8/21/2010 - Brioche

My mother has been telling me that this project is going to make us all fat because of the bad carbs. While I have no intention of jumping on the carbs-are-bad bandwagon, she may have a point when it comes to brioche. PR gives three variations on brioche: Poor Man's Brioche, Middle-Class Brioche, and Rich Man's Brioche, which vary by butter content. I had a hunch that I would probably never bake brioche again, so why not go whole hog and make Rich Man's Brioche? I hesitated because Rich Man's Brioche has an entire pound of butter to 4 cups of flour. But J4 said, "Won't you always wonder?" And he was right, I would. So I took the dive.

This formula begins with a sponge of flour, yeast, and milk. After that foams for 20 minutes, five eggs are whisked in, followed by the remaining flour, sugar, and salt. The resulting dough is allowed to rest for five minutes so the gluten can develop before it is overrun with fat. Then that pound of butter is worked in by quarters. Now, I don't own a stand mixer; I mix my bread by hand. This one was a challenge. J4 actually took a couple of turns mixing the give my arm a break, the wonderful man (which I thought was fitting at the time, as he's the wonderful man who talked me into an entire POUND of butter). We eventually got it all in and spread the very soft dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, which sat in the fridge overnight so that the dough could firm up for shaping. I don't own fancy fluted brioche molds (J4 wanted to get some, but I have to draw the line somewhere), so I just shaped my brioche as standard rolls and left them to proof for an hour and a half. Room temperature is pretty warm at my house in the summer, and that probably did nothing good for my brioche, which spread a bit more during proofing than I would have liked. I brushed them with an egg wash, stuck them in the oven, and came back ten minutes later intending to move them apart only to find that they had spread even further to basically fill the entire pan, so I just let them bake touching.

These were so ridiculously rich. It was amazing. Well, not that amazing when you know that there was between 1/4 and 1/3 stick of butter in each roll. They were yummy and flaky, but we couldn't handle much. We each had one and were done. Even though he's normally the first to gobble up the bread on his plate, J5 barely touched his; I guess in his 22 month-old wisdom he knew what wasn't good for him. So of course I ate his in addition to mine, although I really didn't want it. We decided we weren't ready to have all that richness again the next day, so now there is a bag of brioche rolls in the freezer that we will slowly work our way through. I'm pretty sure I'll never make this again, but I suppose it's nice to not have to wonder.

8/19/2010 - Cornbread

Cornbread is the only chemically leavened bread in BBA (the bread is leavened by baking powder and baking soda instead of by yeast). The fact that it was included at all in a book of yeast breads would suggest that PR is rather fond of it, and he says as much in the description preceding the formula. We like corn bread made the plain normal way, usually served with chili. I also really like to make it the way I remember my mother making it when I was little, with crumbled bacon and shredded cheddar cheese mixed in. We top it with syrup and eat it as a casual, comfort-food kind of dinner. So when I saw that PR tops his cornbread with bacon, I had a good feeling about it.

This formula begins with a cornmeal soaker, which is left at room temperature overnight. The formula calls for buttermilk, but I soaked my cornmeal in whole milk and called it good. Also, I used regular cornmeal instead of the coarsely ground cornmeal or polenta that PR calls for. The next day I fried up my bacon on my skillet; PR instructs to bake it in the oven, but I opted for the easy way. Mixing up the batter was pretty standard, but I could tell already that this formula was going to make a very sweet cornbread. I followed the formula and used the bacon fat to grease my cake pan, poured in the batter, sprinkled on the bacon, and popped it in the oven.

We were excited about this recipe, and we fully expected it to be the new cornbread that would replace my old one. But we were disappointed. First there was the texture. I think using the finely ground cornmeal was a mistake. The overnight soak definitely made a big difference to the texture, but not in a good way; I think a coarser grind of cornmeal would stand up better. Then there was the corn. I have thought about adding corn to my cornbread before, but I've never done it because I didn't think it would be good with syrup. Since this cornbread was so sweet, I wondered if we might be able to eat it on its own, avoiding the syrup issue. It was definitely sweet enough, but it seemed too dry without some gooey syrup soaked into it. Also, J4 missed having bacon pieces baked into the bread. We did enjoy the crispness of the bacon on top, and I think in the future I'll mix half in the batter and sprinkle half on top to get the best of both worlds. I think it may just be that we enjoy a particular cornbread experience that is something completely different from what PR prefers. And for the first time in this project, I think next time I'll stick to my old recipe.  

8/18/2010 - Potato Rosemary Bread

This was an excellent bread to follow the colossal failure that was sourdough bread. Mashed potatoes add tenderness and flavor, and fresh rosemary adds, well, flavor.  This bread is made with a preferment called a biga, which I mixed, kneaded, and left to rise on the counter while brooding over my terrible sourdough bread. The biga sat in the fridge overnight, and then at room temperature for an hour the next day before being mixed in with the remaining ingredients.  I really enjoyed working with fresh rosemary.  It had never occurred to me prior to this that you could buy fresh rosemary at the grocery store (I did have to look at three different stores before I found it in stock, but that's another story).  My experience using fresh herbs has been limited to cilantro, which I have fresh in my kitchen maybe once a year, and a brief spree with mint when J4 and I discovered mojitos back in our childless studio-apartment-living days. I could not believe how strong the rosemary smelled and tasted.  It was just plain fun. Making this bread definitely fixed the idea of a future herb garden in the back of my mind.

We are really enjoying eating this one.  The rosemary makes this soft bread very flavorful, and brushing the loaves with olive oil before baking yields a pleasingly tender crust.  I'll probably be making it again this weekend so all that lovely leftover rosemary in my fridge doesn't go to waste.      

8/17/2010 - Basic Sourdough

This bread has been nothing but failure for me every step of the way. And when you are making sourdough bread there are a lot of steps. Sourdough bread is made by soaking flour with water at room temperature, which provides a growing medium for the wild yeast that is naturally present in your kitchen. You continue to add flour and water for several days until the dough rises, indicating that the yeast is working. This dough, called a starter, can then be kept in the refrigerator and refreshed whenever you wish to make sourdough bread. Along with the wild yeast, this starter is populated by various bacteria which produce the acids that give sourdough bread its distinctive flavor. A small amount of starter is used as the base for sourdough bread, providing both the sour flavor and the leavening power of the wild yeast.

Disclaimer: you probably have no interest in reading most of this. I'm writing it so that I can look back at it when I feel up to trying this again some day in the distant future. You probably want to skip down to the last paragraph or so and just read the part about how ridiculously bad this bread was. However, if you have made sourdough bread before and want to read the whole thing and tell me where my dumb mistakes are, that would be lovely.

I began my starter over a month ago. PR recommends using pineapple juice in place of water for the first two days of building the starter to prevent the growth of a particular strain of bacteria that can be problematic.  The acidity of the pineapple juice provides a pH that is good for the wild yeast and bad for this particular bacteria.  So on day 1 I mixed pineapple juice with flour, and on day 2 I added more pineapple juice and flour, as instructed. I was excited to see a slight rise on day 3, just as PR said there may be, and I discarded half of it and added water and more flour as directed.  On day 4, when the sponge was supposed to have doubled, I saw no rise.  PR said that was a possibility, and so I let it sit out for another day as instructed. But it still didn't rise. That day, day 5, I happened to be on the internet creating this blog when I stumbled upon the solution, blogged by PR himself. My starter had bacteria problems even in spite of the pineapple juice. So I aerated it as he instructed on his blog, and in the next day or so I saw the doubling I'd been looking for.  I scooped my finished starter into a couple of glass jars and stuck them in the back of my fridge.  I had been thinking and stressing about sourdough enough and I wanted to take a break from it for a couple of weeks. PR said the starter would be good in the fridge for at least 2 months, so no problem, right?

Last week, I pulled one of my jars of starter from the fridge and refreshed 1 cup of it with 4 cups of flour and 2 1/2 cups water, as instructed. I didn't get around to doing this until after supper, so I was a little alarmed when I realized it was supposed to sit at room temperature for 4-6 hours or until it was bubbly and foamy. Oops! When I was ready to go to bed, I took a look at it. It had bubbles on top; I wasn't really sure how foamy it was supposed to be, but I did know it was supposed to be refrigerated overnight, so I called it good and stuck it in the fridge. The next day, I measured out 2/3 cup of my refreshed starter, let it warm up on the counter for an hour, and added flour and a little water to make a dough. This was supposed to double in about 4 hours or so and then sit in the fridge overnight again. But it didn't double. In fact, it didn't rise at all. I left it out overnight, and it was the same size in the morning. So I threw it out, along with the refreshed starter.

I still had that second jar of old starter in the fridge, so this week I tried again. This time I made sure to allow enough time for my refreshed starter to bubble at room temperature. And again there were bubbles on the surface, but I was unsure about the foamy part. I decided to go ahead and use it, and I refrigerated it overnight. I made the next build of dough just as I had the week before, and again I saw no rise that day. Again I left it out overnight - might as well if I'm just going to throw it away, right? In the morning, I saw that it had doubled! Finally I was getting somewhere. I made the final dough that morning and left it to rise.  After 3-4 hours it hadn't doubled, so I left it longer. After about 7 hours I decided it had been long enough. It had risen some . . . maybe it had doubled, I wasn't sure. I turned it out onto the counter, where I divided it in two, shaped loaves as best I could, and placed them on a parchment lined sheet pan. The dough was a strange consistency. It almost had a gooey-ness to it and had definitely lost much of the firmness it had when I finished kneading it 7 hours earlier. I decided that at this point I decided that I was all in.  I was going to finish this bread and I was going to bake it.  I popped that sheet pan in the fridge to retard overnight because PR says that will allow develop maximum flavor, and I figured this one would need all the help it could get.  The next day, I let the sheet pan sit on the counter for 4 hours to bring my goo-dough to room temperature.  My "loaves" were basically thick, shapeless puddles on the sheet pan.

J4 pleaded with me to just throw them away, but I didn't come this far and burn though that much flour for nothing, so help me.  Those loaves were going to be baked. And baked they were. Amazingly enough, the loaves had a bit of oven spring, making them a tad less flat. The smell was right.  I transferred them from oven to stovetop to cooling rack, marveling at the somewhat bizarre coloration of their tops. When I sliced into the first loaf at dinnertime, I discovered the texture to be very wrong.  The crust was hard, which I would expect of a hearth bread, but the crumb inside almost had a gumminess to it.  The flavor seemed fine, but the texture made it pretty much inedible and definitely my greatest bread failure of all time.

It may take me awhile to want to hazard sourdough again. Unfortunately, eight formulas in BBA are leavened with a wild yeast starter, so I can only put it off for so long.                

More bagels!

If I don't watch out, my family is going to expect fresh, hot bagels for breakfast every Saturday morning!  I've made a couple different variations, both of which we have enjoyed.  Peter Reinhart gives instructions for making cinnamon raisin bagels in BBA, so I gave those a shot last weekend.  And this morning I made asiago cheese bagels.  Both variations were excellent.  I did order some diastatic malt powder, and it seems to add that "bagel flavor" that we were missing before.  Unfortunately, I couldn't buy it locally so I had to buy an entire pound of it on Amazon.  I wish I had some local baking friends to share it with because I'm pretty sure it will take me years to use that much, even if I do keep making bagels every week!

8/12/2010 - Light Wheat Bread

This is one of the few formulas in BBA that, like challah, requires no preferment or delayed fermentation. This is also the first bread recipe I have ever followed that produces only one loaf of bread. It could, of course, be doubled, but I opted to follow directions. The formula is your basic wheat bread formula - mix and knead the standard ingredients, rise, shape and pan, proof, bake.  And the resulting loaf is your basic wheat bread - soft, wholesome, and slightly sweet.  Excellent sandwich bread.  PR instructs that this bread can be sweetened with either granulated sugar or honey. I went the sugar route because I didn't want to mess with measuring out sticky honey if I didn't have to. That was dumb. I knew as I spooned in the sugar that honey would be better and, sure enough, the first thought to cross my mind when I tasted the finished bread was, "This would be so much better with honey." Maybe next time.        

8/10/2010 - Challah

Challah is a traditionally Jewish bread that is enriched with eggs. I've made challah several times before using a different recipe. I really liked my old challah, but J4 didn't care for it as much. I was interested to see how this bread would compare, as it has a much higher egg content than my old recipe.

This was a simple bread to make because there was no preferment or delayed fermentation; it's flavor is from its enrichment so it doesn't need the extra time. I've almost gotten used to bread taking two days to make, so this felt like a snap. I decided to go fancy with the shaping. Challah is traditionally a braided bread but I opted to make a double braid, with a small braid laid over a larger one. This bread is topped with an egg wash before baking. The resulting loaf may be the most dramatic thing I have ever baked.  My pictures don't do it justice. I wanted to give it to someone as a very special gift, it was that gorgeous.

It was almost too beautiful to eat, but eat it we did. This was an immediate favorite of mine. It is a beautiful bread, and it is rich with a hint of sweetness. J4 liked it fine, but again, he didn't like it as much as I did. Unfortunately, he will probably be eating it again because I am already itching to revisit this one. I have already decided that next time I will make a single braid and curl it around into a wreath shape.

8/3/2010 - Ciabatta

Yes, I baked bread two days in a row.  It was a little crazy, and I was probably not a very good mommy, but I did it and we all survived.  I chose to make the poolish version of ciabatta instead of the biga version.  I prepared the poolish the evening before, left it on the counter for a couple of hours, and then refrigerated it overnight.  The next day I mixed the dough.  Ciabatta is not kneaded on the counter, but is gently stretched, folded, and rested twice before the final shaping.  As I stretched and folded the first time, it was apparent to me that my dough was not nearly wet enough when compared to the pictures.  I put the dough back in the bowl and attempted to add some water, but I must not have added enough because it felt exactly the same when I tried again.  At that point M had awoken from her nap and I had to leave it.  After the partial rise, I shaped my too-stiff loaves as best I could and placed them in a makeshift couche I shaped from a dish towel.  They proofed, and I baked them on the stone.  Two of the loaves were lovely, and the third is conspicuously missing from my picture.

I was pretty disappointed with this bread.  The flavor was good, but the crumb basically looked like that of sandwich bread.  It was completely lacking in the large holes I was hoping to achieve by very gentle handling.  I suspect the problem was the consistency of my dough.  This is one formula that I will definitely need to revisit. 

8/2/2010 - Tuscan Bread

This is one bread that I can guarantee you I would never have baked under ordinary circumstances.  The first thing PR says about this bread in his brief description is that it is salt free and therefore "rather dull and flat-tasting."  What makes this bread interesting is that it is made with a cooked flour paste, which sits at room temperature overnight.  I prepared my paste, stirring boiling water into flour until it was smooth, and let it sit overnight.  The next day I mixed, kneaded, rose, shaped, proofed and baked with little to report.  I am getting much more comfortable with hearth baking, transferring the bread from counter to pre-heated stone on parchment paper and using a steam pan and spray bottle to keep the oven humid.  It was a little intimidating to me at first, but I haven't shattered my oven door window yet (as can happen if cool water hits very hot glass).

In truth, the bread was quite bland.  Not flavorless, but bland.  We ate it with some very good soup and didn't mind it at all, but it would have made horrible sandwiches.  J4's comment: "Good thing you made this.  Now if your bread ever tastes like this again, we'll know what you did wrong."  Thanks, honey.

7/30/2010 - Pane Siciliano

I've been excited to bake this bread since the day BBA arrived from Amazon and I wrapped it for J4.  There is a gorgeous picture of it on the back cover, and I couldn't resist sneaking a peek at it before wrapping the book up and hiding it away.  Bread shaped so attractively must be good, right?  This bread features the first specialty item that I've had to purchase for this project: semolina flour.  Semolina flour is ground from durum wheat, which is the grain pasta is made from.  It was tricky to find, but a man who runs a baking company in town directed me to a local co-op that carries it.  They also are the only place I've found in town to carry rye flour, which will come in handy later.

This bread is made over three days.  The first day, half of the dough is mixed, kneaded, fermented, and stored in the refrigerator overnight.  The second day, the preferment is mixed with the remainder of the ingredients, and the dough is kneaded and shaped into three beautiful S-shaped loaves.  These are stored in the refrigerator overnight, where mine more than doubled in size.  I was a little concerned about that when I pulled them out for baking the next morning, but they had plenty of oven spring.

The finished loaves were not nearly as beautiful as those pictured in BBA.  My tightly coiled S's spread quite a bit to the sides, I suspect because they were over-risen.  The bread had a slightly nutty flavor to it, and we loved the sesame seeds on top.