7/26/2010 - Pain a l'Ancienne

This is the first bread of many in this book whose name I don't know how to pronounce.  It also seems to be the bread of most significance in BBA.  The book begins with a story about Peter Reinhart's trip to France and his discovery there of this amazing bread.  And so I wondered as I read, what is it about a bread that would make a bread expert stop and say "Wow. This is something special."?  Will I, by following this formula, be able to bake bread that amazing, or is it about more than just a good recipe?  If I did bake bread that good, would I even recognize it as awe inspiring, lacking in bread expert-ness as I am?  And so as I baked this bread, I will admit I was both curious and a bit intimidated.

It was actually one of the easier breads that I have baked.  The dough is made with ice-cold water and, once mixed, placed directly in the refrigerator.  The yeast is not activated until the dough comes to room temperature the next day, which gives the enzymes in the dough time to work on the starches, improving the flavor.  Once the yeast has activated and risen the dough, it is shaped into baguettes and baked on a stone.  My baguettes were cooling on the rack by 10am and ready to pair with some homemade soup for lunch.

We spent our lunch enjoying and analyzing this new bread.  It was good.  But if I was meandering through France, would this bread make me pause?  I don't know.  I don't think I've ever even had a baguette before, so how could I possibly know if this one was great or mediocre?  It was the best baguette I had ever had.  J4 gave it a thumbs up and J5 didn't eat a bite of soup, so focussed was he on the bread.  We polished off three of the six baguettes at lunch, and had another two with our supper that evening.  We made fast work of the remaining two the next day.  Just for perspective, this recipe called for 6 cups of flour, which is the same amount I would use to bake a batch of my regular sandwich bread.  That recipe makes two panned loaves which usually last us at least a week and a half.  So we ate over a week's worth of bread in two days.  So who knows?  Maybe that's what really good bread tastes like.  Either way, we enjoyed it.

7/18/2010 - Bagels

This is THE recipe that J4 was most excited about, no contest.  It never would have occurred to me to even try to bake bagels before seeing the formula in this book, but it wasn't really that complicated.  I mixed and kneaded the dough, which was very stiff, so the mixing and kneading were a little more work.  Then I divided the dough into twelve balls and let them rest for 20 minutes to make shaping easier.  I shaped mine by punching a hole through the ball with my thumb and working it to about 2 1/2 inches in diameter, and then let them rise another twenty minutes on pans before putting them in the fridge overnight.  This formula really lends itself to Saturday (or in this case Sunday) morning breakfast because all you have to do the day of baking is boil, top, and bake.  Yes, I said boil.  It turns out that boiling the bagels is what gives that chewy bagel crust.

J4 is partial to the everything bagel, so after 4 minutes of boiling, I scooped the bagels from the water back onto the pans and he sprinkled them with garlic, onion, poppy and sesame seeds, and salt.  10-15 minutes in the oven and out popped these beauties.

We had a hard time waiting 15 minutes for them to cool.  They were pretty good.  The texture was spot-on as far as we are concerned.  They were missing a little of the bagel flavor, which I attribute to the fact that I substituted brown sugar for malt powder.  PR suggested that as a possible substitution, but also said that the malt powder was key to the flavor.  I think we may have to do some searching and obtain some before we make these again.  But that was really a very minor thing; overall they were very good, and the leftovers made excellent sandwiches.        

7/16/2010 - Pizza Napoletana

Home-made pizza has always been harder than it should be for me.  This is probably because I refuse to partially bake the crust before topping it.  That's not how pizza is supposed to be made.  I want to put toppings on an unbaked crust, stick it in the oven, and pull out perfection.  I have spent years trying to modify the pizza recipe in my big red cookbook to be something that it's not and I have never been successful.  So I was both excited and a bit nervous to attempt this formula.

Peter Reinhart suggests that the keys to a good pizza crust are delayed fermentation and very high baking temperature.  Per his formula, I made my crust with cold water and put it in the fridge overnight to delay fermentation.  The next day I took half of it out and let it rest at room temperature for a couple of hours.  I put my pizza stone on the bottom shelf of the oven and preheated it to 550F.  PR gives instructions for hand tossing so I thought I'd give it a shot, but my dough didn't have nearly the elasticity required and would have torn from simply resting on my knuckles, let alone being tossed and caught.  So I just kind of stretched it to where I wanted it with my fingers.  I made three small pizzas that day, and since I don't have a pizza peel I just shaped, topped, and baked them for 8-ish minutes on parchment paper.  It was easy to set on the hot stone and a little more challenging to slide from the stone onto a pan when baked.  The paper became blackened and brittle on the edges, but it didn't start on fire or hurt the pizza.  And the pizza was pretty good.  The crust was pretty thin in the middle, but the overall pizza was the best I've made.  Which isn't saying a whole lot, but I was happy.

The next day I decided to try baking the remaining three pizzas on sheet pans instead of the stone.  I had the same problem with my dough not being elastic enough to toss, which wasn't very surprising.  I wanted this to work better since it's easier to put all the pizzas together on sheet pans and bake them at the same time rather than doing them one at a time on the hot stone, not to mention having to mess with parchment paper and transportation from the stone to the pan.  But it didn't.  The crust didn't get done on the bottom until everything was quite browned on top.  The bottom was barely done and the crust was crisp like a cracker.  My conclusion: the bottom of the pizza really needs the heat provided by that preheated stone.

This one is a work in process, but I feel like I can improve it to get the result I'm looking for, and that's pretty exciting.        

7/12/2010 - Anadama Bread

PR calls anadama bread "one of the great New England breads."  I can count the number of days I've spent in New England on one hand, so I'll take his word on that.  I had never heard of this bread before.  Cornmeal and molasses are featured, giving the bread a unique flavor.

In this formula, the already flavorful cornmeal is soaked overnight to bring out even more of its natural sugars.  The next day, the water, yeast, and some of the flour is added to form a sponge that is allowed to ferment for an hour before mixing in the remaining ingredients, kneading, and so on.  I've never baked with molasses before, and I was surprised by the smell of it.  I've eaten it in cookies and like it just fine, but I found that the smell of raw molasses kind of makes my skin crawl.  To me, it smells like bad spaghetti-o's.  But I managed to make the bread anyway, and once it was baked I had no problem eating it.  It had a slightly sweet, pleasant flavor, and it made excellent French toast.         

7/9/2010 - Kaiser Rolls

It just so happened that I made an enormous pork roast and there was lots of leftover meat.  And what better use for leftover pork than pulled pork sandwiches?  And what better bread for pulled pork sandwiches than kaiser rolls?

This formula called for a pre-ferment to be made the day before and stored in the refrigerator.  The day of baking looked like it would be a long one.  I needed to let the pre-ferment sit at room temperature for an hour, mix and knead the dough, allow the dough two hours to rise to double its size, punch it down, let it rise again, shape the rolls, let them proof for 90 minutes, and finally bake.  According to the formula, the whole process should have taken about 8 hours.  However, room temperature in my house in the summer is 79F, so bread rises much faster in my kitchen than in most.  A slower rise aids in flavor development, so there's a possibility I may be sacrificing flavor, but on this particular day it sure was convenient.

I really liked shaping these rolls.  They aren't technically shaped like kaiser rolls; there is a tool called a kaiser cutter for those who wish to do it properly, but I don't have one.  PR demonstrates a shaping method in which you roll the dough into a snake, tie it in a knot, and loop the ends through the knot again.  I thought it was fun to do, and the rolls look enough like kaiser rolls for me.

We really enjoyed eating these.  They had a hard crust and soft interior, and they were quite flavorful.  We found that we liked them even better on the second day, which is something I've never been able to say before about a bread I've made.

Not Alone

So, I tried googling my blog and discovered an entire online community who dedicated themselves to completing the BBA Challenge last year.  Just the BBA Challenge facebook group has over 400 members.  Apparently I am in good company, albeit a bit behind, and now I know where to go when I'm having problems.

7/6/2010 - White Bread

I decided to start simply.  What could be easier than white bread?  I know my old mainstay recipe by heart, and as I glanced through PR's formula it looked very familiar.  His has a little less flour, but I've gravitated toward kneading in less of it myself in the past month or two.  I figured this would be old hat.  But even with very similar ingredients, the technique PR suggests produced something completely different.

There are three white bread variations in BBA.  The one I opted for features a pre-ferment.  A pre-ferment allows the yeast more time to work on the dough, developing flavor, and while this isn't as important for an enriched bread like this one (it derives much of its flavor from its enrichment: milk and egg yolk), I figured it couldn't hurt.  The pre-ferment did its thing, and after it had been sitting for about an hour I mixed in the rest of the ingredients.  This dough already felt completely different from my normal white bread dough - much softer, but not any stickier.  One thing I realized while making this bread is that I suspect I rarely knead my bread long enough.  Now having read an explanation of what is happening during the kneading process in the opening tutorial, I have a better understanding of what I'm trying to achieve.

I allowed the bread to rise, shaped and panned my loaves, and set them out to proof.  And then I forgot about them.  The dumb thing is that I wasn't even busy at that point in the day.  I put J5 (my 20-month son) and M (my 4-month old daughter) down for their naps and instead of preheating the oven I, like any good stay-at-home mom, plopped down in the computer chair to waste away the entire nap on the Internet.  I didn't remember the bread until M woke up an hour later and my loaves were quite over-risen.  I then proceeded to massacre them in an attempt to score them down the center before tossing the poor things into the oven.

While the finished products still bore the scars of my last-minute mutilation, I would call my first attempt a success.  This bread was much softer than any I've made before - lovely for sandwiches.  The crust had a stronger flavor than we are used to.  Not bad, just stronger.  I think I will try an egg wash next time and see what happens.

The Rules

I will bake all 43 formulas found in Peter Reinhart's book The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

I am not required to bake all variations of every formula.

I am not required to bake the formulas in the order they appear in the book.

I will attempt to use all the correct ingredients, even those that are hard to find, unless PR suggests an easier-to-find substitution (example: honey in place of malt syrup).

I am not required to complete the project within one year, simply because I don't think we can eat that much bread that fast.  I will make a new bread when we finish the last one, and if I can do it in one year, that's great.  If not, that's fine too.

I will blog about every formula after I bake it.  

The Challenge Begins . . .

It all started with a selfish anniversary gift that I gave to my husband, J4. I had scoured the internet for the best bread book I could find, and I settled on Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice.  Don't get me wrong, J4 loves cooking and has been fascinated with the idea of bread baking of late.  He's even done it once.  But I'm the one who bakes the bread around here.  I stay home with our two kids, both under two years, and bread baking has become my outlet, my personal project that has nothing to do with my children (well, besides the fact that they eat it).

Even though the book was secretly for me, J4 was thrilled with it.  He paged through the opening tutorial and searched the list of formulas for the more exciting entries.  Then he looked up at me and said, "You should make all of these."

I know, you've already seen this movie.  We've actually read Julie & Julia, and I'm sure that's where his next idea came from.  "You should make them all in one year."

I'm not writing this blog because I'm an amazing bread baker.  I consider myself just crossing the line between "beginner" and "intermediate".  This blog is my secret public journal in which I plan to chronicle my successes and failures in my journey to becoming a better baker.  I'm flattered that you're reading it, and I welcome any words of experience, advice, or encouragement you wish to share.