A Ku Indeed!

Okay, I’m getting a little frustrated. My last few breads weren’t too good. Heck, my very last bread that I made a day or two ago came out bad – and that’s my “go to” bread! I seem to be in a bread funk. If I were a gambler, people would say that I’m in a heavy “drawdown” period trying to dig my way out. Anyway, the bad bread luck continues. This latest sourdough bread requires a “seed culture” that takes four days to cultivate. Everything good for the first three days. Day four? No rise whatsoever, and it is supposed to triple in size. Now I have to start over. This is not good.

I don’t know who the bread gods are, but I have clearly angered them.

More croutons, dammit.

I don’ t know what the deal is lately, but I just can’t seem to fire up a decent loaf of bread. In this latest challenge, Pugliese, I was hoping to wind up with something good after last weeks bad Potato Rosemary Bread (which also wound up as croutons) experience.

No luck.

Oddly enough, I did get a bunch of good pictures of this bread (artificially staged with some cherries to get a nice color contrast).

It’s alright, I guess. I have the stuff I need to make salads tomorrow, now I have the croutons.

(Posts from fellow BBAers, such as Jim, are here)

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A quick shout out to my BBA friends: sorry for the hold up on the latest challenges! I’m clearly a few behind, and promise to catch up quickly. A few reasons: (1) it’s been so damn hot here in MO (99 degrees everyday for weeks) that the idea of baking has simply not been enticing, (2) my wife and I just completely remodeled our kitchen, so this put the kitchen out of order for a bit, and (3) I was out of town for a while. I’m hoping to be completely up to date by next week.

Now that I’m done with this challenge, I can say that I was a bit ambivalent about this rosemary bread.  To start, I should note that I tried the challenge a week or so ago and it totally bombed (discussed below). So I was hesitant to do it again. When I redid it this time around, it actually did come out the way it was supposed to, but I found myself a bit unimpressed with it. This is due mostly to the fact that it just didn’t match up to the Carol Field Rosemary Bread I made a few months back. Reinhart’s recipe is okay I guess – probably at it’s best when toasted with butter. But on the whole, I don’t think this recipe compares at all to Field’s, which is clearly far superior.

(When my BBA friends pop in, I’ll link to their products here).

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I’m glad to have that last challenge – which was really bland and uninteresting – behind me. This week, Portuguese Sweet Bread, was definitely a step back in the right direction.

As you can see from the shot, I made one of them in a springform, ending up with a loaf that looks more like a cake than anything. The other one, to the right, I made as a standard loaf.

This bread was very (very – did I say very?) light and airy. I was trying to figure out what it was like, and the best I could think was that it was a cross between a challah and a very lite brioche (which is good, because I can’t handle the richness of a normal brioche!).

My impression was that the bread was good and tasty, and had a great texture. As sandwich bread, I’d put it somewhere in the fair category, though (Reinhart recommended it as a sandwich bread). In the morning I plan to try it as a french toast, as the book recommended (I’ll add that as an update tomorrow sometime).

(As always, when the BBAers show up, like Jim, I’ll link to their products here.) (more…)

Zzzzz….

Someone is going to have to explain to me what the point of this week’s recipe — Poolish Baguettes — was, because I just didn’t get it. Maybe I’m dense. This could be it.

Look, I love Italian and French breads. I will bake any variation you throw at me, just because I want to see how it comes out. I like to see how small differences have big effects on product.

In this situation, though, I have to admit…I’m stumped.  This struck me as an average blase white bread shaped into a European loaf.  I’ll eat it, hell it’s still better than the crap in the store around here, but I’m not sure why it merited a place in this book.

(As always, when my BBA friends come by, such as Jim and Nancy, I’ll list their products here, though they may be in boredom comas after this challenge)

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My pizza snobbery is so intense that it’s hard to be around me when pizza is being served and not come away thinking that I’m an asshole. Sometimes I even come away from such situations pretty sure myself that I’m an asshole. It’s just a fact: pizza snobbery brings out the worst in me, and if I sense that I’m in the vicinity of  inferior, my hackles go up. I don’t care if your mother made the pizza. If it sucks, I’m going to tell you. As far as I see it, the pizza situation overall is pretty grim: there are possibly two or three pizzerias in the known universe with great pizza, so chances are your favorite pizza joint makes pizza that is actually crap.

In light of this grim reality, when I make pizza at home I tend to try to shoot for “very good” as opposed to “excellent” pizza because I’m not sure I could ever make an excellent pizza. After all, the bar is just too damn high. This means being always critical of my own product, but I think this is okay. In the end it really shouldn’t be easy to make a good pizza. Unfortunately for most people the bar for great pizza is way too low. As far as I see it, such people don’t deserve to eat or make pizza, but unfortunately I can’t stop people from selling them slices or stop stores from selling them the ingredients to then go and make the slop that they think is pizza (didn’t I say that pizza talk turns me into an asshole?).

With this introduction to pizza in mind, I’m going to rate this pizza, Reinhart’s own recipe, “fair” to “good”. It’s not bad. In the areas where it would need to be tweaked to move up to a solid “good” or “very good” it’s not really an issue of modifying Reinhart’s recipe, but more an issue of havingt the right basic materials, the right stone, the right oven, and so on, on hand. I’ll explain below.

(As my BBA friends, such as Geraint, Jim, Nancy and Susie, come by I’ll list their products here)

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I’m glad to report that I was pretty happy with this week’s challenge. Pane Siciliano is an interesting bread with a unique – and good – taste. It’s well worth making.

Coming off last week’s challenge – Pain de Campagne - this was a good bread to make because — as I noted last time — I thought last week’s bread was somewhat unremarkable. I mean, French bread is always good, but it was somewhat on the boring side of the goodness of French bread. Happily, this week’s variation on Italian bread held up quite a bit better!

Essentially, Pane Siciliano is made by combining bread flour with semolina flour, and also involves adding a few non-standard extra ingredients like honey. I must admit, I thought adding the semolina flour – which is typically used to make pasta – was a bit weird. Not weird in the non-intriguing sense, but rather weird in the “I wonder what this tastes like?” sense. Now that I’ve finished the challenge and eaten the bread, I can confirm that it really does add, in my view, to not just the smell and texture of Italian bread, but also to its taste.

There is one drawback: it takes three days to make this bread. That’s a long process, but it is worth it. Overall, i would say that this is not a good bread to make for everyday use (because of the long process), but would instead work very well as the bread used to go with a pasta meal if you are having special company and you plan ahead.

As my BBA friends, such as Geraint, Jim, Coz, Suzie, and Nancy, show up, I’ll quick link to their products here.

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Opening up the Bread Baker’s Apprentice for this week’s challenge - pain de campagne (country bread) — I found myself trying to figure out what was different about this recipe as opposed to regular basic French bread formulas. It seemed like nothing new. However, reading more closely, you see that this particular version of basic French bread requires the use of a bit of rye flour (or wheat flour) in addition to the staple bread flour (that is typically mixed with unbleached all-purpose flour). I’m always up for modifications on basic European breads, so I was interested to see how this particular substitution would turn out with respect to taste and texture.

Another thing that makes this challenge distinctive is the fact that Reinhart has you take this opportunity – in the first recipe after the halfway point in the book – to try your hand at a variety of different shaping techniques (as you can see in the picture).

Overall, as I’ll mention below, I thought this particular bread had a different, softer texture and it tasted good, but was a tad bit unremarkable to me (though my wife really liked it). As always, the advanced shaping caused me some difficulty, but mastering shaping takes a lot of practice. It’s definitely my weak spot!

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I came into this week’s challenge humming: “Happy days, are here again, the sky above, is clear again…!!:

If you read regularly, you know why. We’ve finally moved away from all of that dreadfully boring sandwich bread and back to the good stuff. I’ve gotta tell you, it really was like climbing over the peak of a mountain, having to bake three sandwich loafs in a row. They were good, but eh…I’ll put it this way: if, tomorrow, all sandwich breads disappeared and were replaced by good Italian and French breads, I wouldn’t miss them a bit. I’d actually be pretty happy.

This animosity to the sandwich loaf has caused a rift in my home, however. Whereas I love rustic European breads, my wife prefers the bland good ol’ American sandwich bread and gets excited when one of those loaves comes up in the challenge. What can I say, she’s from Arkansas, she doesn’t know any better when it comes to bread.

Which reminds me: this pain a l’ancienne — the ancient bread – is good stuff. This time around, I decided to make two batches of this recipe, one to make the bread and then one to try out a foccacia-based pizza (since Reinhart mentions that it could be used in this way). I discuss both experiments below, and both of them were equally excellent.

(As fellow BBA’ers come in, such as Jim, and Susie, I’ll quick link to their products here)

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I wasn’t all that psyched to make this bread. I was a bit tired of all of these loaf breads, to be honest — but this one was a pleasant surprise to me, and I’m glad we did it.

It has a very sophisticated taste, due no doubt to the multiple types of grains (oats, wheat bran, brown rice) that are present in the recipe. In addition the bread is nicely moist, and it has a remarkably open crumb. In fact, I was actually a bit surprised by just how open the crumb was, given the not that high hydration rate on this bread.

This bread is well worth making, I’d argue. In fact, I’m waiting until the morning to see if it works as excellently as toast as Peter Reinhart claims it does!

(As BBA’ers show up, such as Nancy and Jim, I’ll quick link to their products here).

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I’m now caught up!

Making this rye bread was really not a whole lot different from making the Light Wheat Bread. It wasn’t that exciting to do. However, it’s rye bread, so of course it tastes better and is more interesting than wheat bread. This is actually a really good sandwich bread.

There were a few steps along the way, however, that I definitely didn’t do particularly well. These all led to aesthetic problems only, luckily. As I’ll explain below, I just didn’t get the shaping part on this bread right. In truth I was rushed and went too quickly here, and so didn’t think through the consequences of the method I had chosen to use. I’ll explain below how this led to a few problems down the line.

(As fellow BBA’ers, such as Nancy, Susie and Jim, show up, I’ll quick link to their products here.)

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Zzzzzz.

Okay, so I’m a bit behind here. There’s a two-fold reason why. First, it’s finals time, and I’ve been overwhelmed with end of the semester tasks — papers, exams and so on. The good news is that it’s over in a few days. The bad news is that it put me behind in the BBA challenges by a week.

The second reason has more to do with bread making itself: I was so bored by this challenge that I simply couldn’t muster up the energy to do it! I mean look — after making all those great breads, what sense does it make to then back up and make a loaf of wheat bread? Why not just have us make a loaf of Wonder Bread? Ah well, it is now done, so it’s behind me.

Truth be told, however, the bread is actually quite good. Just boring. As long as you can stay awake during the process, it will all be good.

(When BBAers stream in, such as Nancy, Adam, Jim and Joanne, I’ll quick link to their products here.)

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I made these today in the middle of doing some prep work for school, barely even paying attention or putting much effort along the way. Seriously – this is one easy challenge. Quite possibly the easiest one yet in the book.

It’s not just easy, though. Lavash Crackers are also very delicious. I was skeptical about how they would turn out, but my skepticism was misplaced. The specific combination of spices used on these “crackers” (more like breadsticks) is really, really addictive. Once you eat one of these things, you just keep eating. And eating. And eating. Luckily this is not a high-calorie challenge!

(As fellow BBA’ers stream in, such as Nancy and Coz, I’ll quick link to their products right here).

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