The Foppish Baker

Neapolitan Bread

2006-05-18T02:38:00.000-07:00

This has nothing to do with Naples; it's a bread version of the ice cream (which I think is a weird take on spumoni?). It's also evidence I am a genius, with a little help from Cam and my sister. This bread is fantastic.

Cam came up with the idea of a neapolitan bread and mentioned it in the comments of my blueberry fougasse post. We then kicked the idea around, figuring out the details of how to best make it, and this afternoon I finally went ahead and baked some off.

(Also, to protect my foodie street cred, I must point out that that isn't my Prego tomato sauce in the background.)

I used the Japanese sweet bread recipe for basic proportions of ingredients, but adjusted them so I wouldn't have to deal with 5/8ths of a cup of anything. I made the dough all together, then split it into three pieces, added flavours, and followed my sister's suggestion of doing a braid for the shaping. I had been thinking of either a swirl or doing three lumps side-by-side in a loaf pan so it would look like the ice cream.

Isn't that pretty? I'm so pleased with it. It's also delicious (especially the vanilla parts). The strawberry isn't as flavourful as it could be, but I'm beginning to suspect that's what happens with fruit breads. Freeze-dried strawberries ground to a powder might work well though. Here is the recipe I used. Be warned, it makes a giant loaf.

Neapolitan Bread

Recipe by the Foppish Baker

4 teaspoons yeast

1 2/3 cups warm water

5 cups bread flour

3/4 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

4 teaspoons milk

2 eggs

5 tablespoons butter, softened

For the vanilla dough

Seeds scraped from two vanilla beans

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon flour

For the chocolate dough

1 1/2 tablespoons cocoa powder

1 tablespoon water

For the strawberry dough

1 cup frozen strawberries, defrosted

1 cup flour

Egg wash

One egg, beaten

One tablespoon water

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and let sit 5-10 minutes. Stir in two cups of the flour, then add the sugar and salt. Add two more cups of flour, then add the milk and eggs. Knead in the final cup of flour and the butter. You may need to add a bit more flour to make a dough that is manageable, but slightly sticky.

Divide the dough into three sections: two that are about 2/5ths the total, and one that is about 1/5th.

For the vanilla: Stir the vanilla beans, vanilla extract, and flour together into a paste then knead this into one of the larger portions of dough. It takes a long time to work it through evenly. Add more flour if needed to make a smooth and tacky, but not sticky, dough.

For the chocolate: Form a paste of the cocoa and water, then knead this into the other large portion of dough. This also takes a while. Add more water or flour if necessary.

For the strawberry: Defrost one cup of frozen strawberries. Pour them and their liquid into a large bowl and use your hands to squish them into a sort of lazy man's puree. This leads to there being some strawberry chunks in the dough, like all the best strawberry ice creams have. Plus it saves washing the food processor. Cut the smaller portion of the original dough into six pieces and mix them and one cup of flour into the strawberries. Add more flour and knead to form a dough of the same consistency as the other two.

Let all three doughs rise in separate, oiled bowls covered with plastic wrap for about two hours, or until about one and a half times their original size.

Degas the dough and roll out into ropes. Braid these together on a baking pan lined with parchment paper. Let rise for 45 minutes, or until it has increased about one and a half times.

Brush with egg wash.

Preheat the oven to 400*F and bake for 20 minutes, or until dark brown. Lower the temperature to 350*F and bake an additional 30 minutes, until it sounds hollow, rotating halfway through for even baking.

Let cool on a rack, slice, enjoy.

New Books on Bread

2006-05-18T01:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't been baking much, but I have been reading. A friend recently went to Paris for a wedding, and I sent her with a short list of books to pick up. Among those related to baking was 100 % pain : La saga du pain enveloppée de 40 recettes croustillantes by Eric Kayser. I found it on amazon.fr because I wanted a French baking book, but looking through it, it is more amazing than I had hoped. I've just skimmed the beginning so far, but it has what looks to be a fairly thorough description of the history of bread and its cultural significance. I was just eager to get to the recipes.

All the breads seem to be based off the same levain liquide, which is just a half flour/half water sourdough starter. A lot of them call for additional yeast to be added, so they're just using this like a poolish to get flavorful breads you can bake in a day, as long as you have the levain liquide ready. It seems like baking from this book will be a very pleasant respite from multiple overnight refrigerations.

I'm most excited about the recipes, however. It contains 60 recipes, with some fairly standard breads like baguettes, brioche, and Viennese bread, but some very interesting ideas as well, like seaweed bread, pumpkin curry bread, and fig & fennel bread. Some of these ideas are very much up my alley. I think getting the hang of his levain liquide method will also be helpful in getting away from recipes for a basic bread.

The other bread related books I had my friend pick up are the French translation of a manga called Yakitate! Ja-pan. It's about a boy who wants to become a baker and create "Ja-pan", a bread that Japanese people will prefer to rice. It's hilarious and interesting and also useful for learning more about baking bread creatively. I wanted to read the manga in French because I know more baking terms in that language than in Japanese, but I've also got a few episodes of the anime a Japanese friend taped for me, so I'm picking up the vocabulary slowly. If only the translation company I work for would release this manga in the U.S. I'd love to translate it.

I've got some bread ready to go in the oven now, but I think it's lost unless I get some amazing oven spring. It is very dense, but it's hardly risen at all.

Ugly Breakfast Rolls

2006-05-17T00:58:00.000-07:00

These are something I've been wanting to make since I started my current job in January. I have to get up at a ridiculously early hour, even before my stomach is awake enough to know it wants food. One of the few things I have an appetite for at that time is freshly baked bread. Unfortunately, even when I have good bread to eat, I'll still be hungry well before it is time for my 'lunch', which happens to be about the same time I'd be eating breakfast, normally. So I thought it'd be a good idea to make bread that was full of whole grains, nuts, seeds, and dried fruit, as an attempt at a somewhat nutritious breakfast.

When Lee gave me the recipe for the chocolate cherry stout bread, I also copied a recipe from the same healthy magazine for a sunflower seed bread that looked good. I used that as a base to make these rolls, but I took out some ingredients (dried blueberries, cornmeal), added some (walnuts, dried dates, dried apricots, etc) and made some changes due to my complete inability to read my own handwriting.

The dough was too thick and heavy to rise much at all, and the yeast hadn't seemed very active when I dissolved it in warm water in the very beginning, so I did not expect these to turn out at all. I baked them anyway, but didn't slash the top or coat them in seeds, like I'd planned. They cracked around the bottom from the oven spring and generally look like rocks. I thought that putting them in a picture by some ugly bananas that had been slated to be made into banana bread would make them more attractive by comparison. They taste pretty good, though they're a bit sweet for my taste. They stayed fresh for a long time in a plastic bag and provided many a good breakfast.

Next time I try to do a breakfast roll like this, I'm going to experiment with adding some powdered soy protein, more seeds and nuts, and less honey and molasses. I think I will also try to update this blog with my recipe before I've completely forgotten what it was I put in.

Ugly Breakfast Rolls
1 package instant dry yeast
1 cup warm water

2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup molasses
2 tablespoons oil
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup wheat germ
1/4 cup wheat bran
1/4 cup oats
1 1/2 cups bread flour

2 tablespoons sesame seeds
1/3 cup raw sunflower seeds
1/3 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup chopped dried dates
1/4 cup chopped dried apricots

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and let sit five minutes.

Measure the wheat flour into a bowl and add the honey, molasses, salt and yeast water to it. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for one hour to make a sponge.

Add the wheat germ, wheat bran, and oats. Add one cup of bread flour and stir until the dough comes together.

Turn dough onto a floured surface, knead in the remaining flour to make a tacky dough, then gradually knead in the rest of the ingredients.

Let rise one hour in a large, oiled bowl in a warm spot, until doubled. (Or until it hasn't changed a bit...)

Divide into roll-sized portions, form rolls and let rise an additional 45 minutes. Preheat oven to 375*F, slash rolls (or don't...) and bake 35-40 minutes.

Pumpkin Muffins with Cinnamon Frosting

2006-05-16T02:54:00.000-07:00

I hadn't planned on putting these on the blog when I made them. I usually don't bother writing about muffins or cakes because I don't find them all that interesting, and anyone can make them fairly well. There's just not a lot to share about the process. You will also never see cookies on this blog, but that's because I bake terrible (well, on the low side of average) cookies. Even following the same recipe, my mom's or sister's will turn out better than mine.

But I made an exception for these muffins because we happened to be eating some when my sister told me she'd given my blog address to some of her co-workers who had eaten some of my leftover bread once. She said they'd asked if there was anything easy on the blog. I said I didn't put easy things up because they're boring, but my mom flattered me into doing it by telling me the taste and texture of the muffins were 'phenomenal'.

To keep up the level of pretension I've come to expect from my blog, I left my highly sophisticated and fancy magazine in the photo. I think I should try taking pictures in the late afternoon more often, because I really like the lighting on this. And now, without further ado, the recipe...

Pumpkin Muffins with Cinnamon Frosting

Muffin batter

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

2/3 cup butter, softened

1 can pumpkin (I believe it's 12oz, and equal to 1 1/2 cups pumpkin puree.)

4oz sour cream (One half the smaller containers -- the other half goes in the frosting.)

2 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 tablespoon nutmeg

1/2 tablespoon ground cloves

A 2 inch piece of ginger, grated

1/2 cup milk

3 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/2 tablespoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

Measure out the brown sugar in a large bowl. Stir in the softened or melted butter. (A less lazy person might cream the two together, but I don't find it makes a huge difference, and like to save on dishes later by using one spoon for the whole thing.) Add the can of pumpkin and half container of sour cream. Add the eggs, vanilla extract and spices.

In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Gradually add this to the other ingredients. Add milk as needed. The batter will be quite a bit stiffer than most muffin batters, but it turns out really dense and moist. I think I ended up using about 1/3 cup of milk in mine. More milk should give you lighter, fluffier muffins that rise more, and less milk will give you dense and flavourful muffins.

Line muffin tins and fill nearly to the top. Bake in a 350*F oven for 37 minutes.

Frosting

3 oz cream cheese, softened (I used a little package of cream cheese my mom says is 3 oz, but it looks about the size of half a normal package, which is 8 oz. But it's just frosting so it really doesn't matter how much you use.)

4 oz sour cream

1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup powdered sugar

1 tablespoon cinnamon

Put the ingredients in a small bowl and mix with an electric mixer. Adjust cinnamon and sugar to taste. Adjust the vanilla extract for the consistency. I honestly don't remember how much of any of these things I put in...

Pain Aux Pommes

2006-05-08T02:59:00.000-07:00

Two weeks in the making, this is the bread I mentioned in my post about the blueberry fougasse that is made on a starter of fermented apples. It was the first time I had ever fermented anything (on purpose) and I was excited about that (though the actual process mostly involves a lot of waiting) and I like the idea of starting bread on fermented fruit. I'd never heard of that, and it is definitely an idea that merits more attention and experimentation. Just think of everything that's been fermented to wonderful effect, and how many breads that could mean!

The bread also has a very nice texture and flavor. It uses a ratio of 1 part rye flour to 3 parts white flour, which gives the bread a more rustic taste that goes better with the apples than an all white flour bread would.

Making it was fairly straightforward, with only a few problems, all of which I was able to correct. They just seemed worse than usual because it would take more than a week to start over, if I ruined it. There was also very little explanation in the recipe of what the apples and dough should look or smell like at various stages. I also ended up adding some sourdough starter at the second refresh because I was worried it hadn't risen enough. This probably changes the flavor of the bread, but I had been stupid earlier and had to correct it. See, the recipe calls for organic, unbleached flour to be added to the fermented apple paste to make the starter. I was out of flour and all I had was bleached all-purpose thanks to someone's picking up the wrong thing at the grocery store. Bleached APF is very bad for sourdough, to say the least.

But everything worked out anyway, without more problems until I was baking. The recipe makes four (one pound?) loaves, which I shaped into one large and two small bâtards. I thought the sheets I'd put them on would fit on a rack in the oven side-by-side, but they didn't and I had to overlap them a bit. This probably did very bad things to the airflow and the bread burnt on top. It only cooked about half as long as the recipe said, but it was cooked through and delicious, if one overlooked the slightly blackened parts on the bottom and top. Pictured is the larger loaf that didn't burn much and one of the smaller ones ripped open to show the apples inside.

Pain Aux Pommes

Paraphrased from The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz
(This book is full of interesting recipes, but a photo of this one caught my eye and I was fascinated by the idea.)

The Levain de pomme

1 medium-sized apple peeled and cut into pieces (I think I used a Cortland or Fuji.)
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons water

Combine the ingredients and let them sit in a warm place for 8-10 days. When the mixture has become highly alcoholic and carbonic gas starts to develop, it is ready to use. (I kept mine in a Tupperware. After about three days, the lid would frequently swell up from CO2, so I'd let it out. It smelled very alcoholic after about 5 days, but I left it for 8.)
If any mold or fungus has developed on the apple mixture, carefully remove it. This should leave at least three-quarters of the mixture (1/2 cup). (I had no problems with this. One apple chunk turned slightly brown and I took it out, but the rest were fine.)

The first refreshment

1 teaspoon malt extract or 2 teaspoons honey (I used honey.)
1/3 to 1/2 cup warm water
1/2 cup apple starter from the previous step
2 cups organic, unbleached white flour (Seriously! Accept no substitutes)

For the first refreshment: Dissolve the malt extract or honey in the water. Mash the pieces of apple to a paste (I tossed everything in a food processor to do this, since a fork wasn't working.) and add the paste to the honey mixture. Add flour gradually while mixing with a wooden spoon. When the dough comes together, empty it onto the worktable and knead in the rest of the flour. Continue kneading into a firm dough for between 8 and 10 minutes. Place in a bowl covered with a damp dishtowel in a very warm place for between 8 and 10 hours. If it looks spotchy and spooky, throw it out and start over. If it looks round and well-risen, it is ready to be refreshed. (I put mine in a slightly warm oven for 8 hours, and it came out somewhere between 'splotchy and spooky' and 'well-risen'. I didn't particularly want to start over, so I added some sourdough starter.)

The second refreshment

1 teaspoon malt extract or 1 teaspoon honey
Approximately 1/3 cup water
All of the levain from the previous step
1 cup organic, unbleached white flour

For the second refreshment: Dissolve the honey in the water. Break up the levain in a bowl and pour the honey-water over it. Start adding flour gradually while mixing. (Here, I added maybe half a cup of starter and enough good flour (which I'd purchased by then) to make the consistency I expected they wanted.) Mix into a firm dough that is not too dry. Let this refreshed levain fermente between three and five hours in a bowl covered with a damp cloth. It should double in size. (Yep, the sourdough saved it...)

The dough

1 pound tart Granny Smith or Gravenstein apples (4 cups cubed) (I think it was 3 apples?)
3-4 tablespoons butter for sauteeing the apples
1 package active dry yeast (I cut this down to one teaspoon, because of my addition of sourdough starter)
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 teaspoon malt extract or honey
3 cups organic, unbleached white flour
1 cup organic rye flour
1 tablespoon salt
All of the levain de pomme from the previous step

Glaze: 1 egg white beaten with 1/2 cup cold water. (I skipped this. I am becoming less and less a fan of glazes and washes.)

To make the dough: Begin by preparing the apples. Peel, core, and cut them into 1/2 inch pieces. Saute them in the butter for a few minutes until they have softened. Set aside.

Proof the yeast in a little warm water and, when it is creamy, add it and the honey to the rest of the water in a large bowl. Cut the levain into pieces and add it to the liquid. Combine the salt and the two flours, then start adding the dry mixture to the liquid by handfuls, while mixing with a spoon. After you have added several handfuls of flour, you will need to stir the spongy mixture vigorously to dissolve the levain and make sure it is incorporated. Continue adding flour until the dough has come together. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead in the sauteed apples and remaining flour. Knead the dough to a firm consistency with the rest of the flour. (This is a difficult task. My dough remained a bit on the sticky side when I decided it was 'done'.)

Set the dough aside, covered and in a warm place to rise for 1 1/4 hours, until doubled in size.

Cut the dough into 4 pieces and form each into a bâtard or a boule. Place the loaves on a parchment-lined baking sheet and let rise an additional 45 minutes to one hour.

Glaze the loaves (if desired) and slash with a blade.

Bake in an oven preheated to 425* or 450*F, either on the baking sheets or on a baking stone, for between 35 and 40 minutes. For the last 15 minutes of baking, reduce the temperature to between 375* and 400*F.

Note to the advanced baker: You may wish to reduce the amount of yeast to one teaspoon and extend the rising times to give more of a sourdough effect. You can also save a cup of the final dough and let that rise 8 hours if you wish to make the bread again the next day. Take that piece of dough from the 'second refreshment' step to make another batch.

Stout Chocolate Cherry Bread

2006-05-06T03:58:00.000-07:00

Lee mentioned this recipe in a comment on an earlier post, and I got it from her when we made banh mi together last week. The sandwiches were delicious, thanks to a hot dipping sauce we made (I forget the book the recipe was in, but hopefully Lee will post something on this?) and a huge variety of real Vietnamese pork products! Unfortunately, the bread didn't turn out, and I learned that glutenous rice flour is not what you want to use to make them. (At least, I assume that's why they failed.) That's the third time I've tried that recipe, and it's been nothing but trouble. Next time, I'm mixing rice flour and white flour together in advance and using that mixture in a more reliable baguette recipe.

But on to the current project, which I actually baked on Monday. (I've just been busy with work and sleeping and my latest internet addiction, LibraryThing, where you can catalogue all your books online. I discovered I have three more cookbooks than I thought, and also have something like five copies of Treasure Island.) I was excited to try this stout bread, first because most of the beer breads I've had in the past have been cakier - more like quickbreads - and because this called for the stout to be used in making a sponge that is refrigerated overnight, which I think accounts for the incredibly delcious stout flavour in this.

I used my last bottle of New Glarus Brewing Company's limited edition Cherry Stout to make the bread. It was well worth it. It's a great beer to drink and it makes a fine bread, with both the cherry and stout flavours clearly present. I also used cherries from Door County, Wisconsin, so if only we produced chocolate (or flour), it could have been a very local bread. For the chocolate, I chopped up a bar of Lindt 85% (my eating chocolate of choice) because the bittersweet chocolate I bought contained milk, and my sister wanted to eat the bread too. The chocolate was overpowering, even though I used half the amount the recipe called for. Bittersweet is definitely a better idea. I tried my 'g' slash on the loaf again, but it was not as successful as my first, so it's not featured in the photo.

I was surprised this recipe came from a healthy cooking magazine (I forget which... Lee?) because stout, chocolate, and dried cherries do not a healthy diet make. But there's not much sugar in the bread, and no fat, and I think I remember the recipe's calorie count being in the neighbourhood of 150 calories a slice. More importantly, it is delicious. If I made it again, I would probably bake it at a higher temperature and do the whole hearth baking thing for a nice, thick crust. Following the recipe makes you the thin, soft crust Americans prefer. I might also like to try this with Wisconsin Belgian Red in place of the stout, leave out the chocolate, and just do cherries. Of course, the beer and ingredient possibilities are endless...

Stout Chocolate Cherry Bread

4 1/2 cups bread flour
1 12oz bottle stout
1 package dry yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup dried cherries
4 oz bitterswet chocolate (I used half this amount)

spray oil
1 teaspoon water
1 egg white
1 teaspoon pearl sugar

Stir two cups of the flour, the stout, and yeast in a bowl, cover and refrigerate overnight.

Remove from the refrigerator and let stand at room temperature for one hour.

Add the sugar, salt, and as much of the remaining flour as is needed to make a firm dough. (Lee's notes had it needing much less flour than the recipe called for; I used it all.) Knead until smooth and elastic. Add more flour or water, if needed to correct the dough, then knead in the cherries and chocolate.

Put the dough in an oiled bowl, cover, and let rise for one hour in a warm spot.

Degas the dough and let it rest five minutes. Shape into a boule on a pan covered with parchment paper. Spray with oil and let rise one hour, until doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 350*F. Mix the egg white and water together and brush this mixture over the boule, sprinkle with pearl sugar if desired. (I skipped this entirely. -tfb)

Bake 30 minutes, or until browned and the loaf sounds hollow on the bottom.

Merlot Muffins

2006-04-29T04:08:00.000-07:00

Though I am fairly certain these would be better classified as cupcakes, I really enjoy alliteration, hence the name. While making the fruit juice bread in my previous post, I was complaining to my mother about the fact that there is beer bread, but no wine bread or cider bread, and she rememebered having had a wine cake years ago. She found the recipe a friend had submitted to a church cookbook -- one of those frighteningly midwestern collections of recipes for meaty cheese dishes and cheesy meat dishes the whole family will love. The recipe called for some cooking sherry and eggs to be added to a yellow cake mix to make a cake with a poundcake-like texture and density.

I decided instead to add some red wine to a delicious, but obnoxious, recipe for yellow cake I recently adapted to make a spiced chai cake for my sister's birthday. It is indeed moist and tasty, as advertised, but it also involves mixing the ingredients for a total of over 15 minutes. I suppose it's not that bad; it's just more work than I'm used to for a cake. All I did to change it was to replace the buttermilk with merlot, then I decided to bake it in muffin cups instead of a cake pan, and I put powdered sugar on top.

They are very good, and were well-liked at my mom's office, where they were brought in on a co-worker's last day. I liked the batter better than the baked cupcakes (isn't that just always the way?) mostly for its stronger wine flavor. I wonder if I made a poor wine choice. I really don't know much about choosing wines, but I thought something medium bodied and fruity would be nice. It might have been better with sherry or even port, or if I'd tried reducing the wine before adding it to the batter.

But that is often my complaint. "More flavor!" Which I think makes me something like the baking version of Tim "The Toolman" Taylor and his constant quest for "more power". Except I grunt less? We hope. Anyway, I am rarely completely satisfied with anything unless it is the life-changing sort of delicious. Fortunately, there are several things I make that I think would fall into that category, so it's not an impossible standard to hold myself to.

Wine Cake

Original recipe from The Well-Decorated Cake, by Toba Garrett

Ingredients
3 cups (330 g) cake flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup (8 oz or 230 g) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 cups (454 g) granulated sugar
5 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups (10 fl oz or 300 ml) red wine

1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Butter and line with parchment paper two 8x2-inch (20x5-cm) pans. (Or about 24 muffin cups.) Set aside.

2. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

3. Cut up the butter into 1-inch pieces and place them in the large bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment or beaters. Beat for 3 minutes on MEDIUM-HIGH speed until the butter is light and creamy in color. Stop and scrape the bowl. Cream the butter for an additional 60 seconds.

4. Add the sugar, 1/4 cup at a time, beating 1 minute after each addition. Scrape the sides of the bowl occasionally. Add the eggs one at a time.

5. Reduce the mixer speed. Stir vanilla into the buttermilk. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the wine. Mix just until incorporated. Scrape the sides of the bowl and mix for 15 seconds longer.

6. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with a knife. Lift up the pan with the batter, and let it drop onto the counter top to burst any air bubbles, allowing the batter to settle.

7. Center the pans onto the lower third of the oven and let bake 45 to 50 minutes (or about 30 for muffins, depending on their size) or until the cake is lightly brown on top and comes away from the sides of the pan and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Note: Let the cake cool in the pan. Storage: Double wrap the cake in plastic wrap. It will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks or in the freezer for up to 2 months.

Yield: Two 8-inch (20-cm) cakes.

POM Blueberry Fougasse

2006-04-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

When I was still in the process of making these and thinking about the blog entry I'd write for this bread, I figured I'd either start out by declaring myself a baking genius, or saying I'd found out why no one uses fruit juice instead of water in bread. Now that I've made and tasted it, I'm leaning towards the former, but the idea could still use refining.

I got the idea while emailing Lee about making a lean dough version of the coffee rolls below and thinking about the fact that people use things like beer or potato water to make flavored breads (I've even put water from boiling garlic in bread) but you don't really see breads made with fruit juice, even though people put dried fruit in bread, and the juice would combine liquid, sugar, and flavor all together, so it should work well. I decided to try the idea with a recipe for sweet fougasse I'd made before, but wanted to try again with citrus or anise or something in it. I cut back on the amount of sugar to compensate for the extra the juice would add, added some dried fruit, and had to use a little more juice than the recipe called for water to get the same consistency. I used dried blueberries and blueberry pomegranate juice, but I think apple juice or cranberry juice would be nice too, as would most any kind of dried fruit. I wonder how coconut milk would be in bread.

I'm pretty happy with the results. The house smelled amazing while it was baking. It got pretty dark, as is to be expected from all the sugar in it. It is a little more dense than the regular sweet fougasse I made, and it has a nice blueberry flavor. Basically, it tastes like a lighter blueberry bagel (except better). I suppose I only think of it as being like a bagel because that seems to be the only kind of bread people are willing to experiement with. Other breads tend to be the same traditional loaves, but any bagel shop will have dozens of creative and original flavors.

I also just started something new I came across in The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz that I've borrowed from the library. It is a pain aux pommes that takes this idea of a fruit juice bread one step farther by making bread on a paste of fermented apples. It will take about two weeks to make the bread, including time to ferment apple chunks, but I am very excited about it.

Fruit Fougasse Recipe

Adapted from a recipe in Crust & Crumb by Peter Reinhart

Poolish:

4 cups bread flour

4 cups cool water

1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix until smooth.

Cover with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature 3~5 hours, until bubbly.

Refrigerate overnight, covered.

Sweet Rustic Bread:

2 cups poolish from above

4 1/2 cups bread flour

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon instant yeast

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 cup (or more) fruit juice

1.5 oz dried fruit

Confectioner's sugar for dusting

Vegetable oil cooking spray

1. Measure out poolish and let sit at room temperature to take off the chill.

2. Combine the ingredients in a bowl.

3. Mix until gluten develops. (The recipe suggests 8 minutes with a dough hook on medium, or two minutes in a food processor, or 15 minutes by hand, which is what I did.) Cover with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature three hours, or until increases 1 1/2 times in size.

4. The dough will have stiffened somewhat. Scrape it onto a heavily floured counter, flour your hands, and roll the dough around to coat it, kneading gently a few seconds. Form a loose ball and dust with flour. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature one hour.

5. Cover three pans with baking parchment (either flat ones, or invert pans with a lip, because you'll want to be able to slide the dough onto a baking stone in the oven) mist the parchment with cooking spray and sprinkle with semolina flour.

6. Flour your hands and the dough, kneading a few seconds. Pat the dough into a disk about 6 inches in diameter, then cut into 6~8 wedges. Dip the knife/pastry blade into cold water between cuts so it doesn't stick.

7. Keeping your hands floured, transfer the cut wedges to the pans, leaving lots of room between them. Don't stretch the wedges. Mist with cooking oil, dust with flour, and let proof at room temperature 2 hours, until wedges have increased in size 1 1/2 times. Refridgerate overnight.

8. Remove the pans from the refrigerator 2 hours before baking and let rise until nearly twice their original size.

9. 40 minutes before baking, preheat oven to 475*F, with a steam pan on the lower rack, and baking stone on the upper.

10. Do not score the wedges. Slide them (and the baking parchment) directly onto the baking stone. Spray wedges and oven walls with water and pour 2 cups hot water into steam pan. Close the oven door, then spray the oven with water again after two minutes. After five minutes, reduce oven temperature to 425*F.

11. Bake the for about 20 minutes, rotating once halfway through for even baking.

12. Once wedges are golden brown, remove from oven and move to a cooling rack.

13. Spray the wedges with cooking oil and dust with confectioner's sugar. Let cool for 40 minutes before eating.

Miche / Pain Poilâne

2006-04-18T04:24:00.000-07:00

So I finally baked the bread off the cover of The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I'd been sort of lusting after it for a while, reading more about the bakery where it originated, Boulangerie chez Poilâne. Their website, available in English and French, includes a form for ordering loaves to be shipped. What I made would cost me $35.95 to have shipped to my home. I'm not sure how to react to the fact that that doesn't seem excessive for a loaf of bread. I wouldn't eat it every day, certainly, but I'd consider trying it once, even just for the coolness of having bread come in the mail. I also like that their website has food pairing ideas for all their breads.

The bread is a 2kg (~4lb) loaf of very sour, dense, wheat bread. It is essentially the opposite of this pain de campagne I made before. That was a mild whole wheat sourdough starter made with white flour, and this is a fairly acidic white sourdough starter made with wheat bread. Both are delicious (and beautiful) but I think the pain de campagne is a more accessible taste. At least, no one in my family has been making sandwiches on this one. It's also possible they just don't like slicing it though. It is very dense.

I'd been putting off making it because I wanted to do it right. It's just big enough that kneading it is a bit of a challenge, and I wanted a strong sourdough starter. I'm extremely pleased with how it came out though. The book suggested scoring a pound sign on it, but I really liked the stylized 'P' on the real Poilâne loaves, and decided to carve a 'G' on mine for my first initial. (Since a 'K' for my last name wouldn't have looked as nice.) I may have to make that my signature loaf-scoring. It would be nice if I could get good enough at changing the angle of the cuts so that mine looked like calligraphy like theirs do.

The only things I would change if I bake this again would be to dust it with flour to make the scoring stand out more (it looks like they dust at Poilâne, but the cookbook didn't mention it, and the one in their photos aren't floured) and to bake it a bit longer. I pulled mine out at the earliest of the range of baking times, but it was still a little doughy inside. It's possible it's just very dense and is supposed to be like that. I thought a desem-style bread I made recently was underbaked, but I bought one from a local bakery and it had a similar texture. Maybe whole wheat sourdough breads just stay squishy.

One thing I really like about this recipe is that it is apparently too big for most home mixers, even the fancy ones, so even people who have nice things have to do it by hand like I do.

Poilâne-style Miche

Recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.

Barm

3 1/2 cups bread flour
2 cups water, room temperature
1 cup sourdough starter

Stir ingredients together, cover with an air-tight seal and let ferment at room temperature 6 hours, or until barm is bubbly. Open to let gas escape, then recover and refrigerate overnight. It will remain active for up to three days.

Firm starter

1 cup barm
2 cups medium grind whole wheat flour
1/2 cup water, room temperature

Stir together the barm, flour, and enough water to make a firm ball of dough. Knead about three minutes, place in an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap.

Ferment at room temperature 4~6 hours, or until doubled in size. Refrigerate overnight.

Remove firm starter from refrigerator one hour before making the final dough. Cut into 12 pieces and let sit to take off the chill.

Final dough

7 cups medium grind whole wheat flour
3 1/4 teaspoons salt
2 ~ 2 3/4 cups lukewarm water
semolina flour for dusting

In a large bowl mix flour, salt, and starter pieces. Add at least 2 1/4 cups of water to form a soft ball. Adjust flour and water as needed.

Knead on a floured surface for 12 to 15 minutes, continuing to adjust flour and water as needed. The dough should pass the windowpane test.

Let rise in an oiled bowl covered with plastic wrap for about 4 hours at room temperature, or until nearly doubled in size.

Transfer the dough to the counter and form a boule. Proof the dough, seam-side up, in a banneton or large proofing bowl. (I just used the same bowl I had used before... -TFB) Spray the exposed side with oil and cover with plastic wrap.

Proof at room temperature 2~3 hours, or until about 1 1/2 times its original size, or retard overnight in the refrigerator. If retarding the dough, remove from the refrigerator 4 hours before baking.

Preheat oven to 500*F, with a baking stone and a steam pan.

Put a sheet of baking parchment on the back of an inverted sheet pan and dust with semolina flour. Turn the boule out onto the parchment and score.

Slide the parchment and boule onto the baking stone and pour 2 cups of boiling water into the steam pan. Reduce heat to 450*F and bake 25 minutes. Rotate the loaf 180* for even baking, reduce the temperature to 425*F and bake an additional 30~40 minutes.

If the top begins to burn, make a tin-foil hat tent for it, or place an inverted sheet pan under it, if the bottom is burning.

Move the bread to a cooling rack and let cool two hours before serving. Store in a brown paper bag; it should be good for 5-7 days.

Hot Cross Buns

2006-04-16T04:38:00.000-07:00

Hot cross buns are an Easter tradition I had never tried before, preferring to stick to the equally traditional chocolate (while avoiding frightening things like Peeps). But in the weeks approaching Easter, various food blogs and forums I read were full of hot cross buns and terrifying recipe ideas for Peeps and suddenly the hot cross buns looked fairly attractive. I saw a lot of unpleasant attempts with melty-looking frosting crosses, but quickly found a more traditional pastry-crossed recipe at A Spoonful of Sugar.

I knew the buns were pagan in origin - isn't it fun how traditions like these, and Christmas trees, have shifted so we can still practice them thousands (?) of years later? - but learned during my recipe search that they were originally meant to symbolise the sun, quartered to represent the four seasons.

They were fairly easy to make. The most time-consuming part was cutting the pastry and attaching it to the buns. The dough was supposed to take candied citrus peel, but I didn't have any and just used an equal amount of lemon and orange zest. I was probably more generous with spices than the recipe was (even though it claims to be 'extra spicy'), and just like the original blogger said, I didn't end up using all the milk the recipe called for. I'll post the recipe with the American measurements I used, but the original has the metric.

Extra Spicy Hot Cross Buns
Recipe (paraphrased) from Linda Collister, Bread

makes 12

3 1/4 cups unbleached strong white bread flour
1/3 cup stoneground wholemeal bread flour
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon ground mixed spice (I just tossed in a bunch of cinnamon and cloves and allspice)
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
3 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter, diced
1/3 cup currants
1/4 cup raisins
1/4 cup citrus peel (about 1/2 lemon, 2 oranges)
1 package instant yeast
3/4 cup room temperature milk (This is how much I used, the recipe calls for about 1 cup)
1 large egg, beaten
Optional one cup of hot tea

pastry cross
1/2 cup all purpose flour
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, diced
2 teaspoons powdered sugar

glaze
4 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons powdered sugar

Cover the raisins and currants with hot black tea and let plump.

Put the flours, yeast, sugar, salt and spices in a large bowl and mix well.

Add the diced butter and rub into the flour using the tips of your fingers until the mixture looks like fine crumbs.

Mix in the dried fruit (sans tea) and mixed peel, then make a well in the centre of the mixture.

Add the beaten egg to the well and approximately half the milk. Gradually draw in the flour to make a soft but not sticky dough. Add more milk if necessary , or extra flour (a tablespoon at a time) if the dough is too sticky.

Turn the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and knead throughly for 10 minutes.

Return the dough to the bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot in the kitchen until doubled in size, about 1 1/2 hours.

Punch down the risen dough a couple of times to deflate.

Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. Shape each into a neat ball and set well apart on a baking sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise as before until doubled in size, 45 minutes - 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 400*F.

To make the pastry for the cross, put the flour, butter and sugar into a small bowl and rub the butter into the flour with the tips of your fingers until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs. Stir in 1-2 tablespoons cold water to make a firm dough. Roll the dough out thin on a floured work surface, then cut into thin strips long enough to go over the rolls.

Uncover the risen buns, brush the pastry strips with a little water to dampen, then arrange, sticky side down, in a cross on top of the buns.

Bake in the preheated oven for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

Meanwhile, to prepare the sticky glaze, heat the milk and sugar in a small pan until dissolved, then boil for 1 minute until syrupy.

As soon as the buns are cooked, lift them out onto a cooling rack and brush immediately with the hot glaze. (Place a tea towel (or wax paper, suggests TFB) under the rack to catch the drips!)

Eat warm or toasted, or freeze for up to 1 month.

Turkish Coffee Rolls

2006-04-10T20:36:00.000-07:00

Black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love? Well, not quite, but that's what I was going for. A while ago I got some Turkish ground (very fine grind) coffee to use in baking, most specifically to try to make coffee chocolate chip muffins that were better than the ones I had a recipe for. It worked perfectly. Using coffee beans ground to a powder in baking gives a stronger, richer coffee flavor than using brewed coffee or instant coffee granules, the two methods of adding coffee flavor I see most frequently. It's easy enough to buy an eighth or a quarter pound of beans ground like this for use in cooking (The Foppish Baker likes espresso or French roasts) - the only problem is that most recipes will only take a tablespoon or so of the coffee, and the rest might go stale. Clearly having a grinder at home is the way to go.

In hopes of using up the coffee before it went stale, I made the muffins twice and also tried making a 'pain au lait au café', as I called it. I used a recipe for pain au lait, but added a teaspoon of Turkish ground coffee to a cup of milk, warmed it a bit to absorb the coffee more, and added that to the dough. It was nice, but I thought it could have been stronger. (Though honestly, I think my family prefer the more subtle flavor, but they're not coffee drinkers.) So this got me thinking about Turkish coffee and how good it is with cardamom, and why, oh why isn't the restaurant that makes it really well closer to my home?

So, I decided to try the coffee pain au lait again, this time with caradmom and a lot more coffee. The first bite tasted too salty, but I liked it more the more I ate. (This is a bit dangerous...) It doesn't exactly taste too strong, but it goes well with something creamy to balance it out, like butter, or Devon cream maybe.

Turkish Coffee Rolls

4 cups flour
1 package instant yeast
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 egg
8 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
10 pods cardamom, shelled and crushed
2 tablespoons Turkish ground coffee
1 egg + 1 tablespoon water for egg wash

Add the milk slowly to the coffee and cardamom in a small saucepan, stirring well, and heat to about 115* F.

Mix the flour, salt, sugar, and yeast in a bowl, then add the milk and stir with your hand for five minutes. Add the egg and stir for another 5 minutes, then stir in the butter and let rest at room temperature covered with plastic wrap for one hour, or until doubled.

Degas the dough, cover again with plastic wrap and refrigerate for four hours or more.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let it sit out for an hour to return to room temperature, then shape into rolls.

(It looks like the traditional shape is a sort of mini-bâtard, without scores in it, but some Japanese sites I looked at for recipes had used a pair of scissors to make a row of little spikes in the dough. Mine didn't turn out nearly as cute as some of the pictures I saw, but I do like the look.)

Brush with egg wash (or don't, I completely forgot about it myself), let rise one hour, then bake 15~20 minutes at 400*F.

La Meme Chose

2006-03-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

I'm back, my translation finished by the deadline by some miracle. I was also delighted to see I was tagged for my first meme, by Lee, a fellow Madisonian food blogger at Welcome to My Pantry. My cookbook collection is a little pathetic, but it's nice to be thought of, and this is a good way to get back to the blog while my bread rises.

How many cookbooks do you own?

So few it's easy to count them in the photo. There are ten there, but the bilingual Chinese/English one on Dim Sum is something a friend let me borrow after we made some steamed buns from it while she was back in town over spring break. There are quite a few things I'd like to try out, and it's fun practice for my crappy Chinese reading skills.

Usually, I just get cookbooks from the library and read through them, then try to cook in the style presented therein, rather than actually following any recipes. Not that I would mind having more cookbooks -- I'm just cheap and I tend to cook by taste anyway. I use the internet as a recipe source a lot too. Epicurious has a lot of good recipes, and the 'fork ratings' and comments there tend to be fairly accurate.

Which cookbook did you buy most recently?

A couple months ago, I won a trivia contest in the alumni magazine from my alma mater and they sent me a $30 gift certificate to Borders, so I bought Crust & Crumb, which I had had checked out from the library for a couple months. Before that would be the delightfully touristy cookbooks I got in Wales last new year's, though I think all I've made from them so far are bara brith and Welsh rarebit.

Which is the cookbook that you read most recently?

I suppose On Food & Cooking wouldn't count as a cookbook exactly, but I read that recently, and Zingerman's Guide around the same time. I use my amazon.com wishlist as a reading list for cookbooks so I remember them when I've been recommended one. Right now I'm mostly interested in "the classics" -- giant tomes on basic skills and classical French cuisine, like Escoffier, The Professional Chef, and Larousse Gastronomique.

Name 5 cookbooks that mean a lot to you

1. The Moosewood Cookbook is probably the first cookbook I ever got. I became vegetarian when I was 11 (vegan at 18, omnivore at 19) and had to learn to cook better mostly out of necessity. My family would continue eating meat, of course, so I had to cook special meals for myself most nights, and make vegetarian dinners on my night to cook that would be appealing enough that the rest of the family would eat them. This cookbook helped.

2. The Bread Baker's Apprentice and Crust & Crumb have both been incredibly helpful in learning to bake better bread. The improvement I made just after reading through the introductions was amazing. Most bread recipes don't really explain what you're doing or why, so I was making a lot of stupid mistakes. I still do, of course, but I'm making progress.

3. Vegetarian Recipes, published by Better Homes & Gardens, was another one I received around the same time I got Moosewood and that helped me branch out from my mother's recipes and learn there was more to eat than casseroles. I think I preferred this one to Moosewood because the recipes are a little less dependent on your liking vegetables. There's more cheese and fried stuff.

4. Cuisine Bretonne is something I picked up while I was living in Brittany, France. I had hoped to get something a little nicer, hardcover maybe, with more pictures, but the recipes in this looked more appealing than in other books I saw in stores. I had two reasons for getting it: first, I wanted to know what the heck to do with the unfamiliar seafood and vegetables that were always cheap and readily available at the grocery store and market, and second, I wanted a nice, French cookbook I could take home to remember my time there. I haven't used it much lately because the unusual ingredients that were so easy to find over there tend to be a bit pricey here, and I've already figured out how to cook them without a recipe. I do want to make a traditional dessert from it sometime - kouign amann - it tastes like compressed, sweet croissant.

5. Okazu handbook is the little Japanese book in the picture. My sister got it for me for my 21st birthday when we were both in Japan. I was leaving for home in a few weeks, and she knew I really liked Japanese food and this book has most of the typical side dishes that would be served with a meal. I consult it a lot for Japanese cooking, and I like the guide in the back for all the different ways of cutting vegetables. Consequently, I know more words for ways to cut things in Japanese than I do in English.

So that is everything. The only book that didn't get mentioned yet is the other Japanese one, Oishii ocha, ireyo (Make Delicious Tea) It's not a cookbook, per se, it's a guide to tea and how to brew it well, but it also has loads of recipes of snacks to serve with tea, or to make using tea and it's very nice, since I love tea and tea-flavoured things.

That reminds me, Cam made a post announcing his mother's opening a restaurant called Modern Tea in the San Fransisco bay area. The tea sounds amazing, the food looks amazing, and the decor is beautiful. It's too far for me to make it, but if any readers are in the area and want to stop in for me, I'd be jealous love to hear about it. You can mail any leftovers to The Foppish Baker, c/o ....

For tagging on the meme, I'd love to see Matthew at Everything from Scratch and Cam at The Pastry Chef's Son fill this out.

Lavender Focaccia

2006-03-01T20:39:00.000-08:00

I'm a little surprised I ended up making this, since I'm not a big fan of lavender or focaccia. The latter can probably be blamed on the dry sponges people sell as 'focaccia' around here, but even though I was sure homemade focaccia would be fantastic, I could never really motivate myself to make any. Then I was struck by the idea of a sweet focaccia with lavender, lemon, and honey. I thought I'd put some honey in the dough to really change things, but I ended up lost in the process of making the bread and forgot to add anything at all. That happens more often than I'd like. I start measuring flour, thinking about what I'll put in the dough, then before I know it, it's finished with its first rise and it's too late to add anything more without risking completely degassing it.

In the end though, I think it worked out better like this. I put some salt in the herb oil and honey on top, so it ended up with that sweet and salty taste that makes chocolate-covered pretzels so addictive. If I made it again, I would add some lavender to the dough, at least, just to make it less... white and plain. Even if the oil adds more flavour, the dough would look a lot better with something mixed in it as well. On mange aussi avec les yeux, and all. I don't know that I would bother sweetening the dough though. I wouldn't want to lose that sweet and salty wonderfulness.

I also learned an interesting way to save money at the grocery store from time to time. I bought a couple of tablespoons of dried lavender flowers from a bulk bin at the store along with some bulk basil, and Belgian endives. The cashier I chose happened to be a high school student who didn't know what the Belgian endives were. I said their name, and we had a brief conversation about how they taste and how to cook them while the cashier looked for the code. Looking at the receipt later, I saw I'd been charged for the much cheaper chickory endive, and had only paid 20 cents for a couple dollars worth of lavender, and 10 cents for the basil. The same thing happened at another grocery store when I bought more Belgian endive a few days later, also from a cashier who looked to be in high school. Definitely something to remember...

This recipe makes a 17" by 12" sheet pan of focaccia, which comes out as a lot more than I envisioned before I made it. (17x12? Oh sure, we can eat that...) Fortunately people at various family members' places of work were more than happy to pick up the slack, even consuming the copious numbers of leftover beignets from Mardi Gras last night.

Lavender Focaccia
(Paraphrased & slightly adapted) from (you guessed it) The Bread Baker's Apprentice By Peter Reinhart

Herbed oil
1 cup olive oil (Don't bother with extra virgin for this, yo.)
2 heaping tablespoons dried lavender flowers
1 teaspoon herbes de Provence
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon white pepper
2 teaspoons freeze dried shallots
zest of one lemon

Warm the oil to 100* F, remove from heat and stir in the other ingredients. Once it has cooled, it can be refrigerated, but it'll go on the dough the same day, so you might as well leave it out to imbue itself with delicious flavour.

Dough
5 cups bread flour
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons instant yeast
6 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups water, room temperature

herb oil
honey
additional lavender, lemon zest, and basil to mix in the dough

Stir together the flour, salt and yeast in a large bowl, then add the oil and water until the ingredients form a wet, sticky ball. Continue stirring until the dough is smooth. It should stick to the bottom of the bowl, but clear the sides. This would be a good time to add herbs to the dough.

Sprinkle flour on the counter and turn the dough onto it, shaping it into a rectangle. Let dough rest five minutes.

With floured hands, stretch the dough to form a rectangle twice its size. Fold it, letter style into a smaller rectangle. Mist with spray oil, dust with flour, and cover losely with plastic wrap. Let rest 30 minutes, then stretch and fold again. Let rest another 30 minutes and repeat the process.

Let rest one hour. The dough should swell, but not necessarily double in size.

Line a 17" by 12" baking sheet with parchment and gently place the rectangle of dough in the middle. Spoon about half the herb oil over the top, and use your fingers to poke holes in the dough and stretch it out in the pan. (It probably won't go all the way to the edges at this point.) Cover the pan and refrigerate overnight, or for up to three days.

Three hours before baking, remove the pan from the refrigerator, pour the rest of the oil over it. (I, uh, essentially doubled the amount of oil the recipe called for here, but... it's delicious. And possibly part of why it burnt like that.) Use your fingers to poke more holes in the dough and stretch it out further. Now it ought to reach the edges, or close to it. The dough should be about 1/2" deep. Drizzle the dough with honey. (I used a thicker, French honey and spooned it in 1/4 teaspoon blobs all over, but drizzling liquid honey to taste would work too.) Let rise 3 hours, covered at room temperature.

Preheat the oven to 500*F and place the focaccia on the middle shelf. Lower the temperature to 450* and bake for 10 minutes. Rotate the pan 180 degrees for even baking, and bake another 5-10 minutes or until golden brown. (Mine took about 7 minutes, and ended up a very dark brown, as you see.)

Remove the pan from the oven and move the focaccia to a cooling rack. Remove the parchment from the bottom and let cool at least 20 minutes before eating.

Sauerkraut & Red Onion Sourdough

2006-02-27T06:49:00.000-08:00

I managed to bake something nearly every day this week, but didn't bother updating any of it. I had hoped to update about twice a week, but I guess I get busy. And lazy. And uninspired. (I do have something interesting in the works now though.) Still, this week's baking was mostly sweets, and I want to get back to baking bread.

The first time I tried to make this bread, before I had started this blog, it came out light and airy, like a foccacia, but with no crust to speak of, and all the rolls melted into each other to make one big pan of bread that tasted sort of like onion bagel. Everyone who tried it, save myself, thought it was delicious.

But I'm happy with this one. I definitely used too much starter in my first attempt, which made it rise too much, I didn't knead it enough so the gluten wasn't delveloped enough for the rolls to keep their shape, I didn't know how to form rolls well, and I didn't add enough flour to compensate for the extra liquid the sauerkraut and onion would add, though I did try drying out the sauerkraut a bit, which lessened its flavour. So lots went wrong.

This one is almost exactly what I had hoped for. The crust is lovely and blistered and crackly and the inside is nice and chewy. It smells a bit like pizza when it's baking too, my sister said. The only thing I can think to improve upon is to make a stronger sour flavour. I think part of that is having a more mature starter than mine, which I obviously can't help much, besides letting it sit out to proof a few days before baking with it. I'd also like it if I could get more sauerkraut flavour, but that always seems to fade in cooking it. Recently though, I made a Korean kimchi fried rice that involved letting the kimchi sour at room temperature a few days before cooking with it. I think I'll have to try something like that next time to see if I can get a more sour sauerkraut.

I did like that I ended up using a sauerkraut with caraway seeds in it. I like it better for general eating purposes, so it was what we had in the house, but I probably would haven chosen plain sauerkraut for this bread. I think they make a nice addition though, and I would add caraway seeds to the dough next time if the sauerkraut didn't have any.

Sauerkraut & Red Onion Sourdough

Adapted from the recipe for San Francisco Sourdough in Crust & Crumb by Peter Reinhart
Makes about 12 dinner rolls

Firm starter:
1 cup sourdough starter
1 cup bread flour
water, as needed

Dough:
Firm starter from above
3 cups bread flour
1/2 tablespoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 cup cool water
1/2 cup sauerkraut
1/2 cup chopped red onion
caraway seeds (optional)

Measure out 1 cup of proofed sponge sourdough starter and mix with 1 cup bread flour to make a firm ball of dough. Knead for a few minutes, until smooth, but not too stiff or dry. Place dough in a clean bowl covered with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature for 6-8 hours, or until nearly doubled in size. Refrigerate overnight.

Remove the firm starter from the refrigerator and let it sit one hour before using it. This might be a good time to start chopping red onion and measuring out sauerkraut to let it warm up, if it was in the refrigerator too.

Divide the firm starter into about 6 pieces and put in a bowl with the bread flour, salt, sugar, and water. Stir with a wooden spoon until the dough comes together, then turn onto a floured surface and knead. When the dough is close to passing the windowpane test, begin to incorporate the sauerkraut and red onion. This will add a lot of moisture to the dough, so keep adding more flour until the dough has a consistency similar to what it was before you added the sauerkraut and onion. Knead until the dough is smooth and the onion and sauerkraut are evenly dispersed throughout.

Place the dough in a clean bowl covered with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature for four hours. (According to the book, it will not rise very much, but will show some signs of swelling. It said in some cases it will rise more rapidly, but you should still let it ferment the full four hours. Mine went nuts and doubled very quickly, but I let it sit the whole time and it was fine. I wonder if the onions and sauerkraut give the yeast more sugar to feed on?)

Turn the dough out of the bowl to degas, and shape as desired. I did rolls, obviously, but boules or baguettes or batards would be just as nice. Place on a baking sheet covered with parchment that has been dusted with semolina or corn flour. Mist the dough with oil, cover with plastic wrap and let proof at room temperature 3-4 hours, or until 1 1/2 times their original size. Place in the refrigerator overnight.

Let the loaves/rolls/what-have-you sit out at room temperature one hour before baking. Place a baking stone and steam pan in the oven and preheat it to 475* F. Score the loaves, then put them in the oven, adding a cup of boiling water to the steam pan. Spray the oven walls with water, close the oven door, wait two minutes, then spray again and lower the oven temperature to 450*.

One large loaf will bake about 30 minutes, my rolls baked about 10. Bake until the crust is golden brown, turn off the oven, open the door, and let sit another 10 minutes before removing to a cooling rack. Let cool before eating.

Vietnamese Bánh Mì Gà

2006-02-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

About half a year ago, when I was first looking into baking bread more seriously, I happened to read about Saigon baguettes: a French bread made with half rice flour and half wheat flour. It sounded really interesting, so when I found a recipe, I tried it out. I had a lot of difficulty with it, and ended up with only a somewhat-edible loaf of bread. Later, when I found out there is a sandwich made with the baguette, I decided I'd have to give it another try.

So, the instructions and recipes that follow are of very questionable authenticity. I've never had a banh mi in a restaurant, my only experience with Vietnamese food at all is from one restaurant in town (though I do like to make my "faux pho" from time to time) and I'm not all that confident about the authenticity of the recipes I've used to make this. So be warned.

From what I've read, banh mi is an amazing Vietnamese-French fusion sandwich on a rice/wheat baguette with a thin, crispy crust and soft, airy inside. The most common fillings are pork: either breaded, in meatballs, pate, or bologna lunchmeat, though chicken is also fairly normal, and there are a variety of other meats people use as well. (In fact, the one pictured was made after I ran out of chicken, so I put an egg on it. That may be very unorthodox.) It's topped with Asian mayonnaise, Sriracha sauce, soy sauce, black pepper, pickled daikon radish and carrot, cucumber, hot chili peppers, and cilantro, to make a deliciously messy sandwich that's sweet and hot and salty and wonderful. So naturally, I wanted in on that, but the closest restaurant selling them appears to be about three hours away in Chicago.

Most recipes I found online for the sandwiches suggest using a normal French-style baguette. That would probably be very good, but the rice flour really gives the bread a different texture and flavour, and besides, if you're going to substitute a different bread, then you might as well use red radishes for the daikon and Tabasco for the Sriracha sauce, and then what would your sandwich be?

The first time I tried to make the bread, I used the wrong kind of flour, which was my first mistake. I got Arrowhead Mills rice flour because I'd liked their buckwheat flour so much better than the one from Bob's Red Mill. But Arrowhead's rice flour is very coarsely ground and is not at all appropriate for this recipe. Bob's has a more finely ground rice flour that might work, but I decided to play it safe this time and got a one pound bag of Thai rice flour from an Asian supermarket.

My second problem was that I wasn't used to working with such a sticky dough and added too much flour to compensate and turn it into something more like the baguette recipes I was used to. It was good fresh out of the oven, but quickly became too dense and hard to eat. This time, I treated the dough more like a ciabatta or pain à l'ancienne and it came out much better. I'm still not entirely happy with it though. I think I could have baked it longer for a darker, crispier crust and maybe done a nicer job with the shaping. I had expected larger air holes on the inside too, from all the descriptions I'd read of its light, airy interior, but comparing mine to photos I've seen, it doesn't look that far off. Still, I'd love to try to find another recipe for this bread, to compare the two, and maybe try to make something better. I just think I might have to know Vietnamese to manage to find another recipe...

Banh Mi
Authentic Vietnamese Cooking : Food from a Family Table
By Corinne Trang

1 package active dry yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup rice flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter, melted

To prepare: Place the yeast, 1 cup lukewarm water, and sugar in the bowl of a mixer with a dough hook. Sift together the all-purpose flour, rice flour and salt in a separate bowl.

Starting the mixer at the lowest speed, add the butter to the yeast, then gradually add the dry ingredients and beat until well combined, about 3 minutes. Increase the speed to medium and continue beating the dough until it is smooth and comes away from the sides of the mixing bowl easily. Put the dough on a lightly floured surface, cover with plastic wrap, and allow to rise (double in volume), 45 minutes to 1 hour.

[Foppish baker notes: Unless there's something magical about an electric mixer that can make watery dough right, you'll need to mix up an extra cup or so of 1/2 rice flour and 1/2 wheat flour. I mixed mine by hand for 30 minutes, and nothing much happened. I imagine it was good for developing the gluten, but I needed to add a bit more flour before I had a dough that stuck to the bottom of the bowl, but came away from the sides, like ciabatta dough.]

Punch down the dough and knead it for about 2 minutes. Separate into 2 portions and shape each into an 8-inch-long baguette. (The dough may be sticky and hard to handle at this point. Do not overwork it, just gently shape it.) Cover loosely with plastic wrap and allow to rise a second time, about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, place a baking stone on a rack set in the middle of the oven and pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

[Foppish baker notes: I turned the dough onto a heavily floured surface, floured the top and kneaded it a bit before shaping it into long strips, like for pain à l'ancienne. Baking it at a higher temperature, like 450-500 might be a good idea.]

With a sharp knife blade or a clean razor blade, make 1 slit lengthwise or three diagonal slits along the top of each baguette. With the help of a wooden pastry paddle, carefully slide 2 baguettes onto the baking stone and bake until golden, 20 to 25 minutes. To test for doneness, tap the underside of a loaf. If it sounds hollow and the exterior is crisp, then it is done. Remove from the oven and allow to cool before handling.

[Foppish baker notes: Mine ended up awfully lumpy and flat-looking. I'm not sure how to improve this, I'm just complaining. I had expected to make a sandwich on each loaf of the bread, but they ended up large enough that half a loaf made a very filling sandwich. So this recipe makes enough for four sandwiches.]

To make the sandwiches:

Pickled carrot and daikon
2 cups water
1 cup sugar
1 cup distilled white vinegar
3 julienned carrots
1/2 small julienned daikon radish
Kosher salt

Marinate in refrigerator a couple hours. Also, slice and stripe one hothouse/English cucumber and slice one onion.

Chicken (The Gà in Bánh Mì Gà)
3-4 chicken breasts, sliced into strips
Marinade:
juice of 2 limes
3 T brown sugar
1/4 c vinegar
2 t Sriracha sauce
1 T dried lemon grass
3 cloves garlic, diced

Marinate in refrigerator a couple hours, then broil until chicken is done (10 mins?).

Sandwich Making

Slice the (hopefully slightly cooled) loaves of bread in half and cover the bottom half liberally with Japanese mayonnaise. Bake in a 400*F oven for about five minutes to toast the bread. Put Sriracha sauce, to taste, on mayonnaise, then add broiled chicken, cucumbers, a dash of soy sauce, onions, chili pepper, pickled carrots and daikon, black pepper, fresh cilantro, and the top half of the bread.

Plum Spice Pound Cake

2006-02-16T04:15:00.000-08:00

My good friend at Glaukôpidos was bugging me for an update, which I've been putting off because I lack an ingredient for my next planned baking project. After being unmotivated to bake anything that wouldn't require two or three days of proofing, I remembered and idea I'd had over the summer, but wanted to save for winter, when the taste might be more seasonally appropriate. And if you can't bake a wintery cake on a day when most of the city is shut-down due to snow, then when can you?

When my sister came home from Japan late last summer, her host-mom sent her with a carton of Choya Ume-shu and a jar of ume soaked in shochu (a distilled Japanese rice liquour), which was apparently popular at the time, that my sister and her host-mom called 梅だけ, 'just plums'. Technically, they're not even plums, though that is the most popular translation. Apparently, they're more closely related to apricots, but they're very sour and are most commonly eaten soaked in alcohol to make ume-shu, or dried as ume-boshi.

So, I like to use an ume or two as a garnish when I'm drinking ume-shu, and the number of ume sitting at the bottom of a bottle are usually the perfect number to eat this way, but I was a bit overwhelmed by the jar of just plums. The official Choya website offers a recipe for a chicken dish I didn't find particularly appealing or cutting them up and putting them in cake doughnuts. I decided they'd be good in a poundcake with some spices, since spiced plum is a fairly common winter dessert flavour. The jar of ume sat in the fridge (with me sampling some every once in a while) for eight months until the seasons turned and I remembered it.

I used a fairly basic pound cake recipe, but cut down on the sugar because the ume are sweet, and upped the flour to compensate for both the lessened amount of sugar and the extra moisture the ume would add. I used the liquids from the ume to make a glaze, which I poured over the cake when it came out of the oven. It was still a little too warm when I cut it (but it smelled too good to wait) so the cake looks about to collapse, but it's moist and delicious. I think mine turned out exceptionally delicious because I went to the trouble of grinding fresh spices my parents brought back from their vacation to the Caribbean a few years ago.

Plum Spice Pound Cake

2 1/4 cups, plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon fresh grated ginger
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1 cup chopped shochu-soaked ume

Butter and flour for pan.

Glaze

1/3 cup liquid from shochu-soaked ume
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon fresh grated ginger
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
A slurry of 1 teaspoon cornstarch and 2 teaspoons water

1. Sift together the 2 1/4 cups flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.

2. Cream in the butter, eggs and vanilla extract.

3. Add the ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and allspice.

4. Gradually mix in the milk.

5. Add the chopped ume with the extra 2 tablespoons of flour on top, and stir in gently.

6. Pour batter into a greased and floured 9" x 5" loaf pan and bake 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes in a 350*F oven.

7. While the cake is baking, heat the ingredients for the glaze over medium-high heat. Once it boils, lower heat to a simmer and reduce the liquid to about 2/3 the original amount.

8. When the cake is done (toothpick comes out clean), let cool slightly, remove from the pan and drizzle with the glaze.

Cherry Chocolate Rolls

2006-02-10T06:28:00.000-08:00

If you should find yourself, like I have, without any one particular person to impress on Valentine's Day, but rather with a lot of friends who want treats, in a more time-consuming version of the elementary school Valentine's card exchange, you can't do much better than bread. (Unless maybe you prefer cupcakes, the current height of food fashion, or brownies or cookies, but I don't. I like bread.)

On a somewhat related tangent, over the summer I read The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman, and was very intrigued by his mentions of chocolate cherry bread and sauerkraut red onion sourdough. Since then, I've tried Whole Foods' chocolate cherry bread, which is quite good (but I prefer my own). I've never seen the sauerkraut sourdough anywhere, and my own earlier attempt was not successful, but I'll probably try again soon.

This is, in fact, the first original bread recipe of mine that has been worth saving. I'm fairly pleased with myself and hope this is a sign of more successes to come. I was influenced by my experience making Reinhart's cinnamon raisin walnut bread in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, since that was the style of bread I was looking for, but I played around a bit with the amounts to get something a little 'breadier' that was less sweet, because the cherries and chocolate both add a fair amount of sweetness that the raisins and walnuts just didn't have.

Making the rolls was a bit hectic because I've been working full-time, and had a translation deadline today, with a few pages left to finish up after work. Then, it was announced during the second proof that the family was going out to eat (and I wouldn't be back in time to put the rolls in the oven at their peak). I thought the recipe had too much yeast for a slower rise in the fridge, or to survive 2+ hours at room temperature, and was especially unwilling to take chances, having just lost a pizza dough under similar circumstances. I came up with the (rather brilliant) idea of letting them proof in the family room/basement, which is probably the coldest room of the house. (Either there, or my room is, definitely.) All went well until I dropped one of the trays coming back up the stairs after dinner... The fall degased and smooshed the rolls on that tray, but I mostly salvaged them. You just won't see them in my pictures.

I also decided to try adding powdered sugar in a heart shape, in the spirit of the holiday, and in an uncharacteristic attempt at being disgustingly cute. It worked better than I expected. (The heart shape, that is. I'm not sure how adorable I was.) I'm sure there are numerous (possibly better) ways to go about doing this, but I used a small knife to cut a heart shape from the lid of a spread margarine tub. I balanced it on top of the buttered rolls and tried to sprinkle sugar from straight above so it wouldn't fall down below the lid on the sides.

Cherry Chocolate Rolls
Recipe by the foppish baker
Makes about 15 rolls

4 cups bread flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 t salt
1 package instant yeast
2 teaspoons cocoa powder

1 egg, beaten
3/4 cup milk (I, as always, used soy milk, because of my sister's lactose intolerance.)
2 tablespoons butter, melted (Or, y'know, margarine.)
1/2 cup lukewarm water

1 cup chocolate chunks
1 1/2 cup dried cherries, rinsed and drained (I like the slightly sour ones from Door County, WI. I had some blacker, sweeter cherries from CA that I used in the stollen, but I didn't like them as much. (This has nothing to do with Dairy State rivalries.))

2 tablespoons butter, melted
powdered sugar

1. Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

2. Form a well and add the wet ingredients, stirring until the dough forms a ball. You may need to add more water or flour to get a nice consistency.

3. Turn dough onto a floured surface and knead until smooth/the dough passes the windowpane test. It should be tacky, but not sticky. Now knead in the dried cherries and chocolate chunks. The moisture from the rinsed cherries will make the dough sticky and gross, and the chocolate chunks will start to melt from the warmth of your hands. It's a little bit gross, but that's good incentive to hurry up and let it proof.

4. Lightly oil the bowl you used to mix the dough (unless, of course, you prefer a clean one). Turn the dough to coat, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let rise 1~2 hours, until dough has doubled in size.

5. Form rolls and place them on baking sheets covered with parchment. 15 seems a good number of rolls, but the size and shape don't matter, except for cooking time.

6. Spray the rolls with oil and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise 1 ~ 1 1/2 hours, or until nearly doubled in size. Preheat the oven to 350* F.

7. Remove the plastic wrap and bake the rolls for 10 minutes, then rotate the trays for even baking and cook another 8-10 minutes.

8. Once they are golden brown, remove to a cooling tray and brush with the melted butter. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, in shapes, if you want to be disgustingly cute about it.

Bagels!

2006-02-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

After making the sweet fougasse, I put my leftover poolish in the freezer, planning on using it for pizza dough. It took a surprisingly long time to defrost, so that didn't happen, but I ended up making bagels instead. I doubled the recipe in Crust & Crumb so I could take them in to eat at work for the next week or so, depending on how many get eaten at home.

I'd never frozen poolish before, and it was disturbingly fluid. I was also a bit worried by the fact that there were no air bubbles or foaming, as I'd read that yeast dies out in old poolish and makes it unstable for baking. But I went ahead with it anyway, because that's what I do (mostly out of sheer laziness) and it turned out well.

From what I've read online about making bagels, they would probably taste better with malt syrup instead of honey, and maybe with a higher gluten flour. A mix of high gluten and bread flour might be exciting. Still, even using honey in place of the malt syrup, you really can't go wrong with homemade bagels, but next time I think I'll plan ahead a bit and be more adventurous with my choice of toppings, and maybe even add some in the dough itself. This time, I topped the bagels with sea salt, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, and caraway.

Kneading the stiff, stiff dough got me thinking about the difference between pretzels and bagels. Besides the ingredients (the pretzels I made contain butter, and sugar, not honey) I also found this interesting tidbit:

Homemade pretzels and soft pretzels are often made much the same way as bagels, by poaching them in boiling water before baking, the difference being that bagels are usually poached in salt water rather than water and baking soda.

Interesting, but I've never heard that before, and I certainly didn't follow those instructions in making either. I have heard about boiling pretzels in a weak lye solution, which is probably what the water and baking soda mentioned above is an attempt to duplicate. A longer boil makes pretzels and bagels chewier, and recipes tend to suggest less time in the water for pretzels. I like chewy breads though, and doubled the recommended boiling times for both.

I also learned an interesting new word while looking up information about European flours. "Panifiable" means 'ready to be made into bread' in Italian and French. I think I'm going to try to work that into my everyday vocabulary as much as possible. Only, in an American accent, it sounds a bit like something a cowboy might drawl. No idea what it might mean in that context though.

Bagel Recipe
Paraphrased from Crust & Crumb by Peter Reinhart

Poolish:
4 cups bread flour
4 cups cool water
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix until smooth.
Cover with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature 3~5 hours, until bubbly.
Refrigerate overnight, covered.

1 cup poolish sponge
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water
3 1/2 cups bread flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 tablespoons honey or malt syrup

1. Let the sponge sit at room temperature one hour to take the chill off.

2. Stir the yeast into the water and let sit three minutes.

3. Combine sponge, flour, salt, and honey in a large bowl, then add the water/yeast mixture.

4. Stir together, adding more water or flour, if neccessary. (I added a bit more water.)

5. Knead until dough passes the windowpane test, about 15~20 minutes by hand. Dough should be dense and fairly dry, smooth and stretchable.

6. Divide the dough into 6-14 pieces, depending on the size bagels you want. (I did 6, which gives you bagels about the size you'd get at a bagel shop.) Roll into balls, as if for dinner rolls, cover with plastic wrap and let sit 5 minutes at room temperature.
7. Line a pan with baking parchment and dust with cornmeal.

8. Form the bagels by sticking your thumb through each ball of dough and gently widening the hole by winding and stretching it. The hole should be about 1 1/2" wide for big bagels (or even bigger, since mine nearly closed up in the end).

9. Place the bagels on the sheets, cover with plastic wrap, let rise at room temperature 1 1/2 hours, then refrigerate overnight.

10. Remove the bagels from the fridge 30 minutes before baking. Bring a large pot of water to boil, preheat oven to 470*F.

11. Reduce heat on the water to keep it at a simmer. Gently drop the bagels in, being careful not to overcrowd the pot. They should sink to the bottom, then rise to the top. (I suspect I let mine rise too long, because they floated immemditately. Still tasted good though.)

12. Let bagels boil 1 minute on each side. While bagels are boiling, sprinkle the parchment sheets on the baking sheets with semolina or cornmeal and spray with oil.
13. Return the bagels to the sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through for even baking.

14. Let cool 30 minutes on a cooling rack before eating.

(The book has loads of tips and suggestions for better bagels and fun variations. I just don't like typing that much.)

Pain au Maïs

2006-02-01T06:09:00.000-08:00

Pain au maïs is turning out to be more of a challenge than I expected. It started when I was in France for Thanksgiving. An American friend and I were trying to put together a dinner and needed several kinds of bread for my mother's stuffing recipe. We had a white bread and a wheat bread, and went down to a good bakery around the corner from my friend's apartment. We asked what they had in the way of whole grain breads and were given some pain au maïs. A lot of it went into the stuffing, but we each tried a few slices plain and it was fantastically delicious.

It had a thick, hard crust like a baguette, with little bumps from the corn flour. The crumb was fairly even, with lots of small holes, and it was soft, like an enriched bread, but had that buttery feel of a lean bread. (Oh, I wish I'd known then what I know now about baking bread so it would be easier to try to recreate that.) The bread was a little bit sweet and had a strong corn flavour. That bakery had a lot of breads they rotated from day to day, and I never saw pain au maïs available anywhere else. (So it's probably been built into something even more wonderful in my mind because of it.)

I tried twice making something like it without a recipe. The first time, I soaked cornmeal in water for a few hours, hoping that would soften it enough to let its flavour spread through the bread, instead of leaving crunchy bits of cornmeal in an otherwise normal white bread. I put one egg in the batter and used 1/2 cup of cornmeal with, I think, three cups of white flour, a packet of yeast, and enough water to make a dough. This bread came out all right, remarkably similar to this recipe I just tried, but it was too bland.

The second time, I thought I'd try making it a lean bread with an overnight rise in the refrigerator. I started by grinding 3/4 cup cornmeal into something resembling corn flour in the blender. I think I still used about 3 cups of flour, a packet of yeast, and enough water to make a dough. But I could tell it was no good when I took it out of the refrigerator the next morning. It was heavy and dense and gross, but I baked it anyway to see if the flavour was any closer. It did taste more strongly of corn than my earlier attempt, but it still wasn't there.

So recently I decided I'd look up a recipe and try making that. I found a French one that was intended for rolls, but it looked decently similar to what I'd had. I bought corn flour from the bulk bins at Whole Foods, figuring that would get me closer to what I was trying for. I translated the recipe and adjusted the amounts a little bit so it would be easier for American measurements. (Possibly a bad idea? Though it's worked out all right in other recipes...)

While I was making it I remembered happily that it is possible to decide you'd like to bake bread, then have a loaf fresh out of the oven and ready to eat a few hours later. I've gotten too used to sourdough and poolish and breads that take two or three days, at least, to make. But when I tried this bread I decided I'd go running back to my long, slow rises because it really does make a better bread.

This recipe is... not like what I had in France. It tastes good, but it's very dry, somehow. Still a bit of butter and jam covers that up nicely and it's quite edible. (Unlike my second attempt, which was a rock...) But I will have to keep working before I have a pain au maïs I'm happy with. I do have some more ideas from trying this one though. The incredible amount of yeast they used might be something to try. I think the corn flour is fairly heavy and dense, so it needs a lot of yeast. Though I suspect my second attempt failed from having too much yeast, which then died. So, if I want a long, slow rise, I need less. (Right?) Both this and my first attempt had eggs, and I suspect they help make the bread lighter as well. I wonder if the milk helps the flavour too. A little butter might even be worth a try. I think I might try using a poolish when I try it next.

Addendum: This bread is much better in both flavour and texture on the second day.

Pain au maïs
[Original French Recipe]

Yeast - 3 packets (20g) (3 packets is 21g)
Salt - 2 teaspoons
Sugar - 1 tablespoon
Eggs - 2
Flour - 4 cups (500g) (I used bread flour)
Corn flour - 1 cup (100g) (According to an online kitchen measurement converter, 100g = .8 cup corn flour)
Milk (room temperature) - 1 cup (1/4 litre)
Water (room temperature) - 1/2 cup

1. Sift the flours together to get rid of any lumps. The corn flour lumps up a lot. Stir in the salt and sugar.

2. Form a well and pour the yeast and water inside. Stir to dissolve the yeast, also incorporating a bit (about 1T.) of flour from the walls. Let sit about ten minutes, until yeast mixture is bubbly.

3. Crack the eggs into the well and add about half the milk.

4. Using one hand, stir the batter, adding more milk as necessary, until all the flour is moistened and the dough forms a ball. It will be somewhat sticky.

5. Knead until smooth and gluten develops, about 15 minutes by hand.

6. Cover with plastic wrap for the first rise. It should double in size and will take about 1~2 hours.

7. Degas and knead briefly, then shape on a baking sheet covered with parchment and a sprinkling of semolina. (The recipe suggests knot rolls (Is there a better word for that?) but I made a boule.) Preheat the oven to 425*F (210*C). Let the dough rise a second time while the oven preheats. I let mine rise about 25 minutes. Slashing the top might be a good idea, because mine cracked.

8. Bake 25 minutes, or until dark golden brown and the bottom sounds hollow. Let cool, slice, and eat (with lots of butter or other toppings!)

Sweet Fougasse

2006-01-27T05:06:00.000-08:00

And it's back to Reinhart's bread recipes, mostly because I lacked the ingredients for my next idea, and because the promise of a bread with all the "comfort and satisfaction" of a croissant or brioche without any butter was intriguing. This recipe is from Crust & Crumb, which I ended up purchasing after I returned it Bread Baker's Apprentice to the library. I chose this one, even though it's a bit older, because it seemed to have more sourdough recipes, which interest me. The baking instructions differ in the two books: Crust & Crumb says to mist the oven twice, in two minute intervals, while Bread Baker's Apprentice suggests more mistings at 30-second intervals. I think my usual practices fall somewhere in the middle of that.

A nice improvement in Bread Baker's Apprentice is that the recipes tend to call for a full batch of the poolish (or biga) recipe in the front. At least, it's a nice improvement if you only bake every once in a while, and prefer to make up a fresh batch of poolish for each baking you do. Since I am trying to get into baking more often, having a bowl of poolish around all the time might actually be a help. At the moment, I've got some in the freezer leftover from this sweet fougasse recipe.

It ended up taking three days to make, but I was able to make it around my work schedule, though I ended up letting it rise in the refrigerator for eight hours when the recipe called for it to ride at room temperature for three. I just tried to guage its readiness by size and it worked out all right.

The "puffy wedges" shape is interesting, but I haven't been able to find if there's a reason they're not made in the cut-out leaf shape of a savoury fougasse. I did find, though, that it's common to flavour the sweet fougasse with anise seed or orange peel, which would definitely be worth trying next time. Even as is, it was very good (and every bit as satisfying as brioche or a croissant, though not very like either)

Sweet Fougasse Recipe
From Crust & Crumb by Peter Reinhart

Poolish:
4 cups bread flour
4 cups cool water
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix until smooth.
Cover with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature 3~5 hours, until bubbly.

Refrigerate overnight, covered.

Sweet Rustic Bread:
2 cups poolish from above
4 1/2 cups bread flour
5 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup cool water

Confectioner's sugar for dusting
Vegetable oil cooking spray

1. Measure out poolish and let sit at room temperature to take off the chill.

2. Combine the ingredients in a bowl.

4. The dough will have stiffened somewhat. (It's possible mine had moreso, due to being in the refrigerator.) Scrape it onto a heavily floured counter, flour your hands, and roll the dough around to coat it, kneading gently a few seconds. Form a loose ball and dust with flour. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature one hour.

6. Flour your hands and the dough, kneading a few seconds. Pat the dough into a disk about 6 inches in diameter, then cut into 6~8 wedges. (Now, this seems odd. I halved the recipe and still made a disk about 6 inches in diameter, and it seemed awfully thick (like ~2 inches), so I imagine it would be very thick with a full recipe. I cut mine into 6 wedges.) Dip the knife/pastry blade into cold water between cuts so it doesn't stick.

8. Remove the pans from the refrigerator 2 hours before baking and let rise until nearly twice their original size.

9. 40 minutes before baking, preheat oven to 475*F, with a steam pan on the lower rack, and baking stone on the upper.

11. Bake the for about 20 minutes, rotating once halfway through for even baking.

12. Once wedges are golden brown, remove from oven and move to a cooling rack.

13. Spray the wedges with cooking oil and dust with confectioner's sugar. Let cool for 40 minutes before eating.

Matcha Cream Pan - 抹茶クリームパン

2006-01-22T11:01:00.000-08:00

Finally an update! I just started a new full-time job this week, so I have been trying to figure out how to work baking into the schedule. The best I have come up with so far is to start bread in the morning, use my 8 hours at work as an "overnight" rise in the refrigerator, then bake in the evening. In practice, it's not quite so simple, with lots of breads needing to sit at room temperature for 3~4 hours before being refrigerated, but I should figure out something eventually.

I have been really enjoying baking from Peter Reinhart's books, and have learned a lot, but at the same time, it almost gets boring to make delicious, flawless bread every time. The instructions are clear and detailed, and though I've made his ciabatta and cinnamon raisin breads in the past few weeks, it seemed silly to take pictures and write up an entry that basically says "Yup. Baked it to instructions, came out great". Fortunately for me, what I baked yesterday was miles away from that sort of experience so I have lots of tips to share on how not to make this one.

In an effort to try out my newly improved baking skills and move away from Peter Reinhart a bit, I thought I might try translating some French or Japanese recipes and baking those. One of my friends has been pestering me about baking Asian breads, since I love Japanese and Taiwanese breads, and probably because that friend wants to eat them. The nearest Japanese bakery is about three hours away in Chicago, so I don't go often, but I had never heard of people making filled Japanese breads at home. My host-mother in Japan was an excellent cook, but only baked a few things (including an amazing tea chiffon cake I may try sometime). I suppose that's because Japanese filled breads are sort of tricky, and readily available at bakeries over there. Still, there are plenty of recipes to be found online, and it's definitely not impossible. Besides, flawed as they were, these ones I made tasted better than any I'd had in Japan. (Being fresh out of the oven helped a lot, I'd bet.)

For Christmas I received a tin of "raku-raku matcha" - freeze-dried green tea powder that's convenient for cooking -- and thought I'd try making something with it. (Green tea being one of my favourite flavours.) I found out Friday night that the Madison Japan Association was having its New Year's party on Saturday, and that my parents were going to a holiday party the same night and needed something to bring. I foolishly volunteered to quadruple a recipe I'd never tried to make about 60 Japanese sweet bread rolls filled with green tea custard. It seemed like a bad idea, but it takes a certain amount of conceit to be foppish, and I figured it'd all work out okay because I am amazing and can do anything.

I had a recipe I'd already translated for someone else, so I converted the metric into American measurements, quadrupled the amounts, and decided to just make green tea custard to simplify things, though the original recipe calls for the custard to be split into thirds to make trefoils of one vanilla custard-filled roll, one chocolate, and one green tea one all baked together. For some reason, either conciseness of language or greater expectation of skill in the cook, Japanese recipes seem a bit sparse on instruction to me. Translated directly, they seem over-simplified, with loads of room for error on the part of the cook. The version I post here will be more like 'my instructions' than a translation of the recipe (though the original deserves all the credit).

Making the custard filling completely cleaned us out of eggs. Lots of whites leftover though... but I used some for the egg wash and my sister is making angelfood cake tomorrow. We didn't have any caster sugar in the house, but I put granulated sugar in the blender to approximate it. We ended up with a couple cups of leftover custard, but that's probably because I was trying to make a greater number of smaller breads. Pieces of dough that were just a tiny bit bigger than the rest were much easier to fill and held a lot more. I'm sure that following the recipe's suggestion of making twelve rolls (in four groups of three) would be a very nice proportion of custard to dough.

The recipe called for the custard to be strained twice at various stages of its cooking, but I don't have a nice strainer, and the custard didn't come out lumpy. (If anyone happens to make this recipe and happens to really enjoy straining things, just pour it through a strainer each time you move it from sauce pan to bowl or back.) There are some places where the matcha powder clumped though. I have a tin of lower-grade matcha I use in cooking (which really ought to be sifted before using it in anything, but I'm far too lazy for that, and I sort of enjoy the little concentrated bursts of bitter green tea flavour) that I wanted to use up before opening my new tin. The 'raku-raku matcha' was wonderful for cooking though. It doesn't clump at all and stirred right into the custard. I'm told that, if you can't find matcha powder, you can substitute regular green tea leaves (even from an opened tea bag) crushed with a mortar and pestle or in a food processor, but I've never tried that.

Making the dough was pretty straightforward. I was glad I followed the recipe's instruction of putting the yeast in warm water before even starting the custard, because I am pretty sure this step is what gives Japanese bread its distinctive flavour. The ingredients aren't too far off from other enriched breads -- challah might be closest -- but Japanese breads have a strange, yeasty flavour I suspect is from letting the yeast sit in warm water and eat away at itself for a long time before mixing the other ingredients in. I considered skipping that step because the custard would take a lot more time than yeast would take to activate. The only change I made was to stir the ingredients with a spoon instead of using a fancy pastry card (I forget what these are called in English) to mix everything together. Everything seemed to work fine.

The tricky part was getting the custard inside the bread. This is where I messed up and what led to everything exploding later on. It seems to me, from the pictures with the original recipe, that my custard wasn't as thick as theirs. A thicker custard would have made things easier, so maybe I should have let mine boil a little longer, though this did have the same consistency as the other two times I've made custard, so maybe it's fine. I also think the more traditional red brean paste might have made a better first time for a filled bread. Still, it is possible to make nice filled breads with this custard, as long as you don't do it the way I did.

After I divided the dough into little balls (we had 73!), pressed them down and let them rest 15 minutes, I put three into a trefoil shape on a pan without filling for my sister, who can't eat it, (This is also delicious, by the way, if you want to try Japanese sweet bread without the hassle of a filling.) then had my mom help out rolling the remaining 70 into flat disks. If they're too thick, you won't get much custard in, but if they're too thin, the top will burst in the oven. I think that 1/4 inch thickness is about right.

I held the flattened dough in my hand and filled it with a heaping spoonful of custard. Then I pinched the edges together and pulled it tight to form a nice round shape. This was a terrible mistake. This is probably horribly obvious, but I wasn't thinking about it at the time. See, pulling the dough tight over the top makes a very nice roll when it's all bread, but when there's filling, it means the top is stretched thin over it and you've made a big lump of dough at the bottom that's going to rise in the oven. When it does, it pushes the filling into the top, which eventually breaks. Out of the 67 filled rolls I made (73 minus three for my sister, and three mistakes during filling) four came out perfect and beautiful, five or so had exploded horribly and had to be eaten immediately before anyone saw, and the rest had small holes on the side and just weren't very pretty.

So here is the right way to do it: Roll the dough into a disk about 1/4" thick and about 5" in diameter. Hold this in a cupped hand -- the more cupped the dough is, the easier it will be to close it. Spoon in custard, leaving between 1/2" and 1" room at the top. If you spill any custard around the edges, it'll get slimy and won't pinch shut, so be careful. Pinch the dough together tightly enough that no custard will leak, but without pulling the top too thin. The dough will spread out on the pan, but it bakes up quite a bit in the oven, so it won't look too horribly flat in the end. Put the dough, seam-side down, on a pan with a couple inches of room between the other rolls.

This is what one of the worst exploded ones looked like after we cleaned up the spilled custard around it and put it on a plate. They still taste really good, but look fairly awful. The dough on top was so thin the moisture from the custard kept it from browning. I tended to put the more floured side of the dough disks inside, hoping it would keep the dough from absorbing the custard much (or hoping the custard would keep the dry, floured part from being too dry), but I don't know how much that matters.

Inside, the prettiest ones looked like that, so you can still see where the dough rose up into the middle, they just somehow managed to avoid breaking. A perfect one would have a creamy custard centre surrounded by an even layer of bread (though I kind of wonder if the ones that look like that are made by machine).

So, at the end of the ordeal, we had 4 baking sheets of sweet rolls in various states of explosion. My sister picked out the 24 prettiest for our parents to take to their party (where they were a hit, once it was explained what the oozing green stuff was), and we ended up not going to the Madison Japan Association meeting because it tends to be horribly boring, though the food's good. Instead, we packed the rolls into plastic containers and drove around delivering them to friends, who seemed very appreciative.

Matcha Cream Pan - 抹茶クリームパン
[ Original Japanese Recipe ]
(I'd recommend taking a look at that recipe, even if you can't read Japanese, because it has a lot of nice pictures of every step of production.)

Ingredients:
(makes 12 filled rolls)
(Original metric measurements are in parentheses. My conversions seem decently accurate, except for the egg wash, where I just tossed more-or-less equal amounts of egg white and water in a bowl.)

Custard:
Milk – 1 1/4 cups (300ml)
Vanilla extract – 1/2 teaspoon (I used a vanilla bean)
Egg yolks – 3
Caster sugar – 1/2 cup (75g)
Flour – 1/4 cup (30g)
Cornstarch – 1 heaping tablespoon (10g)
Unsalted butter – 1/4 cup (60g)
Brandy – 1 tablespoon
Chocolate, bittersweet, broken into pieces – 20g
Green tea powder (matcha) – 1 t.

Bread:
Instant dry yeast - about 2 teaspoons, just short of one package instant (5g)
Warm water – 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon (195ml)
Bread flour – 2 3/4 cup (375g)
Sugar – 1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon (75g)
Salt – a heaping half-teaspoon (4g)
Skim milk – 2 teaspoons (12g)
Egg – one (38g)
Unsalted butter – 2 1/2 tablespoons (36g)

Egg wash:
egg whites – 1 tablespoon (20g)
water – 1 tablespoon (2 teaspoons)

Vegetable oil, as needed.
Flour for surfaces

Before starting:
- mix the instant dry yeast and warm water in a bowl and set aside
- warm the butter to room temperature

1. Making the custard: pour the milk and vanilla extract in a pot, and heat to near-boiling, stirring frequently.

2. Mix together the egg yolks and caster sugar in a large bowl, then sift in the flour and cornstarch.

3. Stir until all the dry ingredients have been absorbed, then gradually pour in the warm milk from step 1.

4. Return the mixture to the pot, and warm on a medium flame until just boiled. (If there are any lumps, stir them out with a whisk.) Remove from heat and use a whisk to melt the butter in. Pour back into a bowl.

5.Divide into three equal portions. To one, add the pieces of chocolate and stir until smooth. To another add the green tea powder. Once they have cooled, add one teaspoon of brandy to each and stir. Put them in the refrigerator. (The recipe suggests keeping them in pastry tubes - I say that's for fools, and left the custard in a bowl.)

6. Making the dough: Add the flour, skim milk, and salt to a bowl and mix with a whisk. Add the sugar, yeast-in-warm-water, and beaten egg, and stir with a wooden spoon. Once it is mixed together, turn onto a floured surface and knead until smooth and the gluten is beginning to develop.

7. Flatten the dough, then put the unsalted butter on top, and knead, massaging the butter into the dough. Once the butter has been fully worked in, continue to knead until the gluten has formed and the dough is smooth. (The dough should pass the windowpane test.)

8. Form a ball of the dough and place in a bowl coated in vegetable oil. Turn to coat, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise 40 minutes in a warm place.

9. Punch the dough down gently to get the gas out, cover in plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

10. Divide the dough into twelve equally sized (60g) balls. Press into disks, cover, and let rest about 15 minutes.

11. Press the disks flat onto a lightly floured surface with the palm of your hand. Use a roller to flatten them into circles.

12. Put some custard on the centre of each circle and close the dough around the cream. Carefully seal up the opening.

13. Place the filled dough, sealed side down, on a baking sheet covered with parchment. Group one of each of the three flavours of filling together and join them in a trefoil. Cover gently with plastic wrap and let sit 30-40 minutes in a warm place to rise again.

14. Preheat the oven to 400*F (200*C), brush dough with egg wash, and cook at 400*F (200*C) for 10-15 minutes. Remove and allow to cool. (Though they taste best fresh out of the oven.)

Pain de campagne au levain

2006-01-08T21:02:00.000-08:00

It feels good to finally make a successful French country sourdough bread after three failures. This is also the first time I've used my whole wheat sourdough starter, Mulder, in something edible. Most recipes use something more along the lines of my white flour starter, Scully, but there are a variety of different flavours that can be achieved through different starters. Even using the same recipe, Mulder would make a very different tasting bread from Scully.

Then there's also the possibility of a starter made with rye flour (or even something more unusual), one with grape skins or beer yeast added, or sourdough cultures from different parts of the world. (San Francisco sourdough is pretty different from French or German.) From as best I can tell, Mulder has a much milder flavour than Scully. Apparently Europeans tend not to like a strong acidic, sourdough flavour, so there are recipe differences to account for, but I'd say the smell of the starters supports that statement. Breads I made with Scully are more easily recognisable as sourdough, though both make good breads and are equally powerful leaveners.

French country breads are one of the few recipes I've found that actually call for a whole wheat starter, so I tried making them fairly frequently when I first started using sourdough. I made, I think, three attempts at the recipe in The Bread Book, which seemed like it had adequate instructions, and loads of pictures along the way, but I still kept ending up with dense, salty, flat loaves of bread. I found the recipe in Crust & Crumb much less confusing, and even figured out what I was doing wrong before. My biggest problem was that I wasn't kneading enough. I was worried about overworking the bread, since I'd read a lot about that recently. But the reason I'd read about it was because more people are using electric mixers instead of kneading these days. I was relieved to learn it's impossible to overwork bread kneading by hand -- your arms would fall off first. Then there's the complaint I made earlier about The Bread Book and its insistence on using hand-ground coarse sea salt, causing measuring problems for anyone else. I also found their instructions strangely confusing. I mean, the bread has only three ingredients. Even if it takes two days and two nights to make, it can't be *that* hard.

I love the blistered crust on this. It's very thin and crisp on the top, though it gives quite a bit on the sides near the bottom. The crumb is very light and airy like an enriched bread, but still has that chewy, buttery texture of a lean bread. I'm also pleased with my big air bubbles and irregular crumb! I think baking it on my baking stone would have improved the crust, but I wanted to bake both loaves at once. It's so soft it's impossible to cut slices thinner than an inch, but it's a nice bread for soups and eating plain, so I don't think it matters that I'll never get a sandwich out of it. I also need to work on cutting better slashes in the dough.

French Country Sourdough
paraphrased from Crust & Crumb by Peter Reinhart

1 cup proofed whole wheat sourdough starter
1 cup unbleached bread flour
6 tablespoons water

Stir these ingredients together to form a ball of dough. Knead into a smooth ball, place in a clean bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise at room temperature for four hours, then refrigerate overnight.

Cut the dough into six pieces and mix with:

5 1/4 cups unbleached bread flour
2 cups cool water
2 1/2 teaspoons salt

Mix and knead until smooth (the dough should pass the windowpane test).
Put the dough in a clean bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature for three hours, or until it has just begun to rise.
Divide the dough into two pieces (to make two loaves) and form boules. Place them on cooking sheets lined with baking parchment, sprinkled with semolina flour. Spray dough with oil and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise at room temperature for four hours, then refrigerate overnight.

(The actual recipe called for letting the dough rise in bannetons or baskets, but I can't have nice things, so I just let mine rise without that. A basket would have given my loaves a rounder shape.)

Remove the dough from the refrigerator one hour prior to baking and preheat the oven to 475*F with a steam pan on the bottom rack, and a baking stone on top (if you plan to use one). (I had a baking stone on the floor of the oven, a steam pan on the bottom rack, and baked both loaves of bread on one pan on the top rack, which is probably why they got very dark on top, but stayed soft on the bottom.)

Once the oven is hot, either slide the baking parchment onto the baking stone, or put the pan into the oven. Pour a cup of boiling water into the steam pan, mist the oven walls with water and close the oven door. Mist again after about a minute, then again in another minute, then lower the temperature to 450*F.

Bake for 30 minutes (rotating loaves halfway through if necessary), or until the crust is dark reddish-brown. Let cool on the baking pan for about five minutes, then transfer to a wire rack and let cool one hour before slicing and eating.

Christmas gifts

2005-12-31T21:08:00.000-08:00

What are my parents trying to tell me with this combination of presents? I got the Global chef's knife I've been lusting after for the past few months and a box of bandaids. I mean, they are cool bandaids, and I did mention liking them, though I rarely cut myself. Perhaps all that will change now that I have this knife. The prospect of wearing what looks like a strip of raw bacon on my skin almost makes me wish I would cut myself!

Huh, I wonder what my parents would have given me if I'd asked for a gun for Christmas...

For the curious: the knife is amazing, and the free toy in with the bandaids is a little plastic pig.

Sourdough pretzels

2005-12-30T04:46:00.000-08:00

You (probably) have no idea how difficult it is to find a recipe online for real sourdough pretzels. I looked through quite a few, but most of them called for commercial yeast. How is that sourdough? I did find two that were made with a base of sourdough starter. The one I ended up using came from the rec.food.sourdough recipe FAQ.

I made a few changes based on the various pretzel recipes I read before finding this one (so what I'm posting here is not the exact recipe from the mailing-list, but it's what I used). It looks like boiling the pretzels first (bagel style!) makes them brown more evenly and have a nicer texture. I also noticed from the steam rising from the back burner that the wet pretzels also put a lot of water vapor in the air, most likely accounting for their fantastic crust. Plus it gives the salt something to stick to without going to the trouble of an egg & cream wash, though that would probably also give the pretzels a nice brown colour and a bit of a sheen.

(I may try it that way next time. The original recipe called for the pretzels to rise 30 minutes after shaping, then to be brushed with 2 tablespoons milk or heavy cream stirred together with one egg yolk, then salted and baked without the boiling.)

I altered the rising instructions from those given, partially because of my schedule, and partially because I wanted a stronger sour flavour from the dough. I had removed my white flour starter, Scully, from the fridge three days earlier and fed her a bit every twelve hours, since I wasn't sure when I'd be baking, and wanted the yeast to be at a peak as often as possible. Once I had made the dough, I let it rise in the fridge for five hours, then at room temperature for another four before rolling it out. The flavour was excellent, with a faint, but distinct sourdough taste. They go very well with mustard. (And thanks to that picture, I can now identify the paint on our dining room walls as "honey mustard yellow", but I think it's called something else entirely.)

Sourdough pretzel recipe

Yield: 20 pretzels, about 4 to 5 inches across, hard crust, soft center.
1-1/2 cups proofed batter
1 cup hot water
2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
5-1/2 cups all purpose flour

coarse sal

1. Let all ingredients and utensils come to room temperature.

2. Add the 2 tablespoons butter, the 3 tablespoons, sugar, and the 2 tsp salt to the cup of hot water. Cool to lukewarm.

3. Put the proofed batter into a warm bowl. Add the cooled water mixture.

4. Add 4 cups of flour, 1/2 cup at a time, stirring after each addition.

5. Turn out onto a floured board and knead in approximately 1-1/2 cups more of the flour. The dough will be very stiff. (gk: They ain't kiddin'!)

6. Place the dough in a greased bowl, turn over, and cover. Let set for 2 hours to proof.

7. On a board which has been scraped clean of flour break of pieces of the dough about the size of a large egg. Roll each piece out with the palm of your hands until it is about 18 inches long and about 1/2 inch in diameter. Twist into the shape of a pretzel.

8. Bring a pot of water to a rapid boil. Drop as many pretzels as will fit without touching into the water and cook about 30 seconds after they have risen to the top. (Or longer, if you like a chewier pretzel.)

9. Remove to a baking sheet and sprinkle with coarse salt.

10. Bake in a preheated 425*F oven for 15 minutes, until golden brown. Remove and cool on wire racks.

Pain à l'ancienne

2005-12-28T21:36:00.000-08:00

So the picture is not fantastic, but this pain à l'ancienne is my favourite of the breads I've made. It has gorgeous, giant air bubbles that I haven't yet achieved in my other breads, a perfect, crisp crust, soft, buttery insides, and a great taste. It's easy too, so I'm afraid I won't find much to say about it. I made it for the same Japanese visitors who enjoyed my mille crêpes, making our meal a French-American feast of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, honeyed carrots, pain à l'ancienne, and mille crêpes.

I used the recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, and only had one problem, mostly related to my own stupidity and laziness. The recipe calls for the dough (pretty thick, but not thick enough to knead) to be mixed for a certain amount of time (2 minutes, 6 minutes?) with a mixer. Now, the only mixer we have is a little hand blender that can put peaks on egg whites and make whipped cream, but would never get through anything much thicker than cake batter. So I do all my mixing by hand. Someday, someone is going to challenge me to an arm wrestling contest, and that day, I will win. But until then, I have to struggle to stir with a wooden spoon really thick bread dough long enough to form the same amount of gluten as an electric mixer for x minutes.

So, after a while, my arm was about to fall off, and I could see the dough was developing gluten. I decided to call it good enough and put it in the fridge to rise. The next day when I took it out and gently moved it to a heavily floured surface, being careful not to deflate any of the air bubbles in the dough, and it flattened out into a rectangle much larger than the 6x8 inch one I was trying for. Rolling the dough, as the recipe suggested, only caused it to flop over into an equally large rectangle on another side. So, annoyed and panicky, I folded it up. I got my 6x8 inch rectangle, but I also got a lot of floury parts folded inside. Besides having big pockets of flour (gross!) the parts touching it didn't cook as well, and it messed up my beautiful air bubbles. I think that more mixing (oh, my arm aches to think of it!) would have helped that problem. As would folding the dough before I had floured it.

Still, not every loaf had flour inside, and only parts of the affected loaves had large amounts of flour. It was a bit like a lottery. Except you just win... flour, and you don't even get to be king for a day.

The three loaves on the left were baked immediately, and the three darker loaves were sprayed with oil and left to rise another hour. Both were equally delicious, but slightly different.

Recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart

Crumpets

2005-12-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

Crumpets are sort of Important to my mom's side of the family. See, they owned a successfull salvage company based out of Toronto and Kingston, Ontario, but my great-grandfather was sort-of disowned when he went to America to try out to be pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He only made relief pitcher and ended up getting another job to support his family. (My grandfather was about five at the time.) So we have relatives in Canada, who used to come visit my mother's family, bringing fresh crumpets they'd bought early that morning. So, when my family used to go to Canada over summer vacations, we would buy fresh crumpets every year from the same bakery, and became friendly (as much as you can be, when you only see a person once a year) with the old man who owned the bakery. One year we got there and found out he had died just a few days before.

My mom's next Big Hope for crumpets was our trip early last year to Bath, England, where the owner of a bakery told my mother that "No one in England makes crumpets anymore. It's too much work. You can only get the ones they sell in stores". That is a bit hard to believe, but we kept checking bakeries and didn't find anyone who sold them. Freshly made crumpets are a world apart from the rubbery disks they sell in supermarkets, so my mom was very disappointed, because she had been talking more excitedly about getting crumpets than about anything else we might see or do in England.

So, when I came across a crumpet recipe in one of the first books I borrowed from the library on baking bread, I decided I'd make it. That's when my mom told me that my grandmother and several other relatives, all of whom are accomplished cooks and bakers, had tried and failed to make crumpets. Hm. I was daunted, but kept going on about cast iron griddles (necessary for making crumpets, and what my pappy (maternal grandfather) used to make the best pancakes I've ever had) until my mother finally bought me one. I said I thought the crumpet recipe looked like it would work, so my mom bought me English muffin rings and I tried everything out once when everyone was out. (I cook and bake best when no one is around.)

I lost my first batch of four crumpets for a couple reasons:
1. I had the skillet too hot, so the bottom burnt before the rest cooked through.
2. I hadn't greased the skillet, because the recipe said not to, but you really should.
3. The four crumpet rings took up so much room, I couldn't maneuver a spatula to flip them.

Those first four went down the garbage disposal, but the batter was nice and bubbly, like the recipe said it should be, so I tried it again, two at a time, at a lower temperature, and they worked fine.

My mother and sister were leaving to visit family on Christmas day, and I said I'd make them crumpets to take along for my grandma and aunt, since they missed having good ones. I had promised to make stollen for Christmas breakfast too, and at 5am when I finished that, I realised I'd have to stay up all night to get the crumpets done in time for mom to take on her noon flight. The only problem: we'd run out of yeast and everything was closed for Christmas. After thinking about it for a little too long, I finally came up with the idea of borrowing some from the neighbours whose cats I'm watching. I found it after a short walk in the cold and a brief search, but when I got home again, I noticed we were out of all purpose flour. We have loads of bread flour and at least five or six other kinds, but were out of the normal stuff. How very typically me. So it was back to the neighbours' for a cup of flour. At 5am.

I got everything all right, though it seemed like an awfully big hassle for that time of night, with no sleep. I will call that the reason I misread the recipe and measured out finely ground sea salt in a measurement intended for coarse sea salt. The crumpets came out a bit salty, but still tasted good with a sweet topping. I'm told they were a hit with my relatives.

(The salt thing is a complaint I have with The Bread Book; it always gives salt measurements in coarse salt to then be ground or crushed. Seriously, who does that? And wouldn't it be easier to give measurements for the ground salt, so those who do crush their own could measure it once they'd crushed it, and the rest of us would not be confused? I mean, people make fun of me for being uppity with ingredients and using fresh things, but even I don't crush my own sea salt...)

Crumpets
From The Bread Book by Linda Collister & Anthony Blake

Ingredients:
(makes about 18)
2 cups (230g) unbleached white bread flour
1 2/3 cups (230g) unbleached all purpose flour
¾ teaspoon cream of tartar
1 0.6oz cake fresh yeast (15g) or 1 envelope active dry yeast (2 ¼ teaspoons) plus ½ teaspoon sugar
2 ¼ cups (510ml) lukewarm water
3 ½ teaspoons (10g) coarse sea salt, crushed or ground (gk: use about half this if you're not grinding your own coarse sea salt -- or, y'know, if you're measuring by weight, not volume, you're fine.)
½ teaspoon baking soda
2/3 cup (140ml) lukewarm milk

a griddle or cast-iron frying pan
4 crumpet rings, about 3 ½ inches diameter, greased.

Instructions:

o Sift together the flours and cream of tartar into a large bowl. Crumble the fresh yeast into a medium-sized bowl. Mix in the lukewarm water until smooth. If using dry yeast, mix the granules and the sugar with ¾ cup lukewarm water and let stand until foamy, 5 to 10 minutes. Stir in the remaining lukewarm water.

o Mix the yeast mixture into the flour to make a very thick, but smooth batter, beating vigorously with your hand or a wooden spoon for two minutes. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let stand in a warm spot until the batter rises and then falls, about 1 hour.

o Add the salt and beat the batter for about 1 minute. Then cover the bowl and let stand in a warm spot for 15 to 20 minutes, so the batter can “rest”.
o Dissolve the baking soda in the lukewarm milk. Then gently stir it into t he batter. The batter should not be too stiff or your crumpets will be “blind” -- without holes – so it is best to test one before cooking the whole batch.

o Heat an ungreased (gk: oiled!), very clean griddle or frying pan over moderately low heat for about 3 minutes until very hot. Put a well-greased crumpet ring on the griddle. Spoon or pour 1/3 cup of the batter into the ring. The amount of batter will depend on the size of your crumpet ring.

o As soon as the batter is poured into the ring, it should begin to form holes. If holes do not form, add a little more lukewarm water, a tablespoon at a time, to the batter in the bowl and try again. If the batter is too thin and runs out under the ring, gently work in a little more all-purpose flour and try again. Once the batter is the proper consistency, continue with the remaining batter, cooking the crumpets in batches, three or four at a time. As soon as the top surface is set and covered with holes, 7 to 8 minutes, the crumpet is ready to flip over.

o To flip the crumpet, remove the ring with a towel or tongs, then turn the crumpet carefully with a spatula. The top, cooked side should be chestnut brown. Cook the second, holey side of the crumpet for 2 to 3 minutes, or until pale golden. The crumpet should be about ¾ inch thick. Remove the crumpet from the griddle. Grease the crumpet rings well after each use.

Stollen

2005-12-28T21:13:00.000-08:00

In my last entry I celebrated (?) my English heritage with crumpets, and now I can flaunt my more significant German heritage with Stollen. (Plus I live in Wisconsin, where every meal is a bratwurst, sauerkraut and beer.)(Not really, but we can dream.) Unfortunately, my own German grandma doesn't really cook or bake (and is technically of Dutch descent, but I'm told her mother was amazing) so I have no family recipes for this sort of thing, and have to steal them from other German-Americans. Or books, as was the case this time. Specifically, my recent favourite, The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

For the fruit, I used candied citron, dried apricots, dried cherries, dried cranberries, and golden raisins. The recipe offered two sets of instructions on rolling the dough up, and I went for the simpler approach because, at 4:30am, the one that involved rolling the middle of the dough with a rolling pin, then folding in the two thicker edges seemed way too complicated, though it is admittedly prettier. I made the dough into two loaves, one with slivered almonds inside, and one with marzipan (but not everyone in my family likes it as much as I do).

The only changes I made to the recipe were to brush the outside with butter, not oil, and to first coat it in vanilla sugar, then powdered sugar. I'd seen an advertisement for stollen prepared in that manner, and thought it sounded pretty good. It was.

Recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart

Mille Crêpes

2005-12-22T10:54:00.000-08:00

We had guests over for dinner this evening, so I was allowed to make a fancy dessert. The guests were from Japan, so I thought of the mille crêpes cakes I had often had during my stay in Tokyo. The first time I'd seen the cakes was after a particularly bad day at school when I hadn't felt like going straight home and stopped in a chain cafe not far from the subway station. I got my usual iced latte and saw the cake in the display. In Japanese it was ミルクレープ, which I had not identified as French, and assumed the first three characters spelled out "milk", leaving the rest to be "rape". Despite the odd name, it looked really good, so I went ahead and ordered a slice. This misreading affected the intonation with which I ordered the cake, but hey, I'm white, so no one really expects my intonation to be right anyway. I loved my "milk rape" -- light, fluffy crêpes with layers of even lighter, even fluffier vanilla cream inbetween them -- and ended up ordering a slice after a lot of bad days. The strawberry version was delicious too.

When I came back to America, I never saw anywhere selling them, and figured they, like the delicious yuki-ichigo (雪苺娘), were something I would probably not have again. But I thought of them recently when I was trying to come up with an idea for a dessert combining Earl Grey and chocolate. My original idea had been to have chocolate crêpes with Earl Grey cream, but my chocolate crêpes are never as chocolatey as I'd like, though I'd had success with Earl Grey baked goods. I also couldn't think of how to make a really flavourful Earl Grey cream without bergamot essence or something. So I switched it around.

The crêpes are fantastic. Nearly perfect. This recipe is not as light and fluffy as the ones I had in Japan, which made the cake a little harder to cut through with a fork. I think I would need to do something with whipped egg whites to get that softness. The flavour, however, blows Japan's away. (And no one minds using a knife to cut it.) Even without the Earl Grey flavour, this crêpe recipe has a much richer flavour than the almost-fake tasting crêpes sold in Tokyo's street-side stands.

The Japanese recipes I found for Mille Crêpes all used a custard cream as filling, so I just made a custard with some cornstarch, sugar, milk, egg yolks and chocolate chips. It tasted fine, good even, and everyone was suitably impressed, but to perfect the recipe, I would look for something fluffier (a mousse maybe), and flavour it with cocoa powder, to give it a lighter, slightly bitter flavour that would better complement the Earl Grey. Should anyone choose to attempt this, I would recommend they try for what I've described above, but any chocolate mousse or custard would be delicious. I sprinkled cocoa powder on top as a decoration.

Most mille crêpes use a stack of 20 crêpes with cream between each one, but my recipe came up a bit short, and my sister wanted me to set aside a few for her to eat plain, so my cake is not as towering as some I've seen.

Earl Grey Crêpes

(Recipe based on the recipe for "crêpes de froment" from Cuisine Bretonne.)
Makes about 14 crêpes.

- 2 c. white flour (250 g.)
- 3 T. wheat flour
- a pinch of salt
- 1 egg
- ½ c. sugar (100 g.)
- ½ c. butter (100 g.)
- about 1 c. cold steeped Earl Grey tea (25 cl.)
- about 1 c. milk (25 cl.)
- 1 t. ground Earl Grey tea leaves
- 1 T. Grand Marnier
- 2 T. brandy

1.Melt the ½ c. butter.
2.Mix the two flours in a large bowl. Form a well in the centre, and add the salt, egg, and sugar, and begin mixing it into the flours, adding the cold tea slowly.
3.Now add the milk to the batter (the exact quantity will depend on the flour) and continue stirring until you have a smooth fluid batter.
4.Add the melted butter along with the ground tea leaves, Grand Marnier, and the brandy. Let the batter rest 2 hours, if possible.

Stir the batter once more before cooking. So, here the recipe and I differ. It wants you to cook the crêpes in a sort of complex way involving semi-salted butter, clarified butter, and half a potato on a long fork, but I do it the way I was shown in France.

I put a pancake griddle (I find the sides of crêpe pans get in the way, and I end up with thick crêpes) on the range on high, then turn it down to medium-high once it's hot enough that water boils immediately on it. I pour a generous amount of oil on a paper towel and wipe the griddle with that to start, and between each crepe, to clear the surface of little stuck bits of the previous crêpe and keep the surface oiled.

I put about 1/3 c. of batter on the griddle, then spread it into a thin circle using one of the wooden tools that came with our wok. (If I were really good, I guess I could use the bottom of the ladle, and it'd be nice if I had one of those flat crêpe tools, but I made do with what I have.) Once the surface is cooked through, I flip it. If it's ready to flip, it'll come up pretty nicely, though I always lose the first one, and often the first two.

Hawaiian/Portugese Bread

2005-12-20T02:21:00.000-08:00

I always knew this as Hawaiian bread, but its introduction in Bread Baker's Apprentice informs me that it is actually of Portugese origin. Either way, it is pretty fantastic stuff. I first tried it when I was in high school and baby-sitting some neighbours with my sister. The kids (who are now frighteningly grown-up) were surprised we'd never tried it, and insisted we do so because it was so good. This was King's packaged, store-bought Hawaiian bread too, nothing fancy. But we tried it, and it was like crack for us -- it's soft, sweet, and slightly fruity, what's not to love? Plus it was way too unhealthy to be allowed in our house, so it was a bit of a forbidden pleasure. The closest thing we ever had to white bread was country oat. Still, mom's work paid off, and now my favourite breads have more whole grains, more seeds, and fewer unhealthy ingredients even than anything she had us eat. My mom and sister still really like oat breads though, so I'll probably be making some one of these days.

In some ways, it seems to defeat the purpose of having a baking blog when I am doing nothing but make breads from recipes lately, as anyone could do just as well. Still, I have tried making my own breads and, while it does work, I know I need to learn more. Besides, I might as well use these cookbooks while I still have them checked out of the library.

I only made one change to the recipe, which is the work of years of experimentation by bakers who grew up eating good Hawaiian bread, and that was to substitute Grand Marnier for the orange extract. We have lemon extract, which I'll be using when I finally get around to making a stollen (though that won't be until new year's, most likely, because there is no candied citron to be had, even for ready money and it had to be ordered online) but I can't imagine myself using either lemon or orange extract very often and didn't want to buy both just for this bread. There is a nearly unused bottle of mint extract in the spice cabinet too. But getting back to the Hawaiian bread, I did make one other deviation from the instructions and gave it a very long second rise while I was sleeping. It doesn't seem to have hurt anything, though it's possible the bread could have been lighter and fluffier if I'd caught it just as the yeast had peaked.

The bread came out beautifully, and thanks to two friends who came over to have some with tea this afternoon, we've finished both loaves in a day. It makes a fantastic ham sandwich, as well as being delicious plain (or with butter or apricot jam).

Recipe from: The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart.

Experimental Pumpkin Pies

2005-12-15T06:37:00.000-08:00

I am very, very responsible and task-oriented, which is why I spent seven hours on Halloween baking pies when I had a big translation deadline coming up later that week. Just so you don't get it into your head that I'm easily distracted or anything. This post is a little out-of-season, since I didn't bother starting this blog until well after both Halloween and Thanksgiving, the only two acceptable days for eating pumpkin pie, had passed. I am just trying to catch up on some of my past accomplishments to make my blog look more established. I'd back-date entries if only I could figure out how. Anyway, on to the pies!

Starting with the yellowish one and moving clockwise, they are: Pumpkin orange spice custard pie, Pumpkin apple pie, Pumpkin pie with chocolate shell, and Curried pumpkin pie.

We had a sugar/pie pumpkin, which I baked, then pureed to make pumpkin puree. I made the pumpkin pie filling recipe on the back of a can of Libby's canned pumpkin, then used that as a base for all the pies.

The long-named pumpkin orange spice custard pie was generally the most popular. Comments were generally along the lines of "Whoa, that's orange!", "Oh my god that's delicious", and "I've never had anything remotely like this." It's light and fruity, and the pumpkin is so subtle as to be unnoticeable, but it does a nice job of rounding out and softening the orange and blending it with the spices. I think that's the most descriptive comment I've ever made about food. It's not technically a custard, because we ran out of eggs, but it is a very rich pudding.

The pumpkin apple pie is basically the recipe from this month's Penzey's spice catalogue. Well, they provided a crust recipe and one for the pumpkin filling, but I just used my own on both counts. The idea is stolen, is all. The apples are chopped and cooked in butter, brown sugar and cinnamon, then there is pumpkin filling on top and it tastes delicious together. Perfect for those who can't decide what kind of autumn holiday pie to have.

The pumpkin pie with a chocolate shell is just a regular pumpkin pie, baked and cooled, with a shell of melted chocolate spread over the top. The white chocolate looks like crap because I got water in while I was melting it (twice!) and was too lazy and frugal to melt more. I was inspired by Godiva Chocolates' dark chocolate pumpkin truffle. Their pumpkin filling is too sweet for my tastes, and I think my pie works better as a pumpkin/chocolate combination.

The curried pumpkin pie was based on a curry/cinnamon sweet dish I made with squash. I had originally intended to add just enough curry to give it a little 'warmth' like that dish had had, but I ended up adding a lot, and some cumin too, so it's quite spicy. I liked it, and think it's very interesting, and everyone who tried it liked it fairly well, but some said it would go better as a side dish than a dessert. To which I pull my beret down over my face, comment in a breaking voice that no one understands my art, and walk out. Spicy desserts are the future!

Recipes, as best I can manage.

Pumpkin Orange Spice Custard Pie
(Makes two small tarts)

Blind bake two small tart crusts.

In medium saucepan, whisk two eggs, 1/3 cup sugar, 1/3 cup fresh-squeezed orange juice, 1 T grated orange peel, 2 T pumpkin pie filling, 1 Tahitian vanilla bean - split and scraped, 2 t cornstarch, pumpkin pie spices to taste. Add 1/3 cup butter and heat until mixture thickens, but do not allow to boil. Mix in 1/3 cup half and half and another 2 T pumpkin pie filling. Whisk until thick and smooth and beginning to bubble. Pour into pie crusts and allow to cool.

Penzeys Apple Pumpkin Pie

Apple pie or pumpkin pie? Can’t decide? This is the pie for you. A layer of tart apples in a caramel sauce covered with a layer of traditional pumpkin. Add some fresh whipped cream and you’re in heaven.

Crust: Makes one 9 inch crust
1⁄2 Cup butter or shortening
1 Cup all-purpose flour
1⁄2 tsp. CREAM OF TARTAR
1⁄2 tsp. salt
1⁄4 Cup milk

Filling:
1⁄3 Cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1 TB. ARROWROOT STARCH
1 tsp. CHINA CINNAMON, divided
1⁄2 tsp. salt, divided
1 tsp. PURE VANILLA EXTRACT
1⁄3 Cup water
2 TB. butter
3 Cups Granny Smith or McIntosh apples, peeled and sliced about 1/8 inch thick (about 3 apples)
3⁄4 Cup canned solid packed pumpkin
3⁄4 Cup evaporated milk
1⁄3 Cup sugar
1 egg, beaten

Preheat oven to 375°. To prepare the crust, cut the butter into small pieces; it doesn’t have to be cold, but it should not be warm to the point of melting. Add
the flour, CREAM OF TARTAR, and salt, beat or mix by hand to combine. Add the milk in a thin stream, mixing until thoroughly blended. Sprinkle a wooden board or counter top with fl our, place the dough on the board, and sprinkle the top of the dough with fl our. Using short strokes with a rolling pin, roll it from the center to the edges until it is 1⁄8 to 1⁄4 inch thick. You will want to turn the dough over and re-dust with fl our halfway through. Roll until the crust is about an inch larger than your 9 inch pie pan when inverted. Fold the crust in half and in half again so that it looks like a triangle. Place it in the ungreased pie pan with the point in the center. Unfold the crust and ease it into the pan. Roll the edges of the overhanging crust under so that you have a nice rim around the pie plate. Set aside.

In a roomy skillet, combine the brown sugar, ARROWROOT STARCH, 1⁄2 tsp. CINNAMON, and 1⁄4 tsp. salt. Add the PURE VANILLA EXTRACT, water and butter and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. The mixture will thicken, creating a caramel sauce. Add the apples and continue cooking over medium heat for 4-5 minutes, stirring constantly. Pour the mixture into the unbaked pie crust and set aside. In a mixing bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, evaporated milk, sugar, egg, 1⁄2 tsp. CINNAMON, and 1⁄4 tsp. salt. Pour over the apple layer. Bake at 375° for 50 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean. Check the crust occasionally; if it looks too brown, cover the edges with foil. Cool completely before cutting. This pie should be refrigerated.

Serves: 8-12
Prep. time: 20 minutes
Baking time: 50 minutes

Pumpkin pie with chocolate shell

Make a pumpkin pie using your favourite recipe. Melt enough dark or semi-sweet chocolate with a little butter in a double boiler to coat top. Spread over top with a spoon and cool in refrigerator. If desired, melt a small amount of white chocolate and make designs with a toothpick (before cooling, obviously).

Curried pumpkin pie

Add curry, cumin, and turmeric as desired to pumpkin pie filling. Stir, then bake according to your favourite pumpkin pie recipe. (I used about 1 T curry, 1/2 t cumin and a pinch of cayenne pepper for two small tarts.)

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low fat meals

Pain d'Épi

2005-12-15T02:34:00.000-08:00

The next best thing after making bread that tastes fantastic is making bread that looks really cool. While I have more than a healthy appreciation for a perfectly browned, thick crust with little crust bubbles showing a long, slow rise, I also enjoy the fun and showy shapes that people just don't make much in America. I made these on a whim one night after someone had posted a question to a baking community I read asking how to shape the epi loaf. I found this PDF that explains it (with pictures!) much better than I could do here.

For the bread, I used this recipe, which is totally inauthentic, but pretty tasty, and good in a pinch when you don't have good flour or time to let the dough rise overnight. I can see I should have cut at a lower angle, and kept the angle more consistent throughout. Rolling the dough out into a thinner baguette would have helped as well. All in all though, it's not bad for a first try, and it tasted pretty good.

Though, I would make this with a more authentic recipe in the future. Because each grain-piece is so thin, it cooks very quickly and burns easily. Plus it ends up with a higher crust to crumb ratio than an ordinary baguette, so choosing a recipe with a fantastic crust would be a good idea. Brushing it with oil instead of just water (or did I use egg...?) would probably help in making a better crust too, along with the usual spraying of water during baking.

Pane Siciliano

2005-12-15T02:28:00.000-08:00

So this is the last 'back post' I'm going to do before moving on to current baking projects. This isn't even that old; I made it on Tuesday and there's still half a roll left in the kitchen (though it's too stale for anything but toast.)

Recently, I've been trying making up my own bread recipes, with moderate success. Last week I made two loaves, one a sourdough made with rice and wheat flour, and the other an attempt at some pain au maïs I had in France. I forgot to add any salt to the sourdough rice bread, but it was still edible, despite being made with only flour and water. The bread made with cornmeal was also good, especially with berry jam, but it wasn't as flavourful as what I'd had in France. My improvised sourdough sauerkraut red onion bread was also good, but not what I had been hoping for. Still, I am impressed it's possible to improvise with bread recipes at all, and I am pleased with my progress.

Just after making those, I started reading Peter Reinhart's books on baking bread. I found both incredibly helpful because they focus on general methods to make any loaf of bread better, instead of just offering recipes. They also explain what makes breads turn out how they do, and how to get your desired results.

I decided to make the Pane Siciliano mostly because the shape was so cute, but it also would offer me practise in retarding the rising of the dough to increase flavour and in shaping the dough without degassing too many of the bubbles that formed in the first rise to give it a nice uneven crumb. I was slightly annoyed though that his recipe called for a special pâte fermenté made with commercial yeast. I had my nice sourdough starters, and I wanted to use them, dammit!

So I took Scully out of the fridge, added more flour to give her the thicker consistency it looked like the pâte fermenté would have, and let her sit out a few hours for the wild yeast to activate, but not so long that it would give my bread a very sour flavour. Apart from that one change, I followed the recipe exactly (as far as I can remember).

I rolled the dough out into baguettes, then coiled those up into the 'occhi di Santa Lucia' shape. I sprayed them with water to hold the sesame seeds on, then with oil to make the crust delicious and let them take over an entire shelf of the fridge for 12 hours before baking.

That's the loaves just before baking. They were baked with a water bath and frequent mistings of water on the walls of the oven to create humidity, and when they were done, I had gorgeous crust with the bubbling that tastes so good. The bread is delicious -- you can taste the subtle flavour of the honey and olive oil in the dough. It would have been interesting to try it with a higher quality olive oil and raw French honey for a stronger flavour.

Recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.

Very Vanilla Scones

2005-12-15T02:25:00.000-08:00

I ended up making scones tonight because my sister wanted a dessert after dinner. She commented I hadn't made scones for a while (I used to make them about once a week) so we decided on that, since they're quick and easy. They sort of look like an invading army in the photo though. My original name for them included an expletive, but I decided to settle for alliteration in the final version. Woe.

I used the scone recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook (Classy, I know.) as a base, as I almost always do. I substituted margarine for butter and soy milk for half and half because we hate ourselves my sister can't eat dairy products. Even so, there is only one place in town I know that makes better scones, and I'm sure they're not dairy-free.

I used vanilla sugar for all three tablespoons of the sugar the recipe called for, added a teaspoon of vanilla, which I adjusted for by adding less milk, and scraped the seeds out of two Tahitian vanilla beans. Two whole beans may have been a bit excessive, but I have nearly 50 of them. I had intended to make vanilla vodka and vanilla extract, but I don't have enough money to justify buying the alcohol, so I'm very generous with the vanilla in baking instead.

I considered putting candied ginger pieces in the scones, as a sort of replacement for the currants, but ended up not doing it. If I were really smart, I would have put the ginger in half of them. Maybe I'll try it next time. As is, they were extremely good. They taste a lot like these butter cookies my sister and I used to eat -- they taste sort of like shortbread, but with vanilla, and they're shaped as rings with scalloped edges. Only the scones are warm and soft and don't have that funny preservative taste.

Very Vanilla Scones
1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons vanilla sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup butter
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4-6 tablespoons half and half
1/2 cup candied ginger (optional)

Measure the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Cut the butter in, until it is in pea-sized pieces. Add the egg and vanilla extract and stir, (add the ginger, if desired) then gradually add the half and half until the dough forms a ball in the centre of the bowl. The recipe suggests you knead the dough 15 times, then press it out and cut the scones with a biscuit cutter, but I prefer to just ball up the dough, then form scones by tearing off pieces and dropping it. I suppose I prefer that rustic look. Or I'm just lazy. The recipe also says it makes 15 scones, but I usually make 6-8. I know tea and scones are supposed to be dainty, but making 15 scones from this recipe is only appropriate for a doll's tea party. Bake 10-12 minutes in a 400* oven until the middle is cooked and the tops are golden brown. Spread with jam, butter, or Devon cream and enjoy.

The Sourdough Saga Thusfar

2005-11-27T10:48:00.000-08:00

As part of my goal to make good bread without a recipe, I've made two sourdough starters. I started them September 29th, so they're fairly well-established now, though I haven't made as many loaves off them as I should like. One is white flour, and named Scully, and the other is a wheat flour starter named Mulder. (When I get around to making other starters with rye, grape skins, or beer, they will also be named after characters from The X-Files.)

I had my share of problems in trying to get them started. Being the somewhat-obsessive person I am, I read as much as I could find about making sourdough, but only ended up with a lot of conflicting information. The problem is that it's a very delicate process and varies a lot depending on the environment, which causes people to become very adamant that the method that worked for them is the only correct way to do it. It doesn't help that there are few pictures online of the various stages in the process, and that written descriptions of the appearance and smell a good sourdough starter should have tend to be vague and confusing.

I bought organic flours to start them, though I've been feeding them non-organic flours lately. What worked for me was to take one cup each of flour and water and let that sit out in a bowl, lightly covered with a paper towel. I added 1/2 cup each flour and water every 12 hours, removing an equal amount of starter. There were bubbles on the surface, so I knew it was working, but neither had the 'good sourdough smell' various websites and books told me it would have. Scully smelled like vinegar, and Mulder smelled a bit like vomit. I worried about it, but kept going with them because I'd named them already. After about a week, I moved them to jars in the fridge and started feeding them weekly.

Just before putting them in the refrigerator, I tried baking a loaf of bread with Scully. It was a simple white bread recipe I'd found on one of the websites I'd read for instructions on starting sourdough. It did not rise at all, despite my leaving it out over 12 hours. I went ahead and baked it anyway, and ended up with a rock-hard mass of delicious-tasting sourdough bread.

My next three attempts were similar, until a friend with some experience baking with sourdough offered some tips. She recommended the book listed on the side, World Sourdoughs From Antiquity, and told me how to catch the starter as it was peaking to bake. When the yeast in the starter is at its strongest, the top few inches will be foamy with air bubbles. I thought it looked a lot like tapioca pudding. I tried making the most basic recipe from that book (recipe below) with my starter at this point, and it rose perfectly and baked into the loaf above. Because of the addition of butter and milk to the dough, it ended up being very soft, like a normal bread, while I had been hoping for the dense, chewy crumb of an artisanal loaf. But that would come.

Knowing more about the process of baking sourdough, I went back to try a French Country Sourdough (Recipe from The Bread Book.) I had failed to make twice before. It was one of the few recipes I found that called for a wheat starter. The ingredients are also nothing more than flour, water, and salt, so it was closer to what I was looking for, though I'd definitely cut back on the salt next time. (3 1/2 tablespoons is waaay too much for one loaf of bread.)

I have also improvised a few loaves of bread, including a sauerkraut & red onion bread everyone but me enjoyed, and I've substituted my starter for pâte fermenté in other recipes with success.

World Sourdoughs from Antiquity by Ed Wood (not that Ed Wood)
World Sourdough Bread
-makes 2 loaves

4 cups culture from the first proof
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons sugar
6 cups white bread flour

save and refrigerate 1 cup of culture from the first proof before proceeding.

1. Measure the culture into a large mixing bowl. Melt the butter over moderate heat (or melt in microwave). Add the milk to the butter and warm briefly (to 75 or 85 degrees), add the salt and sugar, and stir until dissolved. Add this mixture to the culture and mix well.

2. Add the flour, one cup at a time, stirring until the dough is too stiff to mix by hand. Turn onto a floured board and knead in the remaining flour until the dough is smooth and satiny. Divide the dough in half and form 2 balls.

3. Pat each ball into a 1-inch thick oval and form loaves by rolling the ovals up from the long side, pinching the seam together as you roll the dough to form the loaf.

4. Place in loaf pans and proof, covered, at 85* for 1 1/2 to 3 hours (mine took about 4 hours -gk) When the dough rises 1 to 2 inches above the edges of the pan, it is ready to bake.

5. Preheat the oven to 375*. Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350* and bake an additional 45 minutes.

6. Remove loaves from the oven and brush the tops lightly with melted butter. Turn the loaves out of the pans and cool on a wire rack.

(To let the loaves rise, I turned the oven on to warm for about 1 minute, so it would be about 90*, then turned it off. I reheated the oven like this a couple times over the 4 hours they sat. Then I would suggest slitting the tops so they stay pretty... And I left the loaves in the oven while it preheated to 375* so they would get one last rise, and let them stay in 8 or 9 minutes after the oven had heated all the way.

I would also suggest making half a recipe, unless you have loads of starter and want two loaves. But half would have been just as nice, I think.)

Hazelnut Chocolate Rolls, or the Best Kind of Leftovers

2005-11-27T02:41:00.000-08:00

Because I hadn't had my recipe set for my mother's birthday cake, I ended up buying extra ingredients, just in case something went wrong, or I had another idea. I also ended up buying way too many hazelnuts, which, incidentally, are only sold here as 'filberts' in 2oz bags. Not too convenient or frugal when you're buying a pound of them. So, I found myself with an excess of good quality chocolate, ground hazelnuts, and some hazelnut buttercream frosting. I also had a meeting of the Madison Japanese Association to attend, and needed to bring a dish to pass.

I somehow came up with the idea of making cinnamon rolls with a hazelnut chocolate filling instead of cinnamon (so they weren't cinnamon rolls at all) topped with the buttercream frosting, using up leftovers and making a delicious, and hopefully impressive dish to pass, all in one fell swoop!

I made my yeast dough recipe, cut up the chocolate and ground it into fine chunks in the food processor, added the leftover ground hazelnut, some powdered sugar, Frangelico, egg white, and vanilla yoghurt, then spread that on the dough, rolled it up, baked it, and frosted it. Unfortunately, I have no idea how much chocolate or hazelnut I used, but it was similar to the filling recipe of the cake, and it doesn't matter much anyway, as long as it's not too runny. Some butter might have been nice, even.

Sweet Yeast Dough Recipe [source]

2 eggs, well beaten
¼ C. milk
1 pkg. (or 1 Tb.) dry yeast
¼ C. warm water
½ C. softened butter
¼ C. sugar
½ tsp. Salt
1 tsp. Grated lemon peel
2 C. flour, more if needed

1. Pour lukewarm water, yeast, and sugar in mixing bowl.
2. Add melted (not hot) butter, warmed milk, salt, lemon peel, and beaten eggs. Mix well.

3. Add flour, 1 cup at a time, mixing well after each cup. Add more flour, if necessary, to make a smooth dough, and turn out onto a floured surface.
4. Knead very lightly.

5. Let rise for about 1 hour; punch down and let rest for 10 minutes.

(gk: In this case, I left out the grated lemon peel.)

Hazelnut Chocolate Cake

2005-11-26T06:55:00.000-08:00

I've been working at improving my baking and cooking skills since I got back from France, so about a week before my mom's birthday in September, she asked me to make her birthday dessert.

And so I spent a couple of days looking at recipes, trying to decide what kind of chocolate hazelnut cake I would make. I knew I wanted the richest, most fantastically chocolate cake with a layer of hazelnut inside that would be both crunchy and a little bit gooey, and hazelnut buttercream frosting. My mother was expecting a normal chocolate cake with hazelnut frosting, so I wanted to go all out and make a fancy layer cake. The only problem was that, while Epicurious provided a nice cake recipe, and the frosting was easy enough to figure out, I couldn't find any idea of how to make the filling I wanted. I ended up winging it the day of.

The cake went well enough - there were just a few hitches. Our round cake pans were 9" and not 10", like the recipe wanted, so it ended up being a little high in the pan. I had expected it to just rise up in the centre, like cakes tend to, and I could just cut off the mound, layer, and frost, but instead, it rose evenly in the pans, spilling out inside the oven. (Note to self: Always put a pan under.) I cleaned up the bulk of the batter from the oven, but had to leave a lot there to burn while the cakes finished baking.

For the hazelnuts, I had found recipes for hazelnut praline, which looked similar to what I wanted, and one recipe that called for cereal to be blended in the food processor with the nuts and sugar. I had hoped this would give it the crunch I wanted, and tried a small sample, but the cereal just made it bland. I was also worried about it getting soggy, so I was pleased to see the nuts, egg whites, and powdered sugar alone gave it a nice texture. I just ended up adding a bit of vanilla yoghurt to make it spreadable, and it worked perfectly.

This is without a doubt the best cake I have ever had. The chocolate cake is rich and moist, and the hazelnut complements it very well. (Naturally.) I joked with my family that it was rich enough to kill three bears (and it may very well be). This is the cake that got me my "Foppish Baker" name, and inspired me to continue baking. My mom brought leftovers in to some people at her office, and now they've become my taste testers. A couple have said I should become a professional baker, but flattering as that is, and fun as it might be, I'm afraid I'm too perfectionistic and slow-working to do very well at that. This cake took me four hours to make.

Recipe

Chocolate Hazelnut Layer Cake

12 oz hazelnuts (filberts)

Spread hazelnuts evenly in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Bake in a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes, stirring once or twice to ensure they cook evenly. Set aside 12 hazelnuts for decorating the cake.

3 ounces fine-quality semisweet chocolate such as Callebaut (gk: I used a 4oz bar of Ghirardelli semisweet chocolate, and reserved the extra 1oz to melt and coat the hazelnuts for the top.)

1 1/2 cups hot brewed coffee
3 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups unsweetened cocoa powder (not Dutch process)
2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
3 large eggs
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups well-shaken buttermilk
3/4 teaspoon vanilla (gk: I substituted Frangelico for this.)
two 10- by 2-inch round cake pans

Preheat oven to 300°F. and grease pans. Line bottoms with rounds of wax paper and grease paper.

Finely chop chocolate and in a bowl combine with hot coffee. Let mixture stand, stirring occasionally, until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth.

Into a large bowl sift together sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. In another large bowl with an electric mixer beat eggs until thickened slightly and lemon colored (about 3 minutes with a standing mixer or 5 minutes with a hand-held mixer). Slowly add oil, buttermilk, vanilla (Frangelico), and melted chocolate mixture to eggs, beating until combined well. Add sugar mixture and beat on medium speed until just combined well. Divide batter between pans and bake in middle of oven until a tester inserted in center comes out clean, 1 hour to 1 hour and 10 minutes.

Cool layers completely in pans on racks. Run a thin knife around edges of pans and invert layers onto racks. Carefully remove wax paper and cool layers completely. Cake layers may be made 1 day ahead and kept, wrapped well in plastic wrap, at room temperature.

1 oz semisweet chocolate
12 hazelnuts
1 tablespoon butter

Melt finely chopped chocolate with butter in a metal bowl above a pot of simmering water. Dip each hazelnut in the chocolate, then set on a plate to chill in the refrigerator.

roasted hazelnuts
1 cup powdered sugar
1 ½ teaspoons Frangelico
2 egg whites
2 generous spoonfuls vanilla yoghurt

Coarsely chop roasted hazelnuts, then grind to a mealy consistency in a food processor. (There should have been about 2 cups of whole hazelnuts to start with.) Set aside one spoonful of ground hazelnuts for decorating. Add powdered sugar, Frangelico, and egg whites and mix to a thick paste. Add yoghurt and mix, adding more if needed to reach desired consistency. Put in a covered bowl and store in the refrigerator.

Place bottom layer of cake on a plate and spread the hazelnut paste evenly on top of it. Cover with the other layer of cake, using the paste to fill in any holes and create a smooth surface for frosting.

2/3 cup butter, room temperature
4 tablespoons Frangelico
6 cups powdered sugar
5-6 tablespoons evaporated milk (or half and half)

Cream butter with an electric mixer at medium speed. Add Frangelico. Gradually add confectioners’ sugar, alternating with half-and-half, beginning and ending with powdered sugar. Beat until mixture reaches spreading consistency.

Divide the frosting into two bowls. Frost the cake with from one bowl, then clean the spatula and cover with remaining frosting, to avoid crumbs. Arrange the chocolate-covered hazelnuts evenly around the top of cake, and sprinkle the ground hazelnuts in the middle.