November 7, 2010 - 2:25pm
Bernard Clayton's Feather Bread
Hello!
I made these this afternoon using the autolyse techinique for the first time, and it made a huge difference!
My shaping may need some work, but they taste and smell wonderful!!
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Hello!
I made these this afternoon using the autolyse techinique for the first time, and it made a huge difference!
My shaping may need some work, but they taste and smell wonderful!!
Those look fantastic! Feather bread is Italian, right? It looks nice and soft with a thin crunchy crust. Perfect! Shaping is overrated. The most important things are taste and texture. Bravo!
Mary
The crust wasn't crunchy, it was soft. It calls for an egg white/water wash before baking, and no steam. As you said, it appears to be more of an Italian Bread than a French Bread.
I also found it to be a bit too salty (1tbs of salt in recipe), next time I'll be using 2 tsp.
Overall it was a good addition to dinner. :)
I made Beard's version of this today using SylviaH towel steaming, crust was lightly crunchy, try a little hotter oven if you want more crunch. (I only misted with water, no egg white, but that shouldn't hurt.) Beard does call it an Italian bread, but I'm not sure that really means much.
See blog post for details and recipe. Link here.
wayne
Your bread looks scrumptious, crumb is a bit dense and you definitly need to shape them better but the colour and look is making my mouth water. The bumps on the bread seem to be from rough handling and they have spread maybe from overproofing but still i think yours looks better than waynes(sorry wayne) because they got a lot of character and look so rustic. Mmmmmmmmm I 'm gona go have some bread with cheese now youv'e made me hungry.
The weird shaping is due to my not remembering the length of my sheet, so when they puffed up I had to curve them a bit to stay on it.
My bread is always bumpy, no matter which recipe I use. Bernard says to be rough, but maybe I'm too rough.I find that bubbles emerge during the last proofing that make it look ragged.
At least I can eat my mistakes. :)