Monday, July 5, 2010
White Bread
These white breads fall into the category of enriched breads, as they are made with the used natural dough conditioners: fat (butter or oil), sugar, and milk. The cause the crust to caramelize quickly and, when fermented correctly, give the finished bread a light-as-air quality with a very soft texture.
The variations of this type of bread will mostly come with the kind of milk and fat used and small changes in the ratio of dry to wet ingredients. Once created I would have to say that this was the most flavorful bread I have made to date. I say that every week, but some how this one was so different. Perhaps it was because it was so simple and relatively quick to make.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Portuguese Sweet Bread
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Panettone
This was a difficult bread to make. It took almost two weeks to make the barm (a sour dough starter) and another day to soak the dried fruit in brandy (not a good brandy mind you) and another day to let the sponge soak overnight. Man, this was a wet bread and after mixing it, found that it took a ton more flour than it called for, but that didn’t surprise me considering the dried fruit was still moist. I decided to have fun with this one and eliminate the candied fruit because quite honestly, I can’t stand the taste. I just went with the dried fruit of plums, Turkish apricots, craisins, raisins, and dates. There were many options for shaping this, and the traditional calls for tall paper cups that the dough rise up, but small loaves and even muffins were suggested.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Pane Siciliano
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.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Pain de Campagne
I had a number of choices to shape the dough, and I was anxious to try the epi or wheat sheaf. It looked fun to create a baguette in the shape of some wheat stalks, and I get to use scissors. However my technique proved to be lacking and I had to resort to youtube to see the actually shaping techniques. I should have kept it straight and cut along the face of the bread itself. Instead I just cut at the 45 degree angle from the side. I also used a suggested cutting technique on the boule shape here. It was fun and I think I’ll be doing the epi shape again, especially for a party since it does look good and acts like a pull-a-part bread.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Pain a l’Ancienne
I wish I had read the book ahead of time as I was supposed to retard the dough overnight. Oh well, people at work got some on Tuesday instead of Monday. This delayed fermentation uses ice cold water and a very slack dough. This larger hydration ratio uses the water to break down the flour even further into sugar, to dig at the natural sweetness that remain in breads using standard fermentation techniques.
From this basic recipe I can make Ciabatta, pizza, focaccia, pugliese, stirato, and pain rustique. The bread was sweeter than a standard French bread, and had a great chewy crust. I think this was my favorite bread so far. I served it with oil and balsamic vinegar.
Next week – Pain de Campagne
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Leeloo Dallas Mul-ti-grain
I have adapted some of the previous techniques this week to aid with the loaf development. The dough started with a soaker, where the night before I soaked the polenta, wheat bran and buckwheat in water. I chose buckwheat only because I haven’t worked with it before. The polenta used the same method as the Anadama bread, so I knew it had to soak for a long time to get the corn soft. What was unique about this bread was after using the indirect dough is that it also called for some cooked brown rice. The rice I am sure was used for the extra starch to offset the fiber from the other types of wheat introduced.
With the use of brown sugar and honey, this bread colored up very nicely and I am told will make a great toast. Being an enriched dough it of course called for fat, this time in the form of butter milk. Since I didn’t have any buttermilk I had to use the old method of skim milk and lemon juice to get the fat out.
Next week: Pain a l’Ancienne (don’t ask I have no idea what that is)