Pane Siciliano

Dang, did this one take a long time to make. Well, not in the literal sense of days to create the bread, but rather to procure the ingredients to make this bread. I hope it’s worth it. People at work have been putting up with the same bread for three weeks, just shaped differently.

The reason it took so long was getting the semolina flour. On one day I traveled to no more than 4 grocery stores, including two health food stores. I found all sorts of odd flours, for example; almond flour, cashew flour, and bean flour. But nowhere was semolina flour to be found. I thought it would be easy; after all, this is what you use to make homemade noodles. I searched on the Inter-world-wide-webs and found some Bob’s Red Mill, and order up some. It seemed a little pricey, but where the heck was I going to fine some of this, right?

When it finally arrived on Friday, I realized why it was so pricey. I must not have read the description that great since a whole display box and 5 individual 24oz bags arrived. Oh well, I guess I’ll be making a lot of homemade noodles.

This bread is described as enriched, which if you remember means fat, standard dough, indirect (pre-ferment) and commercial yeast (as opposed to wild.) The technique and bread combines large portions of pre-ferment and overnight fermentation. Semolina is the gritty, sandy flour milled from durum wheat. It’s a hard high-protein wheat, but not high in gluten. The golden color is mainly due to a high proportion of beta-carotene. This version consists of 40% semolina and 60% high gluten bread flour, which I didn’t have, so I just used bread flour.

I used the last shaping technique of the series by doing the ‘S.’ The finished loaf has a beautiful blistered crust, not too crackly and a crumb with large, irregular holes, open to the same degree as a good French or Italian. This bread quickly doubled in size and turned out looking perfect. I knew I shouldn’t have added the sesame seeds. They are just too messy and in my opinion don’t add that much in flavor.