December 30, 2011 - French Bread...flour, water, yeast, salt.
The French Bread recipe is very similar to the Lean Bread, more salt and less water. There is also some slight variations in the technique. Mixing starts the same, this time using the dough hook instead of the paddle, and it worked much better. Then he wants us to do some hand kneading...I am thinking "I have a fancy mixer why do I need to get my hands all gummed up?". OK...so I was wrong, not about the gummy hands...that is definitely something to work on. Also the dough sticking to the table, but it really was nice to work the dough...with my gummy hands even.
Another interesting thing with this recipe...for some reason the last step reads a lot clearer to me...it says if you aren't going to bake everything at once divide it now and stick it in the fridge overnight. This actually was a bit of a hiccup because first of all I only have one glass bowl that I figured to be big enough to hold the doubled up dough. So I put half of it in a stainless steel mixing bowl. Next I didn't have room on the shelf for both bowls, so the stainless bowl went in the crisper. This morning it appeared that the dough in the glass bowl was significantly bigger than the metal bowl. Either of these variations could have caused the difference or it could be there was no difference and not being able to see into the bowl from the side distorted things. Also I just eyeballed "half" so it is possible that there was just less dough in the metal bowl. I am not really stressing about it, but I am looking into getting two matching "fermentation vessels".
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Lean Bread
So the family is sending me a message that reads something like..."hey we think it is cool that you are making bread...now make some that doesn't suck". Maybe that is not the message they intended to send, but that is the message I received...
They gave me two books...artisan breads every day by Peter Reinhart and another one put out by a chain restaurant. I was not all that impressed with the chain book so we took it back to the store. I wasn't planning to get another bread book, but I found another one by the same author called Crust and Crumb that looked interesting and was sporting a James Beard award so I went ahead and got it. When I started this bread baking journey one of the books I looked at was The Bread Baker's Apprentice also written by Peter Reinhart. I guess this is like THE book to have if you are serious about becoming a baker, so I figure this guy Reinhart knows his stuff. The problem for me with The Bread Baker's Apprentice was information overload...it is like an encyclopedia of bread making knowledge and I just want to make a loaf of bread.
See I am not looking to become a master baker, I just want to be able to make some good bread. OK, that is understating it a bit, because I do want to master one or two recipes, but I am never going to make pumpernickel or any other kind of rye for that matter. And I really don't care about the differences between European and North American flours. I just need to know that basics. So far it seems that artisan breads every day is exactly the kind of book I need. Crust and Crumb goes a bit deeper into stuff so for now I will just be using it as reference material. ABED will most likely be doing all of the driving for the first leg of this journey.
The beginning...
The beginning is usually a good place to start...
A few months ago I woke up early on a Sunday morning and decided to make a loaf of bread. For the most part I would say it just came out of nowhere, but the first glimmer of the idea occurred several years ago after watching a cooking demonstration. For the demo the chef made some of "Granny's Bread". For me there was quite a revelation in that it only had 4 ingredients....flour, water, salt and yeast. I am not sure why, but I had always figured there was more to it than that. Of course my experience up to that point with baking was with boxed cakes and one attempt at scratch dinner rolls. I don't really remember the roll recipe that well, but I do remember that they didn't turn out like I expected them too.
Anyway, I woke up and said...let's make some bread. I started digging through many of the cookbooks we have in the house, including some on just making bread, and couldn't find anything as simple as I remembered "Granny's" being. So I gave up and turned to google..."simple bread", "easy bread"...grrr..."basic bread"...BINGO! Flour, sugar, salt, yeast, water...at the time I didn't remember that "Granny's" bread didn't have sugar, but I did know that yeast feeds on sugar so it seemed reasonable to me that this was about as simple as it could get.
A few hours later I had a decent loaf of bread. It certainly didn't blow me away, but it was good. I know that there were issues and at this point I can't recall exactly what was wrong with that first loaf, but I am thinking that it was mostly...boring. I am pretty sure that was the main issue because I remember that with subsequent attempts at the same recipe I tried different techniques to build more flavor. Each attempt failing to overcome boring. A couple of them also failed pretty big in one other area. Density. They were kind of brick like. Don't get me wrong all of the bread was edible, but it was all "meh".
It was suggested that I should use a recipe from King Author flour. So I found a recipe similar to what I had been making, I think it was called "hearth bread". As the dough was spinning around in the mixer it never started to form the "ball of dough" that I was expecting so I added more flour...a little more...a little more. Let's just skip the details and jump to "meh". Looking into it afterwards I figured out that this was a wet dough and wasn't going to come together like I was expecting.
Last week we came across "Granny's" recipe..."hmm no sugar...interesting". So Christmas Eve I dived into this even simpler recipe. It was a huge mess...literally. I converted the recipe from volume to weight, then cut it in half. "OK...I guess this is another wet dough." "Hmm...I don't think this was supposed to be flatbread"
The next day I got a not so subtle message from my family...wrapped up under the tree, two books on baking bread....and that is where we will begin our adventure.
A few months ago I woke up early on a Sunday morning and decided to make a loaf of bread. For the most part I would say it just came out of nowhere, but the first glimmer of the idea occurred several years ago after watching a cooking demonstration. For the demo the chef made some of "Granny's Bread". For me there was quite a revelation in that it only had 4 ingredients....flour, water, salt and yeast. I am not sure why, but I had always figured there was more to it than that. Of course my experience up to that point with baking was with boxed cakes and one attempt at scratch dinner rolls. I don't really remember the roll recipe that well, but I do remember that they didn't turn out like I expected them too.
Anyway, I woke up and said...let's make some bread. I started digging through many of the cookbooks we have in the house, including some on just making bread, and couldn't find anything as simple as I remembered "Granny's" being. So I gave up and turned to google..."simple bread", "easy bread"...grrr..."basic bread"...BINGO! Flour, sugar, salt, yeast, water...at the time I didn't remember that "Granny's" bread didn't have sugar, but I did know that yeast feeds on sugar so it seemed reasonable to me that this was about as simple as it could get.
A few hours later I had a decent loaf of bread. It certainly didn't blow me away, but it was good. I know that there were issues and at this point I can't recall exactly what was wrong with that first loaf, but I am thinking that it was mostly...boring. I am pretty sure that was the main issue because I remember that with subsequent attempts at the same recipe I tried different techniques to build more flavor. Each attempt failing to overcome boring. A couple of them also failed pretty big in one other area. Density. They were kind of brick like. Don't get me wrong all of the bread was edible, but it was all "meh".
Last week we came across "Granny's" recipe..."hmm no sugar...interesting". So Christmas Eve I dived into this even simpler recipe. It was a huge mess...literally. I converted the recipe from volume to weight, then cut it in half. "OK...I guess this is another wet dough." "Hmm...I don't think this was supposed to be flatbread"
The next day I got a not so subtle message from my family...wrapped up under the tree, two books on baking bread....and that is where we will begin our adventure.
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