Does anyone know where I can either purchase or view a video of shaping of french bread dough?? I started making french bread about a week ago, and while it tastes ok, the crumb is not as it should be, and there is usually a large slit through the inside where I have tried to shape it. Any help would be appreciated. I am using the recipe from Peter Reinharts Bread Baking Apprentice book.
I'm making a cranberry walnut bread for Thanksgiving, and won't have time to do the whole process tomorrow. The dough contains eggs and butter - can I still proof and shape it tonight, refrigerate it and bake it tomorrow?
I've done this with straight doughs before, but never an enriched dough.
Thanks!
-Joe
A well-written, funny and, sometimes, brutal article in New York Magazine in which Cornel Professor and French bread expert extraordinaire judges NYC baguettes.
A snippet:
You don’t invite Steven L. Kaplan, Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell University and the world’s preeminent French-bread scholar, to a blind tasting and not expect the crumbs to fly—which they did, all over the wall-to-wall carpeting. “Jesus!” exclaimed the professor, having barely crossed the threshold. “Some of these breads are ugly.” It is that brazen frankness, that instinctively critical faculty, that has improbably won this Brooklyn-born bon vivant legions of fans in France, where he lives part of the year, and where the government, in its chastened gratitude for his missionary baguette zeal, has twice dubbed him Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. To test his mettle—and our town’s best baguette efforts—we assembled a baker’s dozen, all of approximate freshness, and subjected them to Kaplan’s rigorous system of evaluation.
Here's a good link for those who are interested in creating crumbs with large holes
Click on Bread scans and scroll to the bottom to see how bread cross-sections look with different hydration levels.
A great bakery in Burbank, California (Los Angeles) is Porto's.
Porto's has been a staple in the city of Glendale for decades but parking there is a nightmare while the newly opened store in Burbank has plenty all the time. I love their sourdough bread loaf (crusty, nutty subtones) while my wife likes their cuban bread, however pretty much anything in the store is great, from breads to cakes and sweets.
Their website is located here: http://www.portosbakery.com/
Here's a fun article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the massive Internet buzz around the NYT no-knead bread technique.
Here's the top of the article:
Lonelygirl15, have we got a link for you.
The latest sensation burning up bandwidth throughout the wired universe is not an actress with a webcam, an incautious politician caught on video or a raunchy cartoon, but a recipe for bread.
Last week, New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman published the recipe, "No-Knead Bread," which he adapted from Manhattan baker Jim Leahy. This unusual recipe, which Bittman deemed "revolutionary," confounded many notions of baking.
Interesting piece on Apollonia Poilane, daughter of the Poilane who founded and ran the hyper-famous eponymously named Poilane bakery in Paris. Her parents died a few years ago in a helicopter accident. She's now at Harvard and heir to the family business.
Hi. Just want to introduce myself. I'm Warren and I've been trying to learn how to bake bread for about 30 years. My efforts got a good push about two years ago when my son paid my way to one of the King Arthur professional classes. I enjoyed that so much, I attended the 2nd class as well where I met James MacGuire and learned about no-knead baking. This isn't like the threads that have been passing around, but involves folding the dough every 20 minutes for an hour, and then letting the dough rest for 2.5 hours. They you're off and running. I credit James, and not myself, but there is not a bakery my side of Philadelphia that has better baguettes. The system just works so well. Since then, I've experimented with some more recipes using the "no-knead" method, and all turn out great :)
The New York Times had a great article by Mark Bittman on making bread
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/08mini.html
Ideas:
1. Use a very hydrated dough
2. Use only a small amount of yeast, 1/4 teaspoon
3. No kneading
4. Rise at cool room temperature for 18 hours and fold a few times at the end
5. Proof for a few hours
