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.