'Levy's' Real Jewish Rye Bread

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

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)

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

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

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

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.