9/6/2010 - English Muffins

What better bread to make for a lazy Labor Day at home than English muffins? The formula was easy, and the muffins were ready in plenty of time for breakfast-for-lunch. I had fun making these. The dough is mixed, kneaded, raised, and shaped into buns for the final proofing. Then the muffins are cooked on a griddle for 5 minutes on each side, and then popped in the oven to finish baking. Easy, fun, yummy.

My English muffins weren't quite where I wanted them, and I think it was because my dough was too stiff. They didn't really spread on the griddle the way they were supposed to, so we ended up with very fat, dense, muffins. We still enjoyed them, but I'll be revisiting this one.

Even with thicker than desired English muffins, McDonald's has nothing on these.

Taking a "break"

Sort of. I went an entire week without crossing a single formula off my BBA list. That's not to say I didn't bake any of them, I just baked one I had made before. Specifically, I revisited potato rosemary bread, but with a slight variation. This past week I baked potato basil bread, and I made it twice. I was helping with the food at a baby shower this past weekend, and I decided to try out a recipe I've always been intrigued by but never had a good reason to make: the Big Sandwich. You take a round loaf of bread, slice it into five horizontal slices, and load it up with roast beef, turkey or ham, bacon, several types of cheese, onions, and tomatoes. You pop the whole thing in the oven to melt the cheese, slice it into wedges, and serve. Yum! I chose to use potato rosemary bread for its softness, but I wanted the flavor to be a bit milder so I substituted fresh chopped basil for the rosemary. It was perfect for this application. My sandwiches were only sliced into four horizontal slices because the loaves were on the small side, but they turned out beautifully and were delicious!  

8/28/2010 - Cinnamon Buns

Yum! I was excited about this one. This formula is one of the few in BBA that can be made in one day, but I opted to stretch it to two days so we could enjoy these for breakfast. This is a rich dough (though not nearly as rich as, say, brioche), and you actually begin by creaming together sugar, salt, and butter or shortening almost like you're making a cake. Once you mix in the remaining ingredients, it is clearly a bread dough, but a very soft one (or as PR describes it, "silky"). The dough is kneaded and rises to double its size. Then you roll it out into a rectangle, sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, roll it up into a log, slice it, and lay the slices on a sheet pan. At that point, I stuck my sheet pan in the fridge overnight. Well, kind of overnight; I actually set it back on the counter to warm back up and proof at 1am or so. That way, they were ready to bake when we got up in the morning. While they baked, I made the glaze and we all enjoyed the smell of baking cinnamon buns.

These were yummy, but I'll make some changes next time. First, I will use the full amount of cinnamon and sugar called for. It looked like way too much as I was sprinkling it over the rolled out dough so I probably stopped with almost half of my mix left, but this batch definitely needed more. Second, I will make fewer, thicker buns next time. I made 16 buns this time; next time I'll try 12. Finally, the lemon extract. The formula calls for lemon extract to be added to both the dough and the glaze. It didn't bother me in the dough, and I think I'll keep it there, but the glaze was so overpoweringly lemon flavored that it took away from the flavor of the buns. Next time I'm leaving that out completely. One thing I changed that I was happy about - I halved the recipe for the glaze (and yes, I put in half the lemon extract called for), and that made the perfect amount.

8/27/2010 - French Bread

French bread made according to the formula in BBA begins as a preferment called pate fermentee, which means "fermented dough" or "old dough". As with any preferment, the delayed fermentation of the pate fermentee allows the enzymes time to work on the dough while the yeast is dormant, improving flavor considerably. The formula for pate fermentee is almost identical to the list of ingredients that is added to it the next day to make the final dough - 1/4 cup more flour is added, but that's hardly any difference at all. So, you basically mix, knead, and rise half a recipe of French bread dough, put it in the fridge overnight, and then add the other half to it the next day. I've read that it's common for bakers to simply set aside a bit of dough from each batch to add to the next day's bread, which would make sense if you were baking French bread every day.

This bread had excellent flavor, but I was too rough with it in the shaping phase and it lacked the open crumb you want to see in French bread. This is an ongoing issue with my bread and something I need to continue working on. I attempted to score this bread, which is something I generally avoid for reasons you can see in the picture. I think I just need a better, sharper knife, or even a lame to really do it right.

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.