SusanMcKennaGrant's blog

This post is about the typical rye bread of the Swiss Valais where I live. This wonderful bread has its own AOP status (appellation d'origine protégée), a certification which guarantees that everything used to produce it comes from the Valais. This is the French/German-speaking Swiss canton that is home to most of the highest peaks in the Alps and the source of  the Rhone River. The AOP protection helps preserve the landscape by ensuring the continuing cultivation of rye, something that grows well in the difficult mountain terrain, high altitudes and harsh climates that make growing most other grain impossible. 

Pain de Seigle Valaisan is a rustic, round loaf with a dense crumb and is much heavier than it looks. It must contain at least 90% whole rye flour and is usually made with a sourdough starter. It keeps well for a very long time. Traditionally it was baked in village ovens, which would be fired only two or three times a year, so it was important to have bread that would last for several months. Today it is mostly made in commercial bakeries, but many mountain villages still maintain their communal ovens and hold special bread baking days to celebrate this ancient Alpine tradition.

I have worked on this bread for a while now and finally found a formula I really like. It uses a rye sourdough starter, a rye soaker and an optional 10% wheat preferment. I found it here at Bernd's Bakery blog. Bernd's formula makes two huge loaves weighing one kilogram each. I plan to keep one loaf around awhile to see how it matures. If you want to try it you will need an active rye sourdough starter.  

This bread is delicious sliced very thin and enjoyed with a platter of Valais raclette or other Swiss cheese, air dried beef, gherkins and salami. Often it is studded with walnuts or the dried apricots that are so famous here in the Valais. It takes very little effort over a couple of days to build the starter and, once that is done, things move fast. Rye ferments quickly and once the dough is shaped the final rise is just one hour at 29 degrees Celsius.

And a few pictures from the region

See more at http://www.susanmckennagrant.com/2017/04/08/rye-bread-from-the-swiss-valais-pain-de-seigle-valaisan-or-walliser-roggenbrot/

As one ventures into the mezzogiorno or southern Italy, bread takes on a golden aspect as if it has spent more time in the sun than its northern cousins. This is especially true in Sicily where much of Italy’s hard durum wheat is grown. Milled into a sunny colored yellow flour called semolina, durum wheat is used to make the dried pasta for which Italy is famous. When mixed into bread dough it produces a beautiful yellow loaf with a sweet, nutty flavor that has wonderful keeping qualities.

In Sicily, yellow bread dough is shaped into fanciful snails and reptilian forms, sprinkled with sesame seeds and frequently baked in wood burning ovens.

Durum wheat is strong and it is easy to overdevelop dough made with it. It is best to under mix and let your dough gain strength during the fermentation.

-For the recipe: http://www.susanmckennagrant.com/2014/01/11/sicily-revisited-part-3-pane-casereccio-siciliano/#sthash.Ttp7yDsd.dpuf

As usual, one thing leads to another in the kitchen. I was not entirely comfortable publishing a Kouign Amann recipe because I live a sugar-free life and those delicious pastries contain a fair bit of the white stuff. I even tried laminating the dough with honey to see if it might make a good sugar substitute (it almost always does). But working with soft butter and runny honey made the lamination process very messy. The honey-filled pastry also didn’t turn out as flaky as it should. It had a cakey texture, which I suspect has to do with the hygroscopic quality honey has. So I decided to leave the sugar out of the recipe entirely to find out what a savory version of this pastry looked like. I figured the result should be a reasonable stand-in for puff pastry.

A few days ago, finding myself with a bag of Kenji Lopez-Alt’s excellent Neapolitan pizza dough fermenting in the refrigerator, I gave it a go. Using 100 grams of dough I followed the recipe for Kouign Amann in my last post, sans sucre. It worked like a charm, puffing up beautifully in the oven. I rolled out the leftover scraps very thin and sprinkled them with seeds and salt. Those crackers were so deadly I asked my husband to hide them somewhere. (He ate them.)

So if you are like me and don’t like the idea of a sugar-laced pastry,  just leave it out and enjoy some of these savory preparations. The possibilities are actually pretty endless for this pastry. Neopolitans? Bouchées à la reine? Pain au chocolat? Palmiers? Turnovers? Apple dumplings? Croissants? Pourquoi pas? 

- See more at: http://www.susanmckennagrant.com/2017/01/17/kouign-amann-followup-an-easy-puff-pastry-dupe-and-crackers-too/#sthash.4i3z39ip.dpuf

I've been making Kouign Amann for a long time but it wasn't until I visited their homeland of Brittany I realized I had completely misunderstood this delicious pastry. In Brittany I discovered Kouign Amann is not the sophisticated laminated pastry made from croissant dough I thought it was. It is a rustic treat with humble pedigree and it tasted tasted better, much better, than anything I’d ever made. And to add insult to injury it was also much easier to produce! As usual, to really understand a beloved traditional food it can be enlightening to make the pilgrimage to its homeland. 

Kouign Amann is a pastry that traditionally was made quickly and easily in Breton farmhouses on baking days or on Sundays as a special treat using scraps of leftover bread dough and the delicious demi-sel butter for which the region is famous. Today the pastry appears to be mostly produced in bakeries, but the concept is the same. Bread dough is rolled out thin, slathered with a decadent amount of that insanely good soft cultured butter and sprinkled with sugar. The buttered dough is folded into an envelope shape and then rolled out before it is baked in a hot oven. It’s that simple. Sometimes the mix might contain some blé noir, Brittany’s stone ground buckwheat flour, but mostly it is made from wheat flour. 

- See more at: http://www.susanmckennagrant.com/2017/01/10/kouign-amann-demystified/#sthash.Q0cUCmW5.dpuf