(Guest Post by Smokestack)
DOUGH NIGHT: As over clean dinner plates, around 8pm, Idiotbaker and I decided: it was time. Mrs. Idiotbaker and children fled the scene to make room for the culinary chaos about to ensue. Soon the wondermill was lighting up its fine-flour afterburner under Idiotbaker's impatient gaze, while I poured over the five-foot long schedule, wondering how we were going to pull all this off. 
We started with the Panettone. Peter Reinhart's recipe times sixteen. The test loaf turned out alright. We decided to incorporate more white wheat into the flour mix. No time to test again, so we're in uncharted territory as far as flour blend goes. 
One thing to remember when using a 20qt Hobart with a broken low-speed: hand-mix first. After the cloud of flour (raining butter) settled, the damage seemed negligible. The dough looked great after some Hobart TLC.
While Idiotbaker was tweaking the dough, I was doing the hard work: tasting booze/fruit mixtures for each of our four planned panettone batches. Fruits used: cranberry, cherry, currant, mango. Booze: Bacardi, Triple Sec. A couple of the batches had some OJ in there too. 
Also on the docket for the evening was prepping dough for 8 loves of Hutzelbrot. Using a mash is new to both of us. [IB- I messed up and added the altus to the mash as it went into the oven. :( .] No test batch for the Hutzelbrot. This should interesting to watch develop tomorrow afternoon. 
For now, all the dough balls are resting in bags and bowls covering the dining room table; waiting for morning when we fire up the oven. Until then, I'm going to grab a few hours shut-eye. 

 

My advisers pronounced these perfect, at least in terms of duplicating their memory. Twice as much lard and twice as many cracklings (also of a larger size.) A much coarser crack to the pepper. Just for the fun of it, I mixed this dough considerably wetter than the last. I believe I overproofed it some. Both baked covered in cast iron. One twisted, one scored. I don't think it is necessary to score this loaf, although it is attractive.

For people who love bread and love pork, this bread is a touchstone. Make extra; it disappears very fast.

I have done 2 stollen recipes (yilding 3 big, 1 bigger-than-huge loaves), coffeebreads, cookies, now Kugelhopf. Still have a big one to come: pure sourdough pannetone, yup, after last year's sourdough pandora, I am crazy enough to take on another around of sweet starter insanity. The test run went great (with wacky timing though, I was up and baking bread at 4am), will do the real batch this weekend and report back.

 

Now back to the bread at hand, two years ago, I saw a beautiful Kugelhopf pan on sale at local grocery store, of all places. Hesitated, and it was back to the original price the next day. I have been waiting for it to go on sale ever since, and finally happened 2 weeks ago! With the pan in hand, I made the Kugelhopf reciep from the "Tartine Bread Book". It ueses the all purpose brioche dough in the book, with some extra kugelhopf ingredients.

 

Golden and beautiful out of the oven, and smell heavenly!

 

All dress up

 

With around 30% butter, it's a light brioche, I knead the dough well to pass the windowpane, which results in a light and airy crumb.

 

The recipe used pistachio, and I replaced some apricot with cranberries, in addition to lots of rum soaked currants, just love the colorful crumb, so festive. This shot is done under sunlight, which gives a totally different feel from the ones above (done with lights). Too bad it's so rare for me to have sunlight and finished breads at the same time.

Highly recommend it, the recipe can be found in the "Tartine Bread Book".

 

Submitting to Yeastspotting.

Today, we mixed and baked ciabattas and challah, neither of them sourdough. We mixed and shaped olive bread, walnut raisin bread and miche to be retarded tonight and baked tomorrow. We also scaled ingredients and mixed pre-ferments for baguettes to make tomorrow. The baguettes will be made with two pre-ferments – a pâte fermentée and a liquid levain. The doughs for the ciabatta and for the miche were hand mixes, and all the levains were mixed by hand.

Scaling water for the miche mix

Hand mixing dough for the miches

Frank had us make 6-strand challah but he also demonstrated a variety of other braids. His challot are pictures of perfection. (Mine are pictures of squid who ate some special mushrooms.)

Challah pieces ready to be rolled into strands fro braiding

Frank's challot, ready to be egg washed prior to proofing

Frank's challot, baked

Challah crumb

My Ciabattas and Challot 

Stretch and fold

Dividing ciabatta dough

Placing ciabatta on the proofing board

Ciabatta baking in the deck oven

Ciabatta crumb

Both the ciabatta and the challah are delicious. I'm looking forward to the breads we are baking tomorrow.

We spent all day in the bakery and only were in the classroom to list our tasks for the day, first thing in the morning. Most of Frank's teaching dealt with dough handling issues, but I picked up a couple pearls worth sharing.

I asked him about how levain is calculated differently from other pre-ferments. (See my blog entry for Artisan II-Day 3.) Here's the answer: It's a matter of convention. Levain and other pre-ferments can be calculated either as a percent of dry flour weight in the final dough or in terms of the percent of pre-fermented flour in the total dough. No big deal. Your choice.

Frank also made two interesting comments as we were scaling and shaping the miches. The first was that long loaves like bâtards have a more open crumb structure than boules made with the same dough. I have found that to be true but attributed it to my shaping skills. The second was that the size of the loaf has a significant impact on flavor. I had also observed this with the miche from BBA which I made once as two 1.5 lb boules, which had a different flavor from the 3 lb miches I usually make. Again, I didn't generalize from that one experience at the time. Interesting, eh?

I am anxious to get home and practice some of the skills I've acquired before I lose them.

David