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Bonjour, everyone :^)

Susan of Wild Yeast posted an invitation to celebrate Julia Child on August 15th
(on what would have been Julia’s 100th birthday), by baking Pain Français, from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2.

What a special way to honor Julia Child! – many thanks to Susan and her baking group, the Bread Baking Babes,
for extending the invitation to participate in this centenary celebration!
Susan has written a wonderful post to celebrate Julia - here is a link: Oh, Julia!

Here are the loaves I baked, to pay tribute to Ms. Child and her Pain Français.

Une rose pour Julia

I have a yellow rose bush outside, called the ‘Julia Child’ rose, named for (and perhaps by?)  Ms. Child…
it blooms beautifully each year. I really love this rose and when I see the flowers, it makes me happy to think of Julia
and her lovely cooking!
Julia’s rose inspired me to try shaping Julia’s bread as pain français en forme de rose.
I loved the golden crust color of the pain français after baking…reminding me of the golden yellow color
of the rose itself :^)
                                                     

 

                          a close-up of the ‘rose petals’

The idea for shaping the rose came from this post:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/19320/caucasian-bread
The dough was 63% hydration (quite a bit lower than the original recipe, thinking I would need a stiffer dough to make rose petals).
After rolling out, I brushed the dough with olive oil, prior to rolling up into a cylinder. I hoped the olive oil would prevent the petals from merging/sticking together.
The dough was cut in half lengthwise after it was rolled up, folding open as I cut to expose the cut side (facing up). The two pieces were twisted together, trying to keep the cut side facing up, then the twist coiled up to form the ‘rose’.

A picture of the twist, and the final shaping:
 

I had some extra dough from this batch so baked a small batard, decorated with another flower for Julia;
the stencil for this an imitation of the one used by MC,
for her beautiful pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille:

Fleur-de-lys

Admiring the decorative fleur-de-lys pattern, a symbol of la Belle France, on the cover of both volumes of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking – which inspired the stencilling on this boule:

 

For this bake, the dough was 71% hydration.  I am not sure what the crumb is like – I froze this loaf – so hard to not to have a slice to taste after baking, considering the tantalizing aroma as this bread emerged from the oven!


La Couronne des Perles

I watched an episode of ‘Baking with Julia’ on pbs.org, where Julia and Steve Sullivan of Acme Bakery are making decorative French breads (a wonderful episode!).
One of the breads they made was la couronne, decorated with a ‘string of pearls’.
I thought a bread, dressed up with a string of pearls, was a most lady-like thing to bake in honor of Julia’s birthday!
                                                    

After I baked this bread, I re-read the beginning of Ms. Child’s book, My Life in France, where she describes her first meal after arriving in the city of Rouen, enjoyed at the restaurant ‘La Couronne’:
“our first lunch together in France had been absolute perfection. It was the most exciting meal of my life…”  
I loved that part of the book, where Julia writes about how she discovered her love of French cuisine!,
and was happy I’d baked a couronne, considering the name of that restaurant :^)

The first time I tried making la couronne, it was at 76% hydration; I held back a bit of water from the original formula,
as I was using a soft flour.
I didn’t hold back quite enough water, finding at 76% hydration the pearls flattened out when proofed upside down.
This second try was 71% hydration and this time, the pearls kept their shape during proofing.
             Here is a picture of the crumb:


I was so happy baking these breads to honor Julia for her birthday, and to enjoy the pleasures brought by Julia’s fresh, crusty, aromatic pain français.
Joyeux anniversaire et merci beaucoup, Julia, for this bread and everything else that you taught and gave to us,
through your research and writing!

Happy baking everyone!
:^) breadsong

Submitted, with many thanks, to Susan @ YeastSpotting

I'm back from Kyoto and in my first week, I've re-awakened my starter and am tonight attempting to make sourdough. I used 5 oz starter (nice and bubbly and active, 100% starter) 10 oz water and 15 oz white flour. The dough is really wet; I couldn't do stretch and folds because it was sticking to everything. So, I folded and kneaded in at least another cup of flour and it is retarding in the fridge under olive oil as we speak. It smells good but I am really out of practice.  I forgot to add salt until it was almost too late, but I sprinkled in about 1-1.5 tsp of salt while kneading.

The oven that was in our new house was pretty much the cheapest exposed-element electric that they could find when they did the kitchen remodel pre-sale. We replaced it with a Frigidaire FPEF3081MF, from their 'professional' range. It's my first glass-topped unit, and my first convection oven (sadly, no steam). While I still can't find the (in a box somewhere) stuff I need for breadmaking, I used it last night to roast some potatoes and carrots and a pork tenderloin. 

I am now in love with convection. I wish I'd gotten some picture (camera -- in a box somewhere).  These were - by far - the best roasts I've ever produced. The potatoes were well-browned and slightly crunchy on the outside. The carrots were sweet and caramalized. The roast had a perfect crust.

I don't know how much use it will be for bread, but I'm in love with the feature so far...

I don’t know why I sometimes push myself to the extremes, but I can’t resist having excess ripe sourdough, without putting it to good use. I have adopted a lazy method of feeding my starters prior to my weekend baking, and building it to a leaven similar to the ones used in Hamelman’s Bread. No planning involved as to which bread I’ll bake, and I often end up with an excess leaven when I decide to change my recipe at the last moment.

As a result, I had a 2.48 times more Rye Sourdough than my recipe called for, and the final dough mass was 4.22 KG! Why did I fail to notice that I’m actually doubling the recipe? Again, the thought of an excess ripe Sourdough distracted me.

The recipe is a 17% Whole Rye flour, and 8% Whole wheat, taken from TFL member Hansjoakim. The recipe has become quite popular with my wife, and makes a very versatile bread.

Mixing is a nightmare here, as i had to manually mix the ingredients to a 75% hydration wet dough. My back didn't thank me for that :) However, once the dough rested for 1/2 hour autolyze, and subsequent stretch and fold regime, i was content to the fruits of my labor. I have never mixed or baked such amount of dough before, and the size did pose challenges, although i did eventually manage it.

I preheated the oven for 1.5 hours with two stones on two different racks, and loaded two loaves on each rack. During the oven spring, the loaves were cramped in space, and were seen edging beyond the stone surface towards the oven window. All was well, in the end.

I will not bake such dough quantity at once, nor would i recommend it to anyone.

The Ripe Sourdough:

1 Kg loaf, each:

Next day, three loaves were sliced and frozen, and the third was given away.

The flavor, crust, chewiness, all were consistent with what i'm used to. A very good daily bread that is good with almost everything.

Khalid

One of my very favorite snacks is a good old fashion peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I can't get enough of these things. Usually I use a whole grain sandwich bread, like a sprouted wheat loaf, as the base because I prefer a more hearty bread and the health benefits whole grain provides. But every now and then I get the urge to make a totally classic peanut butter and jelly, white bread and all. This was the inspiration behind my latest bake: Sourdough Pan de Mie.

The loaf I decided to make was based off the amazing txfarmer's formula found here. However, this formula calls for retarding the dough overnight and a 6 hour(!) proof time. I definitely did not want to wait that long for my pb&j so I added instant yeast to reduce the bulk to to around 1 hour and the proofing time to 2 1/2 hours. The retarding was skipped all together. This probably cut down on a fair amount of sourness but I was fine with this as I wanted very limited levels of sourness in this bread. I also used whole egg instead of egg whites.

I also altered the way this dough is mixed. Txfarmer did the mixing for her bread in a stand mixer and mixed to a high level of gluten development. I don't have access to a mixer at home so I had to figure out a different way to develop the gluten. I decided to use the method I describe in lesson one  on my site with a couple modifications. 1) I folded the dough multiple times after each five minutes rest until the dough resisted more folding and 2) Even after the initial three folds I continued to fold the dough every ten minutes until the end of bulk. This worked very well as I ended up with nice strength despite the dough being surprisingly wet.

The bread turned out exactly as I had hoped! It is quite moist and mild flavored. It is subtly sweet and slightly rich. It is also surprisingly strong for being so soft. A quality that comes in handy when spreading peanut butter on top. I will definitely be making this again the next time I crave white bread.

For the formula and process visit aBreaducation.

This was my third year to enter the county fair. I finally got somewhere with my baking. I'm not saying that I've got to where I want to be but I think I can at last say that I'm close to the end of the beginning. I haven't gotten that far with Photbucket this year.

I love the idea of a rustic "ploughman's lunch", so I thought I'd try to replicate the experience (or, at least, channel it) via a savoury bread.

I started with a beer-bread base inspired by Dan Lepard's stout loaf recipe, only using an ale rather than the stronger stout:

Adding some locally-produced garlic coil, some diced dill pickles and cubed strong locally-produced Gouda cheese, I came up with this formula for an 825 gram/29 ounce loaf:

I mixed the dough and savoury elements, let it autolyze for about 20 minutes, kneaded by hand until resonably smooth, then let it ferment at room temperature until doubled (about 2 hours).

I then shaped the dough into a boule, and let it proof in a banneton for 45 minutes while the oven was preheating to 510 degrees F/265 C.  The dough was flipped onto parchment, slashed, and put into the oven on the baking stone I keep there.  I sprayed water into the oven from time to time for the first 8 minutes, then lowered the oven temp to 400 F/205 C for 45 minutes.

I was pleased with the resulting crumb, considering it wasn't a levain dough.

The taste?  A nice beer bread, with spikes of meat, cheese and pickles (which baked up tasting and feeling a bit like olives).

A success?  Not as much as I'd hoped in this format.  To better re-create the ploughman's lunch experience, my next experiment will be to make rolls, based on a beer bread formula filled with meat, cheese and pickles (maybe even a bit of chutney - I worried about the flavour spreading all over the bread if I mixed it into the dough itself).

Ideas/feedback (good, bad or ugly) always welcome.

I'd been thinking that the sweet fragrance of basmati rice surely earns it some upward mobility out of its lowly caste, buried under the curry, and up into the brahmin bread basket.  A golden crumb seemed appropriate to its elevated status, so semolina was recruited.  I kept the durum to bog-standard Bob's Red Mill Fine Semolina, so as not to put the formula as out of reach as proper fine durum is (i.e., mailorder only).  Golden Temple Atta Durum would probably have been more appropriate (see below) and somewhat more accessible than the pukka mailorder product, but a soaker of BRM fine worked well.  I'm getting in the habit of adding 3% toasted wheat germ to mostly-whiteflour breads, following David Snyder's report on the SFBI miche.  So in that went.  Finally, developing the formula coincided with the recent spike in RYW chatter @TFL and the concomitant successional climax of my little mason jar crabapple/PinkLady/raisin/honey ecosystem, so RYW was fated to be the levain.  The results were surprisingly satisfying.

Formula

Process

1. Day before baking,

• In morning, feed RYW with equal weight of Rubaud flour mix (100% hydration: 30 g RYW + 30 g flour).  Incubate at 77˚F until evening, then make up levain and incubate that overnight (9h) at 77˚F.
• Bring 3 c unsalted water to boil.  Stir in 2 c white basmati rice (I used Lundberg Organic).  Return to boil and reduce flame to lowest setting.  Cover and cook for 20'.  White basmati rice weighs 142 g/c.  2 c dry came to 909 g cooked = 284 g rice + 625 g water; therefore each g of dry rice contributes ~2.2 g water when cooked.  This is more rice than needed.  Adjust accordingly if you don't want to have leftover rice.
• In evening: Mix semolina soaker and leave at 77˚F (or whatever room temp is) overnight.                                         

2. Baking day, reduce cooked rice to a grainless mush via food processor and/or Foley food mill (I used the latter -- worked well).  Weigh out 420 g of mush.

3. Combine levain and all final dough ingredients (bread flour was KA Organic) except salt into shaggy mass. Adjust hydration if necessary.  Autolyse 30 min.

4. Add salt and french fold 5' / rest 5'/ french fold 5'.  Transfer to fermentation vessel (I use plastic boxes).

5. Bulk ferment 2.25 h with stretch and folds (in box) at 30', 60' and 100'.

6. Bench rest 25'.

7. Shape into a miche or 2 boules/batards.  Proof in rice+wheat floured banneton(s) for 2 h at 77˚F.

8. Bake on preheated stone in 500˚F oven turned down to 450˚F at start, for 20' with steam.  Remove steam apparatus, reduce oven temperature to 440˚F, and bake for an additional 20' with convection.    

9. Turn off oven, open door slightly, leave loaf on stone for 10'.

10. Remove and cool on rack.  Internal loaf temperature 210˚F.  Wait until fully cooled (preferably 24h) to slice.

Baking definitely diminishes the basmati flavor and fragrance.  Whereas the air was intoxicatingly perfumed with every slap of the french folding, in the finished loaf its presence is more evenly balanced with the wheat flavors.  Perhaps those more learned in the arts of gluten-free baking have tricks that would allow increasing the rice percentage in the formula.  The crust is sweet and chewy.  The crumb is angelfood-cakey soft and creamy yellow-white, slightly sticky on the bread knife but far less so 24h out of the oven than when just cooled.  RYW left no SD tang whatsoever, as advertised.  Toasts up exquisitely, best with butter.  The better the butter the better.  Fairly irresistible, truth be told.  I'll definitely be baking this again.  Maybe next week :-)

One feature of RYW that I'd failed to grok from posts by akiko, dabrownman et al. is the explosive leavening power of these potions.  From pilot builds beforehand, I knew my little homebrew could double a 100% hydration Rubaud flour mix in 6 hrs at 77˚F.  But that didn't prepare me for its Usain Boltian performance in a dough.  This juice could raise the dead.  What's up with that?  Just different bugs?  High titers?  Epigenetic adaptation to anaerobic conditions?  My baking routine this summer has been to start a SD batch and, while its fermentation proceeds at its normal stately pace, I can mix, ferment and bake a CY'd preparation (lately Reinhart's 100% WW sandwich loaf).  But bloody hell.  The CY loaf could hardly play through this time with the RYW dough hollering Fore! from the banneton.  It was nip and tuck, with the WW getting a bit overproofed (bogie?) while the RYW loaf holed out.

Finally, this bake and its score honors the victims of the tragedy in Oak Creek, WI.

Voila.  Blogo ergo sum.

Happy baking y'all,

Tom

We, counting my fine apprentice,  have wanted for some time to make an olive bread that was loosely based on Nancy Silverman’s fine loaf that she did with Julia Child on Baking With The Masters.  But, since the girls at home despise olives except for olive oil, this want has gone unfulfilled for what seems like forever.

But, today the evil veil of olive hatred was lifted just enough, to allow an olive loaf to breathe a breath of yeasty CO2 without being killed outright by evil doers before the scald, add ins and olives could be incorporated.

We wanted a bread that had 20% whole grains and some rosemary that pairs so well with olives.  We also wanted some cracked bulgar berries that were scalded.  No sprouts this time - using them to make white diastatic malt instead.  The bread would possibly have been better with sprouts and seeds or nuts – maybe next time.

A mixture of 95% kalamata and 5% green martini olives were used.  The salt was kept down a bit since the olive brought plenty of their own.  The total hydration was around 70% which is a little low for us but the scald and olives brought some extra liquid that was un accounted for in the formula.  The dough felt like it was around 72% hydration but it is harder to tell with all the olives.

The diamond scoring pattern was helped along by refrigerating the large 3.7 pound batard for 3 hours after it had final proofed to 95% or so.  We wanted a huge loaf since no one could  know when we would be allowed to make another one - with olives in it.

There was no way this was going to fit in the mini oven.  With it only being 106 F today, a full 10 degrees less than last few days, we felt it was a real cold spell that we should take advantage of - so Betsy was fired up to 500 F with steamers and stone in place.  The batard baked up deeply brown and very crispy in the Big GE oven using (2) of Sylvia’s steam pans with towels.

The crust was thick and the extra drying with the oven door ajar kept the crust crispy even after it cooled.  The crumb was light, moist, a little glossy and fairly open with all the bran, whole grains and add ins.   Best of all this bread tastes wonderful.  It was just what we were looking for - with the exception of the sprouts, 50 g more olives and some pistachio nuts that we will add next time to gild the lily and turn this into just the kind of bread my apprentice drools over.  It is super just as it is though.

Method

The YW and multi-grain SD starters were built separately over (2) 3 hour builds and then combined.  The water, flour and salt were autolysed for 2 hours,.  All the rest of the ingredients were then added except the bulgar scald and chopped olives.

The dough was kneaded for 4 minutes and then placed into an oiled bowl to rest.  (4) sets of S & F’s, 15 minutes apart, were done on and oiled counter with the scald and olives incorporated in the 3rd set.  They were well incorporated by the 4th set.  The dough was allowed to ferment and develop on the counter for 90 minutes. 

It was then pre-shaped into a large batard, rested for 10 minutes, final shaped and placed into a rice floured and cloth lined basket, placed in a tall kitchen plastic trash bag to proof.  It was immediately refrigerated for 14 hours. 

The dough increased in volume 57.3 % in the fridge overnight.  It was allowed to come to room temperature and proof an additional 2 hours total getting to the 92.6% proof mark before refrigerating again for 3 hours.  This extra retardation would not normally be required but the intracacies of life come first.  Not really but it sounds so right and good.

The oven was preheated to 500 F with steam for 45 minutes before the dough was removed from the fridge, un-molded from the basket onto parchment and a peel, slashed and placed on the stone for baking.  The oven was immediately turned down to 450 F and steamed for 15 minutes.   The steam was removed and the temperature turned down to 425 F convection this time.  The batard was rotated 180 degrees every 5 minutes for another 30 minutes until it tested 205 F in the center.

The oven was turned off and the bread was allowed to crisp on the stone with the oven door ajar for 12 minutes before being removed to a cooling rack.  The batard rose to 209 F while crisping on the stone.

The formula follows the pix's

On a flying visit to Dorset my family and I stopped off in Sturminster Newton to take a tour around the water mill. Wonderful! A very informative and interesting tour provided by delightfully friendly staff reminded us of times gone by. Fully automated machinery that is surprisingly old for the ingenuity. I highly recommend this tour.

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

At the end we were given some flour milled from locally grown wheat. Thank you Tony.
 

A few days later I set about making a loaf with this newly acquired flour

I can’t provide a comprehensive recipe as technically this wasn't without issue and I had to make a few on the fly adjustments to my devised recipe.

To begin I sifted the flour using my drum sieve to remove the majority of the bran because I don’t really like dense breads.

I fermented 80% of the flour as a Biga pre-ferment. However after around 16 hours the dough had deteriorated a little, but still, more than I would like. This flour really can’t handle much fermentation.

On putting the final dough together, after even a gentle mix the dough became overly slack and so I added a little extra white flour and some stock firm sourdough to compensate.

The final dough was a little on the weak side but it still managed to almost triple in size before baking. Oven spring was fairly good too.

Fully fermented Biga, Remaining sifted flour, total removed bran and my sieve.
 

The finished loaf with some of the sieved bran sprinkled on top.

 

Crumb