And We’re Done…
This marks the last week of the CSB in its current form as we are moving from Berkeley. Appropriately today’s blog entry is about the final stage of the bread baking process – the actual baking. This is when all of the hard work and balancing, tinkering, mixing and shaping pay off. If you did most everything right what you end up with is a gorgeous, full loaf of bread with beautiful color, a slight shine on the crust, dramatic scoring and delicious flavor. This makes it all worth it.
Last week I discussed the final proof for the bread; a crucial step is ensuring a balance of flavor and a good rise on your bread. It’s a little nap for your dough before you send it into a searing hot oven where the yeast experiences the pinnacle of its productivity and then collapses.
So what happens during the bake? First, the bread warms up from the heat in the oven. Now the heat is coming from all over (or should be). That means baking on a thick baking stone so the dough gets a blast of heat from underneath in addition to the ambient heat in the oven. That gets the rise going.
Second, the bread starts to rise. This is from two reactions. The warm dough gets the yeast all excited and they start extra-producing acids and CO2. The heat also evaporates the hydrated dough, releasing steam in the bread. Between the CO2 and the steam, the bread begins to rise. The gluten network of your dough needs to be sufficiently strong to capture the CO2 and steam so they don’t just evaporate out of the bread. If your bread isn’t strong enough, you will get a very flat and sad loaf of bread. This goes back to the mixing, folding and shaping stages.
Third, the yeast begins to die off after it reaches a certain temperature and the starches in your dough begin to gelatinize. Gelatinization is the process by which wet dough firms up into what is recognizable as typical bread crumb.
Now the key is to get all these things to occur in a certain order to maximize each’s benefits for the final loaf. So while the heat activates the yeast and releases steam making the rise possible, it also has the completely opposite effect of hindering the rise by creating a crust on the outside of the dough. When the crust starts to harden, the bread can’t rise any more because the pressure from the escaping steam and CO2 isn’t strong enough to push out against the crust.
This means something needs to be done to hold off the hardening of the crust until the rise is nearly complete. And the best way to do that is to create a moist environment in the oven. This is where the very hazardous process of steam production comes into play. In a commercial deck oven used by bakeries, there is a nifty steam button that the baker pushes for 2 seconds, steam automatically releases in the oven without opening the oven and letting heat out, and all is good.
In a home oven, this is an entirely different proposition. Some fancy-shmancy home ovens come with steam injection systems. Not mine. Not most people’s. So, what’s to be done? I have gone through a couple different systems for creating a moist environment in my oven. One of the challenges is getting moistness in there without letting too much heat escape. Now an oven, while a marvel, is not very good at retaining heat if the door is open. I’ve measured it and my oven loses about 100 degrees after being open for 20 seconds. When you need a 500-degree oven to cook your bread, you can’t be losing that kind of heat.
The challenge then is to get moisture into the oven somehow without losing too much heat. One popular method that lots of baking books call for is keeping a metal baking sheet in your oven that pre-heats with your baking stone. Then when you want to bake you boil some water and pour it into the baking sheet and slide your bread into the oven. Many books call for then opening the oven at 30 second intervals to mist the inside of the oven with a spray bottle to keep the interior moist. There are some negatives to this approach: to begin with you want the baking environment to already by moist when you slide your bread in. This approach has the steam being generated simultaneously with the bread going in, so that’s not great. Second, you lost quite a bit of heat this way. With the oven being open so you can pour the water in and then turn around, grab your dough, and slide it into the oven, you’re oven has been open for at least 20 seconds. Then re-opening the door each time you need to spray the oven loses even more heat. Finally, this method creates one big blast of steam, not the steady 2-second steam that is needed so you are not even getting optimal oven moisture.
Here’s what I learned to do at the artisan bread class I took at San Francisco Baking Institute. I keep a cast iron skillet filled with nuts and bolts on the floor of the inside of my oven. This preheats along with my baking stone for over an hour before the bake. I then use a tin pie pan that I have punctured lots of holes into and fill it with ice cubes right. I very quickly open the door to the oven, slip the pie pan onto/inside of the cast iron skillet, and wait. Within 30 seconds I begin to hear the steam hissing; the ice has begun to melt and is dripping through holes and immediately turning into steam upon hitting the hot metal of the nuts and bolts. Now I have a moist oven environment to slip by bread into. So I quickly open the door, slide in the bread onto the baking stone, and quickly close the door. After I close it, the ice continues melting creating that steady steaming action that the bread responds so well to. Since I’ve adopted this method, I get much better rise on my bread.
The bread then bakes, the crust caramelizes, and the aromas start pouring out of the kitchen. When the bread is done, I pull it out and leave it to cool for at least an hour before breaking into it. The cooling off period is very important as the starches are still gelatinizing and the heat masks the true, full flavor of the bread. After that, there’s nothing left to do but enjoy all the hard work of a truly simple, yet complex and rewarding process.
Thanks everyone who’s been apart of the Berkeley CSB experience. I learned so much and feel by bread baking has improved by leaps and bounds over this last year. I couldn’t have done it without having people to bake for. Enjoy this week’s breads!!
Berkeley Sourdough with Whole Wheat
Chocolate Cranberry Bread
Dutch Crunch Rolls
The Final Proof
Hmm…this sounds like something my mathematician husband should be working on. But turns out it has some relevancy to bread baking too.
Last week I spent a whole lot of time discussing shaping and why it’s your last chance to get things right with your bread. Its all about walking the line between tightness and slackness in the dough, and getting it just right so you get a good final rise in the oven.
So the next steps involve the final proof and the bake.
The Final Proof serves 3 important functions: first, it gives more time for flavor to develop in the dough; second, it lets the dough relax after the stressful shaping stage; and third, it allows the dough to rise again.
Flavor: The final proof is a resting period for the bread, which allows the yeast to keep breaking down the starch into sugar and release flavor. This is the same concept as the bulk fermentation stage, in which the yeast are kept busy chomping on starch and producing acids for flavor and CO2 as a by-product.
Relaxing: The shaping stage is also quite stressful for the bread. You’re pushing, prodding, folding and manipulating the dough; after that kind of work out, you’d need an hour or so to relax too.
Rising: The shaping stage also degasses the dough, so you need to give it a chance to re-puff up. The final proof gives the yeast more time to produce CO2, which is then trapped by the gluten strands, and produces air pockets in your final bread.
So the final proof is important, but like most aspects of the bread baking process is fraught with the potential for tragic missteps (a bit of hyperbole, but after going through all the time and effort of the preceding steps, to blow it on the final proof is pretty devastating).
What helps me in understanding this process is that I’m working with a living creature. And as a living creature, it is not completely manageable or able to be manipulated. It has a life path of its own, a metabolism of its own, a mind of its own. And we’re just trying to catch a ride on its life cycle to get to the place we want to get to. So, we put it in mildly predictable environments and hope it does what we think it will do. But it’s a living creature, so we have to appreciate and be respectful of the idiosyncrasies and lack of predictability inherent in that.
Now what that means for the final proof is this: the yeast has been eating for a long time now. Hours, sometimes even overnight. At some point the yeast eats all the food available; its broken down all the starch, eaten all the goodies you gave it to chomp on in exchange for flavor and CO2. And so, it gives up. I’m not sure if it actually dies, but it stops doing what it was doing when there was food around – it stops eating and metabolizing.
This is very bad for the bread. When the yeast stops, it no longer produces CO2, which means the dough deflates. You can tell if you’re bread has gone too far, it starts to look dead. Its listless and sort of wimpy looking. You want perky bread, that bounces back slightly when you push on it. It’s a sad day when your bread overproofs.
What is the result of overproofed bread once it bakes? Sad, sad bread. This gets a little into the baking section, but here’s what happens when the bread heats up in the oven. It goes through a temperature range that is optimal for yeast metabolism. And the yeast just start producing CO2 like crazy, just pumping it out, and this is what makes your bread rise in the oven so much. It’s the last hurrah for the yeast (before they hit 160 degrees and die). So, if you’re yeast have already given all the CO2 they can during the final proof, there’s nothing for them to do in the oven. Which means, your bread is not going to rise. Hence, sad, sad bread.
Ok, but on the flip side, if you catch your dough at just the right stage during the final proof and then slip it into the oven, you get a great rise on your bread. Air pockets expand in your dough and it puffs up to just the shape you want. But…the baking discussion will have to wait for another day.
Until next week, enjoy these pictures of this week’s breads.
Walnut Bread cooling after the bake
French Baguettes
Chocolate-Dipped Almond Biscotti
Flour + Water + Yeast + Salt = BREAD!!
So last week I gave a sense for how you begin the transformation from flour, water, salt and yeast into a loaf of bread. It’s a multi-layered process, one that I am still learning, and one that I am told by bakers is never fully mastered. There’s always more, always a new technique to try, always a new combination, always a way to push the ingredients farther, extract more flavor, or create a more challenging bread.
These are the seeds soaking overnight for the Multi-Grain Batard.
So after mixing your dough, letting it ferment in bulk, and then preshaping it, you are ready to make the final shape for the dough and let it go through its final rise before baking.
4. Shaping – I realized after rereading last week’s post that I went into detail about preshaping, but left shaping out in the cold. Shaping is a very important step for the obvious reason that a bread without shape is no bread at all. But more than just so the bread looks good, good shaping ensures your bread will rise well when it bakes.
Bread making/baking is all about walking a fine line. In the case of shaping, its all about getting the correct tension in the dough. Dough is all about this yin and yang between two key characteristics: extensibility and elasticity. Extensibility refers to how loose a dough is, how much it can be stretched out. If you think of pizza dough that can be pulled and stretched and thrown up in the air, that is a very extensible dough. Elasticity, on the other hand, refers to how much a dough snaps back into place when its pulled. Different doughs require different balances between these two characteristics, but you’re basic dough wants a fairly even balance – not too loose, but not to elastic.
So after that aside, shaping is the last step where you get the chance to readjust the proper balance of tension in the dough. All of your steps up till now have played a part in this balance, but the shaping is your last chance. Don’t blow it!!
Why does shaping readjust this balance and how? Well, I’ll tell you.
It all comes back to gluten. Gluten is a network of fibers (fibers only being a metaphor) that is created in dough once the flour becomes wet. Gluten fibers create a network within the dough that gives the dough strength and tension (ah, key word, links back to the shaping discussion). When the yeast is activated by water during the mixing phase, it starts to metabolize the sugars in the flour. The by-product of that is CO2 (and other things, but we’ll stay on point for now). The CO2 needs to be trapped in the dough in order for the dough to rise; if the dough isn’t strong enough (ie if the gluten isn’t developed enough) the CO2 will just float out of the dough and evaporate. This leaves you with a flat, dead piece of dough. No good.
Ok, so how do you strengthen your gluten network? Folding. Folding. Folding. Everytime the dough is folded back on itself (as happens when it is being mixed), the gluten strands start lining up. Imagine how easy it is to rip a piece of paper, now imagine folding that paper over itself 4 or 5 times. Try to rip it. It’s the same concept with gluten.
All of this means that when you shape, you are getting your last chance to fold the dough. To give it strength or to relax it; whatever it takes to get it to the optimal level of tension to ensure a good rise once it gets in the oven.
Now, the fun part of shaping is the actual shapes. These are as varied and numerous as the people who came up with the shapes. Many shapes are dependent on the type and character of the doughs being made. So, some shapes (like bagels) require a lot of strength to be able to hold up through the boiling and baking process. Others (like ciabatta) are so loose that they cannot be shaped. They are simply cut into squares and left to proof.
Here are the Potato Rosemary Rolls, shaped and proofing before the bake.
Other more traditional shapes are baguettes, boules, batards (these can have pointed ends or be blunted), or braided (such as challah). There are ring breads, bread with hats, breads folded over themselves, breads cut into small pieces that then grow back into each other when proofed and baked – the possibilities are endless.
Ok, well, looks like I’ve written a bit too much about shaping and won’t be able to get to the next step of proofing this week. Stay tuned.
Here’s a look at this week’s breads…Enjoy!!
Multi-Grain Batard Blossom!
Potato Rosemary Roll Daisy
ro
Checkerboard Ciabatta
I believe I was once told not to play with my food; oh well!
Getting from Flour & Water to a Loaf of Bread
Bread making/baking can seem alternately simple/easy and complex/complicated. On one hand, bread is made of just four ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast. Four of the most common ingredients come together to create one loaf. Nothing special, nothing fancy (unless you want); nourishing, satisfying and delicious. On the other hand, four ingredients is not a lot to work with to create nourishing, satisfying and delicious food. How do you get flavor, strength, leavening and texture from such simple ingredients? All within a reasonable and consistent time frame?
I personally vacillate in my thinking of bread baking (of course, its typically when things go wrong that it seems like an unfathomable process to me). Perhaps it should be described as simple, but not easy. And complex, not complicated. It is the push/pull between these two extremes that keeps me coming back and baking more and more. It is an irresistible challenge and while the process has become clearer and more predictable over the years, each batch of bread is different and has its own idiosyncrasies that need to be handled in their own particular ways.
So how does it happen? Bread baking breaks down into roughly 12 steps and almost each step has vagaries and nuances that need to be understood to produce high quality bread. Now don’t get me wrong, one can make bread that is edible and probably pretty tasty without really understanding what’s going on. But to go from passable bread to something truly outstanding, it really helps to have a deep understanding of the physical, biological and chemical changes taking place within your dough.
I’ll highlight a few of the first steps and follow up on other steps in future posts.
1. Mixing - Mixing can be as easy as you want to make it or as difficult. Many recipes call for adding all ingredients into a mixer and then kneading or mixing for a certain amount of time. Others call for just mixing flour and water, letting that rest for an hour and then mixing again with salt and yeast. Others call for mixing the flour, salt and yeast with only a portion of the water, waiting and then adding the rest of the water. All of these methods result in different consistencies and characteristics to the dough. They allow you to make improbably wet doughs or create a dough that is strong, but barely mixed, which maintains the maximum amount of flavor.
The point of mixing is to hydrate the flour and yeast. Hydration activates the yeast, getting them to start breaking down the wheat into sugars (releasing flavor) and producing acid and carbon dioxide as byproducts (more flavor and leavening). The kneading/mixing motion of the hydrated dough also combines two proteins in wheat to produce gluten, a strong network of fibers that provides structure to bread.
2. Bulk Fermentation - After the mixing period, the dough must relax and have time to accumulate flavor and leavening. The fermentation period is typically for 1-4 hours and can often go longer if the dough is retarded in the refrigerator. The cold temperature causes the yeast to slow their activity and in some cases go completely dormant. This results in a different and often more desirable flavor profile to the dough.
3. Preshaping/Shaping - A typical batch of dough for a home baker results in 2-5 loaves depending on their size. The entire batch of dough is fermented during the bulk fermentation stage. During the preshaping/shaping stage, the dough is divided into equal weights. Many times the dough will not easily go into its final shape; however, dough does have a tactile memory. By preshaping the dough pieces into similar but less rigid forms as the final shape, the dough has a chance to “learn”. Preshapes include loose boules (the preshape for boules and batards) and cylinders (which are the preshape for a baguette). The dough needs to rest 20-30 minutes between the preshape and the final shape.
Ok, that’s a lot of bread process to absorb at one time. More next time.
This week’s breads are shown below:
Walnut Raisin Boules
Fresh Basil Focaccia in the Dappled Afternoon Sun
Sesame, Poppy, Onion and Everything Bagels
What the heck does a starter look like anyways?
I realized that I’d been going on and on about wild yeast starters and hadn’t shown one yet. So here’s a couple shots of what they look like.
I keep two starters – a stiff and a loose one. The difference between them is the amount of water used each time I refresh them. The different hydration levels create environments for different types of yeast and bacteria. Bacteria in stiff starters tend to be more heavily acidic; whereas higher hydration starters are sweeter and milder. Here’s what they look like after they have just been fed.
They are fed twice a day when they are in use. I take some of the old starter, add fresh flour and water to it and mix it up. Within 8-12 hours, they are ready to be mixed with dough. When starters aren’t being used they live in the refrigerator, where the yeast and bacteria remain dormant. They can stay dormant for weeks before they need to be refreshed again.
Both the stiff and loose starters are used in this week’s breads. The Whole Wheat Levain uses the stiff starter and the Cracked Pepper Seeded Baguette uses the loose starter.
Whole Wheat Levains
Cracked Pepper Seeded Baguette
Strawberry Muffins
The Wide and Wild World of Wild Yeast Starters
In the beginning of March I took an intensive weeklong Artisan Bread Baking class from the San Francisco Baking Institute. I had taken my first class there back in November where I learned many of the fundamentals of bread baking. The class was an amazing experience and I vowed to get back and take the next class as soon as possible.
SFBI was started by Michel Suas, a world-renowned pastry and bread baker, and is the only school in the country dedicated to a 100% artisan approach to instruction. The passion he has for baking and the school is readily apparent from the first time you meet him. His excitement fills the room and all you can think of is getting to the kitchen to bake some more.
The March class I took continued the teaching of the fundamentals of bread baking, including proper mixing, fermentation, shaping, proofing, scoring and baking. However, this class focused on breads leavened with wild yeast starters. Now the whole thing with wild yeast is that is takes your bread from “eh, that’s pretty good bread” to “wow, that is some serious flavor”. Wild yeast imparts lots of benefits for the bread…first, flavor. Lots and lots of flavor. This is from the acid produced via the bacteria in the starter. This flavor isn’t always sour (though that’s its most recognizable form). Oftentimes it just adds a level of complexity; when added into a sweet bread such as Chocolate Cranberry, the acidity is not apparent at all but it helps to balance the sweetness. One aspect of wild yeast starter that I was intrigued by is how the flavor of a sourdough bread will change over the course of a few days as the acidity in the bread matures. Whereas with commercial yeast in which the bread is best the day it is baked, a sourdoughs can be enjoyed from 1 hour after baking when the acidity is rather mild to about 6 hours to a day after baking when the sourness tends to peak. I made a 3 pound loaf last month, which the recipe recommended to eat over the course of 4 days to see how the flavor changed. It’s a remarkable property and adds another level of complexity to something so simple as flour and water.
The second thing wild yeast provides is strength…this has lots of importance on the production side as more strength gives greater flexibility in terms of time and effort. Greater strength also means the structure of the bread will hold up under greater pressure. For example, a ciabatta bread has lots and lots of water in it which translates into the characteristically large holes in the final bread. Now the bread itself can only support so much because at some point the strength of the dough isn’t strong enough to capture all the air leading to a deflated and very sad ciabatta. But, when you add a significant amount of sourdough to leaven the bread instead of, or in addition to, commercial yeast all of sudden there is greater strength in the dough to support even larger air holes meaning you can get even more water into the dough. And voila, really great ciabatta.
The third thing wild yeast adds to bread is shelf life. The acidity has a preserving effect on the bread. Just as you add vinegar to cucumbers to preserve them in the form of pickles, so adding acidity to flour and water results in a bread that lasts longer before molding or going stale.
So anyways, back to the class…We started each of our own wild yeast cultures on the Monday of the class with only some flour and water in a bowl, and by Friday the culture had developed to such as state that we were able to bake with it. I’ve still got mine going on my counter and most of the breads baked in the next round of the box will use them.
In the class we compared how using different types, different hydrations, different flours, different proportions of starters all affected the final bread. We baked about 20-25 loaves a day individually and performed side-by-side comparisons at the end of each day. It was a fascinating and enriching teaching method, not to mention exhausting. Some of the breads we made included Extra Sour Sourdough, Mild Sourdough, Walnut Raisin Bread, Olive Bread, Ciabatta, Challah, Multi-Grain, Rye, Whole Wheat, and French Country Bread. Plus we baked another 5 types of bread to taste test the variability between starters.
Many of the breads you’ll see in this round of the box are from the class while others are variations that I have been working on in my month of self-training between the class and the CSB. My goal is to expose subscribers to the subtleties of wild yeast breads and hopefully get people as excited about them as I am!
Our “classroom” at SFBI.
Whole Wheat Sourdough Boules proofing before being baked.
All of our starters bubbling away…
Braiding a 6-strand challah!
Look at how beautiful it is!
Final display of all the breads we made during the class.
The Last Week in Bread (for now, at least)
So this week constitutes the final week of Round 2 of Pandora’s Bread Box Community-Supported Bakery subscription. This was a great round; 8 weeks, 3 days a week for 21 subscribers. It was demanding but rewarding. The number and type of subscribers expanded (ie they’re not just all close friends anymore) and more and more challenging breads were included in the weekly boxes.
I’m grateful to all of the subscribers for supporting the CSB and providing feedback, both positive and negative. Its been fun getting to know each of the subscribers better and trading baking stories.
For the final week, the breads are Ciabatta, Soft Pretzels and Florentines. Ciabatta is one of the most difficult breads to make because it is a very wet dough. A wet dough, surprisingly enough, has a high proportion of water to flour making it about the consistency of thick goop. This make it incredibly difficult to manipulate, shape and work with. It takes about an hour to mix all the water into the flour (doing so slowly allows the strength of the dough to build so it can accept all of the water, otherwise you run the risk of disintegrating your dough). It then rests for 3 hours, building strength, flavor and the characteristic air bubbles. You then shape it (basically just stretch it out into its rectangular shape) and let it rest for another hour. Then you slide it onto a 460 degree baking stone and bake it up.
Ciabatta was the first type of bread I ever tried making. I made it every weekend for 5 months and I never ever had any success. The dough was never wet enough and I never got the big holes that are characteristic of the bread. This was before I understood much of anything about baking: the direct relationship between the wetness of the dough and the size of the holes, how to slowly mix in the large amount of water, how the strength of the dough increases the longer it ferments.
It was all I could do to keep making bread, I was so disheartened. Little did I know I was attempting to make one of the most difficult breads out there; not a good choice for a newbie.
Anyways, I’ve finally got a good handle on it. There’s definitely room for improvement and I’ll keep refining my technique. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy it.
The pretzels are really fun to make (and to eat!) They’re a great snack and should be eaten the day you get them. Seriously, after a night, the salt melts into the dough and they lose they’re crisp outside. Eat them today!
I like to just eat pretzels plain, but many people dip them. Honey mustard is a popular dip. Just mix 3 tablespoons of mustard to 2 tablespoons of honey. I encourage you to mix the types of mustard, such as a combo of Dijon and Deli/Brown mustards.
The final baked good this week is Florentines. When I was a kid and my sister and I would accompany my mom to the grocery store, the lady at the bakery counter would always give us a free cookie. Sophie would bounce around in her choices, always getting a different kind. But I had found my favorite, the Florentine, and never tried anything else. For those of you who know me, I guess my sticking with one thing once I like it is not so much a surprise. But its my memory of eating that Florentine as I followed my mom around the store that have nurtured a special fondness for them.
Anyways, I hope this week’s breads are delicious and enjoyable for everyone. I’ve had a great time this round and hope to be baking for you all again next round.
Rainy Day? Perfect, I feel like baking anyways!
It seems like just about every day I’ve done the bread box this winter, this has been the atmosphere. Wet, rainy, a little dreary. All in all, perfect weather to feel like staying in and baking. Keep it coming!
So for Week 7 I tried to respond to subscriber demands, more wheat bread offerings, some healthier snacks. And corn bread that I had made earlier and gotten rave reviews on.
The Light Wheat Loaf is a 33% whole wheat loaf. Its a big loaf, bigger than the Cinnamon Raisin Bread or other ones I’ve made in the box, to make for perfect sandwich bread. This loaf just grows and grows and grows. When making bread, you first mix the bread then let it rise in a bowl, then you shape it and put it in loaf pans, then you let it have a final rise. This loaf was supposed to have an hour and a half final rise; after 45 minutes it was overflowing out of the pan. You’ll see in the photos and when you get your bread that that meant once the bread got into the over where it does its final big rise, it got almost too big. So, enjoy your mondo sandwiches this week!
The Corn Bread is from a recipe that is entitled “The Best Corn Bread Ever”. I figured I couldn’t go wrong. And in my opinion, it is the best pure corn bread recipe ever. Now there are tons of variations on corn bread. Mix in jalapenos, add onions, use bacon drippings instead of butter, make it more crumbly, make it more cakey. All of that is fine and can be delicious, but what I was trying to recreate was the simplest, purest form of corn bread. No add-ins, no fancy flavorings or ingredients; just the corn bread I remember like my mom used to make. Anyways, I’d like to know what you think.
Many people have said, well, I guess I’m going to have to make chili if we’re getting corn bread in the box. I know that combination sticks in people’s minds and is absolutely delicious. For me, I imagine three or four cowboys sitting around the fire, chili bubbling away over the embers and a batch of corn bread setting in a cast iron pan (how corn bread is traditionally made). There are other ways, though, to enjoy corn bread. The way I grew up eating it was for breakfast. Split a slice of corn bread in half and place under the broiler. Toast until the edges start to brown (I like mine to almost start burning for added flavor) and then serve with some butter and honey drizzled on top.
So, between writing the above paragraphs and right now I made a rather unfortunate discovery…the corn bread didn’t cook. Ahhhh!! There’s nothing worse than getting to the point in the day when I’m taking photos of the final breads, finishing the write-up and wrapping everything up for the delivery and then finding out that there is a fatal flaw with not one but four of the orders. Turns out even when you stick a toothpick into corn bread and it comes out clean, it still may not be set in the center. All it would have taken was 5 more minutes cooking and I wouldn’t have lost 4 portions of the bread; what a waste! So here I am, finishing the blog post with 2 more orders of corn bread yet to be cooked. This is going to be a close one. But don’t worry, no one is receiving an uncooked portion of bread; I’m starting from scratch on them all. You can see the depression in the photo below of the center of the corn bread, signalling (now I realize) that the center is uncooked and cannot support the weight of the dough. Below that I’ve posted a photo of what the corn bread you will be enjoying looks like.
Ok the last baked good this week is the Dried Cherry Almond Granola Bars. I’ve never made granola bars before and I can’t figure out why. They are really easy and can be made nutritious and delicious without all of the additives you get from store-bought ones. My personal goal is to avoid the center of the grocery store (per Michael Pollan’s advice) and shop predominantly at the edges where the produce, dairy and meat is located. This means making my own spaghetti sauces, jams and jellies, crackers and snack items. Granola Bars are one more thing to now check off the list of things that do not have to be purchased at the grocery store. Anyways, I hope you enjoy them and try to make them yourself. It takes about 45 minutes to make 18-20 of them. Totally worth it.
Cinnamon Raisin Bread, Pitas and Lemon Bars, Oh My!
This week’s box is a little more on the sweet side with Cinnamon Raisin Bread and Lemon Bars. The Pita Bread is the only non-sweetened baked good (though the Cinnamon Raisin Bread really isn’t that sugary at all).
The Cinnamon Raisin Bread is a light loaf bread perfect toasted for breakfast or an afternoon snack. It was a special treat was I was growing up and despite the fact that I always picked out the raisins, it was one of my favorite breakfasts.
I was so excited when I tried a pita bread recipe a couple weeks ago and found how simple they are to make. As a Persian, pita bread is one of the three staple foods you will always find in my house: feta cheese, Persian tea and pita bread. As you can imagine, we go through quite a bit of pita bread, eating it with everything from stews to hummus to salad pockets (stuffing half a pita bread with green leaf lettuce salad) to grilled cheese (stuffing pita with pepper jack cheese and some salsa). One of my favorite preparations is pita crisps. My parents make these for just about every party they throw and they are completely addictive. Typically they are made by halving the pita breads, lightly buttering them (you can use olive oil too for a lower fat version) and sprinkling them with coarse ground salt and pepper. Repeat this for as many pitas as you like, then stack them on top of each other and slice into 6ths or 8ths. Lay them out on a baking sheet and broil until they are golden around the edges. They can be used in place of chips or crackers and are perfect for dipping.
As I mentioned in the weekly email, the lemon bars this week are a special treat given the origin of the lemons; two sources were used, Patricia’s garden and my in-laws lemon street tree. My friend Patricia (whom many of you know) has created the most delightful and inspiring urban farm/garden in Berkeley, just a stone’s throw from my house. For two years now, she has transformed an unused backyard into a highly productive garden with amazing fruits and vegetables, bees and chickens. Her bounty this season has included daikon, cabbage, various types of kale and chard, garlic and every herb you can think of.
You should all check her blog out about the garden at Foodscaping.
We are always trying to work ways to use garden ingredients in the bread box and this week we succeeded with the Lemon Bars. The lemon tree in the garden actually produces Meyer Lemons, which are not nearly as tangy and tart as the traditional Eureka lemons found in the store. To boost the tang, I picked a couple Eureka lemons from my in-laws house when I was down there for Chinese New Years this weekend. My father in-law did not care much for the street trees that Sunnyvale planted outside his home so he has either removed them or passively hastened their removal by not watering them. In their place he planted between 4 and 6 fruit trees (tangerine, plum, apple and lemon; the types and number vary each time we go down there, it seems). And his lemon tree is by far the most productive tree with the most delicious lemons I have ever seen. Anyways, the Meyer lemons from Patricia’s garden give the lemon bars their distinctive flavor and the Eureka lemons from my in-laws give the bars their tang. Hopefully together they will strike a pleasing balance.
I hope you will enjoy all of the baked goods this week. Let me know how you like everything!
The Italian, the Buttery and the Healthy
That basically sums up the bread offerings this week of Pane Siciliano, Petit Brioche a Tete and Ginger Pear Bran Muffins.
The Pane Siciliano is by far one of the prettiest breads I make, with its ruddy textured crust in a gentle S-curve (and not the kind that is a danger to motorists). It takes 3 days to make and that’s not just work for work’s sake. There are not many ingredients to Pane Siciliano (well, more than in a baguette but more subtle ingredients than say, the Cranberry Walnut Loaf from last week). The extra time and care that goes into making the Pane Siciliano is to coax out every last ounce of flavor from the flour, both white and semolina, and yeast. You can make it in 2 days, but the flavor that comes forth when letting is rise in the refrigerator an extra night is remarkable. The semolina flour (almost 50% of the flour used in the Pane) brings out a sweetness to the bread and adds the distinctive yellowish hue to the crumb.
The Petit Brioche a Tetes (translated literally as Little Heads of Brioche) is a decadent buttery bread best enjoyed in moderation. Brioche can be shaped in multiple ways, as pan loafs, as just Brioche a Tete (1-2 pound tetes) and as these miniature muffin-sized nuggets of yumminess. They also can be made with varying the amount of butter included in the recipe; the recipes are arrayed on a spectrum from Rich Man’s Brioche to Poor Man’s Brioche. The selection this week would best be characterized as Middle Class Brioche, so you don’t need to run to the gym after eating it but you should probably get there after eating four of them.
The last selection is Ginger Pear Bran Muffins. These are one of my first attempts at healthy muffins, due to demand from subscribers. In general, I am of the opinion that one can indulge in something delicious even if it is not very good for you, as long as it is done in moderation. However, the challenge this week was to make a good healthy muffin that you could eat as many as you like without feeling guilty. This recipe calls for the pleasant pairing of pear and ginger, a delightful combination that I liked playing around with so much this week that I’m planning on canning these pears for spring when pears from this hemisphere are no where to be seen. So, instead of putting in overripe pears, as the recipe calls for I decided to heighten the ginger and pear flavors by poaching the pears in a ginger simple syrup before incorporating them into the dough. The rest of the recipe is fairly straightforward with the majority of the dough being composed of wheat and oat bran. No refined flour is used in this recipe, only 100% whole wheat flour. Yogurt is used in place of butter to lend softness, and honey is used in place of sugar for sweetness. I’d love to hear how people think this first real foray into healthy muffins went.
Just got this picture in from a subscriber of her son enjoying the Ginger Pair Bran Muffin. What a cutie!
