Some Breads in the Tartine Style

Photo by Matt Korahais.

I've been playing around a bit with the bread method described in Chad Robertson and Eric Wolfinger's Tartine Bread (the book is beautiful, by the way, check it out). Robertson's method uses a sourdough leaven in a wet dough--but one a little drier than Lahey/Bittman's no-knead.  The dough is turned three or four times during a long bulk fermentation lasting 3-8 hours, depending on temperature.

After the initial mix, the dough gets a 20 minute autolyse before salt and a small amount of water are added in to finish it off.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

The recipe is geared toward two loaves, so each time I baked one in the cast-iron dutch oven and one in the BreadPot. I scored the loaves, but somewhat haphazardly, as the depth of the pots made it difficult for me to get my scoring knife in.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

For the second bake, a walnut pecan golden raisin loaf, the garnish was added after about 40 minutes of the bulk rise, during the first turn.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

I turned the dutch oven into a cloche by turning it upside down and using my skillet as the bottom.

Photo by Matt Korahais. Uncropped!

The crumb was light and airy, well-gelatinized and full of large, irregular holes.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

Bread Baker's Apprentice: Poilane-Style Miche

Above is my attempt at Peter Reinhart's recipe for the oft-cited and oft-copied Poilane Miche. Mine doesn't have the characteristic scoring pattern, because I made it in the clay BreadPot. The loaf is almost entirely whole wheat flour, although I did cheat and throw in about 3/4 of a cup of white flour to lighten the taste. In retrospect, the only thing I would change would have been to proof a little longer, for a more open crumb. It's a dense bread by nature though, and the other night it earned its place in kitchen history by participating in the creation of what may be Matt's favorite sandwich of all time, a sandwich so extraordinary he was throwing around Fight Club language with abandon, a no-holds-barred bacon and cheddar grilled cheese that pushed that chewy, strong bread to its highest purpose. The bacon, which came in a chunk from The Meat Hook in Williamsburg, was a salty Tennessee Mountain wonder, whose like we rarely see. Maybe not a life-changer, but definitely a game changer. And this bread got to participate.

The Eagle Has Landed

The eagle has landed. My new pot of brick clay has finally ended its travels and landed in its permanent home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It arrived in perfect condition and is doing just fine, thank you. Here it is with a loaf of wheat/rye bread with flaxseeds and wheatberries. Its flatter, wider shape also makes it a great breadbox. Thank you so, Judy. 

And don't think I'll be ignoring the original glazed pot. It's become one of my best rising vessels, and keeper for all sorts of things, and I still hope to bake beans in it someday soon. For those of you who have been asking me about the availability of these beautiful vessels, a new batch will hit the market shortly. Keep your eyes open at http://www.motzkin.com/.

Wish Fulfillment

One of my favorite commercial sliced breads is a Pepperidge Farm brand called 'Oat-Nut.' Sounds healthy, but it's really a soft squishy sweet bread with bits of nutty things, that I could eat straight from the bag, toppings optional. I've tried a few times to reproduce it in a home version, and I think I've finally gotten pretty close. The following is an adaptation from a recipe for 'Toast Bread' from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread.

I made one loaf in a loaf pan, and one in the baker, and they were pretty much exactly the same in crumb, crust, and consistancy. The difference in texture on the tops of the two loaves was largely because I dusted the pot loaf with wheat germ to keep it from sticking. I could eat it all day, toppings optional.

Formula:
2 lbs flour (about 7 and 1/4 cups) - I used mostly All-Purpose with about 1/4 cup of whole wheat)
2 and 5/8 cups water
2 tsp sugar  (I used maple syrup, bet honey would be good)
1 Tblsp soft butter (or hard butter cut in tiny pieces)
Malt powder or syrup (optional) 3/8 tsp
1 Tblsp salt
1.5 tsp Yeast

Nutty things--flaxseeds, wheat berries, nuts, etc...whatever...

Knead all ingredients, ferment for 2 hours, folding once in the middle, shape, proof for 1 - 1.5 hours, bake at 430 degrees, 30-45 minutes (making allowances for large or small loaves).

Bread Baker's Apprentice: New York Deli Style Rye

John Thorne, writing about one of Reinhart's earlier books, Brother Juniper's Bread Book, noted that Reinhart particularly shines when it comes to specialty breads. After my seriously mediocre experience with his Basic Sourdough, I'm inclined to agree. This Deli Style Rye more than made up for any sourdough disappointments. It was a rye sourdough starter, into which was stirred that staple of Ashkenazi cooking, fried onions. That sat on the counter getting wet and grey for a few hours, then went into the refrigerator for 24 more. At the end of all that, I mixed it in with some more rye flour, some bread flour, and some buttermilk, sugar, caraway, yeast and oil. The resulting dough was hard to knead, heavy and somewhat unpleasant, but it baked beautifully, both in and out of the pot, and tastes perfect. The crumb is a good sandwich size, fine without being dense., and the taste is just made for deli meats (the dairy in it could be a sticking point for some, but not me). This might even beat out my former favorite, Rose Levy Berenbaum's Jewish Rye, which is a little lighter and softer. The onions, while they added their indefinable essence, were undetectable in the finished loaf.

Bread Baker's Apprentice: Basic Sourdough

I make sourdough nearly weekly at home, and ten to fifteen loaves of it at the bakery, so you'd think I could do a good job with it. And usually I do, but this time around my starter seems to have been a bit sluggish, or I didn't wait for it long enough. This little pot-loaf looks lovely and crusty on the outside, but it was dense and wet, with a few large tunnels but a largely sticky crumb. 

 

In fact, it looks a lot like some of the early loaves I made at the bakery, which didn't rise or spring properly for whatever reason. In this case, I'd put the blame on sluggish sourdough, and possibly too short a proof. It's edible, but could have been much better.

This one was baked for about 20 minutes at 450 in the pot, and then another 10 minutes with lid off. Probably would have benefited from a slightly longer bake, but it wouldn't have done much for the crumb. Amazing how the baker can make even lame bread look so good, though, isn't it? This one had flaxseeds and sesame seeds in it as well. Hopefully now that I've woken up the home starter a little bit things will get back on track. I have a 25-lb bag of wholesale flour to get on with.

Bread Baker's Apprentice: Poolish Baguettes and Pugliese

I'm jumping a little in and out of order here, but humor me. It's a challenge, not a contest...
Last week's contributions to the challenge were pane Pugliese, a ciabatta-like wet dough with semolina, and poolish baguettes, made with a long, wet, sponge. I did a terrible job of shaping both breads, and they split all over the place, and they were very good, the baguettes with goat cheese and the Pugliese with everything, including bread pudding. Jill tells me they're a vast improvement over two or three years ago's bread.

The poolish baguettes are so called because they are made with a poolish, which is a wet pre-fermented sponge of flour, water and yeast, made the day before and ripened overnight. This is then added to the final dough and helps with taste, keeping time, and gluten development. Almost all of the breads I make have some form of pre-ferment, whether it is a poolish (loose, wet), a biga (stiff, Italian), pate fermentee (old dough, French, somewhere between the last two), or a sourdough starter. I use most of these methods interchangeably.

The Pugiliese were part of my clay baker experiment, one in the pot and one out. This time, the open oven won, but the pot had a severe handicap in the form of a large piece of parchment stuck to the loaf, which had to be baked with it and took a long time to release. I didn't knead the wet dough at all, just mixed it hard and then gave it several folds over the next few hours.

Sourdough up next, although there are more straight-dough breads in the future as well. I'm thinking of adding Reinhart's Pane Siciliano to the lineup at Lily & Fig, which last week was a grand production of Oatmeal Sunflower, Brooklyn Sourdough, Challah, Teddy Bears, and lumpy Genzanese all in one wild morning. I don't have semolina, but I think even with AP flour, the fun shape and the sesame garnish would please people.

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.