Bread cetera

Multigrain Bread

Alright everyone.  Get out your monogrammed stationery and Cross pen.  This is a bread that you simply must write home about.

Up until this point, I’ve not been a real big fan of multigrain bread.  Perhaps it’s because I’ve never had the pleasure of sampling a really well-made multigrain loaf.  To me, multigrain bread has always conjured up images of heavy, dry and tasteless planks of corrugated cardboard.  But with my New Year’s resolution of trying to eat foods that are better for me (no, I won’t totally be giving up the occasional croissant or slice of brioche but I am trying to eat less and include only natural, additive-free foods in my diet), I decided to revisit the world of whole grains.

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Tags: flaxseeds, levain, multigrain, oats, sunflower seeds, whole wheat

A Toasted Bialy with Butter and Smoked Salmon - Perfect for Breakfast or Brunch

If there was one bread that could legitimately lay claim to being the bagel’s ‘heir apparent’, it would have to be the bialy.  A lesser-known cousin to the bagel, the bialy is named after Bialystok, the city in Poland from which it originates.  Like the bagel, the bialy has a characteristic chewy, toothsome crumb.  However, that is where the similarity ends.  Unlike the bagel’s shiny, deep brown crust, the bialy’s crust is soft and floury.  And instead of a hole through the center, the bialy sports a central indentation where a small amount of chopped onion resides, giving the bialy its signature flavor.

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Tags: bialy

100% White Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

As a child, I, like many other Americans, had been conditioned (unintentionally, I’m sure… no conspiracy theory here!) to think of bread as merely an adjunct; a pasty white, flavorless platform for slices of lunch meat, peanut butter or any other filling that happened to find its way into my school lunch sandwich.  But sandwich bread doesn’t have to be dull and uninspired.  With a little imagination, even simple sandwich bread can take center stage, providing both a satisfying, deep wheaty flavor and needed nutrition.

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Tags: sandwich bread, white whole wheat

Potato Leek Bread

With the arrival of spring here in New England (although with evening temperatures still below freezing, one would be hard-pressed to find evidence of spring’s return), gastronomic thoughts turn from the rich, substantial ‘comfort foods’ of winter to lighter, more refreshing fare.  But what of those of us who would like to continue to enjoy some of the hearty flavors of winter throughout the year?  Potato leek bread perfectly sates this desire.  Suffused with the flavors of a rich potato leek soup, the deep, earthy aroma of freshly roasted potatoes and the slightly vegetal accent provided by the leeks combine to give a bread that would be ideally suited as an accompaniment to a salad or light broth.

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Tags: fendu, leek, potato

Gougères

I think it was in a Szechuan Chinese restaurant where the list first began.  After a bite of a particularly spicy serving of mapo doufu (spicy bean curd), I grabbed my glass of water, downed about half of its contents and, after reducing the fire on my tongue to a mere smolder, turned to my wife and remarked, “Water has to be one of the world’s greatest inventions!”.  Thus, my list of the World’s Greatest Inventions was born.

Now before I get comments pouring in, pointing out that water isn’t strictly an ‘invention’, I ask that you bear with me and allow me the latitude to use the word ‘invention’ in the broadest possible sense.  Why the requested forbearance?  Because my list of the World’s Greatest Inventions includes inventions, discoveries, natural resources… well, you get the picture.  And what does all this have to do with gougères?   Gougères happen to be made with two ingredients that are on my World’s Greatest Inventions list; water, #2 on my list and cheese, #4 (anyone care to guess what #1 and #3 are?).

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Tags: gougères, gruyère, pâte à choux

Scali

Like most major U.S. cities, my home town, Boston, is a wonderful mélange of people from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.  Boston’s North End, rich in colonial history, is today home to a vibrant Italian-American community.  One of my favorite activities has always been to stroll along the narrow streets of the North End enjoying the commotion (I did, after all, spend my childhood years in Brooklyn, New York) while, along the way, sampling the fare at a few of the many Italian eateries, specialty food stores and, of course, bakeries.

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Tags: braid, scali, sesame

Ciabatta Made Using New Tandem Technique

In the previous post (More Musings on Mixing… ), I described a newly devised ‘double flour addition’ dough mixing technique which will allow a home baker, using a conventional tabletop stand mixer, to produce a well developed, nicely aerated dough nearly identical to those produced by professional bakers using commercial mixing equipment.  While it was demonstrated that one could use the double flour addition technique to produce a pain au levain with the desired open crumb, there was still a question about the versatility of the technique.  Could double flour addition be used to produce the type of high hydration dough used to create the wide open crumb structure characteristic of a ciabatta?

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Tags: ciabatta, mixing

Pain au Levain Made Using New Mixing Technique

In a previous post (Musings on Mixing…), I described what I believe to be a fundamental difference between bread baking at the commercial scale and bread baking at the much smaller scale of the home baker.  At the commercial scale, spiral and oblique dough mixers are quite efficient at incorporating air into the dough during mixing, making overoxidation of the dough a real concern for the professional baker.  For the home baker, however, the opposite concern comes into play.  Conventional tabletop stand mixers are relatively inefficient at mixing dough.  Therefore, the home baker has to look for ways to increase air incorporation during mixing.  I concluded in the previous post that the only way for the home baker to do this effectively was through hand mixing.

Hand mixing, whether it be by a slap and fold technique like the one shown here or by just a series of folds during the first fermentation, can produce a nicely developed dough which yields a loaf having the desired open crumb with many large air cells (alveoli).  However, it is a technique not without its own challenges.  If performed improperly, hand mixing can lead to a loaf with large alveoli embedded within an otherwise doughy mass.  The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that there must be an easy way to use a conventional home stand mixer to produce a dough that would rival the quality of a professional, spiral-mixed dough.

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TARRP Bread

Sometimes, a wonderful creation can be stuck with a terribly unfortunate acronym.  When first published in the May 2005 issue of Modern Baking, Steve Barnhart of Bennison’s Bakery in Evanston, IL chose to call his richly-flavored bread, laden with tomatoes, Asiago cheese, roasted garlic, rosemary and Parmesan cheese, “TARRP” bread.  Little did he know that only 3 years later, an almost identical acronym “TARP” (Troubled Asset Relief Program) would come to represent the U.S. government’s response to the greatest financial crisis this country has seen since The Great Depression.

Its unfortunate moniker aside, this version of TARRP bread works wonderfully as a surprising synergy of what one might at first glance expect to be strongly competing flavors.  But make no mistake; this is a specialty bread.  TARRP bread is not one to have as a daily bread with meals but rather can almost be a meal in and of itself.

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Tags: cheese, fendu, garlic, rosemary, tomatoes

Sticky Buns

I know.  It’s hard to get excited about yet another baking blog posting a recipe for sticky buns.  But before you leave here to go send those ”Happy New Year” e-mail messages to friends and family that you should have already sent (Freudian projection, anyone?), just take a few more minutes to read further.  These aren’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, sticky buns.  Taking a cue, once again, from my friend and baker extraordinaire James McNamara, these sticky buns are made with croissant dough, rather than the standard sweet dough used to make more conventional buns.  The result is a sticky bun which is light, flaky, sweet, gooey and nutty.  I guess I’ll just have to make going on that diet my resolution for the next New Year!

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Tags: caramel, croissant dough, glaze, sticky bun