Bread Baker's Apprentice: Pain a l'Ancienne in a Pot

With all the bread I've been working on, I've actually managed to neglect the Bread Baker's Apprentice challenge, meandering off somewhere around Marbled Rye.  I still appreciate Peter Reinhart, but I've become besotted with Jeffrey Hamelman, and it was hard to wrench my attention back. Still, I think that it's worth while to continue through the book, and in order to make it happen, I'm combining the project with another one I'm working on, testing recipes and techniques in the clay bread baker made by Judy.

Judy now has several friends (including my mother, in her first blog appearance) market testing and reporting on variations of the bread bakers, and my plan is to prepare the upcoming Apprentice recipes as much as possible according to the book, and then shape for and bake in the pot, unless that would mutate the recipe entirely too far. This way, I can make the Reinhart recipes, and learn how they are, and at the same time see how a variety of techniques and formulae behave in the baker.

My first foray back was the Pain a l'Ancienne, a wet dough usually used for baguettes, the central feature of which is a long overnight retarding in the refrigerator. I nearly doubled the refrigerator time, to about 24 hours, but otherwise left the recipe alone except for cutting it in half. Like most of Reinhart's recipes, I found it under-hydrated, and added a little extra water, and still could probably have managed more. Once it had woken up out of the refrigerator, I shaped it into a boule and proofed it on a floured napkin, while preheating the oven and the pot to 450. Baked for 23 minutes with the lid on and another 20 or so with it off, the finished product was the best I've done in the baker, better shaped and more attractive than the no-knead variations I've been trying, with a surprisingly soft crumb given that there were no oils, and a very crisp crust with those little cracked patches bakers love so much.

Bread whispers and cracks a lot when it comes out of a hot oven, and this one was chatty.

Cape Cod Cloche

Cape Cod girls, they have no combs
Heave away! Heave away
They comb their hair with codfish bones;
We are bound for Australia


Heave awy me bully bully boys
Heave away! Heave away
Heave away and don't ye make a noise;
We are bound for Australia!


Cape Cod boys, they have no sleds
Heave away! Heave away!
They slide down hills on codfish heads
We are bound for Australia!

Guess where I got to get snowed in last weekend...

A foot and a half of beautiful snow deep in a many-windowed house in Welfleet, generously lent by Judy and Richard, good friends to me from the day I was born. They did themselves one better this time, opening their house to me and three dear friends for a wool-socked, Scattergories-playing sister weekend. The snow was deep, the kitchen was stocked, and we couldn't have asked for much more.

As I mentioned once before, Judy is a potter, and a big fan of the no-knead bread, and now she's experimenting with making clay baking vessels. One such attempt was waiting for us on the counter at the cape house, with the bread recipe etched right into the glaze under the lid. The compact shape and the recipe combined were almost irresistible, and I was glad when Judy encouraged me to try it out, and then to take it home. She doesn't consider it her finest specimen, but that only makes me want to make with it more--no danger of ruining high art, and the shape is just so satisfying--small without being tiny, and perfectly rounded. I made a nice no-knead raisin bread on the Cape, but took no pictures. Many more to come, both kneaded and no. I might even think about baking some beans.

I did take a picture of the bread I made after I got home, Hamelman's pain au levain, which I tested for the bakery. The test was successful, and as I write this there's a batch rising in the proofer for Saturday's crowd. Hamelman says that refrigerating the dough overnight isn't recommended for this variety, so I started from the beginning at about 6 am, and am just nearing the shaping point by 9:30.

Corn-Rye No Knead (x2)

Here's a slightly sheepish truth about me. I'm competitive, and when I see something beautiful that someone else has baked, some itch in me starts up, and within a week or two, I usually try it myself. Thus it is that this weekend I decided it was time to give Judy's Corn-Rye No Knead Bread a shot. I don't have a picture because it didn't look so great, but mostly because it was immediately consumed, because it was wonderful, especially the crunchy corn-infused crust. (I threw in an extra handful of corn flour in addition to the cornmeal, and that seemed to have a good effect.) I'll be making it again soon, and will post a picture whatever the results. For now, this is what the batter looks like:
Judy also has a new blog, which has customarily beautiful things on it.