More Bread

Despite the complete lack of update here, I've been pressng forward with my bread making over the weekends. We are both loving all the fresh baked bread, and I am definitely getting better at using my instincts on hydration and whatnot.

As a follow up to the french bread, I baked another batch of Ciabatta. I was more aggressive with the hydration this time. I still didn't quite get the crumb I was looking for, but at least it didn't look like a chicken. We managed to eat it all before I got a picture, so you'll just have to trust me on that.

I followed that up (last weekend) with Pain a[funny accent here] l'Ancienne, which Reinhart spends much of the 100 page intro to the book rhapsodising.

This bread uses deferred fermentation, which means that you retard rising overnight by using ice water in the dough and putting the bread in the fridge. This allows the secondary reactions that usually occur concurrently with rising to get a head start, leading to a very different flavor. While most of the breads using a pre-ferment have a sharper, more savory flavor, this one has a smoother, sweeter one.

My loaves came out a bit rustic (which is the polite way to say 'ugly') but they had a great, open crumb and wonderful flavor. I wanted to make baguettes, but because of the size of my baking stone had to keep them pretty short. I made six, fifteen inch long loaves and by the end of the first day half of them were gone. The taste and texture of this bread was just great, and we really enjoyed it. It did seem to lose freshness a little quicker than some of the other breads I've done from this book, but a quick visit to the toaster fixed that just fine.

This was a truely amazing bread, and was one of the easiest to make. No pre-ferment is needed, and because of the hydration level all the keading is done by machine. This guy took very little effort, and made a wonderful loaf.

So far in this bread frenzy, I have been using only all purpose and bread flour. Since over the past few years Mary and I have managed to accumulate quite a collection of flours, I was interested in making a recipe that would use something else as well.

This weekend, I found that in Pain de Champagne, which uses a small amount of wheat flour. This bread is back to the more standard method (pre-ferment mande the prior day and kept in the fridge overnight after rising) and according to Reinhart is the one most often used around France for creative shaping.

I chose to knead this one by hand rather than with the Kitchen Aid in order to get a better feel for the dough. I was very pleased with the hydration level and feel of the dough, so I'll probably continue this habit in the future. The hand kneading doesn't take that much longer, and once you get the hang of it and don't constantly have dough sticking to your hands is quite fun.

Mary had suggested that I make rolls so that we could have meatloaf sandwhiches, so most of the dough got shaped into small batards for that purpose. I did, however, save out a chunk in order to attempt the most absurd of bread shapes -- the Epi or sheaf of wheat. To shape bread in this way, you first shape a baguette and then perform a series of cuts and pulls to make the lobes of the wheat berries.

I was very pleased with my shaping this time around, and only had one real ugly duckling in the rolls. The baguette for the Epi came out so wonderfully that I considered just baking it in that form. Because I was going to bake it in a sheet pan rather than on the stone, it was long and slender and I had managed to shape it to a very even thickness. Still, the Epi was so silly that I just had to press forward. While you won't mistake mine for the picture in the book, I do think I did a good job of at least approximating the proper shape. Next time, I'll cut a little deeper and at a sharper angle, in order to allow the 'wheat berries' to be pulled a little further out from the loaf. After baking, I realized why this was such a great shaepe: The ratio of crust to crumb was way higher than with a regular baguette, so we ended up with a loaf full of end pieces. Could there be anything better?