Recent Blog Entries

As I begin to work my way through Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf, there is a bread pictured on the inside cover that got me wondering. It looks like a boule with an appendage twisted with pointed tips and makes me think of a handle to hold while carrying or cutting. Dan didn't identify the bread by name and I haven't seen anything like it before so until I hear otherwise from Dan or someone who knows the real name, I'm calling it Medieval Bread. I used the first recipe for White Leaven Bread as the mix and tried to shape the dough as pictured.Waiting until after proofing to shape the twist was a mistake I suspect. If you have the book, you will be amused at my rookie attempt to replicate the image.

I have made Dan's Black Pepper Rye and the White Thyme bread which were delicious but I think I should progress in an order that will let me understand Lepards thinking. After looking at nearly every bread in the book, I see the ratios of leaven and timing are different than I have been accustomed to using. There are also a few specialized techniques that I haven't used and ingredients while common at home are unfamiliar to me in baking. Pickle Juice would be a good example. It would be easy for me to get distracted by the many wonderful new recipes and ignore the common sourdough white loaf. As I discovered, that would be a mistake.

I made the White Leaven bread by the book except I substituted 30 grams of sifted rye into the 500g white bread flour. Dan suggests using fresh yeast and as soon as I find a local source for 1 pound bricks I intend to make the change from Instant Dry (IDY). Most of the brick fresh yeast sold in the US is made just a few miles from here so it's just a matter of finding a distributor.

The method of developing the gluten in all of the recipes in this book are most easily done with your hands or a plastic scraper. Dan is insistent on minimal kneading, waiting 10 minutes and again just a few seconds of kneading and wait 10 minutes. After a few cycles of this you begin to see the dough come together well and become smooth and silky. Following the initial development comes a schedule of stretch and fold, waiting between folding sessions. All very gentle and effortless steps. The result is a perfectly incorporated and developed dough with just the right amount of aeration.

Remembering that these same four ingredients can be mixed and handled in many ways to arrive at vastly different ends, I am very pleased to have followed the procedure exactly. The bread is wonderful. For me a perfect outcome is a bread that looks wonderful and has a full flavor with a long lasting after taste. The crust has been baked to a dark brown and has a deeper caramelized flavor that contrasts the crumb. When I manage to bake a bread that has this contrast and tastes this good, I'm really pleased.

I know there are many bread books out there to choose from. Many are very similar and will produce great breads. If you are serious about making breads that are not merely great but outstanding, "The Handmade Loaf" or the US version "The Art of Handmade Bread"  is available from our link for $12. At this point it's the best value in my library and I'm delighted with the best breads I have made. Lepard has traveled Europe and befriended some of the old time bakers in far off the beaten path corners of the world. Developing these recipes for modern use is a gift to those of us who strive to bake these old style hearty breads.

No snickering at my attempt to make the twisted boule now!

Eric   

 P.R. new book 'artisan breads every day' just arrived and I have 3 lbs. of wild rice and plenty of organic dried onions.  So what better reason to bake this bread.  I added a little extra hydration for the dried onions and changed only one ingredient ..the salt I used is Italian sea salt and summer truffle.  The aroma from this bread was intoxicating as was the flavor.  I over proofed the batards but they baked up without deflating.  I froze some extra wild rice so it will be ready for my next batch of maybe some rolls, they would be delicious with Thanksgiving dinner!  The recipe was very easy to make and I retarded the bulk dough for a little more than 24hrs. though it will keep longer.  Recipes like these that are bulk retarded make my wood fired oven baking so much easier.  Timing bread and oven to ready at the same becomes so much easier.  These batards were not baked in the wfo. 

Sylvia

I've never been a big fan of bagels, which is part of why I skipped this recipe at first, but I know a lot of people who like them so I finally decided the time was right. First step of the recipe is easy, making a sponge, just water, flour and yeast left to expand for a few hours.

Once the sponge is ready, time to (attempt) to mix in the rest of the flour, the yeast, and malt powder. I say try, because bagel dough is really low hydration so I ended up needing to add a fair portion of the flour during the kneading. There was just no point in adding more to the dough while it was still in the bowl. And boy did it require a lot of kneading...

Once kneaded I let the dough rest for a bit and started dividing it into roughly equal balls. Followed by a bit more resting, and shaping into bagels (I used the thumb punch shaping method shown in the book, it worked really well). Then the shaped bagels took a trip to the fridge for retardation overnight.

I wasn't really sure of the taste in bagels of the people I was making these for, so I stuck with plain, poppy seed, sesame seed and cinnamon raisin (trying to make 1/4 of the dough cinnamon raisin after the dough is already mixed is VERY tricky, I do not recommend it, but it was the only way I could see to easily divide it so). The boiling process before topping the bagels was easy, a little bit of baking soda and malt powder added to the water (they really make it foam up!) and away they went. I didn't notice I had no cornmeal or semolina left before I started, and the semolina flour worked less than perfectly when placing the boiled bagels back on the sheet pan, which definitely reminded me to pick up cornmeal the next time I was at the store.

I followed the suggestion in the book to top the cinnamon raisin bagels with brushed on butter and a cinnamon sugar topping, looked delicious! As did the rest of the bagels. Note, I say looked, I made this first batch to take in to people at school and since I only made the single batch of 12 I didn't actually get to try any(I did the next time I made them though)! One thing I was surprised by during the baking process was the blast of steam/water vapor when you open the oven to turn them around, I'm not sure if it is because of all the water in the crust from the boiling or the baking soda... But when I opened the oven to turn them around it felt like some sort of chemical weapon assault! Never experienced that when baking bread before.

Another post submitted to YeastSpotting , having that available to submit posts to really keeps me inspired to bake, and I love seeing what other people have made each week, thanks so much Susan! Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge

Recently there have been some postings about wine bread with some interesting colours coming from the inclusion of red wine. And who could forget Shiao-Pings Praline Almond bread. 

Well i decided to have a go with the inclusion of Beetroot on 2 counts first it makes an excellent  BEETROOT & CHOCOLATE pudding which is a lovely and moist. The 2nd being the vivid colour.

The duty chef was keen to give the idea a run so we produced dinner rolls for the evening restaurant crowd

The dinner rolls are pictured above and show a vivid outside colour but the inside was an orange tint which interested me some what.

I decided to make a Beetroot sour dough, i have been maintaining a sour dough culture here at the college for over 6 months now so it was a good reason to try it at home as i had beetroots left over.

The total flour was 500g, 400 being white and 100 wholemeal (ran out of white)

over night ferment featured 250g of the flour  100g of grated beetroot and and all the water 250ml and 50g of the sour dough starter , i kept this low as i wanted it to take the night to ferment.

I started it at 5.00pm see the pretty mix in the bowl, 12 hours later 5.00am i made up my dough adding the other 250g flour and 10g salt and 50g of oil and made a dough on the bench by hand.

The dough came to work and bulk fermented till about 9.30am  when i added 100g of pistacchios and divided and handed up into 2 boules .

1 of my colleagues took a pic with his mobile phone (hence poor quality) but what a lovelly colour!

After a further 3 hours i turned the boules  out onto a sheet and baked in the deck oven. The crust colour had changed somewhat  and lo an behold when i cut into the loaf, some one had pinched the colour or changed it just like a CHAMELEON.

My taste team all had some with only one person describing the sour as too much for their liking but i already knew that would be their viewpoint. but for me superb taste.

I would have like to have tried some as toast but alas with a large taste team it didn't see the next day. i wll be trying a larger batch soon.