SusanMcKennaGrant's blog

These past two years I haven't baked much sourdough bread. Since I left Petraia I've been working with a pretty poor oven. But recently a friend inspired me to try baking with a cast-iron combo-cooker. After testing the technique the first thing I did was to pay a visit to the Mulino Marino in Italy's Piedmont region where I have been sourcing flour for over 20 years.  I picked up a supply from their wonderful stone ground range including farro, enkir, macina di grano, burrata, and rye.

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.

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.

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!