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

We have a persimmon tree and this year I thought I would make Persimmon bread from the fruit.  First I had to find a recipe that I liked and do a trial run to see how the bread tastes.  I found a recipe at this website that I used to make my bread.  http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2007/11/persimmon-bread.html The first one turned out very tasty but I thought that I should double the recipe and bake the bread in my panettone mold.

Recipe:

2 1/2 cups persimmon, mashed pulp.  I put mine in a blender and made a smoothie out of them.  There was a little extra that went into the bread also.

2 tablespoon lemon juice

4 tablespoons olive oil

1 cup plus 4 tbsp. sugar and 4 tbsp. water

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 cups bread wheat flour

2 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon nutmeg 

1/2 teaspoon cloves

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup golden raisins

1/2 cup roasted almond pieces

Mix the persimmon lemon juice, olive oil, sugar, water, and vanilla extract together.  Then add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves.  Then mix until all the flour is moistened.  Add the almonds and raisins and mix them in.

Pour into what ever baking pan you are going to use and smooth the top out so it looks nice.

Preheat oven to 325°F then cook for 1 1/2 hours.  Let the bread cool completely before cutting.  The glaze was made by melting a thick slice of butter.  Then added a half tablespoon of fruit flavored brandy, an eighth of a teaspoon of Vanilla and Almond extract each.  The glaze is then thickened up by adding powdered sugar until I got the thickness that I wanted.  This glaze is just very wonderful all on its own.  I then placed some sliced Almonds on top of the glaze.  I love the wonderful flavor that the persimmons give to this bread.