Sprinkle the dough with flour and knead for about 3 minutes. Invert the bowl over the dough and let rest for 15 minutes. Knead 2 to 3 minutes more, until the dough is smooth and elastic. Cover with a damp kitchen towel and let rest about 10 minutes.

Combine all filling ingredients in a medium bowl.

Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces. Oil a work surface and your hands. Flatten a ball by hand on the work surface into a very thin circle. Spread about one-eighth of the filling over the center of the circle. Fold the left third of the circle over the filling, then fld the right third over to omake a rectangle. Fold the top third over the bread and the bottom third under the bread to make a square about 5 inches on each side (mine turned out smaller than 5 inches at this point). Let rest while you make 3 more squares in the same manner. Flatten the squares of filled dough until they are quite thin.

Oil a large frying pan and place over medium-high heat. Place the squares in the hot pan, drizzling a little additional oil over the bread. Cook for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes on each side, until golden. Remove to parchment paper or a wire rack. When all breads from the first batch are cooked,kk shape, fill, and cook the remaining 4 breads. (I was able to cook 4 at one time, but I think the author envisions them as bigger and flatter than mine). Serve immediately.

Meini o Pani de Mei (Italian Sweet Corn Buns)

2011-07-01T08:26:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine asked me recently if I was still doing my bread blog. When I said I was, he asked if I hadn't made every possible kind of bread by now. I said there were many, many left to do. Then he suggested a new project: making a bread from every country in the world. I'm intrigued by this idea, but not enough to commit to it. And does every country have a signature bread? Andorra? The Seychelles?

But I have made breads from a fair number of countries already: Turkey, Puerto Rico, Norway....and, of course, France and Italy, the king and queen of bread-baking. This week, I turned once again to Carol Field's The Italian Baker for inspiration. Although I wasn't even thinking about making sweet corn buns, I was so taken by the description that I had to try them:

These sweet buns are a very delicat e cross between a corn muffin and a scone.... Meini are definitely a Lombard specialty, and the Milanese traditionally eat them on April 24 as a celebrfation of the liberation of their contryside from the assaults of a ferocious highwayman and his brigands during the Middle Ages.

Oh, how I love Italy! A country that celebrates being liberated from a highwayman by making a big batch of sweet, buttery, crumbly rolls! I just hope I remember this recipe next April 24, and that I make them again to mark Highwayman Liberation Day.

As a scone-ish, muffin-ish, cookie-ish hybrid, these are easy to mix up, especially if you use the whisk attachment to your stand mixer. With just over half a pound of butter, they really can't be bad, can they?

The ratio of white flour to cornmeal is about 3 to 2, which I figured should keep it from being too grainy. I like to taste of cornbread and muffins, but not if they're overly sweet, not sweet enough, not too crumbly, not too dry, not too insipid. It's a tough. but not impossible, bill to fill.

It ends up coming together a little like scone dough--rough and buttery.

A few seconds of kneading turns it from rough and buttery to smooth and buttery.

The dough is divided into about 15 90-gram pieces. I love weighing out pieces of dough. I'm not obsessive about it--if they're 89 or 91 grams, that's okay with me.

Form each piece into a ball, squish it down, and place it on a parchment-lined baking sheet. (You'll need two). Brush the tops with water, then sprinkle with granulated sugar. Finally, sift some confectioners sugar on top.

After about 15 minutes in the oven, or until the tops are cracked "into a pattern that looks like the land after a long dry summer, they're done.

These are really nice. You could Americanize them with the addition of, say, fresh blueberries or dried cranberries, but why bother? The Italians have been making them this way for about 500 years, and there's no need to mess with tradition. Not surprisingly, they go well with tea or coffee. More surprising, at least to me, was how good they tasted with a glass of wine. Have one with afternoon tea, another with a pre-dinner glass of wine, and freeze the rest for later. And be thankful your town isn't overrun with highwaymen.

Meini o Pani de Mei
--The Italian Baker, by Carol Field

•2 sticks plus 2 tablespoons (250 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
•1¼ cups (250 grams) granulated sugar
•2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons honey
•1 egg
•1 egg yolk
•½ cup plus 2 teaspoons milk
•3¼ cups (450 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
•1¾ cups plus 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon (300 grams) fine yellow cornmeal
•3½ teaspoons baking powder
•1/8 teaspoon almond extract
•About 1/3 cup (70 grams) granulated sugar
•½ cup (70 grams) confectioners’ sugar

Using the whisk attachment, beat the butter, sugar, and the honey for 1 to 2 minutes at low speed until combined. Increase the speed to medium-high and beat until light and fluffy. Add the egg, egg yolk, and 2 teaspoons milk and continue beating for 1 minute. Mix in the flour, cornmeal, and baking powder. Add ½ cup milk and the almond extract and mix at the lowest speed until blended. The dough should be stiff but not heavy. Knead briefly by hand or mixer, sprinkling with additional flour as needed, until buttery, soft, pliable, and slightly sticky.

Line baking sheets with parchment paper. Cut the dough into 15 equal pieces (90 grams each). Flour your hands and roll each piece into a ball. Flatten each ball into a ½-inch-thick patty, the size of a hamburger and the width of a woman’s hand. Place on the paper-lined baking sheets.

Brush the tops with water and then sprinkle with granulated sugar, making sure a thin layer of sugar covers each bun. You can shake off the excess sugar by holding on to the paper and shaking the sugar up and over the edge of the pan. Place the confectioners’ sugar in a sifter or sieve and sift the sugar heavily over the buns so that they look as if they’re lost in a blizzard of sugar. The excess powdered sugar can stay on the paper because it will not caramelize.

Heat oven to 375ºF. Bake until the sugar on top has cracked into an irregular design, 15 to 20 minutes. Cool on racks.

Far Breton

2011-06-10T15:41:00.000-05:00

Granted, this is not a bread. It's not even a cake, exactly. It's more like a clafoutis, except it's made with prunes soaked in Armagnac, rather than with cherries. It's the national dessert of Brittany, where I just spent a vacation, and it was so good I wanted to try making it myself. (I have also wanted to try making crepes, the other famous food of Brittany, but am more intimidated by that).

Brittany's butter is world-famous, according to the Butter Council of Brittany. It's lightly salted, whereas most French butter is unsalted. At my local grocery store, there was no Beurre de Bretagne, but there was Normandy butter. Unsalted. I settled for that. I hope that Brittany and Normandy aren't arch-rivals, like Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Let me say a word in favor of the much-maligned prune. Even as a child, I understood that there was something faintly ridiculous about a prune. Only grandparents ate prunes, which were always called "stewed prunes." I understood that they did it for some vaguely shameful health reason, and I knew that I would never get so old that I'd order stewed prunes at a restaurant. So maligned are they that prune manufacturers have taken to marketing them as "dried plums," because plums aren't tainted fruit, as prunes are. Cherries aren't tainted either, so clafoutis is considered acceptable. But (non-stewed) prunes are delightful. Really, they are! Eating them won't make you old. (I was old before I ate them). In this recipe, they're cooked in water until the liquid has nearly boiled away.

Then you pour on some Armagnac (or other brandy). I used Calvados, again opting for a product from Brittany's neighbor to the north. You light a match to the brandy, which flames up quite dramatically, but harmlessly. It's very difficult to get a picture of a flame; if you look very closely at the above picture, though, you can see a hint of a flame. (Contrary to common wisdom, it appears that flaming or boiling down alcohol will not remove all the alcohol from the food, so this is a dish that should probably not be served to someone who avoids alcohol).

The custard/cake, however, is so wholesome that anyone, even a baby, could eat it: it's just eggs, butter, flour, milk, sugar, and a little vanilla. I used a recipe from epicurious.com, but there are many similar recipes available on the internet and in books. I followed the recipe exactly except that I omitted the raisins, so the dessert could be an unsullied ode to prunes.

It came out of the oven looking poofier than a quiche and less poofy than a Dutch baby pancake. Perhaps some day I'll compare recipes and see if I can figure out what the poofiness factor consists of.

My dinner guests loved this--they asked for the recipe and declared that they too were now admirers of prunes. I served it with slightly sweetened whipped cream, which was lovely, but not essential: it would still be good on its own, unadorned but classic.

Dutch Crunch Bread and Pistolets

2011-06-02T20:39:00.000-05:00

Another of life's lessons learned: if someone tells you that there is one ingredient you need to make your recipe perfect, but gives you some second-class substitutes, just go to the grocery store and buy the perfect ingredient, even if you're feeling too lazy to get in your car and drive to the store.

My friend Melinda Pickworthmade this bread - Peter Reinhart's Vienna Bread with Dutch Crunch Topping - in November of 2008 (right after Obama was elected president). I wanted to make it as soon as I saw it. This is how long it's taken me--maybe I'm not that great on follow-through.

The Vienna bread itself is an easy-to-make, fine-textured white sandwich bread, which can also be shaped into rolls or buns. If you want to make the Dutch Crunch topping, you need rice flour, which I didn't have. Melinda made her bread in November of 2008, so you would think that sometime in the 2 1/2 years after I read her blog and got inspired to try it, I would have picked up some rice flour. Not true.

But, since you can substitute any number of things for the rice flour, I did, even though Reinhart warns that rice flour is most commonly used because it's "perfect for the job." Meaning that the substitutions are less than perfect.

I said this bread was easy, and it is, but you do have to start it the night before you want to eat it. It starts, as do so many tasty bread recipes, with a pre-ferment that you make the night before, stick in the refrigerator, and bring to room temperature in the morning. On the second day, it's just a dump-everything-in-the-bowl, knead, and shape kind of bread.

Vienna bread is different than French bread in a lot of ways. First, it's got a lot more ingredients than the yeast/flour/salt/water quartet that works such magic in a baguette. It's also got barley malt syrup, shown here in its sticky splendor, an egg, butter, and a little sugar.

After this is mixed, kneaded, and allowed to rise, it's time to decide what kind of bread you want.

The recipe makes two one-pound loaves of Vienna bread (usually shaped into a batard), but you can make rolls with part of the dough, or you can make American-style loaves in loaf pans. I decided to make four three-ounce pistolets (miniature batards) and one large Dutch-crumb loaf.

What turns Vienna bread into Dutch crumb? A topping made from rice flour, yeast, sugar, salt, and water. (Or, if you can't be bothered to go fetch some rice flour, a mixture of cake flour and cornstarch). This mixture gets brushed on the shaped loaf, where it starts to bubble and burst. Frankly, it looks a little frightening. If made with rice flour, the contrast between the crunch and the loaf is supposed to be much more striking than in my picture--it's called tijgerbroodin the Netherlands, whence it comes, and should look like the markings on a tiger.

Almost alive.

The rolls turned out pretty and golden brown. I used them as dinner rolls, but they could also be used for sandwiches.

The bread's topping wasn't as pretty or as crunchy as the photo in The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I blame the lack of rice flour for the lack of perfection in the Dutch crunch, but it still formed a lovely crust--slightly sweet and toothsome, although not as firm as a baguette's crust. The interior was soft and even-crumbed--equally good for sandwiches and as toast.

I'd like to thank the people at Channel 4 for naming Breadbasketcase one of their top ten bread blogs. Check out their list for some great-looking blogs.

Vienna Bread
from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart

Pate Fermentee
1 1/8 cups (5 oz.) AP flour
1 1/8 cups (5 oz.) bread flour
3/4 tsp (.19 oz.) salt
1/2 tsp instant yeast
About 3/4 cup (6 to 7 ounces) warm water

Mix together the flours with the salt and yeast. Then add the water while stirring until you have a rather 'shaggy' dough. You may need to add the extra water to bring it all together.

Remove the dough to a floured surface then knead it for a few minuted until the dough is smooth and slightly, not sticky. Place this dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover and let it ferment for at least 4 hours at room temperature. Place in the refrigerator overnight.

Vienna Bread

2 1/3 cups (13 oz.) pate fermentee (You'll have a little left over)
2 2/3 cups (12 oz.) bread flour
1 Tbs sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp instant yeast
1 large egg, beaten slightly
1 Tbs melted butter
3/4 cup + 2 Tbs (6 to 7 oz.) warm water

1. Remove pate fermentee from the refrigerator, cut it into about 10 pieces then let it come to room temperature, covered, for about an hour before using it.

2. Stir together the flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Then add the pate fermentee, egg, butter and 3/4 cups of the water. Add extra water if needed, then continue mixing until you have a smooth dough. Knead with dough hook, or by hand, about ten minutes.

3. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, turn to coat, then cover. Let it rise until doubled in bulk for 2 hours.

4. Shape the dough into rounds (big or little, depending on what you want your final product to be). Cover and let rest for 20 minutes.

5. Shape into batards, rolls, or loaves, and let rise until nearly doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 450F. Just before placing the bread in the oven, place an empty pan in the oven and pour a cup of boiling water into it closing the door quickly.

Place the bread in the oven, reduce the heat to 400F. Continue to bake for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, rotate the baking sheet to ensure even baking. Bake an additional 10-20 minutes, depending on size.

Cool on a rack to room temperature.

Pear Buckwheat Bread

2011-04-16T20:37:00.000-05:00

This is the first bread I've made from Advanced Bread and Pastry: a Professional Approach, by Michel Suas. It's a daunting book. I mean it's a TOME (over 1000 pages). And you have to read through the first chapters before you can bake--because the recipes assume that you've read everything--and you have learned more than you ever wanted to know about bread and pastry. Especially if you don't retain information the way you used to. Another clue that it's not just for the home baker is that the recipes make about 10 loaves, although Mr. Suas reduces the massive numbers to a more manageable "test loaf" (i.e., two loaves).

As I periodically skimmed the book (I'm not going to pass the midquarter, by the way), I kept coming back to this pear and buckwheat bread. It intrigued me because 1) I've never baked with buckwheat and 2) the dried pears soaked in white wine sounded quite yummy. And I realized it wasn't hard at all. So I got me some buckwheat and went to town.

The first thing you do is make a buckwheat poolish--just a mixture of buckwheat flour, bread flour, water, yeast, and salt--that sits overnight. I almost threw in the towel after I saw the unappetizing color of the poolish--sort of a bluish black-gray. It didn't look like a food color. And that was a mere 1 3/8 ounces of buckwheat flour. But the rest of the bread was all white flour, so I hoped that the addition of more white flour would tone down the brackish looking mixture.

The hardest part turned out to be finding dried pears. I checked two grocery stores and a co-op; though there were many dried fruits, none of them were pears. Finally I bought some mixed fruit, and took out the pears. Not enough pears, so they had to be supplemented with dried apples.

I toasted the walnuts and vigorously toweled off the skins. This extra step is supposed to make the walnuts less bitter. I don't think that walnuts taste bitter, but sometimes I add this step anyway--if I'm feeling worthy of baking from an "Advanced" cookbook, for example.

The poolish, which has been developing overnight, is mixed into the macerated dry fruits, walnuts, and more flour, yeast, and water. It's still an odd color (not the rich brown of whole wheat), but looks less offputting than before. As you may know, but I did not, buckwheat is not even related to wheat. It's a pseudocereal, which seems a bit harsh. It's also used as an upholstery filling, which seems even harsher.

I shaped the dough into two rough torpedo-shaped loaves, poking the fruit slices back into the loaves in order to avoid burned apple and pear bits. These are supposed to be shaped into pear-shaped loaves, with a pear stencilled on top of the loaves in flour. The pear-shaped loaves were very attractive, but I could see all kinds of frustration ahead of me, so I nixed that idea.

The loaves came out of the oven a nice mahogany brown, not the unappetizing gray they looked before baking. This turned out to be quite a successful bread after all. The crust was nice, and the crumb was delicate. The wine-steeped fruit added sweetness and character, and the toasted walnuts were unexpected but welcome. You could use almost any combination of fruit and nuts--cranberries and pecans would be nice, or raisins and hazelnuts.

I've got plenty of buckwheat left. I think it will next go into some buckwheat crepes, or galettes, a specialty of Brittany, where we're headed next week. This will give me a good excuse to try galettes all over Brittany.

I'll give you the recipe just as it is in the book, and you'll see what I mean about abbreviated instructions. If you've made bread before, the language will make sense. If you haven't, it won't.

Pear Buckwheat Bread
--from Advanced Bread and Pastry, by Michel Suas

Poolish Formula
Buckwheat flour 1 3/8 oz.
Bread flour 4 7/8 oz.
Water 6 1/8 oz.
Yeast (instant) 1/8 tsp.
Salt 1/8 tsp.

1. Mix all ingredients until well incorporated.
2. Allow to ferment 12 to 16 hours at room temperature.

Final Dough Formula
Bread flour 9 7/8 oz.
Water 4 3/4 oz.
Salt 3/8 oz.
Yeast (instant) 1/8 oz.
Walnuts (toasted) 1 3/8 oz.
Dry pears, soaked in
white wine* 3 1/4 oz.
Poolish 12 1/4 oz.
*Soak pears for one hour, then strain

1. Mix. Add pears and walnuts after dough has developed in first speed
2. First fermentation. 1 hour 30 minutes at 80 degrees F.
3. Divide (one pound each)
4. Preshape (light ball)
5. Resting time (20 to 30 minutes)
6. Shape (pear shaped loaves if desired)
7 Final proof (one hour)
8. Score
9. Steam (two seconds)
10. Bake for 30-35 minutes at 450 degrees F.

Pan de Mallorca

2011-03-22T21:46:00.001-05:00

On a recent visit to Puerto Rico, I tried a little powdered-sugar dusted roll called pan de mallorca at the hotel dining room. It wasn't very good, but I didn't want to let that fact stand in the way of further exploration--after all, the hotel bagels were bland and the hotel croissants were soggy.

I discovered that some of the best mallorcas were supposed to be found at a little restaurant called La Bombonera, where they serve them filled with ham and cheese. So we made a little trek to Old San Juan, and found La Bombonera. I ordered fresh orange juice and a La Bombonera Special, which I assumed would be a ham and cheese mallorca (or majorca, I've seen both spellings). Alas, it was not. It was more like a club sandwich with ham, cheese, and egg. Pretty good, but not what I was looking for.

So when I got home, I searched out a recipe. Of course, the recipes are all different, and how am I going to know an authentic recipe when I see one? All I knew is that I didn't want one that tasted like the bad hotel version, and I wanted to use it for a hot ham and cheese sandwich.

I settled on this recipe, from seriouseats.com, an adaptation from A Taste of Puerto Rico, by Yvonne Ortiz. It's a super-easy dough to mix up, especially if you have extra egg yolks on hand, which I did since I made an angel-food cake last weekend.

It's a rich, slightly sweet dough, with melted better, egg yolks, milk, flour, sugar, and yeast. After its first rising, you shape it into a rectangle.

But this is when I started having doubts about whether I'd searched long enough for the recipe. You brush melted butter on the dough and roll it up. Nothing wrong with that concept, but the mallorcas I'd seen in Puerto Rico didn't look like a cinnamon-less cinnamon roll. They were flatter in shape, with a little knot on top.

These just weren't going to turn out like that. The recipe also said to put them in a 9-inch square baking pan. I could see that this wasn't going to give them much room to spread, but I did it anyway. I should have listened to my better judgment. The problem is that one's better judgment isn't always right. I figure there's only about a 50-50 chance, so I might as well give the directions a chance. Also, if there's blame to be placed, I'd just as soon blame somebody else's recipe than my better judgment.

I wanted a flat, slightly rounded roll, but this is what I got. Why didn't I spend more time in Puerto Rico stopping in at bakeries and sampling various mallorcas? I had a perfect opportunity to do scientific testing, and I squandered it. I can see I'm going to have to return--not for fun this time. Just for experimentation.

The first taste test was eating one plain--no butter, no sugar, no jam. no ham. Pretty good. I might have baked them just a few minutes too long. The outside was a little crisp, and I don't think it's supposed to be. (I'll have to check on that aspect in my taste-testing journey). Not too sweet, not too soft. I like it.

Next taste test (which I completely forgot to photograph): the savory ham-and-cheese mallorca. I got out my super-cheap Target panini maker for its debut run. Let me say that mallorcas and panini makers are not a match made in heaven. The rolls are too high to get nicely scrunched, but they did get browned and the cheese (almost) melted. Not bad. You would think the powdered sugar and ham would not like each other, but, surprisingly, they're quite happy together. And so was the cheese. (The Puerto Ricans used Swiss or American; I used provolone. The provolone was a better choice, I think).

Despite these not being my dream mallorcas, I liked them well enough that I'd like to experiment with different recipes. But maybe that will wait until I go back to Puerto Rico to walk up and down the streets looking for the perfect mallorca. Oh, the sacrifices I make.

Flatbread with Fingerling Potatoes and Shitake Mushrooms

2011-02-18T09:54:00.000-06:00

The full name of this flatbread, taken from epicurious.com, is "Flatbread with Fingerling Potatoes, Shitake Mushrooms, and Truffle Oil." I drizzled it with olive oil instead of truffle oil, because I don't like truffle oil. A few years ago, I splurged on a little bottle of truffle oil, and thought it had a very unpleasant taste. I figured it was just my lower-middle-class upbringing showing, and I was a Philistine who didn't appreciate the finer things in life. Then I read that truffle oil is not olive oil infused with truffles, as you might think (and as the truffle oil purveyors certainly want you to think), but, instead, it's olive oil infused with chemicals. Yes! I was vindicated. It's not that I don't like truffles--it's just that I don't hanker after 2,4-dithiapentane.

About half the comments to this recipe said it was unworkable because there was a mistake in the recipe--too much water, too little flour. Well, that was a challenge I wanted to take. I mixed the ingredients for that flatbread as directed, and came up with gruel. Definitely too much water. I gradually added flour, tablespoon by tablespoon, until I got a dough that still quite liquid but more or less manageable.

I ended up mixing it for almost 20 minutes (instead of the 10 minutes in the recipe) to get it "elastic but still sticky." It was very elastic.

A very nice thing about this bread is that you can put it in the refrigerator immediately after making it, and let it do its very rise overnight. In fact, I didn't take it out of the refrigerator until mid-afternoon, so it would be ready around 5:00--in time for cocktail hour.
By then it had more than doubled in size.

At first blush, it might seem that potatoes and bread = carb overload. But I say there's no such thing as carb overload. I also say, what about the famous Sullivan Street Potato Pizza? And what about the classic Italian dish consisting of pasta, potatoes, and pesto?
The recipe specifies fingerling potatoes. In a pinch, you could use another kind, but a baking potato would probably be too mealy and a new potato not soft enough. The fingerling is actually just right.

Fresh thyme, sauteed shitake (or other) mushrooms, and plenty of olive oil (or truffle oil, if you like that kind of thing), and it's ready to go into a hot oven.

15 minutes later (the recipe says 20 to 22), it's ready to come out. The crust is phenomenally crusty and brown; the potatoes al dente, and the mushrooms sizzling. Most of the thyme remains green, but there are crispy bits of the herb as well.

Then the finishing touch--dabs of creme fraiche and thyme. Oops. I had half a carton of creme fraiche in my refrigerator--not yet at its expiration date--but when I opened it, I saw that there was some white fuzz on top. Thinking that white-fuzz topped flatbread did not sound very appetizing, I tossed the creme fraiche and used sour cream instead.

Creme fraiche would probably have been better, but sour cream was good enough. Or just skip the whole bits-of-cream idea and serve the flatbread as is when it comes out of the oven. Anything made with a dough this liquid requires a leap of faith: is this really going to work? But if you have faith (and modify the recipe somewhat, either using less water or more flour), you're rewarded with a wonderful appetizer. Be careful, though--you may eat so much that you've no appetite left for dinner.

Scones--Two Ways

2011-01-31T16:37:00.000-06:00

I make scones about once a year, usually for our January coffee hours, and looking back over the years, I see that I nearly always declare that these scones are the best I've ever made. In all honesty, I think this must be because I love scones so much that I'm always pleased with myself for having made them.
This year I made two variations on the Cook's Illustrated basic theme. And once again, I think that they may be the best scones I ever nade, especially the pecan scones with maple-cream glaze. I suppose if you were violently allergic to nuts you wouldn't like these; otherwise, there's no hope for you if you turned up your nose at them.

I doubled the recipe and made apricot scones with grated lemon peel and the aforesaid pecan scones. The doubled amount--with four cups of flour and 10 tablespoons of butter, was a bit much for the food processor to handle efficiently. If I made this recipe again and doubled it (which I had to do to provide enough scones for the neighbors), I think I'd just make the single recipe twice.

After mixing in the cream, you pat or roll out the dough into a circle. No one will know if your circle isn't perfectly circular. As usual, I rolled mine out too thin because I always think that otherwise the scones will be too fat. I'm always wrong. I may get it right sometime, but I'm not counting on it.

A dough scraper is the easiest thing to use to cut the dough into eight wedges. If you don't have a dough scraper, I highly recommend that you get one posthaste. (My daughter just used the word "posthaste" on her Facebook page, and I thought to myself, "what a good word! I will have to use it myself.")

These scones have only two tablespoons of sugar per two cups of flour. That is much less sweet than typical American coffeehouse scones. If you want them sweeter you can increase the sugar. Alternatively, you can brush cream on top of the unbaked scones and sprinkle them with sugar; that's what I did with the apricot-lemon scones. Or you can wait until they're baked and drizzle a glaze on them. For the pecan scones, I made a glaze of cream, maple syrup, and confectioners' sugar. (I didn't measure--just add sugar until you get the consistency you're looking for).

These scones were a huge hit. Only the children ate the doughnuts. The adults all dug into the scones. Two of the neighbors are scone aficianados, and claimed that these were as good as (or possibly better than) the best bakery scones. Of course, they do have an interest in encouraging me to bake for them, so it wouldn't be politic for them to criticize my baking, would it?

Cream Scones
--from America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook

2 cups (10 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour, preferably a low-protein brand such as Gold Medal or Pillsbury
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons chilled, unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
3/4 cup fruit or nuts (Toasted pecans, chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries, currants, etc.)
Grated lemon or orange rind (optional)
1 cup heavy cream

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 425°F.

2. Place flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in large bowl or work bowl of food processor fitted with steel blade. Whisk together or pulse six times.

3. Remove cover and distribute butter evenly over dry ingredients. Cover and pulse 12 times, each pulse lasting 1 second. Add any fruit/nut additions and pulse one more time. Transfer dough to large bowl.

4. Stir in heavy cream with a rubber spatula or fork until dough begins to form, about 30 seconds.

5. Transfer dough and all dry, floury bits to countertop and knead dough by hand just until it comes together into a rough, sticky ball, 5 to 10 seconds. Form scones by turning the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface, cutting the dough into 8 wedges with either a knife or bench scraper. (You could also roll or pat out and cut pieces with a biscuit cutter).

6. Place wedges on ungreased baking sheet (I covered the pan with parchment paper) and bake until scone tops are light brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Cool on wire rack for at least 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Almost Easy to Make "Bostock"

2011-01-25T17:39:00.000-06:00

This is not authentic Bostock. But then it's not authentic Brioche either. It's 5-Minutes-a-Day Brioche, which is essentially dump-and-stir bread. A real Bostock is a twice-baked brioche; before bostocks became trendy, they were a way to use up day-old brioche. The thrifty French topped the practically over-the-hill brioche with almond cream and baked them.
Perhaps it was devised by a baker named Bostock, but no one seems to know.

The "5-Minute" brioche recipe is certainly the easiest I've ever made: just mix up water, yeast, salt, eggs, honey, and melted butter; then mix in the flour.

This recipe has a very casual attitude toward the brioche dough: never mind about mixing it thoroughly! Don't let a few floury lumps trouble you! I wasn't troubled, but I ended up having to pick some lumps out of the dough after I rolled it out, so I think I shouldn't have been so quick to adopt the authors' carefree attitude.
I wanted to make this Bostock on Saturday morning, so I mixed up the dough Thursday evening, let it rise for a few hours, and then put it in the refrigerator until I was ready for it.

I made the almond cream on Friday night. Again, just a matter of mixing a few ingredients: almond paste, butter, egg, flour, almond extract, and orange-flower water (I used Fiori di Sicilia). It smelled heavenly.

Saturday morning, all I had to do was roll out the brioche dough to an oblong, fill it with the almond cream, and roll it up, jelly roll style. It looked like cinnamon rolls without the cinnamon; everything was very white.

Because there's almost no color difference between the almond paste and the brioche dough, you can hardly see that something is rolled up--it looks like blobs of uncooked dough.

Even the topping--sugar, almonds, and grated orange peel--didn't give it much color differential.

Ready to bake. It still looks pretty white.

Only if you look at the bottom can you see that these are actually nicely browned rolls.

By 9:30 Saturday morning, they were out of the oven, and I was able to serve them warm to the neighbors who come to our house on Saturdays in January for our annual coffee and doughnut hours. They tasted very good, but not as good as the Bostock I've had from good bakeries. The almond cream layer kind of baked into the brioche, so there wasn't that lovely, gooey, almondy topping that you get on a proper Bostock.
On the other hand, a proper Bostock can't be whipped up on Saturday morning and be ready to serve just a few hours after the second punch of the snooze alarm.

Almond Brioche Bostock
from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.

Brioche
3/4 cup lukewarm water
2 1/4 tsp. instant yeast
2 1/4 tsp. salt
4 eggs
1/4 cup (80 g.) honey
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, melted
3 3/4 cups (541 g.)flour

Almond Cream
3/4 cup almond paste
6 Tbsp butter (at room temperature)
3/8 cup flour
1 1/2 eggs
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/2 tsp fiori di sicilia (optional)

Topping
3/8 cup sugar
zest from a whole orange
1/2 cup sliced almonds

1. Make the brioche: mix the salt, yeast, eggs, honey and melted butter with the water in a large bowl. mix in the flour without kneading. The dough will be loose but will firm up when chilled. cover the dough and allow to rest a room temperature for 2 hours. Cover the dough bowl with plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator until ready to use.

2. Make the almond cream: cream together the butter, almond paste, flour, egg and almond extract in a food processor until smooth and set aside.

3. Dust the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour and cut in two even pieces. Dust the piece with more flour and quickly shape into a ball. Roll the dough out into a long rectangle (about 1/4 inch thick), using enough flour to prevent it from sticking to the counter. Spread the almond cream evenly over the rectangle and roll the dough up like a jelly roll, starting at the long end. Repeat with second ball of brioche dough. Chill the log in the freezer for about 15 minutes. Grease an 8 inch round cake pan with butter and sprinkle liberally with sugar.

4. Cut the chilled dough into 8 equal pieces. Place them evenly in the cake pan so the swirled edge is facing upward. Allow the dough (covered) to rest in the pan for an hour. Twenty minutes before baking time, preheat the oven to 350 F. Just before baking, combine the sugar, orange zest and almonds and sprinkle over the brioche. Bake for about 40 minutes or until golden and well set in the center.

6. When you remove the brioche from the oven the run a knife around the inside of the pan to release the bread from the sides and invert it onto a large plate. Eat while warm.

Craig Ponsford's Ciabatta

2011-01-04T16:36:00.000-06:00

Who is Craig Ponsford, you ask?
I would ask the same question, except that I have Maggie Glezer's book, Artisan Baking, and she tells me that Craig Ponsford has a bakery in Sonoma, California. Lucky man.
And lucky us, because he was willing to give Maggie Glezer his recipe for ciabatta.

Before I start in on the bread, however, I'd like to thank Tara Snyder for listing this blog as one of the top 50 bread blogs. Although as #50, I may have been somewhat of an afterthought, I'm still honored to be in such great company. And you'll want to check out some of these blogs: the listing includes both the tried and true, and the (probably) new to you.

Back to bread. After I make a soft-crusted sandwich loaf, I often have a hankering for something with crispy crust and big holes. This ciabatta fills the bill.
Making this ciabatta is a two-day affair. The first day, however, takes just a few minutes. You mix four different flours (all-purpose, bread, rye, and whole wheat) with some water that's been merely kissed by yeast--the most minute amount of yeast possible. After 24 hours, this little lump of dough has tripled in size, and you're ready for Day 2.

On the morning of the second day, (sounds kind of Biblical, doesn't it?), this multi-grain starter is mixed in with more flour, yeast, salt, and a lot of water. It's a wet dough, and would be difficult to handle if you tried to make it by hand. The KitchenAid is a life saver here.

After five minutes of mixing, the dough is easier to handle, but still sticky.

The technical term is "gloppy."

You pour this gloppy mixture into a bowl, and let it rise for about 3 hours. But don't go away. Your work is not done.

This dough requires you to turn it every 20 minutes, until it's been turned four times. Turning simply means that you turn it out on the counter, gently stretch it into a square, and fold over all four sides. After being turned four times, the dough is still soft, but considerably easier to handle.

Finally, after about 3 hours, the dough is ready to be stretched once more, floured, and covered in a floured tea towel (or couche) for another 45 minutes. There are no pictures of the tea towel hiding the dough.

Although this bread may look misshapen, I'm actually very pleased with the way it turned out. I knew that "ciabatta" means "slipper" in Italian, and I always assumed it was a pretty satin dancing slipper. But, according to Glezer, it's meant to look like an old grandpa's slipper. I think mine definitely bears a resemblance to Grandpa's beat-up slipper, especially if Grandpa was inclined to dump flour on his slippers. No, I don't know why he would.

In order for the crispy crust and full flavor to develop, this bread needs to be completely baked, so set the timer for another five minutes after you think it's done. Then it will be perfect.

This is an excellent bread--the kind you could just keep on eating. Plain, buttered, slathered with cheese, dipped in olive oil, used to sop up spaghetti sauce--however you want to enjoy it, that's the way it's meant to be enjoyed.

The recipe in Artisan Baking makes two loaves. I made only half a recipe, which is the recipe I'm including. Obviously, it would be easy to double.

Craig Ponsford's Ciabatta
--from Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer

Biga
1/8 tsp. instant yeast
1/2 cup water (110 to 115 F)
100 grams unbleached bread flour
50 grams unbleached all-purpose flour
7.5 grams whole-wheat flour
7.5 grams rye flour
92.5 grams water

Sprinkle the yeat over the warm water, stir, and let it stand for 5 to 10 minutes. Mix the flours in a bowl. Measure 1/4 teaspoon of the yeasted water into the flour mixture. Then add the rest of the water, using warmer water in winter and cold water in the summer.
Mix by hand until the flour is absorbed. This is a very stiff biga. It's ready in about 24 hours, when it's tripled in size. It may spend the day looking like it's doing nothing, but it will expand eventually.

Dough
162.5 grams unbleached AP flour
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
1 3/8 teaspoons salt
171 grams lukewarm water
The biga

Combine flour, yeast and salt in bowl of stand mixer. Add the water and biga and mix the dough on low speed with paddle attachment until it forms a rough dough. Raise speed to medium and mix for another five minutes. If the dough doesn't seem wet enough (it's "gloppy"), add a little water.

Scrape the dough into a container and cover tightly. Let it ferment until about doubled in bulk, 1/2 to 3 hours. Turn the dough 4 times at 20-minute intervals; after the fourth turn, let dough rise for the rest of the 2 1/2 to 3 hours.

Flour a tea towel. Gently stretch out the dough and fold loosely into thirds, using a business-letter turn. Place seam side down on the floured cloth, sprinkle more flour on top, and cover with another towel. Proof about 45 minutes, or until the dough barely springs back when pressed.

Preheat oven to 450, putting a rack in the top third of the oven. Place a baking stone on the top rack.

Place a sheet of parchment paper on a peel. Flip the loaf onto it so it is seam side up. Carefully stretch to make the dough "vaguely rectangular." Dimple the dough all over with your fingertips. Slide bread onto the baking stone with the parchment paper. Bake for 35-45 minutes, or until very dark brown. Rotate loaf halfway through bsking.

Cool on a rack.

Dan Lepard's Sour Cream Loaf

2010-12-07T21:33:00.032-06:00

Although I was initially taken by this bread because of King Arthur's story about a British home baker named John Dyall, who wrote out this recipe and mailed it to King Arthur, it turns out that the bread should actually have been attributed to Dan Lepard, a noted British cook/baker/writer.

King Arthur has since added a parenthetical attribution to Mr. Lepard. I received several comments telling me about the mis-attribution, and a nice letter--not threatening to sue me--from Mr. Lepard's partner and business manager, inviting me to consider editing my post to clarify the genesis of this recipe.

The internet can be a morally iffy spot. While it's an amazing advance to be to have so much information at one's fingertips, a lot of the information is wrong, or, as in this case, incomplete. Baking is
both an individual and a collaborative effort; there is probably very little that is actually new under the sun. Still, I'm glad to credit Mr. Lepard for printing this recipe in The Guardian. But I would never have tried it were it not for King Arthur, which wouldn't have published it without its relationship with one John Lyall. So thanks to all, and I encourage you to try this bread. (By the way, I've now got a link to Dan Lepard's engaging blog on this site, and I encourage you to take a look at it).

The recipe is a modified no-knead loaf, although it takes a modicum of kneading, and it's even easier, as it doesn't require all the hours of resting that no-knead bread does. It contains both cold water and boiling water, a little sugar, and a half-cup of sour cream--this mixture apparently provides a welcoming atmosphere for the yeast.

Flour, either white or whole wheat, is added to the mix and kneaded by hand--very briefly--until it makes a rough dough.

The dough rests for about 10 minutes. Then minimal kneading again (really minimal--about 10 seconds); rest; repeat. The three sets of brief kneading are enough to make it look like proper bread dough.

It takes only about an hour for the dough to double in size. The mixture of boiling water, cold water, and sour cream must be one where the yeast thrives because, even in a cold kitchen on a cold day, the dough is unstoppable.

And it continues rising enthusiastically for another hour, until it domes over the top of the loaf pan. The oven spring is just as enthusiastic. Midway through the baking, I realized I'd better move the top oven rack up one notch or the bread was going to run right into it.

In addition to being easy to put together and relatively quick (it is a yeast bread, after all), this recipe makes an exceptionally good basic white sandwich loaf. Jim is a very good audience for freshly baked bread. The goodness of bread still containing a hint of warmth from the oven always seems to take him by surprise; his reaction was, "This is REALLY good bread--it doesn't even need butter."

It's not the crusty artisan bread that we all crave, but it doesn't pretend to be. And sometimes you just need an ordinary loaf of bread.

Cloverleaf rolls

2010-11-29T13:07:00.000-06:00

I believe that the butter-topped rolls in The Bread Bible are the best I've ever tasted. They're certainly the best I ever made. But this wouldn't be much of a blog if I just kept repeating the same old recipes, so I tried the "soft butter rolls" from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread. Better than store-bought rolls, to be sure, but they don't measure up to Rose's version.

The directions say that the first rise only takes an hour. The dough eventually got nice and fluffy, but it had barely moved after an hour. I put it in the refrigerator overnight, took it out immediately in the morning, and let it rise for another three hours. Only then did it double in size.
I should have wondered--there are four cups of flour in this recipe, but only one teaspoon of yeast. In Rose's recipe, it's more like a teaspoon and a half of yeast for two cups of flour. There was no way this was going to take only an hour to proof.

For some reason, I find it very relaxing to divide dough in numerous pieces, weighing each piece to make sure it's exactly the right size. I was supposed to divide the dough into small enough pieces that I'd get two dozen rolls, but it looked like I'd have two dozen bite-sized rolls, so I increased the size and made 18. Once they were shaped, they were supposed to rise again. Hours later, I was running out of time, so they were going to have to go into the oven, risen or not.

They look a little bit puffy, but certainly not like they're going to turn into giganto-rolls.

And they didn't. Bigger than bite-size, but not by much. And because they didn't rise enough, they were heavier than Rose's version, not so light and tender. Since they were brushed with butter, both before and after coming out of the oven, they had a lovely buttery taste and the crust had a slight crispness that was very attractive. So definitely not a failure, but neither did they become the new gold standard.
If I tried them again, I'd either add more yeast or allow for a lot more time for proofing. But, since I like to try out new recipes for this blog, I guess I'm not likely to try them again.

Jim Lahey's Pane Integrale

2010-11-15T14:59:00.000-06:00

I bought another bread cookbook last week: My Bread, by Jim Lahey, owner of The Sullivan Street Bakery. I'm afraid to count how many bread books I have. But I use them all--eventually.
Lahey is, of course, the person who, along with Mark Bittman, took the bread-baking world by storm with his no-knead bread. For a while, everyone, including me, was baking no-knead bread. Even non-bread-bakers were baking no-knead bread. I think it's now sort of last year, but it should have a place in every bread-baker's repertoire.
In this book, Lahey talks about his travel and background, and what brought him to baking bread. (No offense intended, but he seems like he's kind of a quirky and difficult-to-get-along-with kind of guy). He keeps mentioning that he quit various jobs because he had disagreements with co-workers. But what would you rather have? One more nice guy or an irascible originator of the Sullivan Street potato pizza? I'll take Mr. Irascible, as long as I don't have to live with him.
The book is a slim volume, with recipes for about a dozen basic breads, a few more breads made with liquids other than water, ten or twelve different pizzas, and as many sandwiches.
I chose the pane integrale, or whole-wheat bread, to start with. Except it's not really whole-wheat; it's bread made with some whole-wheat flour. Which is okay with me, because I usually find bread made with 100% whole-wheat flour too dense, solid, and bitter, the exception being Chris in Rhode Island's whole wheat bread. To be exact, this bread has 300 grams of bread flour and 100 grams of whole wheat flour. So it could be called Pane 1/4 Integrale, I guess.

If you recall, no-knead bread begins with a quick mix of flour, yeast, salt, and water. That mixture is left by itself to rise for 12 to 16 hours. (In my case, it was ready for the next step at about 9:00 p.m., but I wasn't ready for it, so I put it in the refrigerator.) The next morning, I took it out, and did the next step after the dough got back down to room temperature. Then you scrape the dough onto a floured counter, and pinch the edges together in the center.

And then you shape the dough into a round loaf. After the dough rises on a floured cotton towel for a few hours, comes the part where you simply have to defy logic and experience, not to mention a fear of burning your hands. Get that preheated pot out of the oven, take a deep breath, and turn the risen loaf into the pan. No, the pan doesn't have to be greased or lined with parchment paper or anything else. Cover the pan and put it back in the oven.

About a half-hour later, you can take the lid off and continue baking the bread until it's nice and brown. You want it to be a deep brown, not a wimpy pale color.

Oddly enough, it comes right out of the pan without any coaxing or prying. At least it always has so far, although anything can happen. As Lahey describes it, the bread "sings" when it's removed from the oven and begins to cool. It's more of a crackly sound than a singing sound to me, but singing sounds more poetic.

This is a first-class rustic bread. Although I'm not the world's biggest fan of whole wheat bread, in this case I think the whole wheat flour gives the bread a little depth of flavor that the all-white no-knead bread is lacking. You could try any combination of white and whole wheat that you wanted, as long as the total amount is three cups of flour. There are a number of other variations in the book that sound delicious, and a few that just sound odd (the one made with strained sea water and nori comes to mind). But I'm pretty sure I'll return to this recipe.

The Village Baker's Olive Bread

2010-11-02T16:51:00.000-05:00

I managed to get hold of a copy of The Village Baker, by Joe Ortiz, a book that I've heard many good things about and which is now out of print. It was originally published in 1993, and some of the relatively recent bread-baking innovations aren't used here; for example, Ortiz uses active dry yeast, which requires proofing, rather than instant yeast, which doesn't. He doesn't talk about making use of a stand mixer to knead wet, artisan doughs--something that makes them much easier for a home baker to handle. Most seriously, he uses volume measurements instead of weighing, and he doesn't even tell you the method he uses for his measurements. These shortcomings don't make the book unusable, but they do require you to make some substantial changes to the directions. Still, I ended up with a very good loaf of green olive bread, made with Picholine olives.

What makes the bread so tasty is its long, slow preparation. First you make a compagnon levain, just a variation on a bread starter. It uses yeast, flour, water, and salt, and is left to rise slowly at room temperature for about 8 hours, and then to rise even more slowly in the refrigerator for another 24-36 hours.

The bread itself is made with the starter, more bread flour, a little whole wheat flour, a little more yeast, salt and some olive oil. The relatively small amount of whole wheat flour gives the dough a rustic, speckly brown look. The dough is pretty sticky, so I let it rest for about 20 minutes and added a little more flour.

Then you flatten the dough, and sprinkle a cup of chopped olives on top. Suddenly a cup of chopped olives looks like a LOT of olives. Roll up the dough, and knead it so that the olives are distributed more or less evenly. They'll also try to pop out of the dough, but you can pop them right back in.

The dough isn't as sticky as it was before its rest, but a dough scraper is handy to use so that it doesn't stick to the counter.

The dough rises again, and then is shaped into a boule. It's brushed with a little olive oil before going in the oven.

This would be an ideal bread to bake in a banetton because it doesn't hold its shape well enough to make a nice round boule, but I didn't think of that. So I ended up with a flat-top boule. But, of course, no one knows what you had in mind, so it's unlikely that anyone is going to criticize the shape of the bread.

Whether you like the bread will depend on how you feel about olives. The olives are a very assertive flavor, and because there are so many of them, it would be difficult to eat your way around them. It's definitely an olive-y olive bread, and so, in my opinion, it's best as a stand-alone and not as an accompaniment to other food. Just let it cool for a while, and eat it dipped in olive oil. (However, if you want it to accompany, say, a roast chicken or broiled fish, I don't think anyone would report you to the food police).

Panne alle Olive
--adapted from The Village Baker, by Joe Ortiz

To make the Compagnon:
About 3/8 cup water
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup bread flours

Mix all ingredients by hand, or with a stand mixer with a flat blade, kneading until the dough is smooth and firm.
Let the dough rise in the bowl, covered with a damp towel, for 8 to 10 hours.
Punch the dough down, and transfer to covered bowl. Refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours.

To make the bread:
1/2 tsp. instant yeast
3/4 cup water
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup compagnon (see above)
1 tsp. salt
3 tsp. olive oil
1 cup chopped green olives.

Using a stand mixer, mix the yeast, water and all but about 1/2 cup of the flours until blended. Add the compagnon, bit by bit, until it is broken up and mixed in with the flour mixture. Add the salt and two teaspoons water. Knead in the rest of the flour, as needed, until the dough becomes elastic. It will still be wet.

Turn out onto the counter and knead by hand, adding more flour if necessary for the dough to be workable. Let rest for 20 minutes.

Flatten the dough and strew the chopped olives on top. Roll the dough up onto itself, and knead it until the olives are necessary. Add more flour only if necessary to keep the dough from becoming too sticky.
Cover the dough and let it rise for one hour.
Flatten out the dough and fold the edges over into the middle to form a round loaf. Place it on a parchment-covered baking sheet and let it rise for about 2 hours.
Preheat oven to 400, putting a baking stone on a rack on the lower third of the oven.
When oven is hot, brush the loaf with the remaining teaspoon of olive oil, slash it 3 times on the top with a razor blade or sharp knife, and bake for 30-35 minutes, until golden brown.

Classic Brioche Loaf

2010-10-03T20:29:00.000-05:00

This bread is actually Part I of a cake: namely, the Caramelized Pineapple Pudding Cakes, the October 4, 2010 cake featured on Heavenly Cake Place. In the recipe for the pudding cakes, which are more like bread pudding than cake (and that's not a bad thing), Rose gives you permission to buy brioche rather than make it. But there was no way I was going to miss out on the chance to have even part of a loaf of brioche around the house. In fact, my only regret is that I didn't make two loaves, since it's a very small recipe and would have doubled easily.

Like many of Rose's bread recipes, this one starts out with a sponge. It only sounds complicated. It's simply a whisked-together mixture of, in this case, water, flour, yeast, sugar, and an egg. On top of this batter-like mixture goes flour, sugar, salt, and a bit more yeast. After a few hours, you can see the sponge start to bubble up under the flour. This is satisfying, because you know that something yeasty is going on. You can mix up the dough after a few hours or you can put it in the refrigerator to await your convenience. Although brioche has a French name, it's not at all hoity-toity. In fact, you can boss it around to your heart's content.

When you feel like it, in hours or days, you make the dough. Mix the sponge with a few more eggs and a stick of butter with the dough hook for a good five minutes. (You could do it without a stand mixture, but it would be difficult). It's sticky, but after a few more hours in the refrigerator, it becomes easier to handle.

After the dough has both risen and been refrigerated for a while, it's time to put it on a floured counter, pat it into a rectangle, and give it a business-letter turn. Repeat. Then it's wrapped loosely in plastic wrap and put back in the refrigerator. How long? Whatever fits your schedule.

This is what it looks like after some time in the refrigerator--soft and puffy. It's chilled enough so that it's pretty easy to handle.
It gets shaped into a loaf, and, after it's risen just above the top of the loaf pan, you slash it down the middle.

With an egg-yolk glaze, the loaf comes out of the oven looking super-shiny and appetizing.

The cake is going to need about 2/3 of a loaf, leaving us only a few slices to have as wonderful toast, or as just plain bread. And I mean plain: Jim had a slice with no butter, no jam, no nothing, and pronounced it rich, slightly sweet, and highly satisfying.

Sweet Rustic Bread

2010-08-23T16:20:00.000-05:00

This is the kind of bread that makes you feel amazed that you actually baked it yourself--when you smell it baking, when you break it open and see its lovely texture, and, most of all, when you taste it. Of course, it is a three-day bread, so there should be some payoff.

Day 1 is simply making the sponge: a matter of mixing flour, water, and a small amount of yeast, and ignoring it until it's nice and bubbly. Then it can be refrigerated until it's ready to play its part in Day 2.

On the second day, two cups of the sponge is mixed in with more bread flour, a little sugar, water, olive oil, salt, and a bit more yeast. The dough is so wet that it must be mixed with the paddle attachment first--until it comes together enough that you can use the dough hook.

The dough hook goes to town for at least eight minutes. It would take a long time if you did it by hand, and the dough is so wet and sticky that I'm not sure you could do it successfully.

After about three hours, the dough becomes very soft and billowy, and you do get to roll it around in flour by hand, which is nice because it has such a good feel.

Another rising time, although this one's only about an hour. We have about four hours of rising time so far, and we're well into Day 2. It doesn't look like this bread is going to be on the menu for dinner.

After just about an hour, it's puffy and bubbly--ready to shape into eight small loaves. In my mind, I had envisioned these as about the size of dinner rolls--they're described as "wedges," but they're much bigger. There are little loaves of bread all over the house.

All these loaves have to proof for another two hours or so. Then they're supposed to go in the refrigerator overnight. I was going to skip that step, but as it happened I had a meeting to go to, so I ended up making room in the refrigerator for eight large--and getting larger by the hour--wedges of bread dough.
On Day 3, however, I had nothing to do but take the pans out of the refrigerator, let them come to room temperature, and bake them. The directions said to bake the loaves for five minutes at 475, and then for another 20 minutes at 425. I did 450 and 400 in my convection oven, and the first batch still got very, very brown. (I couldn't fit all eight loaves on my baking stone, so I had to bake them in two batches).

You're supposed to sprinkle powdered sugar lightly on top of the loaves, but I omitted the sugar for the loaves I made for dinner. On a second go-round, I'm not sure I'd put powdered sugar on any of them. Even without the sugar on top, they're sweet enough to have as a breakfast treat with butter and jam, yet not so sweet that you can't have them for dinner. The powdered sugar topping is attractive at first, but it melts by the next day. Having sugar on top makes the rolls much less versatile as well.

This "Sweet Rustic Bread" is one of the master recipes from Peter Reinhart's Crust and Crumb: Master Formulas for Serious Brad Bakers. It's one of his earlier books--published in 1998, three years before The Bread Baker's Apprentice. These formulas are long, so instead of typing the recipe, I'll just link to it.

You can find this recipe at a link to google books

Panmarino (Rosemary Bread)

2010-08-06T14:21:00.000-05:00

I have a pot of rosemary growing just outside my back door, so when I saw this recipe, while browsing through one of my favorite bread cookbooks, I wanted to give it a try--especially when I saw how easy it was. In the dog days of summer, I just didn't have the energy for a full-on, two-day, complicated recipe.
Mixing milk and oil--that's about as difficult as it gets.

Well, that and chopping up the rosemary.

The dough comes together very nicely.

And shapes into a free-form boule quite easily.

Apart from the rosemary, what intrigued me about this loaf was its alleged sparkliness. The inventor of this bread, a baker named Luciano Pancalde, supposedly read a biography of the d'Este family, which told about a fabulous banquet where a rosemary bread encrusted with diamonds was served. I see some problems with this story, not least of which is the damage that eating diamond bread would do to your teeth. Luciano decided that his bread would have sea salt crystals on top and that they would "sparkle like diamonds" at a fraction of the cost. (Sea salt may be expensive, but not if you compare it to diamonds). Actually, I think that will be my new standard for deciding if something is too expensive for me to buy. I'll just ask one question: "cheaper than diamonds?" If yes, there's no reason to deprive myself.
As for the bread, I didn't really think the sea salt was going to convince anyone that I'd made diamond bread.

The salt looks faintly sparkly before baking. After baking, it looks a lot like ... salt.

It's a good bread, especially given how easy it is. However, I'll admit it doesn't surpass my own personal gold standard in rosemary bread--Rose's Rosemary Focaccia, from The Bread Bible. Once my nemesis, the rosemary focaccia has become my friend and my go-to bread for all kinds of occasions. But you have to keep trying new recipes; otherwise, you may miss the bread that's even better than anything you've ever made. This one doesn't meet that high standard, but it's certainly worth making, especially if you have a lot of rosemary and not a lot of time.

Notes: The recipe, as given, makes two loaves. I cut it in half. The recipe cautions that it is slightly large for a mixer, so if you make the full recipe, you'll have to stop now and then and push the dough down so it will thoroughly mix. That caution, and the fear of overtaxing my mixer's motor, are the reasons I made only one loaf.
For my taste, the bread was just slightly too salty. If I make this bread again, I'll cut the salt to about six grams per loaf.

Panmarino (Rosemary Bread)
--from The Italian Baker, by Carol Field

3 3/4 teaspoons instant yeast
1 cup warm water
1 cup milk, room temperature
1/2 cup less 1 tablespoon olive oil
3 1/2 to 4 tablespoons finely chopped fresh rosemary
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon (20 grams) salt
6 3/4 cups (900 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour

1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons coarse sea salt

Whisk together the yeast, flour, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Using the flat beater, mix in the water, milk, and olive oil. Mix until the flour is absorbed. Add the rosemary and change to the dough hook. Knead on medium speed until elastic, smooth, and somewhat moist, about three minutes. Finish kneading briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface.
You can also knead all ingredients by hand.

Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover tightly, and let rise until doubled, about 1 1/2 hours.

Gently punch the dough down in a lightly floured surface. Cut the dough in half and shape each half into a round ball. Place the loaves on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper, and sprinkled with cornmeal.

Put baking stone in the oven and preheat to 450 degrees. Just before oyou put the loaves in the oven, slash the top of each loaf in a star shape with a razor blade and sprinkle the sea salt into the cuts of each loaf. Bake 10 minutes, spraying three times with water. Reduce the heat to 400 degrees and bake 30 to 35 minutes longer. Cool completely on racks.

'Levy's' Real Jewish Rye Bread

2010-05-31T16:00:00.000-05:00

Monday, May 31, 2010

I have made bread in the last two months--really, I have. I just haven't had time to string two sentences together. But I've finally gotten so tired of seeing those hot cross buns that I must blog about something else. I got some rye flour from King Arthur a few months ago, and I was worried that, at this rate, it would go bad before I'd used an ounce of it, so I finally decided that on this long weekend, when I didn't even have to bake a cake, I'd open the bag and bake some rye bread. I looked for exotic recipes, but I couldn't find anything that sounded better to me than good old "'Levy's' Real Jewish Rye Bread" from The Bread Bible.
This bread is made using the flour mixture on top of sponge method, which is excellent because you can start it the night before you want to eat the bread.

It's also a great method because as the sponge starts to rise, it oozes up over the flour mixture, giving it an alien space-blob appearance.

See, it looks like it's taking over the poor flour mixture, which is being swallowed up by The Blob.
All is normal again, however, when it's kneaded.

Rose gives alternate directions for mixing by hand and by machine. This dough has to be kneaded by ten minutes in the KitchenAid, and I didn't even check to see how long it's kneaded by hand. Probably if I kneaded bread by hand, I wouldn't have to lift weights to try to stave off the batwing arms that you start to get at a certain age.

The bread rises for about an hour and a half. You take it out of its bowl, stretch it out, give it a business-letter fold, and let it rise again.

The wonderful thing about bread is that you can just stick it in the refrigerator at any point if, for example, you decide that you must go out and buy more flowers, even though you have no room in your garden for more flowers, unless you dig some up, or at least do some serious pruning. When you return, with $148 of flowers, (I think I need help!), the dough is just right to shape and bake.

I'm putting it on parchment paper on the bottom of La Cloche. The top is in the oven, preheating.

Rose learned from her grandmother that the best way to eat this bread is with unsalted butter, sliced radishes, and kosher salt, crushed with your fingertips and sprinkled on top. I had radishes, salt, and butter, and of course I had the bread. But I ended up using the bread as a substitute for hamburger buns for our Memorial Day cookout, and after I'd eaten a big fat hamburger, I had no room for the more genteel sliced radish option. Maybe tomorrow.

"Levy's" Jewish Rye Bread
--from The Bread Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum
Sponge
3/4 cup (4 ounces, 117 grams) bread flour
3/4 cup (3.3 ounces, 95 grams) rye flour
1/2 teaspoon (1.6 grams) instant yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons (0.6 ounces, 18.7 grams) sugar
1/2 tablespoon (10.5 grams) barley malt syrup
1 1/2 cups (12.5 ounces, 354 grams) water, at room temperature

Flour Mixture
2 1/4 cups (12.5 ounces, 351 grams) bread flour
1/2 plus 1/8 teaspoon (2 grams) instant yeast
2 tablespoons (0.5 ounces, 14 grams) caraway seeds
1/2 tablespoon (0.3 ounces, 10.5 grams) salt

Dough and Baking
1/2 tablespoon (0.25 ounces, 6.7 grams) vegetable oil
about 2 teaspoons (about 0.5 ounces, 16 grams) cornmeal for sprinkling

Make the sponge: Combine sponge ingredients in a large or mixer bowl and whisk until very smooth. Set it aside.

Make the flour mixture and cover the sponge: In a separate large bowl, whisk together the flour mixture and gently scoop it over the sponge to cover it completely. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and allow it to ferment for 1 to 4 hours at room temperature. (The sponge will bubble through the flour mixture in places.)

Mix the dough Add the oil and mix with the dough hook on low speed for about 1 minute, until the flour is moistened enough to form a rough dough. then raise the speed to medium and mix it for 10 minutes. The dough should be very smooth and elastic, and it should jump back when pressed with a fingertip; if it is sticky, turn it out on a counter and knead in a little extra flour.

Let the dough rise: Place the dough in a large container or bowl, lightly oiled. Oil the top of the dough as well. Allow the dough to rise until doubled, 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Let the dough fall out on to a lightly floured counter, press it down gently, fold or form it back into a square-ish ball and allow it to rise a second time, back in the bowl covered with plastic wrap for about 45 minutes.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter and gently press it down again. Round it into a ball and set it on a cornmeal sprinkled baking sheet, or on a cornmeal-covered piece of parchment paper on the bottom of La Cloche. Cover it with oiled plastic wrap and let it rise until almost doubled, about 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 450°F an hour ahead of time. On a shelf at the lowest level, place a baking sheet or bread stone. Unless you're using La Cloche, place a cast-iron skillet or sheet pan on the floor of the oven (or the bottom shelf) to preheat.

Slash and bake the bread: With a sharp knife or singled-edged razor blade, make 1/4- to 1/2-inch-deep slashes in the top of the dough. Put it in oven; if you're using La Cloche, cover it with preheated top dome. Otherwise, toss1/2 cup of ice cubes into the pan beneath and immediately shut the door. Bake for 15 minutes, lower the temperature to 400°F and continue baking for 30 to 40 minutes or until the bread is golden brown and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Cool the bread on a wire rack.

Hot Cross Buns

2010-04-04T21:00:00.002-05:00

Sunday, April 4, 2010

I have never before made hot cross buns. I've tasted the ones available in grocery stores and have not been overly excited about them. When I saw this recipe, however, I thought--hmm, I'll bet these could be good. And they were.
Remember the rhyme?
Hot cross buns
Hot cross buns
One a penny, two a penny
Hot cross buns.
If you have no daughters
If you have no daughters
If you have no daughters
Then give them to your sons.
And if you have none of these merry little elves
Then you must eat them all yourselves!
This always struck me is a good reason not to have children. Hmmm. Here are your options after you buy something good to eat: A) give them away to your ungrateful children or B) eat them yourself.
I did not give any of these hot cross buns to my daughters, but I did take them to Doug and Mary's house, where we went for Easter dinner. At least they weren't ungrateful. And I didn't have to give them all away.

This recipe, from simplyrecipes.com, is a nice one. Since I don't have another one to compare it to, except for the store-bought ones, I can't say it's the best ever, but it's good and quite easy. It calls for 3/4 cup of currants. My grocery store was out of currants, possibly because everyone else in the neighborhood has baked hot cross buns for Good Friday, when you're supposed to make them, so I substituted a mixture of golden raisins and dried cherries. That may actually have been an improvement on the all-currant rendition.

The dough is simply left to rise for a few hours. It's then divided into 16 pieces (each weighing in at about 60 grams), and shaped into round rolls. I love doing this shaping. If you put them in a baking pan about a half-inch apart, they'll join together while rising and baking, and will look like the rolls I see in grocery stores. But I like to let them keep their shape.
If you want a roll with a shiny crust, and why wouldn't you, you'll brush them with a mixture of an egg and a tablespoon of milk.

You can also cut a cross into the roll with your trusty slasher.

You can either leave the slashed cross unfrosted, although that's not traditional, or you can use the slash marks as a guide for where the pipe the frosting cross. Otherwise, you can just pipe the frosting on without a guide.

Those of you who read my cake blog may notice how casually I used the words "pipe the frosting." It was only last week when I was hyperventilating at the thought of piping. Now suddenly it's second nature to me now. Like breathing out and breathing in.

I ended up with a combination of frosted and unfrosted hot cross buns, although none of them were hot, and if they had been, the frosting would have melted off the buns. The other dinner guests scoffed at the non-frosted variety, but I preferred them. The rolls, with the two kinds of fruit and the combination of cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg, hardly needed any more flavor and were sweet enough without the icing. But then I used to scrape the frosting off my birthday cake and give it to my dog.

Compagnon (or Whacked Bread)

2010-03-28T18:03:00.015-05:00

Sunday, March 28, 3010

This is a recipe from one of my newer bread cookbooks--one that's been out of print for a while, and I finally just ordered it for myself: The Village Baker, by Joe Ortiz.

I've seen good reviews of this book, which was one of the earliest of the recent spate of books on artisan bread baking. (Compare the 1993 date of The Village Baker to the 2003 publishing date of The Bread Bible). Ortiz has some great stories about traveling around Europe talking to (what else?) village bakers. Unfortunately, Ortiz gathered up the European recipes and painstakingly translated all the weights into volume measurements. Scale snob that I've become, I was dismayed by this. If I want to try the recipes, I may have to go through the book and re-translate into grams.
The reasons I picked this recipe were: 1) It's a simple, direct-method dough that requires nothing other than flour, water, salt, and yeast; and 2) it directs you to whack the bread violently about 100 times with a rolling pin. It "helps to break down the gluten." (I'll just bet it does). It is also supposed to give the bread a very uneven texture.

I wouldn't call this a "very uneven" texture, so perhaps I didn't whack hard enough, although I certainly gave it my all.

You can't really tell from the still photos how enthusiastically I'm whacking the bread with the rolling pin. It might have worked better if I'd had the handleless French kind instead of the American pie-rolling-out kind. After all, it is a French bread. Although I may not have ended up with the uneven texture I was supposed to have, I will say that the whacking technique brought that dough into line.

This is what the dough looked like when it came out of the food processor, before getting assaulted.

And here is what it looks like after being punched into docility.
After the bread rises in its shaped form, it gets double-slashed.

And then it's glazed with a very diluted (one-half cup water and one egg white) egg white mixture.

I usually glaze with a slightly diluted egg yolk, so I wondered what the difference was. It turns out that an egg white glaze gives you a less shiny and not as dark loaf of bread. I prefer the result from the egg yolk glaze, which is shinier and more dramatic.
This compagnon (it means companion or company: synonyms include compère, camarade, condisciple, confrère, collègue, maître, intime, copain, complice, amant, associé, baron, collaborateur, acolyte) is a good basic bread, although the only thing truly extraordinary about it is that you attack it with a rolling pin. I can tell you that that will get the full attention of anyone who's with you in the kitchen, and that that person will be nicer to you the rest of the day because he's not completely sure what you may do next with the rolling pin.

Direct-Method Compagnon
--from The Village Baker, by Joe Ortiz

2 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast
1 3/4 cups water
3 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
Glaze: 1 egg white beaten up in 1/2 cup cold water.

Mix yeast and 3 cups flour in food processor fitted with plastic blade. Pour 1/4 cup cold water in food processor and pulse two or three times. With the motor running, slowly add 3/4 cup water and process for 30 seconds. With the processor still running, slowly add the rest of the water. Sprinkle the salt onto the dough and process for another 15 seconds. Add all but a handful of the remaining 1/2 cup flour, a little at a time, and pulse a few times.
Sprinkle the remaining flour on a countertop, and pour the dough out onto the table. Beat it vigorously about 100 times with a wooden rolling pin, folding the dough over onto itself several times. If the dough is too sticky, add a little more flour. After the dough is beaten, it should be moist, elastic, and satiny.
Let the dough rise in a covered bowl for 45 minutes. Put it on the counter, press it into a rectangle, and fold it over, business-letter style. Return to bowl and let rise another 30 minutes.
Flatten the dough and roll it into a tight, oval loaf or divide it in two and make two small loaves. Place the loaf, or loaves, on a parchment-lined baking sheet, cover with a towel, and let rise for 1 1/2 hours.
Slash two long, parallel cuts on the top of the bread. Glaze the loaves and place them in a preheated 450-degree oven. Immediately spray the oven with an atomizer filled with water. Bake a large loaf for 35-40 minutes and small loaves for 25-30 minutes.
Remove when crust is golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.

Duivekater (Festive Dutch Spiced Loaf)--A Lazy Bakers' Project

2010-03-14T00:01:00.001-06:00

Sunday, March 14, 2010

This is a Lazy Bakers Project. Melinda is always telling me I'm not lazy enough to be a proper Lazy Baker, but I guess I'm showing her that my laziness bows to no man's. Or woman's. She has already posted hers and so has Oriana. Thank goodness Evil Cake Lady has a yeast phobia, or I would have to be last, and how my stubbornly competitive self hates to be last! (Sorry, ECL).
This bread comes from a most intriguing cookbook called Warm Bread and Honey Cakes, by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra. If you leaf through this book, you'll wonder where on earth Pagrach-Chandra hails from because it contains such an oddly eclectic mix of recipes. It turns out that "where in the world" is pretty much right because she's got roots or connections all over the world. (She is of Indian ancestry, educated in North American and Europe). She's also an expert on Dutch baking, and is the author of the infamous speculaas-speculum cookie recipe that was another Lazy Bakers project.

This recipe makes an extremely stiff dough. I've been making baguettes and Italian breads lately, so I've become accustomed to the very soft and wet doughs that result in big holes. While the wet doughs have their own shaping problems, I thought this dough was hard to work with because it's so solid. I ended up working more milk into the dough as I kneaded it, but I still thought it was difficult to handle.

Once I added enough liquid to make the dough more malleable, I just had to let it rise.

I checked it after one hour. No movement at all. After two hours. No discernible change, even though there were two teaspoons of yeast in the dough. I began to wonder if I'd forgotten the yeast, but I distinctly remembered measuring out the yeast. Was the kitchen too cold? No, the sun was actually shining brightly and the kitchen was warm. After four hours, I was running out of time, so I decided it was good enough.

As I look at the pictures, I don't think it had doubled even after four hours.

You roll the dough out into a ten-inch-long rectangle, and then make cuts on both ends. You stretch the pieces you've cut into legs. I can see that my legs were not long and lovely as they should have been; I made short, stumpy legs. Then the legs are rolled up.

My short, stumpy legs (that is, my bread's short, stumpy legs) turned into misshapen lobster claws. I envisioned these legs as turning into lovely, graceful violin scrolls, but they didn't quite make it. Then I waited again for some upward movement from the dough. We were going out for dinner with friends, so I was running out of time, and had to hope that oven spring would make up for what wasn't happening with the dough.
Next step: egg wash and a whole lot of decorative slashing. It was pretty easy to cut the dough with a razor because it was still pretty stiff. I don't know why I have no pictures of this part of the process.

Melinda suggests that if you want a really brilliant shine, you should do two separate egg washes, waiting for the first to dry before you apply the second coat. This is one reason that her bread looks better than mine.
I didn't have any bread when it came out of the oven; instead, I waited dutifully until the next day to eat it, when the flavor is supposed to have mellowed. Even though I had my doubts about this bread all the way through the process, I actually liked it quite a lot.
The texture is fine, but still rustic-looking.

The spices in this spice bread are nutmeg and cardamom, with some lemon peel for fruity interest. I thought that the cardamom overpowered both the nutmeg and lemon zest. I didn't object to this because I like cardamom, but I would have preferred a more balanced taste. Because of the spices, the shaping, and the lengthy rising time, this is not a bread you'd want to have as your regular sandwich bread, but it's nice for a tea bread or just a change of pace. I have a practical objection to the ends of the bread, though (remember those rolled up legs?)--when you slice the bread, the ends fall apart into little bits and pieces of bread that are hard to do anything with. They also fall to the bottom of the toaster and can't be extracted, which is quite annoying when it happens first thing in the morning.
I believe that both Oriana's and Melinda's versions were aesthetically superior to mine, and the picture in the cookbook is quite amazingly beautiful. Even a second-rate version is impressive. (The pictures don't do it justice). If you want to impress people with your skill as a bread baker, this might be just the ticket.

Duivekater, or Festive Dutch Spiced Loaf
--from Warm Bread and Honey Cake, by Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra

500g/1 lb 2oz/ 3 1/2 cups bread flour
scant 2 teaspoons easy blend (instant) yeast
100g/ 3 1/2oz./1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
zest of 1/2 lemon
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
about 200 mls/ 7 fl oz/ 3/4 cup milk, warmed
75g/ 2 3/4 oz / 2/3 stick butter, melted and cooled slightly
1 egg, lightly beaten
extra beaten egg for glazing

Method:
Put the flour, yeast, sugar, salt, lemon zest, and spices in a large bowl. Add the milk, butter and beaten egg and mix with a spoon or spatula until the dry ingredients are well moistened.
If you are kneading by hand, turn out onto a floured surface or silicone mat and knead until elastic.
Alternatively, use a heavy-duty mixer fitted with a dough hook and knead for about five minutes, or until elastic.
Shape into a ball and place in a large bowl. Cover with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in bulk.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment.
Transfer the risen dough to a lightly floured surface. Knead until once more smooth and elastic. Roll out to an elongated oval shape, about 25 cm/ 10 inch long.
Make a cut at the top, about 10 cm/ 4 inch long. Make a similar cut at the bottom.
Place on the baking sheet. Twirl the the cut pieces between your fingers to lengthen them a little.
Coil then inwards into a spiral. You will have two spirals at the top and the bottom.
Cover loosely with lightly oiled cling film and leave in a warm, draft-free place until almost doubled in bulk.
pre heat the oven to 350.
Brush well with beaten egg and use a very sharp knife, or razor blade, to score a decorative pattern into the top. A series of shallow semi-circles goes well with the shape. Start in the middle, making the cuts the shape of a parenthesis- ( )- and then make 4 or 5 parallel cuts on either side.
Bake for 30 -35 minutes. The loaf should be a rich golden brown with the scored pattern much lighter. To test, tap the loaf sharply on the top and bottom; it should sound hollow.
Cool on a wire rack.

Pain a l'Ancienne

2010-02-08T21:21:00.000-06:00

Sunday, February 7, 2010

I think a l'ancienne means something like "in the old-fashioned, or traditional, style." But I like to think of it as "bread of the ancients," or even "bread for old people," which is right up my alley. Those ancients knew how to make bread.
Reader Paul has been urging me to try this recipe from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I wanted to try it, but when I looked at the recipe, I just didn't get how to shape it. As it turns out, you pick up the dough and it shapes itself. It's as if it has gone to obedience school. (Cakes, on the other hand, never go to obedience school. At least they don't graduate).
What the ancients like to do with bread dough is mix it up with ice cold water. This is very counter-intuitive, isn't it? Even though I don't proof my yeast any more, I still fear that too hot or too cold water will kill it, and I usually try to give it a nice, room-temperature water that won't shock its sensitive little system. But in this recipe you want to shock it. The idea is to make it ferment very, very slowly to develop flavor.

Here it is after being mixed with ice water and then put immediately in the refrigerator to retard its growth overnight. I let it rise for another three hours in the morning, and dumped it onto a well-floured counter. With more flour on top, it shapes easily into a rectangle.

This rectangle of dough is cut into six pieces. I used three of them for baguettes, and put three in the freezer, in individual small ziplock bags, for later use--probably for pizza. At least, I'll try one for pizza and see how it works.

Now here's where I didn't understand what was supposed to happen. There are no directions for shaping the bread into baguettes, but once I picked up a strip, I saw why there was no need for directions. If you just pick it up, you barely even need to stretch it. It stretches itself and goes right into the baguette pan, practically of its own accord.

It really was the most remarkably docile bread dough, especially considering that it's a pretty wet dough. It was not quite so tractable when it came time for it to be slashed. In fact, Reinhart says that you can skip the slashing step if the bread is uncooperative, but I don't think you should skip it. He also suggest using scissors, but I thought the scissors were less effective than my usual little lame.

When you see the breads ready to go into the oven, you can tell which one was scissored and which ones were lameed. (Spellcheck is not going to like that word).

You know how wonderful the kitchen smells when bread is baking? Well, this bread smells even more so.

Good as the aroma is, the taste is better. The loaves have a toasted wheat flavor that's quite remarkable. Despite the length of the instructions in the cookbook (and below), it's a very easy bread to make. All you have to do is remember to start it ahead of time. It has only the one rising, most of which is done in the refrigerator.
Between this recipe and the food processor baguette recipe from Mark Bittman, there is very little excuse not to have a few fresh baguettes every week. Well, except for laziness and lack of planning. Since I suffer from both, I assume I won't be having the weekly baguette I'm trying to convince you to make.

A few other pictures, before the recipe. I haven't blogged for a few weeks, but I have been baking something every Saturday morning in January for the neighbors. Three weeks ago, it was caramel rolls.

These were a big hit. The dough is from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, so all I had to do on Saturday morning was shape the day, fill it, and let it rise. (I still had to get up at 6:30, though, which is not my usual hour of rising on Saturday).
The next week, I wanted to do something easier, so I made blueberry muffins--a recipe I'd never tried before, from King Arthur. Although it's been my experience that muffins are the least popular of the January breakfast treats I make, these were eaten up within 45 minutes and roundly praised.

And now January is over, and the poor neighbors have to fend for themselves on Saturday mornings.

Pain a l'Ancienne
--from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Peter Reinhart

6 cups (27 oz.) unbleached bread flour
2 1/4 teaspoons (.56 oz.) salt
1 3/4 teaspoons (.19 oz.) instant yeast
2 1/2 to 3 cups water (19 to 24 oz.), ice cold
Semolina flour or cornmeal for dusting

Combine flour, salt, yeast, and 2 1/2 cups of water in the bowl of the electric mixer and mix for 5 to 6 minutes on medium speed. The dough should be sticky on the bottom of the bowl but it should release from the sides of the bowl.
Lightly oil a large bowl and immediately transfer the dough with a spatula dipped in water into the bowl. Mist the top of the dough with spray oil and cover the bowl with plastic wrap.
Immediately place the bowl in the refrigerator and retard overnight.
The next day, check the dough to see if it has risen in the refrigerator. It will probably be partially risen but not doubled in size. Leave the bowl of dough out at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours (or longer if necessary) to allow the dough to wake up, lose its chill, and continue fermenting.
When the dough has doubled from its original prerefrigerated size, liberally sprinkle the counter with bread flour (about 1/2 cup). Gently transfer the dough to the floured counter with a plastic dough scraper that has been dipped in cold water, dipping your hands as well to keep the dough from sticking to you. Try to degas the dough as little as possible as you transfer it.
Dry your hands thoroughly and then dip them in flour. Roll the dough gently in the sprinkled flour to coat it thoroughly, simultaneously stretching it into an oblong about 8 inches long and 6 inches wide. If it is too sticky to handle, continue sprinkling flour over it.
Dip a metal pastry scraper (or knife) into cool water to keep it from sticking to the dough, and cut the dough in half width-wise with the pastry scraper by pressing it down through the dough until it severs it, then dipping it again in the water and repeating this action until you have cut down the full length of the dough. (Do not use this blade as a saw; use it as a pincer, pinching the dough cleanly with each cut). Let the dough relax for 5 minutes.
Take one of the dough pieces and repeat the cutting action, but this time cut off 3 equal-sized lengths. Then do the same with the remaining half. This should give you 6 lengths.
Flour your hands and carefully lift one of the dough and transfer it to a parchment-lined pan, gently pulling it to the length of the pan. (Or, easier, use a perforated three-loaf baguette pan)
If it springs back, let it rest for 5 minutes and then gently pull it out again. Depending on your pan size, place 3 strips on the pan. Prepare another pan, and repeat with the remaining strips.
If you don't want to make all six loaves, divide them and refrigerate or freeze the remainining amounts. You can use them for baguettes, focaccia, or pizza.
Preheat the oven to 500°F and make sure to have an empty steam pan in place.
Score the dough strips as for baguettes, slashing the tops with 3 diagonal cuts.
Place the pans inside the oven. Pour 1 cup hot water into the steam pan and close the door. After 30 seconds, open the door, spray the side walls of the oven with water, and close the door. Repeat twice more at 30-second intervals. After the final spray, turn the oven setting down to 475°F and continue baking.
The bread should begin to turn golden brown within 8 or 9 minutes. If the loaves are baking unevenly, rotate them 180 degrees. Continue baking 10 to 15 minutes more, or until the bread is a rich golden brown.
Transfer the hot breads to a cooling rack.

Ciabatta Using Double Flour Addition and Double Hydration

2010-01-17T17:12:00.001-06:00

Saturday, January 16, 2010

This is another bread from Breadcetera.com,Steve B's website devoted to "professional quality baked goods from a home kitchen." I was quite worried about him because he hasn't blogged since June 14 of 2009. But then I noticed that he's been faithfully answering people's questions on his blog, so I could stop fretting about his well-being.
I made his version of white whole-wheat bread and grumbled about its being bitter. But there will be no grumbling about this bread. I wanted to try this bread for a few reasons: first, the photos on Steve B's blog looked gorgeous and second, I couldn't resist the title with its uber-scientific "double hydration" and double flour addition method. All it means is that you add both the water and the flour in two separate additions, which turns out not to be so mysterious after all. I got the gorgeous-looking bread, learned a few new techniques, and loved the taste of the ciabatta.
It starts out with a poolish that's mixed together quickly and left standing at room temperature for about 12 hours, so it's perfect to do the night before you're ready to start making the bread.

In the morning, you mix the poolish with some of the water and olive oil, using the whisk attachment (new technique #1) until it's mixed to a "homogeneous slurry" (new word combination #1). Some of the flour is whisked in, and then the rest of the flour added, switching to the dough attachment (this is the "double flour addition").
Oh, and by the way, this recipe specifically calls for King Arthur Organic Select Artisan Flour. They may have changed the name, but this is the closest I could get.

Now comes the "double hydration" part.
You mix everything together except for about 40 grams of water. It's a fairly wet dough as it is, but after mixing and mixing, and allowing to rest, you add the additional water just a little at a time.

I don't know if you can see the difference in the picture on the left and the picture on the right, but it was actually great fun to watch the dough slowly absorb even more water.
Now I understand that "fun" is a relative concept, and if most people were asked to rate, say, 100 activities for their fun quality, and one of the 100 were "watching bread dough slowly absorb small amounts of water," that might, in a general election, come in last. But I get more enjoyment out of that than I would out of hang gliding, which doesn't sound at all fun.
You can see that after all the water is absorbed, it's a very wet dough.

After three hours of rising, the dough is divided in half.

Then this very wet dough is shaped, floured and placed on a couche to let rise again. This is new technique #2. When I mentally pictured the bread on the couche thing, I pictured a big horrible mess. I decided to give it a try anyway.

To my amazement, it wasn't a mess at all. The bread pretty much shaped itself into nice oblong loaves, and they didn't stick at all.
Here's what the directions say: "After proofing, the dough peices are gently flipped onto a transfer peel and then slid from the transfer peel onto an oven peel." Huh? I though I was doing good to have a peel. I definitely don't have one that I consider my transfer peel. I have a peel. One.
So I hoisted both breads on a baking pan lined with parchment and placed the pan on an oven stone. I couldn't decide whether the loaves should be dimpled, so I dimpled just one.

Both loaves came out of the oven looking crispy and golden brown, and smelling delicious. I think that the one I dimpled had a slightly more even shape.

I was so pleased with their appearance that I didn't want to cut into them. Steve B's pictures showed such big holes and great texture, and I was sure mine would not be up to snuff (maybe because I didn't have a transfer peel), but they had the promised "wide open interior crumb."

We ate this bread as an accompaniment to soup, but the bread is so good that the soup (which was good too) became an accompaniment to the bread. This is not a dead-easy bread, but it's worth the time it takes. It's one of those kinds of breads that will make you feel like a professional bread-baker, and it will wow your friends.

If you're wondering what I made for January Coffee Hour #3, it was these cranberry scones:

They're from America's Test Kitchen cookbook, and can also be found at Smittenkitchen.
I've already blogged about these, so I won't say anything more than that they're still about the best scone around: not dry, not too sweet, tender, flaky, and delicious. Add whatever you want. Make a glaze by brushing on cream and sprinkling on sugar (or not). They're hard to mess up.

Cinnamon Sugar Popovers

2010-01-10T17:54:00.001-06:00

Saturday, January 9, 2010

This is the second thing I've baked for our annual Saturday morning coffee hours. (The first, a chocolate streusel coffee cake, can be seen on heavenlycakeplace).
I got the idea for these cinnamon-and-sugar popovers from a comment by PinkNest on my Thanksgiving popovers. She said her favorite popovers were with cinnamon and sugar. She didn't say whether butter was involved in her equation, but I liked the idea of rolling them in butter and then in a cinnamon-sugar mix.
This popover recipe is so good! And you can either mix it up the night before, as I did, or make it immediately before putting the popovers in the pan. Just brush each pan with a bit of melted butter, heat the pan for a few minutes, and pour in the batter.

I truly believe these popovers, if made as directed, are foolproof. I have made them several times, and they have never failed to do exactly what they're supposed to do: rise up high and handsome with a delicious taste and a texture that's decidedly non-gummy.
I had a bowl of melted butter and a bowl of cinnamon and sugar waiting for them when they got out of the oven.

The popovers keep their shape, so it's not difficult to pick them up with tongs, roll them in butter, and then spoon the cinnamon-sugar over them.

The first guest arrived just as I was putting the popovers on a platter. She grabbed one off the platter, and was delighted with it.

In fact, everyone loved them. I don't think I've ever baked something for these Saturday morning open houses that anyone has liked better. Someone compared them to the beignets served at Cafe du Monde.

All the neighbors were trying to outdo themselves in flattering comments so they would be quoted in the tasting panel: "An incredible explosion of deliciousness!" I had to explain that I don't have a tasting panel feature in this blog. They couldn't believe it when I ran out. "Didn't you make two pans?" A neighbor who arrived after the twelve popovers were eaten was morose. "I only got up because you told me you were making cinnamon and sugar popovers."
It looks like I'd better make these again, and soon.

ROSE'S FAIL-SAFE AND HIGHLY DELICIOUS POPOVERS
--From The Bread Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum
Wondra flour: 1 cup plus 3 tablespoons or 145 grams
Salt: 1/2 teaspoon
Sugar: 1/2 teaspoon
Whole milk: 1 liquid cup or 242 grams
Eggs: 2 large
Unsalted butter, melted and cooled: 4 tablespoons or 56 grams (divided)

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and sugar. Slowly whisk in the milk. Add the eggs, one at a time, whisking for about 1 minute after each egg is added. Beat until batter is smooth. Beat in 2 tablespoons of the melted butter. Transfer batter to a pitcher. Use immediately or refrigerate for up to 24 hours.

2. Before baking, preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

3. Using a pastry brush, coat the interior of the popover pan (you can use either the pan that makes six large or the one that makes 12 small popovers). Put the pan in the preheated oven for about 3 minutes (don't let the butter burn!) until the butter is hot.

4. Remove the pan from the oven, and fill each cup about half-full. Bake for 15 minutes.

5. Lower the heat to 350 F. and continue baking another 20-25 minutes for small popovers and 40-45 minutes for the larger ones.

6. Ten minutes before they're done, open the oven door and, with a sharp knife, quickly make a small slit in the side of each raised popover. This will release the steam and let the inside dry out more.

7. Lift the popovers out of the pan and onto a rack. Let cool slightly.

8. For cinnamon-sugar popovers, dip each popover into melted butter (melt 4-6 tablespoons butter) and then into a cinnamon-sugar mix (about 1/2 cup sugar, preferably extra fine, and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon).

9. Serve immediately.

New Year's Eve Dinner

2010-01-01T15:18:00.040-06:00

Friday, January 1, 2010
And it seems like only yesterday that we were in a panic about Y2K. Do you even remember it now?
Two years ago, I blogged about our annual neighborhood New Year's Eve travelling dinner party. Last year, I didn't. The neighbors complained: "I was looking forward to seeing pictures of all the food--what's wrong with you?" This year, I assigned Jim camera duty. The neighbors complained: "Don't we have any privacy rights? What's wrong with you?" This is a hard bunch to please.
To respect their privacy rights, about which they have never before expressed concern, I will use only their initials.
This year, our theme was Volume I of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The book club went to S.P.'s sister's house in Martha's Vineyard last fall, and we saw Julie and Julia as a group. When we came out of the movie, someone (M.W.) said, "Why don't we make recipes from Mastering the Art for our New Year's dinner?" We all agreed this was a fine idea, especially since New Year's Eve was three or four months away, and so the idea didn't really require a lot of commitment.
As NYE approached, we didn't lose our enthusiasm, and we passed around the several battered copies of Mastering that, among us, we owned. I was assigned the hors d'oeuvre course. L.D. got the soup, S.P. the salad, and B.B. drew dessert. M.L. said she wanted to do Julia's classic boeuf bourguiggnon, and J.N. volunteered to be M.L.'s assistant. (Using initials is harder than you might think--I keep forgetting who these people are).
I spent a lot of time looking through the small hors d'oeuvre chapter, while also perusing a lot of related information. I finally settled on vegetables a la Grecque, cold Roquefort balls, Quiche Lorraine, and creamed shrimp on toasts.

The shrimp on toast required bread, naturally, and Julia recommended homemade pain de mie. Ha! I can do that, I thought to myself. I had forgotten had easy it is to make pain de mie, AKA Pullman loaf. I got out my Pullman loaf pan, and The Bread Bible, and mixed it up in just a few minutes. It was easier than going to the grocery store and buying a loaf, especially since the roads are still very icy and all parking lots have huge piles of snow sitting around blocking your view of oncoming traffic.
On Thursday, I sliced the bread--it slices very nicely--

and cut the slices with a two-inch biscuit cutter.

I really enjoyed cutting the bread circles. I also enjoyed making clarified butter, and sauteeing the rounds. I was still moving at a slow pace and having a good time.

Then I put together the vegetables a la Grecque. I've never hankered to make these because they sound kind of boring, but the other things I was making were heavy-laden with cream, eggs, cheese and things of that nature, so something less artery-clogging seemed in order as a palate cleanser.
I decided to make a small plate of mushrooms, red peppers, and carrots.

To make them in the Greek manner (or what the French consider to be the Greek manner), you cut them up and cook them in a broth made of water, olive oil, lemon, shallots, celery, herbs, fennel seeds and peppercorns.

This is how they turned out. The picture is a little dark; they were actually quite pretty.

The cold Roquefort balls were also easy and make-ahead. Roquefort cheese, butter, chives, minced celery, a dash of cayenne, and a few drops of Worcestershire; shaped into little balls and rolled in breadcrumbs and minced parsley.

Butter and cream are so tricky. They can actually make things seem light--these little cheese balls were so ethereal and delicate. It's a miracle to me that you can mix two high-fat foods together and end up with something that could be packaged with a "Lite" label. But that would be wrong.

At this point, I was feeling pretty good. I had got two of the appetizers already made and in the refrigerator. But I still had to do the quiche, which means making the crust and refrigerating it for a while. Suddenly, all the time in the world has collapsed into just a few hours.
I had already decided that I'd try to follow the details of the recipes as much as possible, which meant homemade bread and following Julia's pastry recipe. She didn't use a food processor, so I wouldn't use a food processor. She used a crazy amount of butter (13 tablespoons for two cups of flour--her pate brisee recipe); I'd use a crazy amount of butter. It's not easy to work that much butter into flour, and I never did get to the stage of small pea-size bits of butter. I thought maybe it would be ok because I still had to do the step called fraisage, where you use the heel of your hand to work butter into the flour, but even after that, I didn't think it was right. But I was running out of time and couldn't start over, so this was going to have to do.

But I ultimately worked it into a tart pan. I remembered that I had some pie weights somewhere, bought at some point when I was going to try to get better at making pastry. I make these pie resolutions periodically and then get discouraged when I mess around with pie dough. Today was no exception.

The pie crust shrank, as is its wont, and I forgot to put it on a pan when I filled it and put it in the oven. In my defense, I have to say that Julia Childs' recipes are often not that easy to follow, and they often have key instructions hidden in some random part of the recipe. Not in my defense, I should have figured out without being told that a tart pan with a removable bottom and filled with uncooked custard was going to leak. It did. My oven was a mess. I neglected to do the top with butter. But the quiche still turned out looking pretty good.

Julia's quiche Lorraine recipe is made without cheese, so it's just a plain custard and the bacon pieces are pressed down on the bottom of the pastry. The quiche itself is very delicious, and so were the sides and tops of the crust. The bottom was very soggy, though--it didn't get done enough during the partial bake to withstand the custard.
Finally, I made the cheese puffs. The official title is fondue de crustaces, or cream filling with shellfish, plopped on top of an already-made sauteed bread round, and broiled. These were the most delicious of the four appetizers I made, and a huge hit. It was a race against the clock to finish them by 7:00, the designated starting time. And neither Jim nor I had time to take pictures of the process. It's a thick cream sauce, flavored with tarragon and a little sherry, as well as some grated Swiss cheese. (I used a nice French Abondance). I diced cooked shrimp, which I heated up with a minced shallot, and put it into the very thick sauce and sprinkled it with a little more cheese. This is worth making again, although it's time-consuming, expensive, and very rich.

We served Argyle sparkling wine, made from an Oregon vineyard, with the appetizers, which I highly recommend.
The only thing remaining on the plates when we left to go to L.D.'s house for soup was about a quarter-cup of vegetables, which I take as proof that if you offer people vegetables, bacon, cheese, or shrimp, you'll always have leftover vegetables.
The soup was the mushroom soup from Mastering the Art, and L.D.'s rendition was perfect. She grumbled about how it took her all day, but she turned out a soup you could dream about. As I'm writing about it now, I wish I had just one more taste.

S.P. didn't make a salad from Julia's cookbook--it turns out that there is no salad chapter, and Julia would probably tell us a salad in France is lettuce with a good vinaigrette. Don't be adding fruit or nuts or cheese or some other fancy stuff, she might say. In fact, S.P. made a green salad with a perfect champagne vinaigrette--courtesy of Ina Garten--and toasts with goat cheese.

I'm pretty sure this salad would be just fine with Julia.
Next, the main course, presented by M.L. and J.N.--Julia's classic boeuf bourguignon. This was the first recipe of Julia Child's that I ever tried, and it forever changed the way I thought about what I used to call stew.

With roasted vegetables on the side, it was a wonderful entree.

I wondered what dessert B.B. would make: a tart? a sweet souffle? Maybe a mousse? Well, B.B., who is well known for having a mind of her own, decided she didn't really want to make a French dessert, so she made a chocolate mousse pie.

She might have been able to get away with claiming it was a variation on a version of one of Julia's chocolate mousse recipes if it weren't for the Oreo crust. I can't say for sure that Julia never made an oreo pie crust, but it seems unlikely. In fact, she said she'd never even tried an Oreo (or a Twinkie), although she always claimed not to be a food snob, and said she loved hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato chips. So she might very well have been just crazy about this chocolate mousse pie, which was especially good with the big cloud of whipped cream and the shaved chocolate.
Unlike some recent years, we made it up well past midnight. We made predictions for 2010. The person who has the most correct predictions gets to have a bright green glass women's head wearing a Santa Claus hat for a year. Tiger Woods featured prominently in this year's predictions.

Happy New Year to you all, and may you enjoy good food and good company throughout the year!

Mark Bittman's Food Processor Baguettes

2009-12-30T09:00:00.000-06:00

Sunday, December 27, 2009

I had no hope at all for this very simple recipe for baguettes. I don't even know what possessed me to try it, except that my daughter Elizabeth had asked me for a bread recipe that used a food processor, and my daughter Sarah had asked me for Bittman's How to Cook Everything as a Christmas present. When I was leafing through the new, improved version of the cookbook, I ran across the recipe for "Easiest and Best French Bread." Oh, right, I thought. Toss four simple ingredients into a food processor, and then, when you think of it, give them a little shaping and bake. I'm sure that's going to make a good baguette.

I don't know why, but this easy-as-pie recipe turned out a better baguette than the Peter Reinhart version I made a few weeks ago where I laboriously sieved whole wheat flour to try to approximate "clear flour." It's not at all fair that something this easy should turn out so good, but there you are. It's a recipe that you should try anytime you feel like turning out a flavorful baguette but you don't want to start the process three days ahead of time.

The recipe consists of flour, water, salt, and yeast. Everything goes in a food processor for about 30 seconds. You gather up the dough--it's pretty wet--put it in a bowl and let it rise for a few hours.

Shape it into three loaves and put them into a French bread pan.

Let them rise again, slash them, and put them in the oven.

Take them out a half-hour later.

That's it! I don't know why one of the loaves looks so much more decorous than the other two--I guess the slashes weren't as deep.

I liked the way they looked when they came out of the oven. I liked the way they smelled. But I'd liked the way the poolish baguettes of a few weeks ago looked and smelled too, and then I was disappointed when I tasted them. But these tasted really good--so much better than I expected. I've considered the possibility that it was just my low expectations that made me so impressed with the way these loaves turned out. Since I expected nothing, any result above nothing would be good. But I don't think so. The outside is crusty but not hard, the inside is chewy and full of rich flavor. If I bought it at a bakery, I'd go back for more.
Everyone knows Mark Bittman is the one who popularized no-knead bread, the craze of a few years ago. But maybe it's this food processor baguette that really deserves the popularity.

Easiest and Best French Bread
--from How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman

3 1/2 cups (546 grams) bread flour
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. instant yeast
1 1/2 cups water (or more)

1. Process flour, salt, and yeast for a few seconds in food processor, using the metal blade. With the machine running, pour most of the water through the feed tube. Process about 30 seconds, or until dough becomes a sticky, shaggy ball. If it doesn't feel sticky, add more water.

2. Turn dough into large bowl, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise for two to three hours at room temperature.

3. Sprinkle a little flour on the counter, and cut dough into three equal pieces. Shape each into long roll, and place in a lightly floured baguette pan. Cover with a towel, and let rise for another one to two hours. (On a cold day, you'll need the full rising time).

4. About a half-hour before baking, put baking stone in oven, and skillet or pan on lowest shelf. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. When ready to bake, slash loaves with sharp knife and sprinkle lightly with flour. Put about 1/2 cup of ice cubes on pan on lowest shelf of the oven, and quickly put baguette pan on top of baking stone.

5. Spray sides of oven after five minutes and again after ten minutes.

6. Bake 25 to 35 minutes, until crust is golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.

Christmas Popovers

2009-12-25T20:42:00.010-06:00

Friday, December 25, 2009

I usually make a big Christmas breakfast that tides us over until dinner, but today's dinner was going to be early, so I wanted to make something less hearty, but still festive. I decided on Greek yogurt, lightly sugared berries, and granola, but that menu seemed lacking in the festivity category. Suddenly, I thought of popovers. I haven't made them since the year I baked all the breads in The Bread Bible. 2006? Time sure flies when you're eating carbs. Fresh out-of-the-oven popovers with cherry preserves, orange marmalade, and some apricot filling left over from making Polish apricot Christmas cookies. Now that seems festive.

One of the great things about Rose's recipe for popovers is that they can be made ahead of time. I made them Christmas eve and put them in a little pitcher. I don't know why people (including me) are afraid of popovers. They couldn't be much easier. I'm going to have to make it my mission in life to convince people to make them. My former mission was to convince people to weigh ingredients when baking, but it seems that I got rather tiresome about that, or so I gathered when people started leaving the room when I merely mentioned how I loved my scale.

The trick is using Wondra flour. This is Rose's trick, not mine, but I will adopt it for my mission. Mix up Wondra flour, milk, eggs, a few tablespoons of melted butter, a bit of salt and a bit of sugar, and hey presto!

The other trick is in having a popover pan. I'm sure you can use muffin pans, but they are squatter and don't have the nearly straight sides of a specialized popover pan, which is worth buying even if you only use it twice in four years.

Of course, you could also use a full-sized popover pan, but I like to use the smaller ones, because they seem so tiny and harmless that you don't mind eating a second, or even, possibly, a third.

And a new Christmas tradition is born.

Poolish Baguettes

2009-12-14T18:15:00.024-06:00

Saturday, December 12, 2009

When I was trying to think of a new bread to make this weekend, it occurred to me that I hadn't made a baguette in a very long time. I found this recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, and it looked like I'd be able to bake it on Saturday while I was writing a brief. It worked out very well--I sat at the counter and typed away on my laptop (about what the burglary statute means by a "person in lawful possession") while occasionally checking the progress of this slow-rising dough.
All I had to do on Friday was mix up the poolish until it started its bubbling action, and then put it in the refrigerator overnight.

I made a whole recipe of poolish, and didn't realize until Saturday that I only needed a cup of it. The poolish was so lively and gluteny that I couldn't bear to throw it away, so I googled "freezing poolish." According to a source, whether reliable or unreliable I have yet to find out, poolish can be frozen for up to three months and used successfully if it's brought back to room temperature. We'll see.
The real fun started when I tried to approximate something called "clear flour." Reinhart says that you get this by sifting whole wheat flour and leaving behind the bran. He also says, not particularly helpfully, that most home sifters don't have fine enough holes to separate the flour from the bran. (Is this anything like separating the wheat from the chaff?) If there is not a sizeable amount of bran left behind in the sifter, he says, you'll know it's not working.

I sifted out only two pieces of bran from over a cup of flour, so I could see that this wasn't going to work. I searched my kitchen for something with finer mesh than a sifter, and came up with an ancient tea caddy. This actually worked pretty well.

However, since I could sift only about a tablespoon at a time, I got tired of it before I sifted through the entire 8 ounces, so I filled in with extra bread flour. (This is what Reinhart suggests if you can't sift away the bran, so I felt I had permission to do it that way). I did get a nice mountain of very finely sifted flour.

The dough came together nicely, and went into a bowl for a two-hour rise.

It looks a little like an angry mask, doesn't it? But after the first rising, and a little hand-kneading, it loses its angry appearance and just looks like bread dough.

Another few hours, and the dough is ready to divide and shape.

The dough scraper is one of those little gadgets that, once you have it, you don't see how you ever did without it.
The dough almost shaped itself into three baguettes.

I loved the way these baguettes looked when they came out of the oven--just the right deep brown color, and the kitchen smelled exactly the way your house is supposed to smell if you're trying to sell your house: warm, homey, yeasty, delicious.

Because it looked so beautiful, it was a bit of a letdown to taste the bread. It was good. It had a very nice wheaty flavor, but it didn't have the open, chewy texture that I was hoping for.

It wasn't bad at all, but I would have to say that it wasn't worth the time spent sifting flour through a tea caddy. I'd like to try something made with authentic "clear flour" sometime to see what this bread is supposed to taste like. Meanwhile, I'll look for other recipes to use up my frozen poolish, and hope I remember to do it sometime in the next three months.

Poolish Baguettes
--adapted from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart

1 cup (7 ounces) poolish*
1 3/4 cups (8 ounces) whole wheat flour, sifted (or use all bread flour except for about 2 tablespoons of unsifted whole wheat flour)
2 cups (9 ounces) bread flour
1 1/2 tsp. (.37 ounce) salt
3/4 tsp. (.08 ounce) instant yeast
1 1/8 to 1 1/4 cups (9 to 10 ounces) water

1. Stir together the flours, salt and yeast in the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the poolish pieces and the water, and mix on low speed with the paddle attachment until the ingredients form a ball. Add more water or flour as needed, to create a dough that is soft but not sticky.

2. Knead on medium speed with dough hook about six minutes, until dough is soft and pliable. Lightly oil a large bowl and transfer the dough to the bowl, coating all over with oil. Cover bowl with plastic wrap.

3. Let rise about 2 hours, or until dough is nearly doubled in size. Remove dough from bowl and knead about a minute. Return to bowl and cover again.

4. Let rise another 2 hours until dough is doubled in size.

5. Divide dough in 3 pieces on a floured counter. Shape into baguettes. Putting them in a three-baguette pan works perfectly. Let rise another hour.

6. Preheat oven to 500. Place baking stone on lower third of oven. Slash baguettes with knife or razor blade, and put in oven. Create steam in oven by putting either about 1/2 cup ice cubes or 1 cup hot water in preheated pan on rack below the rack with the baking stone.

7. Spray additional water twice on oven walls at 30-second intervals, if desired, and then lower heat to 450. Bake for 10 minutes. Rotate pan, and bake for another 8 to 12 minutes, until bread is golden brown.

8. Remove bread from oven and let cool on a rack.

*Poolish (Makes about 23 ounces)

Stir together 2 1/2 cups (11.25 ounces) bread flour, 1 1/2 cups (12 ounces) water, and 1/4 tsp. instant yeast. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and ferment at room temp. for 3 to 4 hours, or until bubbly and foamy. Refrigerate it for up to 3 days. Remove from refrigerator an hour or two before using.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-24T07:17:00.003-06:00

Off to Las Vegas for a family Thanksgiving. No bread for a few weeks. I am consciously avoiding any lame jokes based on "bread" and Las Vegas.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Royal Crown's Tortano

2009-11-14T17:22:00.026-06:00

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

This recipe is from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking, but, luckily for me, Rose put the recipe on her website just a month or so ago, and I don't have to type it out. Also, it got the RLB Seal of Approval, so you know it's good.
Tortano and casatiello seem to be used interchangeably, and they refer to a round-shaped Italian holiday loaf which, in its full glory, contains lard, salami, and cheese and also has four raw eggs, still in their shells, which are placed atop the unbaked bread and cook while the bread bakes. This version looks like a full-meal bread and then some, but the version I made has no lard, no salami, no cheese, and no eggs, raw or otherwise. It takes a long time to make, but is otherwise not particularly difficult. In fact, although Glezer lists it as a bread requiring "intermeditate," rather than "beginning" skills, I think the only reason for the upgrade is that the dough is wet and sticky. Don't let that deter you from making this delicious bread--if you soldier through, you'll be impressed with yourself when you realized you turned out this artisan bread from your own kitchen.

It takes just a wisp of yeast to make this bread--a quarter-teaspoon dissolved in a cup of water; only 1/3 cup of this yeast water is used, making a total amount of about 1 1/2 teaspoon of yeast. I was doubtful that this would work and was tempted to cheat by adding a little more, but I didn't. I mixed this pre-ferment up on Tuesday at about 5:00 in the afternoon. When I got up on Wednesday morning, it had bubbled up and grown enough that it was clear that it was working. (I had a chance to bake on Wednesday because it was Veterans' Day, and government workers get that day off).

The dough is made with the pre-ferment, more flour and water, some honey, and about a quarter-cup of potato puree. I used half a leftover baked potato, but you could also use a boiled potato. It takes about 10 minutes to turn this mixture into a smooth, silky dough--very moist and sticky, but not a problem to handle if you flour your hands.
It needs another four or five hours to rise, and you can't just walk away and leave it. For the first 80 minutes, it requires tending every 20 minutes, when you take it out of the bowl, flatten it, and fold it.

The dough scraper is a fine invention. If you didn't have it, you'd really fight with the dough when you were folding it because it would want to stick to the counter.
Finally, after about five hours, you get to punch a hole in the center of the round loaf that you've shaped. (This is the shape that makes it a tortano). With your hands, you enlarge the hole. You should enlarge it more than I did, because when you bake it, the loaf gets quite a bit bigger, and you can end up losing most of the doughnut shape.

Here is the bread just as I'm about to make four slashes in the top and put it in the oven.
Below is as it comes out of the oven, 40 minutes later.

The bread is supposed to bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until it is a "very dark brown." After a half-hour, it seemed brown enough, but I let it go another 10 minutes, by which time it was indeed very dark.

It had taken so long for the two risings that the bread didn't come out of the oven until after 6:00, so there was no time to sample it before we went to Gigi's for our usual Wednesday pizza and bottle of wine. When we came home, we had to have bread for dessert. Seriously. If you live in fear of carbs, the idea of bread after pizza should make you tremble.
This is probably not the ideal way to appreciate this bread, but I'm glad we had some the same day it was baked. The only down side to this tortano, aside from its taking its sweet old time to get ready, is that its life span of perfect freshness is not that long. 24 hours later, it was still good, but not as spectacular. Its crust is crusty, the holes are, as promised, as big as radishes. The bread itself demands savoring--with every bite you can taste the earthiness of the potato and the slight sweetness of the honey.
Every ingredient counts in this wonderful bread, and you are again reminded that the simplest, homiest ingredients can result in something spectacular.

Peppered Cheese Bread

2009-11-03T17:39:00.017-06:00

Saturday, October 31, 2009

I didn't think I'd have time to bake bread this weekend, but we were having guests over for appetizers in the afternoon and I wanted to serve something I'd baked. When I ran across this recipe, it seemed perfect: it looked pretty fast and easy, and so full of flavor that it wouldn't much much matter that it hadn't had a long, slow rise for subtle flavor development. With 2 teaspoons black pepper and 1 teaspoon of red pepper flakes, this was not, I predicted, going to be a subtle bread! Nor was it. But it was very good in it unsubtle, but tasty, way.

Even after being kneaded by machine for five minutes, the dough was still too sticky, so I kneaded in more flour by hand,

and then flattened it out and sprinkled half the cheese on top.

This cheese is so orange it looks like grated carrots, but it's not.

More kneading, more flattening, more cheese.

You can see the little bits of cheese that have already been mixed in. It takes only about 45 minutes for the dough to double in size--ready to be shaped into a ball.

Another 45 minutes for it to be nice and puffy,

And ready for the slash-and-brush treatment.

I'm crazy about the shine you get with an egg glaze. Sometimes I wish I could brush an egg glaze on everything I make, but I don't because I'm a conformist at heart. Also, I suppose it would get a little monotonous.

I was just a bit worried about serving this bread to our friends because I just wasn't sure how the three teaspoons of pepper were going to play out in a loaf of bread. I pictured Bill and MaryAnn taking a bite of bread and spitting it out. Then I pictured myself getting angry because they spit out my bread, and pictured Jim trying to make peace. Fortunately, none of that picturing actually happened. The bread had a lovely peppery bite, but it wasn't at all overpowering and went very well with the tangy bits of cheddar.

I tried it the next day, toasted, as the base for a fried egg sandwich, and that was an inspired combination. All you have to do is have the courage to toss in a full tablespoon of peppers into a standard white bread dough, and you end up with a nice accompaniment to appetizers, a way to upgrade a plain dinner, or a surprisingly good piece of toast.

PEPPERED CHEESE BREAD

--from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison
1 1/3 cups milk
2 1/4 tsp instant yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
1 tsp red pepper flakes
1 beaten egg
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup grated cheddar cheese

1. Mix milk, yeast, salt, peppers, flour, and all but one tablespoon of the beaten egg into the bowl of a stand mixer.
2. Knead on medium speed for about five minutes. If it is still sticky, turn the dough out onto a floured counter and finish kneading until dough is smooth and workable.
3. Flatten dough and scatter half the cheese over it. Knead dough until cheese is mixed in, then flatten again, and add the rest of the cheese. Knead until all cheese is incorporated. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl. Turn once, then cover and set aside until doubled in bulk, about 45 minutes to an hour.
4. Push the dough down, then turn it out onto the counter. Shape it into a tight ball. Cover and set aside until doubled in bulk again, about 45 minutes.
5. Preheat oven to 375. (Optional: put baking stone on shelf in lower third of oven and let the stone preheat as well).
6. Slash an X in the top of the bread and brush with the reserved beaten egg.
7. Bake about 45 minutes, and turn onto a rack to cool.

Jessamyn's Sephardic Challah

2009-10-19T20:29:00.015-05:00

Saturday, October 17, 2009

This bread is three-for-three. It's easy to make, despite the braided shape which looks harder than it is, it's stunning to look at, and it's absolutely delicious. The recipe makes two loaves. I took one of them to work, and my co-worker Teddie told me that it was so good she could happily eat the whole loaf. (Although she didn't).
The recipe is from an article in the November edition of Food & Wine called "Inside Hot Bread Kitchen," about - what else? - the bakers at New York's Hot Bread Kitchen, a bakery in Queens. A woman named Jessamyn Waldman founded the bakery as a way to help women immigrants acclimate to the United States, learn English, and provide job opportunities. The article includes recipes for tortillas, gorditas, and Palestinian Spinach pies, but it was the challah that caught my eye. This is Sephardic, not the better-known Ashkenazic challah. I never knew that regular challah was Ashkenazic, but it's worth knowing if only because it gives you a reason for saying Ashkenazic, which is so much fun to say.
This bread uses the direct method, which means more yeast, less time, and, usually, less flavor, but I figured that the caraway and sesame seeds would give it enough flavor to make up for it, and indeed they did. It was supposed to have anise seeds too. I usually like to make a recipe the first time with no additions, subtractions, or substitutions. But there are only a few things I like anise seeds in, and bread isn't one of them. I remember the first time I made Swedish limpa bread, and I had a big argument with myself about whether to use aniseed. My follow-the-directions self won the argument, but my real self wished that she hadn't, so I decided to dump the anise seeds and the devil take the hindmost. If you use "Ashkenazic" and "the devil take the hindmost" in one sentence today, you might (or might not) win a fabulous prize.
Back to bread--you will want to have a heavy-duty mixer for this recipe, since you must knead it by mixer about ten minutes. If you mixed it by hand, I hate to think how long it might take. But after ten minutes, it's an elastic but not sticky mass.

It rises nicely and after just an hour or so, it's ready to stretch into a 30-inch rope.

The rope gets shaped into a coil, with one end of the rope forming the center of the coil. This is much easier than braiding.

Brush the coils with a beaten egg, let sit uncovered for 30 minutes, brush again, and sprinkle more seeds on top.

The double egg glaze gives the bread such shine that it's hard to get a bad picture of it.

But you can make anything look pretty. (Actually, this is so not true!) The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. The bread tasted great fresh from the oven, but most any bread does.

But it also tasted delicious several hours later, as an accompaniment to a pureed root vegetable soup, as toast on Monday morning, and as day-old bread brought into the office, where people were so enthusiastic about the bread that it was finished before the chocolate cake that Jessica brought in from her mother's birthday party. It's just a fine bread to have in your repertoire.

JESSAMYN'S SEPHARDIC CHALLAH

--Adapted from Food & Wine Magazine

3 1/2 tablespoons sesame seeds
2 tablespoons caraway seeds
2 1/4 tsp. instant yeast
2 cups lukewarm water
5 cups (780 grams) bread flour
2 1/2 Tblsp. (50 grams) olive oil
2 Tblsp. (40 grams) honey
1 Tblsp. (16 grams) kosher salt
(One egg, for glaze)

1. In a skillet, toast the sesame and caraway seeds for a few minutes over moderate heat. (You may reduce the amount of sesame and caraway seeds and add anise seeds if you like).

2. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine the flour and yeast with the olive oil, honey, and water, and mix on low speed until a very soft dough forms. Add the salt and all but 1 Tblsp. of the seeds and mix on medium-low speed, until dough is soft and supple, about 10 minutes.

3. Transfer dough to large oiled bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let stand until dough has doubled, about one hour.

4. Put parchment paper on one large or two small baking sheets. Dust parchment with cornmeal, if desired. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and press to deflate. Cut the dough in half and let rest for five minutes. Roll each piece into an 18-inch-long rope, and let rest for another five minutes; then roll each rope into a 30-inch rope. Beginning with one end of the coil, which will be the center of the coil, work outwards, forming each rope into a coil. Tuck the end under the coil.

5. Transfer coils to the baking sheet or sheets and cover with plastic wrap for about an hour, until nearly doubled.

6. Preheat oven to 400 F. Whisk the egg with one Tblsp. water. Brush over the loaves and let stand uncovered for 30 minutes. Brush again with egg wash and sprinkle with the reserved seeds. Bake the loaves in the center of the oven for 30 minutes, until they're golden brown. Transfer to racks and let cool completely before slicing.

Rose's Butter-Dipped Dinner Rolls

2009-10-10T18:29:00.019-05:00

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Last week Jim asked me why I didn't blog about one of Rose's breads again. I told him I couldn't just repeat recipes all the time, or it wouldn't be much of a blog, would it? He agreed, but pointed out that nobody was likely to call me out for making a bread I'd made three years ago. Since it was his birthday week, I decided I could sneak in my favorite dinner roll recipe. If you eat these rolls with butter, they're really triple-butter rolls: butter in the dough, melted butter brushed all over the shaped dough, and more butter when they're served. Whether you think that's over the top or just right depends on your attitude toward butter. My attitude is favorable.

Last week, I said that you should never let bread be the master of you. I took my own advice and made this bread through the first two risings on Friday night, so I'd have enough time to shape them and let them rise again before taking them to a Saturday lunch. Lunch at 12:00 sharp people! (This is Jim's family, all German and heavily into order and routine--as he would be the first to tell you). It worked beautifully.
Friday night I made the sponge and the flour mixture, letting it sit long enough so that the sponge started to bubble up through the flour. Here's the point where the butter gets added and everything is mixed together.

It takes a few hours to double, then it gets pressed into a rectangle and folded.

Back into the bowl. Here, you can either continue with the recipe, or put it in the refrigerator to rise slowly overnight, which is what I did. By the next morning, it has doubled in size again.

If your husband gets up earlier than you do, you can tell him to take the bowl out of the refrigerator when he gets up. Then you can have a cup of coffee, read about Obama getting the Nobel peace prize, and get to work. Otherwise, you can have two cups of coffee and also read about everyone's reaction to Obama's getting the Nobel prize, and then get to work.
There are instructions for shaping into little round rolls, Parker House rolls, and Cloverlead rolls, but I just made the pan o' buns. You roll them into balls, dip them in butter all over, and place them in a square or round pan, keeping a little distance between them.

Within an hour and a half or so, they've risen enough so that they're crowding each other, and they will form themselves into little loaves.

After they cool for a few minutes, you can break them apart. They are little visions of loveliness and lightness.

I don't generally include Rose's recipes because I did every recipe in the book. If I'd printed all the recipes, and some lawyer called me and accused me of violating a copyright, I wouldn't have a great defense. However, if you want the recipe and don't have the book, you can go to starchefs.com and get it. But the short version of the recipe doesn't have weights, so maybe you should just break down and buy the book. If you make these, just be prepared to perfect your fake-modest disclaimer that, really, it was nothing.

Best and Easiest Home-Baked Bread

2009-10-05T19:56:00.018-05:00

Sunday, October 4, 2009

That is actually the name of the recipe: "Best and Easiest Home-Baked Bread," from Nick Malgieri's How to Bake. It's neither the best nor the easiest bread I've ever made, but it's pretty good and pretty easy, and it does come out of the oven with a fabulously crunchy crust.
The last bread I tried from this cookbook was an Italian ring bread, which was better in concept than in reality, but I was more impressed with this recipe--even though I do think it's gutsy to call one of your recipes "the best."
And it does involve some planning ahead, which kind of takes it out of the "easy" category, I think, although once you've committed yourself to making it, and set aside the requisite number of hours (24, more or less), it requires only short bursts of time and energy.

About 24 hours before you think you might want to eat the bread, you make a simple starter--water, a tiny amount of yeast, and flour. That bubbles away for a few hours (you can slow the activity down by putting it in the refrigerator if that fits your schedule better).

The starter is added to a sponge, made with more water, yeast, and flour--plus the starter--and that also bubbles away for a while. (It's easiest if you mix up the sponge just before you go to bed. In the morning, you can either make the dough immediately or refrigerate it until you're ready for it).
Never let bread be your master! It can almost always be refrigerated if you're not feeling breadish at that very moment.
The final dough stage just consists of the sponge, more flour, and salt.

It's a soft dough, so you may want to knead in a little more flour by hand. Well, of course, you can do it all by hand if you want to, but I'm loyal to my KitchenAid bread hook.

Although it has less than a teaspoon of yeast in it, the dough rises quickly: about an hour in a bowl and less than an hour after it's shaped. You can shape it however you want to, but I used a colander with a towel to help it keep its shape.

Even so, it flattened considerably as soon as I removed it from its colander-mold, so if I'd just done a free-form boule, I think it would have looked like a flatbread.

Jim got all excited when he saw how I'd slashed it because he thought it looked like a sand dollar. I told him I thought a sand dollar only had five lines.

I was afraid he was going to turn on the bread because he wasn't going to be able to find a picture of a sand dollar to compare it to, but he decided he liked it anyway.

The bread was exceptionally good with sour cherry preserves, which I had left over from my cake adventure of the week: Hungarian Jancsi Torta.

(It does look a little bit like a sand dollar).

BEST AND EASIEST HOME-BAKED BREAD
--from How to Bake, by Nick Malgieri

STARTER
1 cup warm tap water
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1 cup unbleached all-purpose or whole wheat flour

SPONGE
3/4 cup warm tap water
1/2 tsp. instant yeast
Risen starter, above
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

DOUGH
The sponge, above
1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tsp. salt

1. To make the starter, mix water, yeast, and flour in a small bowl. Cover with plastic wrap. Set aside to rise at room temperature and doubled and bubbly--from 2 to 8 hours.
2. For the sponge, mix water, yeast, and starter in a larger bowl until smooth. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise until about triple in volume, 4 to 8 hours, or overnight.
3. For the dough, stir the sponge to deflate it. Stir in the smaller amount of flour and the salt in a mixing bowl. Using the dough hook, knead on low spead for about five minutes. Add the additional flour if the dough is too soft.
4. Turn the dough into an oiled bowl. Cover and let rise about an hour, until doubled. (You can also mix by hand or in a food processor).
5. Shape into a boule, and place, bottom side up, in a colander lined with a floured cotton towel. Sprinkle with cornmeal. Cover with plastic and let rise until doubled, 45 minutes to an hour.
6. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Put baking stone on middle rack. When the oven and dough are ready, carefully invert onto a baking pan lined with parchment. Quickly slash top of bread. Just before placing bread in oven, put about 1/2 cups of ice cubes into heated pan on bottom rack of oven. Put bread in oven and immediately reduce heat to 450 degrees.
7. Bake for about 20 minutes. Then put bread directly on baking stone and reduce heat to 350 degrees. Bake 20 to 30 minutes longer.
8. Remove bread from oven and cool on rack.

Zucchini Pizza with Cherry Tomatoes and Goat Cheese

2009-09-19T17:59:00.026-05:00

Sunday, September 13, 2009

If you've been frequenting your local farmers' markets this summer, you'll probably not be surprised that I was searching for something to use some of the zucchini and tomatoes that I bought in the morning. I turned to two of my favorite cookbooks--The Italian Baker for the pizza dough and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for the topping. You could use any pizza dough, of course--both Rose and Peter Reinhart have excellent ones--and figuring out the zucchini topping isn't rocket science. But I'll include both recipes in case you want to try these specific ones.
The pizza dough is simple enough: just yeast, water, flour, olive oil, and salt.

Mixed until the dough becomes "soft and satiny but firm."

Pizza dough is so easy! Why didn't we all grow up eating homemade pizzas? It just has to rise a little bit, get shaped, and rise a bit more. It takes no time. And the beauty of this recipe is that it makes enough dough for two pizzas, each of which is more than enough for two people. Now I have a round of pizza dough in the freezer, which is better than having a bird in the hand. Really, a lot better, as I think of a bird squirming in my hand and pecking me.

I was planning to use a rolling pin to shape the crust, but it didn't work too well.

So I shaped it with my hands, which worked just fine. It was easy to work with, and it didn't develop cracks or holes.

Then I daringly put the dough on a pizza peel sprinkled with cornmeal. No pizza pan, no parchment paper--just the naked pizza dough touching the naked peel. I knew what was coming up soon: slide the unbaked pizza onto the red-hot baking stone. Many, many things could go wrong at this point, which is why I've never tried it before, but I was feeling very devil-may-care, so I did.
Meanwhile, I made the topping, which was also easy. Lightly sauteed zucchini,

quartered cherry tomatoes, mixed with garlic, salt, and olive oil,

and sliced fresh mozzarella and crumbled goat cheese.

and snipped basil.

Amazingly, the step that involves sliding the prepared pizza dough onto the hot baking stone went off without a hitch.

When it's done--in about 15 minutes--you can drizzle on some olive oil and a bit more fresh basil.

Delicious! The crust was crisp, chewy, but still tender. The vegetarian topping was flavorful and very fresh-tasting, with just the right amount of cheese.

Pizza Dough

--from The Italian Baker, by Carol Field
Makes one 15- to 16-inch pizza, 2 medium-size, or 5 or 6 individual pizzas.
1 3/4 tsp. instant yeast
1 1/3 cups warm water
1/4 cup olive oil
3 3/4 cups (500 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. (8 grams) salt

Stir the yeast and sugar into the water in a mixer bowl. Stir in the oil with the paddle attachment. Mix the flour and salt and add to the yeast mixture. Mix until the dough comes together. Change to the dough hook and knead at medium speed until soft and satiny but firm, about 3 minutes. Finish kneading briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface.

(You can also mix the dough by hand or in a food processor).

Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until not quite fully doubled, 45 minutes to an hour.

Shape the dough into whatever shape you want, being careful not to tear it. Place it on a peel that has been sprinkled with cornmeal. Finish shaping the dough with your fingers. Cover with a towel and let rise for no longer than 30 minutes. The dough should be puffy and softly risen.

Top with any filling, including:

Zucchini with Cherry Tomatoes and Goat Cheese

--from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison

1/2 recipe pizza dough, above
1 medium zucchini, thinly sliced into rounds
Olive oil for sauteing, plus more for the top
Salt and pepper
About 4 ounces cherry tomatoes
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
4 basil leaves, thinly sliced
2-4 ounces fresh mozzarella, sliced
2 ounces goat cheese, grumbled

Preheat oven to 500.

Saute zucchini in 1 tablespoon olive oil in a skillet over medium heat and beginning to color, about 4 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Cut the tomatoes into quarters and toss them with the garlic, a little olive oil, freshly ground pepper, and half the basil.

Distribute the cheeses over the prepared dough, then add the tomatoes. Bake on a stone for 5 minutes, then add the goat cheese and bake for another 5-6 minutes. Remove, drizzle with a little more olive oil, and sprinkle on othe rest of the basil.

Peter Reinhart's Corn Bread

2009-09-02T20:46:00.016-05:00

Sunday, August 30, 2009

I don't admit that summer is coming to an end. I have to admit that the vegetables at the farmers' market are end-of-the-season vegetables, however, and I wanted to bake something with the lovely corn that's available now. I also had a pound of great-tasting Nueske's bacon. When I ran across this recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice--a cornbread made with fresh corn and bacon, I thought I'd found nirvana. Then I read the recipe--always a good idea--and saw that I was supposed to do Step 1, soaking polenta in buttermilk, the day before baking. Well, this was Sunday, my baking day, and I didn't want to bake on Monday. So I pouted for a while. Then I realized that the only reason to soak the polenta was because it was coarse-grained, so if I just used a fine-grain corn meal, which I had, there would be no reason to soak it. Admittedly, there was the chance that I'd be missing out on something spectacular that the coarse grain would add, but I was willing to take that chance.
Since I didn't have to do Step 1, I could start out with Step 2, baking the bacon.

I wish my mother had told me that if you just lay strips of bacon in a sheet pan and bake them for 20 minutes or thereabouts, you avoid the dreaded attack of the bacon grease and you don't have to turn the pieces and it's just generally a lot easier. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've told my daughters, neither of whom cooks a lot of bacon.

Step 3 is cutting the corn off the cob.

My mother did tell me that white corn is sweeter and more tender than yellow corn, but usually I can only find this bicolor. Corn in general--whether white or yellow--seems to be sweeter than the corn I remember from childhood, but that may just be my imagination.

The batter is thick and creamy--it's supposed to look and feel like thick pancake batter, and it does. And then, just add the fresh corn, and it's done. I found a 16-ounce bottle of buttermilk, and the recipe takes exactly 16 ounces, so this is a no-guilt, no-waste buttermilk recipe.

Just to make sure it's not too healthy and boring, you grease the pan with leftover bacon fat which you quickly heat up in the oven.

Then bake until it's nice and brown. Serve as soon as possible. Jim says this is the best corn bread he's ever eaten, and I wouldn't disagree. It's possible that it's better if you make it with the more coarse-ground polenta, but I like it so much this way that I don't feel a need to mess with it. People are picky about their cornbread, so be forewarned that this is a pretty sweet cornbread with a finer texture than many.
It also makes a big pan, and it's not as good the second day as the first, so it's a good thing to make when you're serving a lot of people, who may all tell you that it's the best corn bread they've ever eaten.

Have a great Labor Day weekend, and enjoy the last weeks of corn and tomatoes!

This cornbread is on many food blogs, so, rather than typing up the recipe myself, I'm just going to give you a link to one of the blogs that includes the recipe.

100% White Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

2009-08-22T14:26:00.021-05:00

Sunday, August 16, 2009

I found new bread blog via Rose's web site--it's called breadcetera.com, and the owner, SteveB, describes it as "an obsessive's quest for for professional quality baked goods from a home kitchen." I would say that's a pretty accurate description. He blogs only about once a month, but when he does, he shows a bread that he's worked up to perfection. I was more attracted to other breads on his site, but I opted to try the white whole wheat sandwich bread because I realized that, although I'd tried other whole wheat breads, I hadn't yet tried one made with white whole wheat. I've been disappointed with other breads made with white whole wheat, but I was willing to give it a try. I'm sorry to report that I was disappointed with this one too, but the friend I gave the other loaf to liked it quite a lot, so I may just have an errant taste bud that makes me taste bitter when I taste whole wheat.

I was excited about this recipe because it started out with a poolish, and I know how much flavor that overnight fermentation usually adds to bread. Also, it had honey, butter, and dried milk--all of which should amp up both the flavor and the texture.

Another thing that made this recipe different from most other bread recipes is that the initial mixing was done with the whisk attachment. I was curious to see what, if any, difference this might make in the final outcome--maybe it would make the dough a little fluffier, the texture a little lighter? Or maybe not. I couldn't tell any difference in the outcome. Finally, this bread uses the double flour addition method, which is pretty much what it sounds like--the flour mixture is added in two separate installments. I was psyched! I was sure this was going to be the best whole wheat bread ever--better even than Chris in R.I.'s whole wheat bread, my (so far) all-time whole-wheat favorite.

It was a lovely dough to handle, with enough butter to give it a very rich feel. It rose nicely (although the color is a little sludgy), making easily enough dough for two standard-sized loaf pans.

SteveB writes his own recipes, and even includes helpful videos for trickier parts of the process, like braiding or shaping. His recipes are all written in the passive voice, which seems somewhat odd and disembodied, and also a little irritating to a former English major. (Instead of saying, "Place the dough in a covered container," for example, he writes, "The dough is placed in a covered container.") Maybe he just doesn't want to sound bossy.

The bread came out of the oven looking brown and beautiful--not sludgy at all--and I anticipated the first slice. It was supposed to have a "satisfying deep wheaty flavor," according to SteveB. But it just tasted bitter to me. Jim liked it (although when I pressed him, he admitted he didn't love it), and my friend who got the second loaf said she liked it.
I intend to try more breads from Breadcetera, but they won't be made with white whole wheat flour. In fact, in a fit of pique, I threw out the rest of the bag. Although I'm not exactly giving this a rave review, I wish someone else would try it and let me know what they think because I'd like to know if it's just me.

Gussied-Up Semolina Bread

2009-08-03T21:06:00.013-05:00

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Two weeks ago, I made a semolina bread that was quick, easy, and good, but not quite good enough. I was surprised that the distinctive semolina taste didn't seem as distinctive as in other breads that use a combination of flour. I wanted to see if I could improve a perfectly good bread so that it would be even better. I thought about doing a pre-ferment, but I wanted it still to be a simple bread that I could make in one day.
I decided to add some white bread flour and a small amount of whole wheat pastry flour, just for fun. And then, because I had sourdough starter, I cut down on the yeast amount and added some of that.

This is not just your ordinary sourdough starter, by the way. This came to me, through a few twists and turns, from the refrigerator of Rose Levy Beranbaum herself. Yes, I have sourdough starter from the Queen of Bread. I have fed it and coddled it, but I hadn't yet put it in bread, so this was its maiden voyage.
If you don't have sourdough starter, then you could just up the yeast amount to the original one tablespoon, and no one would be the wiser.
The semolina flour, plus just the little bit of whole wheat pastry flour that I added, gave the dough a nice golden color.

I wish that I could say it was some brilliant flash of insight that made me add the whole wheat pastry flour. What really happened, though, is I was looking through my shelf of flours and saw the pastry flour. I looked for a "use by" date but couldn't find one, although I knew that I had bought it a few years ago I figured that I might as well use a little more before I tossed it, and so I did. Although you wouldn't ordinarily use pastry flour for bread, I thought its softness would be counterbalanced by the bread flour.
The sourdough may have been more active than I thought because, even though I put only about 1/4 cup in the dough, the bread rose faster and higher than I was expecting, and it made a bigger loaf.

I liked this bread a lot. I preferred both the texture and the ever-so-slightly tangy taste to the original recipe. But that could be just because I wanted to like it more since I'd spent some time figuring out how to improve it. When I asked Jim which one he preferred, he got the deer-in-the-headlights look that means he thinks there is going to be no right answer to this question. "Uh, maybe....about the same?" I looked dissatisfied. He tried again: "I guess I like this one a little better." "Really? Why?" He took another bite, pretending he was deep in thought, and I decided to let him off the hook.

It was a nice accompaniment to the salad made from the things I'd gathered at the Farmers' Market that morning: lettuce, beets, yellow cherry tomatoes, and cucumbers. And the next night, it served as a base for wonderful BLT's, with first-of-the-season tomatoes.
Now I've started my quest for the best semolina bread in the world, and I'll let you know if I find it. Or maybe I already have.

GUSSIED-UP SEMOLINA BREAD
--Adapted from King Arthur's Semolina Bread recipe

2 teaspoons instant yeast
1 1/2 cups water
2 tablespoons soft butter
2 tablespoons nonfat dry milk
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups semolina flour
1 cup bread flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/4 cup sourdough starter

Mix all ingredients in the mixing bowl of a stand mixer.

With the dough hook, knead the bread on medium speed for three to five minutes, or until smooth. If kneading by hand, knead for eight to ten minutes. Spray a bowl with nonstick cooking spray, set the dough in the bowl, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours to 2 hours.

Turn dough onto lightly floured counter. Shape into rectangle, and fold, using a business-letter fold. Shape it into a loaf. Place it into a greased 5 x 9-inch bread pan. Cover with a towel and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 50 minutes.

Bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 40 minutes, or until bread is a light golden brown and tests done. Turn the loaf out and let it cool on a rack. Let cool thoroughly before slicing. Makes 1 large loaf.

Buttermilk White Bread

2009-07-26T20:31:00.018-05:00

Sunday, July 26, 2009
As thrifty bakers know, buttermilk always has to be used up. Buttermilk was an ingredient in the Red Velvet Cake I made over at Heavenly Cake Place, so that meant I had to find at least one more buttermilk recipe. This recipe, one of three variations on Peter Reinhart's basic white bread, uses a cup and a half of buttermilk, so it serves the purpose very well.

Plus it's just an excellent, easy to put together, soft-crumbed white bread. And if you added red food coloring, I guess it would be a soft-crumbed red bread.
(Out of curiosity, I Googled "red bread," just in case there was such a thing. I didn't find it, but I did find that one of the accusations made at the Salem witch trials was that the so-called witches "ate red bread like man's flesh." There's also an out-of-print book called Red Bread that's an account of a Russian-born journalist's return to his native village after it had been collectivized in soviet Russia. Also, here is a very intriguing loaf of bread, made with dough colored with beets, spinach, and tomatoes.)
But I digress.
This is another easy, mix-it-all-together bread. To show you what a few hours of fermentation does to a dough, here it is after it's just been mixed together:

And here it is two hours later:

(The dough is divided in half because it makes two loaves of bread, 18 dinner rolls, or a dozen hot dog or hamburger buns).
I decided to bake two loaves, but I wanted them to look different, so I put one in a loaf pan and one I made into a free-form boule. For a shiny crust, I brushed on an egg wash, but you could also leave it bare or brush on melted butter. It's a highly versatile bread.

It's amazing how much sheen a little egg wash can give to a bread. For the boule, I decided on a starfish pattern:

I wanted the bread to look shiny all over, so I slashed the bread and then covered it with egg wash. If you want the slashes to be more prominent, you could slash first and wash second. (I wonder if "Slash First, Wash Second" could be the title of a crime novel?)
I didn't want to eat two fresh loaves of bread, so I decided I would just give one loaf of bread away to the person who walked in the door first. Fortunately, it was not a burglar because that would have been a peculiar transaction. Instead, it was my daughter Sarah, who was delighted to take take a loaf home. She chose the standard-edition loaf and not the freeform starfish pattern, but she said it was not an easy choice.
Every now and then, I bake a kind of bread that makes me think I should enter it in the state fair. This is one of those kinds of bread: down-home, wholesome, easy, and pretty. I had it plain, in a sandwich, and as toast, and it excelled at them all. The bread also smells especially tantalizing while baking.
If I had a bottomless container of buttermilk, I might make this regularly. Since I don't, though, I'll probably go on to something else next week. In the meantime, here's the recipe, from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart.

Ingredients:

4 1/4 cups (19 ounces) unbleached bread flour
1 1/2 tsp. (.38 ounce) salt
3 tablespoons (1.5 ounces) sugar
2 tsp. (.22 ounce) instant yeast
1 large egg, lightly beaten, at room temperature
1/4 cup (2 ounces) butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups (12 ounces) buttermilk

1. Mix together the flour, salt, sugar, and yeast in the bowl of an electric mixer. Pour in the egg, butter, and buttermilk, and mix on the low speed of the mixer with the paddle attachment until all the flour is absorbed and the dough forms a ball. (This can also be done by hand).

2. Change to the dough hook, and, adding more flour if necessary, mix on medium speed for six to eight minutes, or until the dough clears the sides of the bowl. Lightly oil a large bowl, roll the dough in oil so that it's all lightly covered, and cover the bowl with plastic wrap.

3. Let rise about 1 1/2 to 2 hours, or until doubled in size.

4. Remove the dough from the bowl, and, on a lightly floured counter, divide into two pieces if you're making bread (18 if you're making rolls, 12 if you're making buns). Cover with a towel and let rest about 20 minutes.

5. Shape into whatever shape you want to use, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise another 60 to 90 minutes, or until doubled. Before the dough is doubled in size, preheat the oven ro 350 (for bread) or 400 (for rolls or buns). Brush with egg wash (one egg, beaten with a bit of water), if desired. You can also top with sesame or poppy seeds if that strikes your fancy. Bake loaves for 35 to 40 minutes, or until golden brown. (A freeform loaf works best if it's baked on a bread stone).

6. Remove the loaves from the oven and transfer to a wire rack. Let cool before eating.

King Arthur's Semolina Bread

2009-07-20T18:42:00.015-05:00

Sunday, July 20, 2009

I was trying to decide what kind of bread to make this weekend, when I ran across this recipe on the King Arthur website. I'm a big fan of breads made with semolina flour (or durum, the more often recommended, and finer-textured, alternative). Most semolina bread recipes call for about half semolina flour and half something else--all purpose or bread, most often. But this one was 100% semolina flour. If some is good, more must be better, right? Oddly, though, the distinctive taste of semolina flour that I like so much seemed to be less noticeable than it is when it's mixed with another flour. I liked this bread, and it makes wonderful toast, but it's not as distinctive as I hoped it would be.

It makes a lovely, cream-colored dough that's both easy to mix and easy to handle. (I read--too late for this bread--that it's a good idea to add any of the milk solids that are strained out making clarified butter, as I did on heavenlycakeplace.blogspot.com, to bread dough. I'll just take that on faith, for now).
It rose very nicely too, both in the bowl and in the pan:

As it should, since it has a full tablespoon of yeast.
It made a handsome loaf, too, with a nice texture.

And it tasted good, too. Jim was a big fan, and my friend Karen, who came over to taste the plum ingots, took a piece home with her. Despite all these virtues, I'll admit I'm feeling just lukewarm about this bread. Maybe it needs the addition of a different kind of flour to enhance the taste, or maybe, because it's a direct mix bread, it lacks the added flavor that a pre-ferment or a little sourdough adds.
I can recommend this bread as one that won't give you any trouble, but I can't say that your life would be less meaningful if you never tasted this bread. I'll admit that's a high standard, but it's the best I can do at summarizing my mixed feelings about it.

Ciabatta with Biga

2009-07-12T14:07:00.029-05:00

Saturday, July 12, 2009

This ciabatta turned out to have one of the most successful crusts I've ever made. It actually shattered when I cut into it. And it was delicious too. It's from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread, from which, after making 4 or 5 different breads, I still can't decide whether I like or not. It's filled with information, but it's written in a way that's hard for me to decipher.
Jim looked at the cookbook and asked me if I was making ciabatta with poolish. "No," I said, "I'm making the one with the biga." "What's the difference between biga and poolish?" he asked. "Ummm," I said, "well, you know." "No, I don't," he said. I didn't want to admit I really didn't know the difference myself. I searched my memory. "Well, you ferment them ahead of time and add them to the dough. And poolish means Polish. I think." I finally looked it up, and there's not a huge difference, except that a biga is a more generic term for a pre-ferment and can be soft or stiff in texture, and can be refrigerated up to three days, whereas a poolish is never refrigerated. Got that?

This is the biga after it's been fermenting for about 14 hours.

It's stiff, and very, very sticky. You add it to the dough while it's mixing, and the biga definitely resists leaving your fingers.

It's an extremely wet and sticky dough. As with all of Hamelman's recipes, he gives two different quantities: one for professionals (that one uses 20 pounds of flour and makes 31 loaves) and one for home use (two pounds of flour, makes three small loaves). I decided to make only one large loaf, and so I divided the "home recipe" in half, using a total of one pound of bread flour.
Here's where I had trouble with the recipe. It tells you to fold the dough twice during the three-hour period of its first rising. It says, "Spread a considerable amount of flour on the work surface for the folds, and fold quickly and assertively. Be sure no extra flour is incorporated into the dough as it is folded." I must have read this 20 times. First, I couldn't picture in my mind what constituted "assertive" folding. I finally did a self-affirmation: "I am quick! I am assertive!" and hoped the bread would understand. Second, I couldn't figure out how I was going to do the folding without getting some of the flour on the counter mixed in with the bread dough.

As it turned out, it worked pretty well, and I managed to brush off most of the flour that wanted to incorporate itself, but I'm still not satisfied with those instructions. I think my hands look quite assertive.

You can see how much more the gluten has developed by the second folding, an hour later.

The bread takes very little shaping. If I had made the three loaves, they'd be narrower than this. But I wanted to use my bread steamer, and I can't make two, much less three, loaves at a time using the steamer.

I don't have a picture of the steamer process because it takes four hands to slide the bread on the hot stone, put the steamer lid on top, and actually steam with the hot steamer contraption. The word "hot" is in there twice, because we've rarely managed to use the steamer without getting at least a little burned. This time it went very smoothly, and we gave each other a congratulatory little fist bump. But not so fast.
The steamer lid stuck to one end of the bread, and the poor loaf got malformed.

But when I sliced the bread, I cut into that end first, so then it looked just about perfect. The crust is a rich mahogany brown--I probably would have taken it out of the oven a little earlier, but Hamelman warns that doing so would "greatly impair eating quality."

The eating quality of this bread was not impaired at all. It came out of the oven around 4:00, and we had it for a simple supper, with Italian dry salami, Morbier cheese, sweet cherries, and a crisp Chilean sauvignon blanc. If I had made the small loaves, we would probably have polished off one of them.
This morning, it was still fresh enough to be the star of a yogurt, fruit, and bread breakfast.
It's an exceptionally delicious bread, but I can't imagine what I would have done with this recipe if it had been the first bread I'd ever tried.
I'm going to give the recipe as it is in the book, but feel free to cut it in half, as I did.

Ciabatta with Stiff Biga
--From Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman

BIGA
6.4 oz. (1 1/2 cups) bread flour
3.8 oz. (1/2 cup) water
1/8 tsp. instant dry yeast

DOUGH
1 lb. 9.6 oz. (5 3/4 cups) bread flour
1 lb, 3.6 oz. (2 1/2 cups) water
.6 oz. (1 T.) salt
.13 oz. (1 1/4 tsp)instant dry yeast

1. BIGA. Mix the yeast, flour and water until just smooth. The biga will be stiff and dense, and may need a few more drops of water to mix entirely. Cover the bowl and plastic and leave for 12 to 16 hours at room temperature.

2. MIXING. Add all the ingredients to the mixing bowl except the biga. In a stand mixer using a dough hook, mix on low speed for 3 minutes. As the dough comes together, add the biga in chunks. The dough will be quite sticky and slack. Finish mixing on medium for 3 1/2 to4 minutes. The dough will still be sticky.

3. FERMENTATION AND FOLDING. Put the dough in a mixing bowl sprayed with baker's spray. Fold the dough twice, after one hour and again after two hours. This is where you fold quickly and assertively, adding no extra flour.

4. DIVIDING AND SHAPING. Flour the work surface copiously. Invert the dough onto the work surface and pat out the larger air bubbles. Lightly flour the top surface of the dough. Cut the dough into 3 rectangles, weighing about 18 ounces each. Gently shape into rectangles. Place the dough piece onto floured bread boards (I used floured parchment paper). Cover the shaped dough with baker's linen and then plastic.

5. FINAL FERMENTATION. About 1 1/2 hours.

6. BAKING: Preheat oven to 460 degrees.
To transfer the proofed dough to a baker's peel, spread the fingers of both your hands. With a quick, deft stroke, invert the dough piece so that the side that was touching the bread board is now on top. Place one hyand at each end of the dough piece, bring your fingers underneath, and pick it up. Here you will slightly punch the dough for easier transport; there should be wrinkles in the center of the loaf as the transfer it to the peel. [I just picked up the parchment paper and put it on top of a pre-heated baking stone--I'm using his instructions here just to show why I think they're hard to understand.) Fill the oven with steam, load the ciabattas, steam again, and bake for 34-38 minutes. (I used the steam machine; otherwise you can use either an ice cube or boiling water method to get steam. Hamelmans thinks you should use all three: ice cubes on a heated skillet before the bread goes in, boiling water on a heated pan when the bread goes in, and spritzing with water too). Lower the oven temperature by 10 or 20 degrees if bread is taking on too much color, but be sure not to underbake.
Remove the bread from the oven and let cool on a baking rack.

Dakota Bread

2009-07-05T16:31:00.016-05:00

Sunday, July 5, 2009

How I love baking bread. It's so satisfying to feel the rightness of the dough with your hands, and to get into the rhythm of mixing/resting/shaping. The cakes have been a real adventure, and have pushed me beyond my comfort level. It's good to be pushed, but it's also good to return to what feels comfortable and right.
My blog (and now in-person) friend Jini has been telling me about this bread for months, and finally she sent me the recipe. When she did, I realized it came from a cookbook I already own: Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland, by Beth Dooley and Lucia Watson, the owner and chef of fabulous local restaurant, Lucia's.

When I bought this cookbook, well over ten years ago, I didn't pay attention to its chapter on breads, because I didn't bake bread at the time. It's a very down-home cookbook, heavily influenced by the immigrant German, Scandinavian, and eastern Europeans who populated Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas. The bread chapter contains, for example, recipes for Saint Lucia buns, kolachke, Norwegian toast, and Finnish cardamom coffee bread. This first recipe, Dakota bread, has made me want to return and try more.
The Dakota bread is from a St. Paul institution, Cafe Latte, a cafeteria/bakery/coffee shop/wine bar, that's especially well-known for its breads and cakes. This bread is a customer favorite, and for good reason: it's soft and light, but every bite has a different combination of crunch and taste because it's got four different seeds: sunflower, poppy, pumpkin, and sesame, as well as cracked wheat.

Even with all the nuts, the dough is very easy to work with. I usually prefer breads with small amounts of yeast and long fermenting times, but this one has two tablespoons of yeast and requires an initial rise of only one hour, then a rest.

After the dough is shaped into two loaves, it takes just a half-hour or so to rise again. It's nice to have a bread in your repertoire that comes together this quickly and easily and can be ready in time for lunch.
I made one loaf in a banetton

and one free-form boule.

They looked stunning coming out of the oven because of the shininess of the egg wash and the seeds scattered on top. I followed the recipe exactly, and I liked this combination of seeds, but you could vary them depending on what you have and what you like. Flaxseed would also be good.

It has a nice, even crumb. We ate it plain, with a little butter, this afternoon, but it looks like it will also be good for toast and an excellent sandwich bread. Jini also uses this recipe to make rolls, and I think they'd make perfect hamburger buns as well.

DAKOTA BREAD
--from Savoring the Seasons of the Northern
Heartland, by Beth Dooley & Lucia Watson.

2 cups warm water
2 scant tablespoons yeast (instant or active dry)
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup cracked wheat
1 tablespoon salt
1 cup whole wheat flour
5 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (or more for kneading)
1/2 cup roasted unsalted sunflower seeds
1/3 cup hulled raw pumpkin seeds
1 tablespoon poppy seeds
1 tablespoon raw sesame seeds

1 beaten egg

In a large bowl, combine the water, yeast, honey, oil, and cracked
wheat and allow to proof about 5 to 10 minutes, or until the yeast is
light and bubbly. Add the salt, whole wheat and white flours, and
stir to combine.

Knead by hand, or, using a dough hook, knead in a stand mixer for five to ten minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic.
Mix the seeds together and sprinkle them over the dough, reserving a
few tablespoons to sprinkle over the loaves before baking. Then knead
the seeds into the dough. (If you use the stand mixer, finish kneading by hand for a minute).
Turn the dough into a greased bowl, cover with a towel, and allow the dough to rise
until double in bulk, about 1 hour. Press the dough into a rectangle and give it a business-letter turn. Let it rest for 5 minutes.
Place baking stone on rack in lower third of oven, and preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit
Divide the dough and shape it into two round loaves on lightly floured parchment paper. Let rise 25 to 30 minutes. Brush the loaves with a beaten egg and
sprinkle on any remaining seeds. Slash the tops of the loaves with a razor blade or sharp knife.
Carefully place the loaves, still on parchment, on the baking stone. Add steam by spritzing water in the oven, putting ice cubes on a preheated pan, or adding about a half-cup boiling water in a preheated pan.
Bake for about 30 to 40 minutes, or until the loaves are
nicely browned and sound hollow when tapped.
Remove the loaves from the oven and cool on wire racks.

Sullivan Street Potato Pizza

2009-06-28T22:11:00.012-05:00

Sunday, June 28, 2009

I've been itching to bake this pizza for a few weeks. The color photograph in the book looks wonderful. But it's pizza dough, lots of potatoes, onion, rosemary, and olive oil. No cheese, no tomatoes. Just potatoes and bread. The kind of thing that would make your mother say, disapprovingly, "You don't need two starches." Or maybe you'd say that to yourself, especially if you just got off a low-carb diet. But the picture looks so good. I figured it would either be spectacularly good or dull. It was actually both.
The bites at the edge of the pizza, where the crust was golden brown, and the potatoes were soft yet crisp, and there were little bits of onion and salt--those bites were fabulous. The middle of the pizza, which stuck to the pan, and where the potatoes were neither soft nor crisp, were mediocre.
When I looked at the picture in Artisan Baking again, I saw that the pizza was on a pizza stone. Well, no wonder. My problems with pizza in the past have always been because I was too cowardly to bake the pizza dough directly on a hot stone. After getting encouraging comments from readers, I finally dared to do it, and it did make an amazing difference. If only I had remembered this learning experience, I might have used it.
I made only half the recipe, and it was more than enough for two people. If you make the full recipe, you'll have a lot of pizza.
The dough is one of those miracle doughs, like the focaccia recipe in The Bread Bible. It's very, very wet, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to do anything. Then, after a good 20 minutes, it starts to come together, and suddenly it's a real dough.

This is a great pizza to make on a weekend because you can mix it up in the late morning, and have the afternoon free before you have to come back and start working on it again.
After the dough has risen and rested, it's pretty easy to stretch out onto a pizza pan (although I've just told you that I shouldn't have used the pan). It does need to rest for about 10 minutes (or longer) or it will pretend that it's moving toward the edge of the pan and then it will just slither back into place.

I squeezed the potatoes, and put them in a colander, and dried them with towels. They still didn't get as dry as I would have liked, but the dough was ready and I was hungry, so I just plunked them on top of the dough, and brushed them with more olive oil. (I didn't use all the potatoes, by the way, and I don't think you need 4 pounds--I would use only about half the recommended amount. I'd also use more than the recommended amount of rosemary).

The pizza bakes for nearly 40 minutes, which is really quite pleasant because it smells amazingly good when it's cooking. When I took it out of the oven, I thought that I had achieved pizza nirvana. It was the best looking crust I've ever achieved.

The picture in the cookbook is of a large rectangular pizza baked in a half-sheet pan. Because I cut the recipe in half, I used a round pizza pan.
I think the deck is stacked against a pizza maker using a home kitchen. You just can't get a hot enough oven. If I were to do this again, I think what I'd do is oil a big piece of parchment paper and shape the pizza on parchment. Then I'd transfer the parchment to a pizza peel and slide it right onto a preheated baking stone. I think then you'd get all the delicious flavor and crunchiness without the sticking-to-the-pan problem.
If anyone has made this pizza, I'd love to hear how it went for you.

Sullivan Street Potato Pizza
--from Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer

For two 13 x 9-inch pans, or one half-sheet pan

3/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons (130 grams) unbleached bread flour
3/4 cup plus 2 T. (130 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1 1/4 cups (285 grams) lukewarm water
1/2 tsp. granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
Extra-virgin olive oil.

Mix the flours and yeast in a mixing bowl. Using the paddle attachment, add water on low speed until the batter comes together. Increase the speed to medium and beat for 20-25 minutes until it cleans the bowl and comes together. (If it hasn't started to come together in 20 minutes, add a few pinches more flour). The dough should still be quite weg. Add sugar and salt and mix for another 2-3 minutes.

Cover the dough with plastic wrap and let it rise about 4 hours.

Coat the baking pan or pans with olive oil. Pour the dough directly into the pan. With hands coated with olive oil, press the dough into a thin layer. Let it rest for 10-15 minutes, and then finish pressing it into the whole pan. It will be quite thin. Cover and let rise for another hour.

Meanwhile, slice 7 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled (about 4 pounds) into thin slices. Toss them with salt and let them exude moisture for about 15 minutes. Squeeze them dry in a colander to release more of their liquid. Toss them with a thinly sliced onion and about 2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary.

About 30 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 425 degrees F (220 C) and put one rack on the oven's top shelf. If using two pans, put another rack on the lower third.

After the dough is proofed, spread on the potato topping. Brush with olive oil and sprinkle with more salt. Bake until the potatoes are brown at the edges and easily pierced with the tip of a knife, about 40 minutes.

Pane al Latte (Italian Milk Bread)

2009-06-13T20:17:00.013-05:00

Saturday, June 13, 2009

From Carol Field's The Italian Baker, this is a delicious, slightly sweet, slightly eggy, slightly rummy bread. It's too sweet for sandwiches, except maybe for peanut butter and jelly, for which it would be fantastic. If I had to fit it into a bread niche, I'd say it was made for some good fruit preserves and a cup of strong tea. Don't skimp--it should also have a layer of butter before you slather on the jam. If you wanted it with coffee instead of tea, that would not be amiss.
Butter, eggs, milk ... and rum. Just a smidgen, only a tablespoon; you can't taste it if you eat the bread in the recommended way (with butter and jam), but there's a faint hint if you try the bread plain. If you doubled the amount of rum, it would probably be too much. This is just enough to give it character, although rum is not really known for adding to character, is it?

Like other doughs made with butter and eggs, this is a joy to touch. It's so soft, silky, and kneadable, it's really a pleasure to work with. And quite easy. It goes through one fast rise, and then it's ready to be divided into 15 pieces to make 3 small loaves. Each 50-gram piece is rolled out into a cigar-shaped form, fat in the middle and tapered on the ends.

You line up the five cigars so they're touching each other, and pull them together, making the outer ones slightly longer so that you can pinch them firmly together.

After it's shaped, it rises again. Just before putting it in the oven, you brush it liberally with an egg glaze, which makes it beautifully shiny and adds to the egginess of the bread.

After I made two small loaves of bread with 50-gram "cigars," I looked at the dough that was left. Instead of having 250 grams like I was supposed to, I had well over 400, so something went wrong somewhere, but I don't care because it didn't matter. The small loaves were fine and so was the larger one.

Luckily, because the loaves were tiny, I didn't have to wait a full hour before slicing into it.

It was a delight to get back to baking bread. I've been having a great time with the cakes, but there is nothing more satisfying than a slice of freshly baked bread. I also have not imposed the "one piece" rule on myself with bread as I have with cake, so I had three (well, maybe four, but who's counting) pieces of bread.

Pane al Latte (Milk Bread)
From The Italian Baker by Carol Field

SPONGE
1 3/4 tsp. dry yeast
1 T. sugar
1/4 cup warm milk
1 cup less 1 T unbleached all-purpose flour (130 grams)

Stir the yeast and sugar into the milk in the mixer bowl; let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes. Add the flour and and whisk vigorously to make a thick batter. (You may have to add a little milk to make a stirrable batter). Cover and let stand until doubled, less than one hour.

DOUGH
1 egg
1 T. rum
1 cup milk, at room temperature
1/2 stick (55 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 3/4 cups (375 grams) unbleached A-P flour
1 tsp. (5 grams) salt
Add the egg, the rum, milk, and butter to the sponge, and mix with paddle attachment for about a minute. Add flour and salt, and mix on low speed. Change to dough hook, and knead until soft and elastic, 3 to 4 minutes. Finish kneading briefly by hand.

Place the dough in a tightly covered, oiled bowl, and let rise until doubled, 1 to 2 hours.
After the first rising, cut the dough into 15 pieces of dough (if you decide to weigh the pieces, weigh the batter first and divide by 15 to see how much each ball should weigh). For each loaf, roll five of the balls into 6-inch-long cigars, plumper in the center and tapered at the ends. Place the five cigars next to each other on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover with a towel and let rise until doubled, about 45 minutes.

About 20 minutes before baking, preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Brush with an egg wash made with one beaten egg, making sure it gets into the cracks between the "cigars." Bake 25 minutes, or until shiny golden-brown. Cool on racks.

Note: You can also make this bread by hand or in a food processor. If you use the food processor, the milk and butter should be cold, not room temp.

Heavenly Cake Place

2009-06-02T09:02:00.003-05:00

Dear readers,
If you've been wondering where I've been lately, check out my second blog at www.heavenlycakeplace.blogspot.com.
I'm going to try to bake all the cakes in Rose Levy Beranbaum's soon-to-be-released cookbook called Heavenly Cakes.
I definitely haven't given up on bread, and I hope to keep trying out new ones. But if you don't see a new bread, there may be a new cake.