I made these the other day and they were gone in minutes. I went to a restaurant called Bar Louie and ordered these and said, "I have to make these". I already love pretzels, so why not?

I see I'm not the only one who was on a quest for the perfect croissant...I'm on the quest for the perfect pain au chocolat i just want the dough to be right. I want my croissant and pain au chocolat to taste like the one from Galaxy Desserts/Williams-Sonoma. I came relatively close and this is the results I have thus far. These tasted great but I have no idea where to get fresh yeast from so I used active dry rapid yeast and I think the fresh yeast is what I'm mixing for them to be absolutely perfect. I love the way the layers looks. I was truly amazed when I popped these out of the oven.

Hello Fresh Loaf Friends,

My name is Tara Jensen and I'm the baker/owner behind Smoke Signals. We're a micro bakery located just outside of Asheville, North Carolina specializing in honest bread and rustic pastries. All our work is done by hand we source our flour exclusively from Carolina Ground, a local mill devoted to milling grains from the Carolinas. We've been doing all our baking for our first year up & running at our town's local pizza shop. Without the generosity of this shared hearth we wouldn't be were we are today, however, our bread is gaining popularity and we need to purchase our oven to meet the demands. So, we've launched a Kickstarter. If you are unfamilliar with Kickstarter, it's a fundrasing platform whereby you make a pledge towards a monetary goal and recive various rewards and recognition. We are raising $5,000 to purchase a gently used gas, deck oven and have a number of different rewards. Give us a look and share with your baking community!

Click here to go to our Kickstarter, learn more, watch our video & share:  Smoke Signals Kickstarter

And click here for our website: Smoke Signals Website

Hi,

Along with croissants, the miches (Hamelman and Shiao-Pings post Miche Gerard Rubaud, the post that initially lured me into TFL) felt quite out of reach, and I had as many failures as trials.

Recently I ordered a bag of 

in the belief it was strong white flour.

Well, it is actually high extraction flour, and at last I managed to make Hamelman's Miche Pointe-A-Caillere with it.

It is just the right stuff for this bread. The dough handles like a treat (at 85%  hydration).

And the result -veeeery tasty. My 7-year-old gobeled down 2 slices (topped with marmalade) and even made his way through the crust!

Here is what it looks like:

And here the crumb:

I made two little 500g miches, are they michelles then, or maybe michettes?

And here is the man who REALLY loves daddy's bread:

Cheers,

Juergen

We haven’t talked about bread in a while, though I have been baking. Not as much as I would have liked, but I do have a couple of breads to tell you about.

Today is a lovely pain rustique that I’ve baked three times already and it’s just delicious, with a sweet perfumed crumb and a lovely caramelised crust. I think it’s one of our favourites, together with a white and semolina mix and a rye and caraway seeds one  . 

Time schedule:

Day 1: Make the preferment, leave for 12 hours at room temperature to mature. I don’t know exactly what the temperature in my kitchen is over night…I guess not above 21C.  I usually leave my preferment for around 12 hours until it’s nice and bubbly and has not sunk. You can test if it’s ready by putting a spoon of it in a bowl of water, if it floats it’s ready, otherwise it needs more time.

Day 2: Make the bread

• Mix the preferment with the water and flour.
• Leave to rest for 30mins (autolyse)
• Add the salt and mix for 8 minutes on low speed
• Leave to rest for 50mins
• Perform 1st stretch and fold
• Leave to rest for 50mins
• Perform 2nd stretch and fold
• Leave to rest for 50mins
• Shape the bread
• Proof it for 150mins
• Bake at 250C for 5 minutes then reduce the oven temperature to 210C for another 40 minutes

Sourdough culture: I use a 100% hydration sourdough culture: 90% whole wheat, 10% dark rye. 

Recipe for 1 loaf (aprox. 78% hydration)

Flour: For this loaf I used very strong white Canadian flour, organic dark rye flour and organic light rye flour from the Shipton Mill.

Ingredients for the preferment

Make it 12 hours before you want to start on your bread.

Method for the preferment

Dissolve the starter in the water. Add the flour and mix until well combined. Cover tightly with cling film and leave it to rest at room temperature for about 12 hours or as I said above: until it’s bubbly and floats. 

Ingredients for the bread

Final baker’s percentage (including preferment)

Method for the bread

I dissolved the preferment in about 2/3 of the water and then added it to the flour. Mix  until you have quite a weird and not smooth mass of wet flour coming together. Do NOT add the salt at this point.

I covered the bowl and left it to rest for 30 minutes for the autolyse.

When the 30 minutes are up add the salt and the 1/3 leftover water and mix for around 8 minutes on low speed. I used the Kitchen Aid with the hook attachment this time. If you want to knead it by hand do it for about 10-15 minutes.

Transfer the dough to a clean greased bowl (I used an oil spray to grease the bowl), cover it with cling film and leave it to rest for 50 minutes. I recently purchased some really cheap shower caps from Boots and I use those to cover my bowl with. Pretty handy as they’ve got elastic and everything  . 

When the 50 minutes are up you are ready for your first stretch and fold.

I did my stretch and folds directly in the bowl, but you can either tip the dough onto a lightly floured surface or you can initially place your dough in a large rectangular container so you can do them directly in there.

Now cover the bowl again and leave to rest for another 50 minutes. Do another stretch and fold (the last one) and again leave to rest for 50 minutes.

After this final rest you need to shape your bread. I shaped this one as a  batard. I moved it in a floured banneton, placed it in a plastic bag that I closed tightly and left it to proof for 2 hrs and 30 minutes. You can find here a clip on shaping and scoring a batard.

You will need your oven to reach 230C so start pre-heating sometime after the proofing period has started, depending on your oven.

To bake the bread I use a 3cm thick granite baking stone, that needs at least 1h20 minutes in a 250C oven to heat up properly.

So, after the 2hrs and 30 minutes of proofing, I tipped my bread on a baking sheet scored it with a long score and put it in the oven. 

I also keep in the oven one of the trays, while it is pre-heating, so it gets hot hot. Then, immediately after transferring the bread on the stone, I add a cup of hot water to the tray below to create some steam and shut the door quickly.

You will need to bake this bread for 45 minutes at 230C. To get a nice crust open the oven door 5 minutes before the baking time is up, to release some of the steam.

For me the baking was 5 minutes at 250C and then, because I have a really small oven, I reduced the temperature to 210C for the rest of the 45 minutes.

Resulting bread:

This is a very nice and tasty bread. It had a nice caramelised crust and a sweet perfumed crumb from the rye flour addition.

Traditions get all tied up with the way things used to be but they point to a better future too.  There aren’t too many traditions that are tied to bad things.  No one wants to celebrate them year after year.   Those we try to forget.  But, the good things we want to remember and renew.  St Paddy’s Day is such a tradition and everyone can be Irish one day a year, put on the green and look forward to a better future.

Carrying on traditions can also be mean that things don’t change over time and the typical Irish feast is a fine example.  Who doesn’t want corned beef and cabbage, boiled; potato, carrots, celery and onion, a nice brown bread, soda bread or scones and fairy cakes at least once a year?  Next day Irish Ruben’s aren’t bad either.

This year, as we usually do, we mixed things up a little bit with the recipes to renew the tradition by not get stuck in the way things were, a problem with traditions that don’t change with the times - can’t let pride get in the way of progress.

So instead of covering the simmered corned beef in mustard and grilling it to finish we covered it as usual but baked it in the oven to get some color and flavor on it.  Instead of sautéing the cabbage with some garlic in butter and bacon fat, we added Swiss chard   and collard greens to the mix - highly recommended.  In place of scones, we made lemon curd fairy cakes and our take on Ballymaloe’s Yeasted Brown Bread replaced the usual soda bread.  So like all traditions that last, they change to withstand the test of time.

Sadly, our daughter Molly couldn’t be with us this year, but she did have Dad email her the recipes from his and her cookbook.  She called to tell me that a lot of important stuff was missing from them too!   She more into the way things are now than the way things were yesterday and so long ago as last year.

It’s the bread we want to talk about.  After staying at Ballymaloe for several days so long ago, we had the luxury of having their SD bread, soda breads; brown and white and their famous yeasted brown bread which is far and away our favorite with the sourdough coming in 2nd.  A SD brown bread would be out favorite if they made one.  Looks like a future project for my apprentice?

I have never had much luck making this yeasted brown bread as the recipe was originally written.   The recipe had several errors in it that have now been corrected by Darina Allen.  It had 50g too little flour, 150 g too much water and the hydration was 127%, pretty high for a no knead, one rise bread and totally unworable.  She has since changed the recipe adding 50 g of strong flour (now the bread is not 100% whole wheat) and cutting the water down to 425 g from 575g. 

The revised recipe can be found here: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/24/how-to-make-yeast-bread

I’m not into no knead bread and I wanted to keep the recipe 100% whole wheat if I could, plus, I wanted to use Guinness for the water.  I don’t keep packages of yeast around as a general rule but I did have one that had a little bit left in it which I used to make a 180 g 100% hydration biga that had 50 g of home milled soft white wheat in it.

Irish whole wheat, which is traditionally used to make this bread, is milled from soft red wheat, something I haven’t found unless online - at exorbitant prices.  So, to try to replicate this flour, I used 50 g of home milled hard red wheat, 150 g of whole wheat pastry flour and 300 g of store bough whole wheat flour.  With the soft white in the biga and the pastry flour we added 15 g of VWG to help this bread out with its lack of gluten.

The Irish Ruben - Kerrygold Irish Swiss cheese and butter for panini, home made Dijon mustard, corned beef with sauteed cabbage, Swiss chard and collard greens  just yummy with the usual veggies and fruit assortment.

You always want to buy Guinness in the can since Guinness travels so poorly.  The can is the only way to get anywhere close to what you get in Dublin out of the tap.  It has a small plastic CO2 canister in each can that lets loose its bubbles when you pop the top to ensure you get the proper stoving that Guinness is so famous for when poured,  as the bubbles work their way back to the top to make the head.

Since one can of Guinness is 14.9 oz or 423 g that is what we used for the 2 hour autolyse.  With the 100% hydro biga and the 84.5% autolyse, the 45 g of molasses (6 times more than Darina’s recipe) and 15 g of VWG we ended up with just the right amount of liquid at 88.51% hydration to allow us to do a nice set of French slap and folds to incorporate the biga into the autolyse and develop the gluten.  Plan on doing 10 minutes of slap and folds to get the dough in shape, eventually the dough will come around.

Once the dough had rested for 10 minutes after being slapped around, we divided it into 3 portions, did some S&F’s to get it tight and then made 3 little boules to fit in the large loaf tin.  You can see from the picture that the dough did not fill the tin even half full - Irish tins are smaller just like the leprichauns that make them - so have your apprentice make a 12% larger amout of dough next time like i will.  I wasn’t paying attention and let the dough proof 1/2 “ past the top of the tin, instead of  just under the top of the tin so it was over proofed and there wasn’t any oven spring as a result.

It took 8 hours on the counter to get it over proofed - so 7 hours would have been better.  We also thought that we would bake the tin in a hot MagnaWare oval turkey roaster with 1/8 C of extra water under the trivet.  We preheated the roaster at 425 F until the oven beep went off saying it was at temperature and then 5 minutes later removed the roaster from the oven, put the tin inside, topped with the lid and put it back in the oven for 20 minutes of aided self steaming.

We removed the tin from the roaster and put it on the oven rack and turned the oven down to 350 F, convection this time.  We removed the bread from the tin 10 minutes later and placed the bread upside down directly on the oven rack for 10 more minutes.  When it hit 205 F on the inside, it was removed to the cooling rack.  The oven had a stone on the top and the bottom of the oven to regulate the heat properly.

We like the way this bread tastes and isn't far off the Ballymaloe version from a taste point of view.  Even though my apprentice over proofed it, the crumb was glossy, open and mildly sweet.  The crust was crispy, probably due to the DO, but went softer as it cooled.  No wonder this is the bread Ballymaloe is famous for baking and serving to their guests!  Will post the Irish Rubens here after we make them for lunch.  Happy St. Patrick;s Day to All Fresh Lofians everywhere.

Formula

My plans to make green bread started before St Paddy's with me deciding to try and make bread in the artichoke shape I saw at the back of the Village Baker and then saw on video here: http://www.archivesaudiovisuelles.fr/FR/_video.asp?id=1690&ress=5424&video=120392&format=69#22065

Since I can't seem to make anything without changing too many variables at once, I made a 65% hydration sourdough with 400g AP and added 2-3 tsp of matcha, which later turned out to be far too little to get a good color, but did result in a nice flavor combination with the sourdough. I think I might try even lower hydration if I go for this shape again with sourdough, as it was a bit, floppy? Anyway, it was a fun experiment, but I'd definitely change things up the next time. (What am I saying, I nearly always change things, even if I am happy with the first iteration.):

Doesn't it look green? :)

In any case, St Paddy's rolls around and I decide to make some cinnamon rolls and get green the good old fashioned way: with flourescent green food coloring. Instead of cinnamon I used 5 spice powder, which may explain why my daughter preferred making them to eating them.