Christopsomos

this is a greek celebration bread, and the recipe is from reinhart's BBA. it's freakin' huge. and really, really good. see how shiny it is? the glaze is a simple syrup with honey (and a little free-lance tangerine juice). the bread is sweet and spicy (cinnamon, allspice, cloves, nutmeg) and fruity (golden raisins and dried cranberries and lemon & tangerine zest), and the glazes adds a little extra sweet chewiness. the greeks, they know how to celebrate, i'd say.

Pain de Mira

this is actually the Potato, Cheddar & Chive Bread from reinhart's BBA, a recipe i've been eyeing for quite a while, but since mira is a notorious (and self-confessed) potato ho & cheese ho (not to mention ham ho), i thought the above name more appropriate :)

it's a sourdough-spiked-with-yeast loaf, and it's as good as it looks. what you do is roll out a hunk of dough after it's risen, lay slices of cheddar cheese on it, then roll it up. after it has proofed for an hour, you slash (or score) it to the depth of the cheese so that when it bake, the cheese comes out and forms that brown, bubbly grigne that you see there. so good, and perfect with the ham i baked today (sorry, mira. i'll make it up to you).

Walnut-Blue Cheese Sourdough Bread

when is it blue cheese and when is it bleu cheese? i suppose i could look it up--i am on the internet, after all--no, i don't see a quick answer. i don't guess it matters. this recipe comes from reinhart's BBA. in his section on sourdough breads, he claims this particular version is his favorite variation of sourdough bread. it seemed a bit unusual to me, but i decided to try it. since i'm the only one in the house who would eat such a bread, i made a smaller loaf for me and a larger one to take in to work tomorrow. i have to say i'm quite happy with this bread; peter reinhart was right (he isn't always, though. i've had a few BBA experiences that i wasn't happy with, and i'd rather blame him than me). it's a lovely color (though the crust got a little dark as i waited for the crumb to finish baking) and has good texture and taste. i had a version of a ploughman's lunch for supper tonight with this bread, some apple slices, pickles, and a porter. i hope my buddies at work like it. it's a bread that's best used in that fashion, i think, rather than as an accompaniment to a meal or as a vehicle for sandwiches or spreads. it should be the main star of a ploughman's lunch, or a part of an appetizer platter or just served with beer or wine as a snack.

French Bread

yep. just plain ol' french bread from reinhart's BBA. no fancy shapes, no funky flavors. made a pre-ferment last night, mixed it with a fresh dough today, and that's it. it's as good as it looks. no, it's better, given my photography. i saved the unusual for the main course, which was italian sausages and plums braised in red wine, a recipe from one of my favorite cookboods all about braising. a winner!

Poolish Baguettes

okay, so they're kind of, er, fat for baguettes. call them poolish french loaves if you like; i call 'em good eats. oh, wait...that line's taken.....i call 'em darn good. the recipe is from reinhart's BBA. quite easy, but it makes a lot. i should've made like 5 skinny baguettes instead of 3 fattish loaves, but heck...it's all good. especially when you steam a bunch of mussels in white wine, shallots, garlic, butter, and parsely (okay, i added a splash of cream to the liquid at the end just to make it a little more decadent) and use the bread to sop up the juices afterward.....okay, tomorrow i'll make turkey saltimbocca and use the leftover bread to sop up that liquid. life is good.

Italian Bread

it was our friend's birthday and she came over and made spaghetti sauce. i made tyler florence's ultimate meatballs and italian bread from reinhart's BBA. this is a 2-day bread as it uses a biga pre-ferment. the resultant bread was really, really soft. it tasted very good (the malt syrup adds a little depth) and it looked good, though i didn't score the one loaf deeply enough. the recipe has instructions on how to make it crustier, and maybe i'll try that technique one day. luckily, there is leftover bread and leftover meatballs, so i'm thinking sandwich tomorrow :)

Bagels!

i love bagels. as a man of few routines, i must have an everthing bagel at least 47 of the 52 sundays of the year. and i'll regret not having one those other sundays. so, in the year of bread, why not bagels? reinhart has this great looking recipe in his BBA. most of the work is done the day (or two) before you boil & bake them. then again, why go through all that bother when you can usually buy pretty darn good ones at the local shop when you want one? well, as i've learned so far in the year of bread, it's not that much bother. bread baking is more about timing than work. even kneading isn't that bad, and you can have your stand mixer or even use the "dough cycle" of your bread machine (in fact, the King Arthur Four Baking Companion claims the bread machine provides the best, most consistent results versus hand- or mixer-kneading). if you're going to be around your house anyway, then there's really not that much bother. now, the bagels are a little more work than most other breads. the dough is incredibly stiff, and my kitchen aid struggled getting the flour completely hydrated. this dough you HAVE to knead by hand (unless you're doing a smaller batch, i guess), and it's 10 minutes of hand-kneading of the stiffest dough there is. still, i have to say, it's worth it. these are really good bagels. chewy, malty, fragrant--and you control the toppings. i like a lot of onion, quite a bit of salt, and a good dose of poppy & sesame seeds, and i like them equally distributed on the top, bottom, and sides. as long as you top them this way, this is the way to go. if you're going cinnamon-raisin or pumpkin or bacon-cheddar, then you'd have to make a separate dough, and that is too much bother. and those aren't really bagels anymore, anyway. these are. i won't do it every week, but i'll definitely do it again. and again.

Pizza Napoletana

a more traditional, thin-style pizza this time, the pizza napoletana from reinhart's BBA. reinhart suggest making smaller pizzas if you aren't comfortable working with bigger ones. HA! i'm an old pro at pizza-making and can toss the crusts around like the best of 'em, so i opted for bigger ones. um, yeah, about that....this dough was much softer and more fragile than the doughs i'm used to throwing around (which, it must be said, was over 25 years ago now). they came out looking very rustic :) but tasty--especially the crust. it was great! i used pizza sauce in a jar and wasn't happy with that--next time i'll just make my own simple sauce of mostly tomato. with a better sauce, it might be worth making pizza at home. otherwise, it's more of a novelty. there is good pizza to be had at good prices that don't require this much work.

Casatiello

this bread is a wonderfully rich, brioche-like bread stuffed with italian salami and provolone cheese. the recipe is from reinhart's BBA, but it needs help. sorry for the terrible photo, but one thing you can tell in the photo is that there's not enough salami. i'm going to double it next time. i made this yesterday thinking it was the perfect super bowl bread (what a great game), and i was right. speaking of yesterday, i also made the "cornbread" recipe in BBA that reinhart included even though it's not a yeast bread, because he thinks "it doesn't get any better than this." he's wrong. it tastes fine, but it's not "cornbread." corn pudding maybe, or corn cake, or spoonbread at best, but you can't call something with 1/4 c. of granulate sugard AND 1/4 c. of brown sugar AND 2 Tbsp. of honey in it "cornbread." (it also has bacon, but the addition of bacon never bothers me.) i can eat it, but it's so sweet that it's almost a dessert. i also made chili yesterday. this is an emeril recipe. i chose it because it was simple, i had the stuff (except the hasa), and it didn't look terribly spicy (the other residents of this house have new jersian tastebuds). i doubled (at least) the spices anyway because it was really bland (my mother-in-law still thought it was a little on the spicy side, but i thought it was still pretty mild). the really odd thing about this recipe is the 8 CUPS of beef stock for just 2 lbs of meat. beef stock is kind of an odd ingredient for chili anyway, but 8 cups?! i stopped at 4 and still thought it was a little on the soupy side. i'd make it again, cutting down on the stock and adding some chipotles. and i always use pinto beans rather than kidney beans, but i do prefer beans in my chili (sorry, purists).

Challah

today's bread is Challah (from reinhart's BBA), a braided Jewish bread enriched with eggs and a little bit of sugar. it makes terrific french toast! this was rather easy to work with and to braid. the only problem is (and it may not be a problem--i haven't tasted it yet) is that the instructions gave you the option of making one large or two small loaves. i opted for two. when it's time to bake, it says bake 20 minutes, then turn the pan around for even browning and back another 20-45 minutes depending on the size of the loaves. fine, i made two smaller loaves, so i took them out after 19 minutes and checked them. the internal temperature should read at least 190 degrees on an instant-read thermometer inserted into the middle of the bread, but mine registered 205 degrees. hopefully, it's fine. it looks nice, at any rate :)

Pain à l'Ancienne

this is reinhart's revolutionary bread recipe in BBA, destined to extend the frontiers of breadbaking to dimensions unknown. well, it's good. really, good. i'm a little disappointed in that mine is more flat than round, but it's still excellent. reinhart says you can use this dough to make pizza--it would make great pizza. i may do that next week. hey, next week is super bowl--perfect! the reason this bread is revolutionary is the method. last night i mixed together some ice-cold water, bread flour, salt, and yeast. after the dough came together, i poured it into a large, oiled bowl, sprayed oil over the top of the dough, covered with plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge. i took it out this afternoon, let it sit at room temperature for about 3 hours, poured it out on the counter, gently shaped in into an oblong, divided into 3, let it rest 5 minutes, then gently placed it onto a baking sheet and baked it in a hot oven with steam. that's it. no kneading, and only the one rise. crusty and chewy and tasty. a winner.

Marbled Rye Bread

finally tracked down some rye flour so i could make this bread from reinhart's BBA. there were a number of options available with this bread. you make a light rye dough, then a dark rye dough--the only difference being the dark rye bread has a darkening agent of some kind--either caramel coloring, or cocoa powder, or carob. i opted for hershey's special dark cocoa. there was the option to add caraway seeds to both doughs. i added them to the light dough only, so each would taste a little different. then there were the marbling options. you could just form pieces of light and dark dough together and just have random marbling, or you could roll pieces of each and then either roll up a light, then wrap a dark around it, etc., for a bull's eye effect, or stack them up in alternating layers and rolls them up together for a spiral effect. i opted for the latter and baked them in loaf pans rather than free-standing. and they turned out really nice, they taste good, and i enjoyed making it. perhaps i should have sliced the loaf above through the middle where there's likely more of a spiral shape than on the end, but i think that looks kind of cool, too. those i work with will get to sample the rye bread tomorrow, as well as the pane siciliano, and the ciabatta. i'll bring in some artichoke spread--feel free to bring whatever you like if you wish.

Pane Siciliano

i used the pate fermentee that i prepared a couple of nights ago to make the pane siciliano from reinhart's BBA. i finished the dough yesterday, let it rise, then divided it into three equal parts. i formed 3 baguettes from them, then curled them up into an S-shape, brushed with water, sprinkled with sesame seeds. i let them proof, them parked them in the fridge overnight. i took 2 of them out this afternoon, waited about an hour and a half to take the chill off, and baked. these were terrific. my favorite so far. i like everything about this bread--the dough felt great and was nice to work with. the loaves are visually stunning. it tastes great. the crust is crispy, the crumb is tender. incidentally, this is the third bread i've made that uses semolina flour in the the dough, and they've all been successful, and the dough has felt really good in my hands each time. i'll have to research more semolina breads! oh, and i left the 3rd loaf in the fridge and will bake it tomorrow. hopefully it'll be just as good, if not better.

Poolish Ciabatta

2nd ciabatta from BBA today, made from the poolish pre-ferment i made last night. the good news is, it tastes good. hey--it's fresh-baked bread, so that's almost a given. the crust also had a deeper color than the biga version. but...i can't really taste any difference between them. it also puffed up more than i'd expected--even more than the biga version--and the crust is soft and the crumb lacks the big holes it's supposed to have, though it performed slightly better in this respect than the biga version. so, in short, i pronounce the poolish version very, very slightly better than the biga. but i have to say that, honestly, the ciabatta i made a couple of weeks ago was far better than these two, and it only took one day. maybe because the dough was so much wetter than these two today. the doughs today were very, very soft and somewhat difficult to work with, but that other dough was so wet that it was almost impossible to work with. so, maybe i just need to make sure the dough is wetter.

Biga Ciabatta

two ciabatta recipes from reinhart's BBA today: the first uses the biga pre-ferment that i made last night. except for the type of pre-ferment used, the only real difference between the recipes was that the biga recipe listed an optional addition of olive oil, so i opted for it. the good new, it tastes good enough to eat. the bad news is.....it's not what i expected. like it's poolish brother (see next post), it puffed up more than i thought it would, and the crust is softer than i'd wanted, and i did not get the kind of big holes in the crumb that you expect from ciabatta. oh, well. let's check out the poolish version now.

Pre-Ferments

tonight, i prepared reinhart's pate fermentee, poolish, and biga from BBA. the pate fermentee and biga are doughs you mix up, knead, let rise, punch down, then stick in the 'fridge overnight or up to 3 days. the poolish is somewhere between a dough like the others and the kind of wet sponges i used to prepare as a pizza chef back in the day--it's like a very thick pancake batter that is simply water, flour, and yeast stirred together and left out to ferment and get puffy and foamy for a few hours, then parked in the 'fridge overnight or up to 3 days. the difference between the pate fermentee and the biga is that the pate fermentee (reinhart's version, at least) is half bread flour and half all-purpose flour, and has salt. the biga is all bread flour and has no salt. the lack of salt means less yeast as well, because salt inhibits yeast action. the purpose of all these methods is that they allow time to be your ally, drawing out as much flavor as possible from the wheat. they allow those simplest of breads that don't use much in the way of eggs or fats or flavorings or even much sugar--your baguettes and italian loaves and ciabattas and so forth--to let the complex properties and natural sugars of the wheat take the main stage. i've used the biga before and made terrific italian bread with it. i haven't decided yet how i'll used these. i made ciabatta once without any of these and it was good, but BBA has ciabatta recipes for either a poolish or a biga, so i may try both of those and see which i like best.

Portuguese Sweet Bread

another recipe from BBA today: portuguese sweet bread. doesn't it look lovely? sweet, enriched with a couple of eggs, flavored with orange, lemon, and vanilla extract. reinhart says it makes fabulous french toast or bread pudding. i hope so, because this was a disaster. i mean, i waited all day long for this thing to rise, until i couldn't wait any longer. the recipe calls for 2 hours for the initial rise, and 2-3 for the final proof, but....i didn't much action either time. i managed to obtain the desired deep mahogany color, and the bread is edible if heavy, but....i'm not happy with it. not only am i not happy with the lack of rise, but i'm also not a fan of the orange and lemon extract flavor...it's awfully strong and....extract-y tasting. i'd like to try this bread again, and succeed, but i may look to substitute fresh orange and lemon zest rather than use the extracts.

Cinnamon Raisin Bread

bread number two today was cinnamon raisin bread from BBA. reinhart also adds walnuts to his, but i left them out. i also decided against the optional cinnamon swirl and the optional cinnamon topping as i wanted to keep it in the "bread" family rather than the "dessert" family. i had to go out to buy some medium-sized loaf pans for this recipe as i only had large ones. i thought they turned out very nice, and will toast very well for breakfast. since the recipe makes two loaves, one of them may be destined for a bread pudding. i reckon i'm okay with that.

Light Wheat Dinner Rolls

since i didn't prepare a biga or poolish last night, i decided that for one of today's breads i would use the light wheat bread recipe in peter reinhart's "the bread baker's apprentice" (hereafter referred to as BBA here in the Pub) to make dinner rolls. i'm glad i did, as they turned out great--soft and puffy, with the ratio of about 1/3 whole wheat flour to 2/3 regular unbleached bread flour making the taste and texture more interesting than regular white dinner rolls. i'll definitely be making this again.