The Fresh Loaf

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pmccool

This cake, a Jamaican Christmas tradition, came to my attention from a very strange direction.  

Back in October, my wife and I, along with my sister and her boyfriend, spent a long weekend in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula.  That's the “horn” pushing up into Lake Superior at the western end of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.  We happened across The Jampot, a bake shop operated by the Holy Transfiguration Skete Society of St. John, a Byzantine Catholic monastery.  Seriously, where else would one go to find out about a cake that is beloved on a Caribbean island?

The Jampot's version is a large, loaf-shaped cake with a $54 price tag.  My interest was piqued, even though my pocketbook was unmoved.  After some on-line research, I settled on this recipe

If you look at it carefully, you will note that it calls for just over 5 pounds of fruits and nuts.  Add to that a pound each of butter, sugar, and eggs.  And close to a quart of booze.  Only one pound of flour is allocated to bind all of that together and just 4 teaspoons of baking powder to leaven it.  This is not a dry, light cake.  

The recipe says that the fruit should soak in the rum and wine for at least three days.  I let it soak for close to a month, thinking that it would allow for a better marriage of the flavors.  I’m happy with the results. 

On baking day, I made the caramel color, then ground the fruit and almonds in the food processor as directed.  The rest of the process was fairly straightforward but I was very glad for my 7-quart KitchenAid mixer, since the batter and fruit filled the bowl nearly to the rim.  If you have a mixer with a smaller bowl, plan to combine the batter and the fruit in a large mixing bowl by hand.  

The recipe makes three 9-inch cakes.  I used two regular cake pans and one spring form pan, which turned out well, since it would have overflowed a third regular pan.  These cakes have a long bake time.  The cakes in the regular cake pans took two hours; the thicker cake in the spring-form pan baked for 2.5 hours.  

The cake is very rich and filling.  The flavor is deep and complex, with both the fruit and the booze figuring prominently.  There's lime zest and cinnamon in the mix but those contribute undertones to the flavor, rather than being noticeable as distinct flavors.  The texture is predominantly that of the fruit.  If you will, this is a cake made of fruit rather than a cake that contains some fruit.  Not surprising, considering the ratio of fruit to flour.  

I would make this cake again but I will want to make sure that I have plenty of helpers to eat it.  It’s a lot of cake!

Paul

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pmccool

The grandfather of the husband of one of our nieces (nephew-in-law?) died recently and my wife made a meal for his family.  I pitched in with ciabatta bread, using Reinhart’s ciabatta with poolish formula from BBA.  Since each loaf was a different size, we gave them the Papa Bear and Mama Bear sized loaves.  

I did run into one snag with the formula.  The final dough calls for 22.75 ounces of flour, which I dutifully mixed in.  And immediately began to wonder if I had strayed into a bagel recipe, since the dough was so stiff and dry.  A second reading confirmed that I had read the weight quantity correctly but then I noticed that the volume quantity called for 3.5 cups.  I suspect a typographical error occurred and that the weight should have been 12.75 ounces, instead.  

Cue the addition of water.  And more water.  And more salt.  And more water until, eventually, the dough was the sticky, slack blob that it should have been.  Fermentation proceeded pretty much as expected.  As much as possible, I avoided degassing the loaves while shaping but I did flip them (deliberately) while transferring them from the couche to a baking sheet.  They showed good oven-spring while baking.  

The bread was well received.  To quote our niece’s husband, “The bread you made is freaking insane.”

Since I haven’t cut into the third loaf, I don’t know what the crumb looks like.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find that the texture is closer than a typical ciabatta because of the additional mixing/kneading to incorporate the added water.  

Paul

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pmccool

We've been traveling. It seems a bit odd to say that we are vacationing, since we are retired, so “traveling” might be the better verb.  Last week we were in Nashville, TN.  This week we are in Sapphire, NC.  

Today we took a little ramble down to Highlands, NC just to poke around a bit.  On our way, we came across this business that is one part furniture store, one part antique store, and one part reclaimed architectural bits store.  I won’t try to estimate how many parts might have been junk.  From a bread perspective, they had a stack of strapped pans from some long-defunct bakeries:

 There were also several dough troughs scattered about, like this one:

Some of the other specimens were in much rougher condition.  

There were other “treasures” too numerous to mention.  Happily for my pocketbook, none of them followed me home, although there was a very close call with a bench.  

We’ve also managed to see a few of the numerous waterfalls in the area:

Paul

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pmccool

A good part of yesterday was spent helping my brother-in-law cut, split, and stack firewood for his winter heating.  After that, I came home to clean up (and take some ibuprofen!) and make hamburger buns.  Those will be used for this afternoon's Halloween gathering.

Paul

 

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pmccool

Although, really, I think it would be better named “Apple Chopped Bread”.  One could almost treat it as a pull-apart bread but it toasts up so nicely that I prefer to slice it.  As its appearance suggests, flavor matters more than beauty for this bread. 

I find myself wanting to make this bread at least once each Fall when apples are in abundance.  Although there is no added sugar in the dough, the apples, brown sugar, and cinnamon in the filling provide enough sweetness without becoming cloying.  And, though the original recipe doesn’t call for it, I like to add a bit of mace to round out the flavor. 

The recipe in Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads makes two 4x8 loaves.  My tweaked version is scaled down to one 4x8 loaf:

Dough

Warm water.        1.25 cups / 285g

Active dry yeast   1.5 teaspoons / 3g

Bread flour.          3-3.5 cups / 430g

Salt.                     1.5 teaspoons / 10g

Butter, softened   2 tablespoons / 28g

Measure the water into a medium mixing bowl.  Sprinkle the yeast on the water.  When the yeast has hydrated (most of it will sink to the bottom of the bowl), add the remaining ingredients.  Mix to form a shaggy dough.  Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 8-10 minutes.  The dough will smooth out and become elastic.  

Place the dough back in the bowl and cover it to prevent drying.  Allow the dough to ferment until it doubles in volume, which will take approximately an hour.  Turn the risen dough onto a floured surface and roll or press it into a 16-inch square that is approximately half an inch thick.  

While the dough rises, thoroughly butter or grease an 8x4-inch loaf pan. 

Filling 

Apple, diced         1 cup / 110g

Egg, beaten          1 large./ 55g

Walnuts or pecans, chopped   0.25 cup / 28g

Brown sugar, packed   0.25 cup / 50g

Cinnamon             1.5 teaspoon / 4g

Mace                     0.25 teaspoon / -

Peel, core and dice the apple(s) and scatter them on the rolled-out dough.  Pour the beaten egg over the diced apple.  Combine the brown sugar, cinnamon, and mace and sprinkle over the apple/egg mixture.  Fold the dough so that the filling is completely enclosed.  Use a bench scraper or chef's knife to roughly chop the package into chunks approximately 1-inch square.  (No, it won't be pretty!). 

Scoop the chopped up dough and filling into the prepared loaf pan.  Cover the pan loosely with plastic wrap and let the bread rise until it is slightly above the edge of the pan.  Depending on room temperature, this may take 45-60 minutes.  

Preheat the oven to 375F.  Place the pan in the oven and bake for 40-45 minutes.  The internal temperature should be 190-195F.  Alternatively, a skewer or cake tester inserted in the center of the loaf should come out clean when the bread is ready. 

Remove the baked loaf from the oven and use a butter knife or similar tool to gently loosen the loaf in the pan.  Carefully remove the loaf from the pan (it will be fragile and the filling will still be molten) and place it on a cooling rack. Cover loosely with a towel while the loaf cools to room temperature. 

This bread is good as is or with a smear of butter.   It makes fabulous toast.  I suspect it would make marvelous French toast, too, but haven’t tried that yet.  Edit: Have confirmed this morning that the bread makes very good French toast, indeed.

 


Paul

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pmccool

I've been jonesing for a rye bread, so when my most recent bread (a yeasted 100% whole wheat bread with tangzhong) developed mold before the loaf was half-eaten, I seized the opportunity. 

The first order of business was to pull my starter out of the refrigerator and give it a good feeding.  Although I have tended it, the poor thing has been in cold storage about a month and a half since it's last use.  Happily for me, it perked right up and was ready for use with just one refresh.  (Although not germane to the bread that is the subject of this post, we took delivery in April of the refrigerator and freezer pair that we ordered in February.  That's received in April 2021, ordered in February 2020.  Yes, more than a year later.  Thank you Electrolux/Frigidaire for getting right on that.)

Early that evening, I mixed both the levain and the soaker.  The levain went into my Brod & Taylor proofer overnight.  My one deviation from the recipe was to mill the flour for the soaker at a coarser setting and then use boiling water, rather than room temperature water, to hydrate it.  The soaker was then covered and allowed to cool overnight.

The next morning, about 7:30 or so, the levain was puffy and well aerated, so I went ahead with the final dough.  The KitchenAid mixer made short work of combining everything, following the recipe's directions for mixing times.  The dough went back into the proofer for the short 30-minute bulk fermentation. 

Hamelman's instructions talk about shaping the dough and proofing it in baskets for either round or oblong loaves.  But then, almost as a aside, he mentions that it works well in Pullman pans, too.  After checking on the amount of dough that he recommends for a 13x3.5x3.5 pan and scaling for my 9x4x4 pan, I found that the amount of the dough in the recipe would work perfectly for my pan.  Consequently, at the end of bulk fermentation, I shaped a single loaf and packed it into the pan, using wet hands to dome the top of the loaf.  Then I put it back into the proofer for final fermentation.

When I came back to check on the fermentation progress, I was surprised and rather concerned to see that it was at full proof and needed to go into the oven.  Just one small problem: the oven wasn't preheated yet.  Two, actually: it was also apparent that the lid wasn't going on the Pullman pan, since the dough was crested slightly above the rim already.  After re-reading the baking instructions, and checking another recipe that was specifically written to use Pullman pans, I elected to adhere (mostly) to the instructions for this bread.  There's an initial 10-minute bake at 470ºF.  Then the temperature is turned down to 430ºF for ____ minutes, depending on loaf size.  Between the directions for the two recipes, I guesstimated that 50 minutes at the lower temperature should get me pretty close.

When the oven reached temperature, I gently maneuvered the pan onto the center of the middle shelf.  Ten minutes at the higher temperature and 50 minutes at the lower temperature brought the internal temperature of the loaf up to about 203ºF.  The top was a chestnut brown and the sides, once depanned, were golden.  This:

To illustrate just how close to the edge of the over-proofing cliff I was, take a look at all of the pinholes in the top crust where bubbles were beginning to pop:

Luckily, there isn't a flying roof, nor has the top crust sunk after cooling.  The crumb shows some compression zones around the pan sides and bottom but I think these are more a product of the final expansion of the loaf's center during the bake, rather than overproofing tells.

For an 80% rye, the crumb looks pretty good.  It is very moist but doesn't coat the knife blade, some 30 hours after coming out of the oven. 

The flavor is surprisingly mild; just a faint hint of sourness and the earthy/spicy notes that I associate with rye.  There are no seeds or spices, so all of the flavor comes from the flour. 

To avoid a rerun of mold before I can use up the bread, I've cut the loaf in three pieces.  Two are in the freezer, one is in the pantry.

Paul

 

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pmccool

Using the recipe from the King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook, I recently made teething biscuits for two great-nephews who are each 6 months old:

Peter (I've no idea why the picture refuses to display in the correct orientation.)

Amos

Getting them off to a good start with home-made baking.

 

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pmccool

A week or so ago, my sister said “Let's make bismarks.”  So today we made bismarks, aka paczki.  Two batches, as a matter of fact.  It was one of our favorite things that Mom made.  Today, there are a number of happy McCool kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids reliving memories of Mom/Grandma/Great-Grandma Joyce and her bismarks.  

We never just make food.  We make a tangible expression of our love with everything that we prepare. And memories; strong, lasting memories. 

Paul

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pmccool

The last time I made this bread, I said I'd definitely make it again.  That was two years ago.  Two years!  At least I got back to it faster than MacArthur got back to the Phillipines.

Based on the prior experience, which was completely experimental, I made a couple of adjustments.  The first was in the grain bill.  I dropped the malt entirely and I swapped out 50g of the barley flour for 50g of rye flour.  The second adjustment was to bake the bread in 9x5 pans instead of 8x4 pans, which was a better fit for the dough quantity.

The revised formula is:

350g Whole barley flour

50g Whole rye flour

400g Whole wheat flour

400g Bread flour

900g Water

60g Honey

10g Active dry yeast

The process was unchanged.  Autolyse the flours, water, and honey (about 45 minutes this time around).  Mix in the salt.  Mix in the yeast.  Do three sets of stretch and folds at 20-30 minute intervals.  When the dough has doubled from its original volume, divide into two pieces.  Shape the loaves and place them in prepared 9x5 bread pans.  Ferment the loaves until they have nearly doubled, then bake in a preheated oven at 375F for 50-60 minutes until the internal temperature reaches 195F. Depan and cool on a rack, covered with a towel.

I like the addition of rye flour for this version of the bread.  It intensifies the whole-grain flavors without standing out as RYE!  The barley moderates the grassiness/bitterness of the red whole wheat and lends a certain fullness to the rest of the flavors. 

The crumb, while firm, is moist and fairly open for a bread with 66% whole grain, half of which are gluten-free or nearly so. 

Definitely a keeper and I think that I don't need to do any further adjusting with the flours.

Paul

 

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pmccool

About a month ago, I reviewed Daniel Leader's Living Bread.  In passing, I mentioned that I had baked one bread from the book and would post about it separately.  Well, finally, here is the promised post.

The formula is fairly straightforward: a liquid levain (40%), Type 65 flour (90%), whole rye flour (9%), water (77%), salt (2.5%), dry instant yeast (0.1%).  Note that I'm following Leader's baker's percentages; the T65 flour is really 91%.  He does give a separate table for the liquid levain build; all of the levain goes into the final dough with no carryover or discard.  While the dough has a nominal hydration of 77%, based on the water in the final dough, the actual hydration is closer to 81% when the levain's water and flour contributions are included.

Since I didn't have T65 flour on hand, I did a little noodling with Pearson's Square and came up with a blend of whole wheat flour and bread flour in the proportions (if memory serves) of 65% whole wheat and 35% bread flour.  This looked as though it would have an ash and protein content that is in line with T65 flour, even if it isn't the real deal. 

Since this was my first time making this particular bread, I followed the quantities and directions scrupulously for the levain, the autolyse, and the final dough; up to the point of the overnight cold retard.  The flours that I used would have benefited from slightly lower hydration.  The dough was quite sticky and grabby, preferring to latch onto any available surface instead of releasing cleanly.  That was after 15 minutes of machine mixing and two rounds of stretch and folds.

Since the loaner refrigerator that we have from our appliance dealer (it's only been a year since we placed the order for the fridge and the freezer, which doesn't seem to concern anyone at Electrolux) is rather small, I elected to skip the overnight cold retard and bake the bread after it fermented at room temperature. 

The second departure from the recipe came during shaping.  The text talks about shaping boules.  The accompanying photograph shows batards.  I chose batards, which precipitated the third and final deviation from the recipe: I baked them on a stone in the oven, with steam, rather than in a Dutch oven.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Preshaping and shaping this very sticky dough was a challenge.  Although I managed, it wasn't my best effort.  The shaped loaves (I made the dough into two loaves, instead of one very large loaf) went into bannetons for their final proof.  It turned out that the dough wasn't quite finished with me.  Slashing was ugly, with the dough grabbing the razor blade.  And, even though I transferred the loaves to a sheet of parchment on the peel, they still managed to latch onto the peel itself instead of sliding off cleanly.  That's why they look a little beat up in the photos.

The lead photo shows both loaves after baking.  The following photo shows a close-up of one of the loaves.  The crust color is excellent and, suprisingly, there are some blisters in the crust even without the cold retard step.  The loaves exhibited quite a bit of oven spring, which was a real relief considering how much they were degassed while trying to release them from the peel.  Cleaner scores would have allowed for even better expansion with less tearing.

 

The crumb, shown in the following photo, also attests to the miracle of oven spring.  I really thought that the wrestling match to get the bread into the oven would thoroughly deflate it.  The crust was thin and crisp.

So, how did it taste?  Pleasant, with a mild tang, but nothing to write home about.  I suspect that the cold retard would allow more flavor development.  One could also do away with the yeast kicker to slow fermentation further.  The texture was firm with a respectable chew but not tough.  Not surprisingly the crumb was moist, although it didn't go so far as to be custardy; which was fine by me.

I'm not sure that I will make this specific bread again.  It doesn't have any glaring deficiencies but neither does it have much of a "Wow!" factor to elevate it above other pains au levian.  I will give it points for tenacity, which is most likely a product of the extended mixing time and the relatively high-protein flours used.  Most breads would have come out of the oven as frisbees after being subjected to the struggles I had with getting it off the peel.  Then again, a dough with a lower hydration wouldn't have been nearly as sticky.

Paul

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