Zucchini Pizza with Cherry Tomatoes and Goat Cheese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.