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.