Breadhead Friday: Lean Artistry

I picked up Richard Bertinet's Dough not long ago and got some very good ideas on kneading and shaping bread dough.  His kneading process is different: you slap the dough on the counter, fold it over, pick it up, and slap it down again.  Over and over.  This puts air into the dough and helps it get the big holes you want in the simpler, lean breads (a lean bread is one that doesn't have sugar, fat, or eggs to enrich the dough).

The epi is on the right. It's supposed to look like a wheat sheaf

Having done breads only with my trusty KitchenAid for the last several years, I was skeptical, but willing to experiment.  My experience working with wet doughs was helpful: I knew that the soggy mess I was flopping around would eventually come together, and it did.

Great oven spring. The epi is a bit lumpy

One tool that I'd disdained as unnecessary has turned out to be vital in the process: a plastic dough scraper.  If you want to keep air in your dough and get that light, airy crumb, you need one.  It cuts without letting air out, and helps with both mixing and shaping.

I got the big holes in a baguette!

Across the board, I'm happy with the results.  The mini-baguettes, while not perfect, have great holes in the crumb, the best I've gotten with baguettes.  And while the fougasses may be a little clunky, they were also airy and nice to eat, and with practice, I'll get better at them.

These fougasses are not fugazi

The breads pictured here were my own recipe: a 75%-80% hydration lean dough to ensure lightness in the crumb.  I highly recommend Dough as an excellent bread primer with plenty of good techniques, ideas, and recipes.

Breadhead Friday: Dutch Oven Experiments

I hauled our cast iron dutch oven out of storage, cleaned and re-seasoned it, and got it ready for some bread baking.  Baking bread in a dutch oven is simple: you preheat the dutch oven in your regular oven, put the dough in there, cover it, and bake it.  For the last few minutes of baking you take off the lid to help color the crust.  A simple Google search on dutch oven bread recipes presented variations on this one by Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery, so I gave it a try.

The crust was nice, the crumb was nice, but there was a certain flavor to it I didn't care for, probably having to do with the overnight fermentation on the counter.  So I adapted a more tried-and-true lean bread recipe, using a cold rise in the fridge, and had much better results.

Okay, great.  What now?

My first experiment was with bacon bread.  Same lean dough recipe, perhaps a little wetter than usual, with pieces of cooked bacon added to the mixing process.  It turned out really well.  There was a faint smoky flavor throughout the loaf, and the little bacon bits added texture.  Any concerns about the salt content of the bacon affecting the yeast were unfounded: it rose just fine in the fridge.  I used the leftover dough to make pizza, which was really quite good.

Bacon dough, pre-rise

Bacon dough, after 3 days in the fridge

The baked bacon bread

Bacon bread crumb

Bacon dough pizza with chicken parm and pepperoni

Where else do we go with this?

As I leafed through a Zingerman's catalog, I saw their mail-order breads and found my answer: Parmesan pepper bread.  If the salty bacon didn't mess up the rise, surely a salty cheese like Parmesan wouldn't, either.  Right?

Raw loaf in the hot dutch oven - note the pepper

Parmesan pepper boule

The crumb shot

It came out perfectly.  There's a great, rich taste of Parmesan cheese, mixed with a pleasant, lingering heat from about two teaspoons of black pepper.  As before, I'd done nothing different in the mixing and kneading process: I just added the extra ingredients in the beginning.

No eggs, milk, or butter needed: just a straight flour-water-yeast-salt dough, plus the flavoring of your choice.

Breadhead Friday: Pizzas I Have Known

It's been another extremely busy week.  Here are the highlights:

• The novella is finished editing and has gone on to formatting.  Once again, I've used Mark Coker's Smashwords Style Guide, which is an excellent resource on formatting documents into ebooks.  It's a somewhat lengthy process, but the results are worth it.
• I trained myself to use GIMP to create a cover for the novella.  GIMP is powerful, easy to use, and free.  Luckily, I have some experience using Photoshop, so GIMP wasn't terribly difficult to learn.  The cover photo was taken by me at 4:30 AM in downtown Dunedin.
• Everyone says that unless you're a graphic artist, you shouldn't do your own book covers.  That's mostly true. However, I have done professional graphic art and have experience designing both book and video covers.  The cover for Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City is good and captures the feel and look of what I'd imagined.
• I changed the look of this blog.
• I practiced baking bread in a dutch oven.  The results have been good, but I want them to be great, so I continue to work at it.

With all that in mind, here are some pizzas I have made over the last few months.  This does not represent all of the pizzas; only the ones I remembered to take photos of.

Turkey pepperoni and chicken parm pizza

Turkey pepperoni, grilled chicken, and bacon

Turkey pepperoni, chicken parm, and bacon

Turkey pepperoni and bacon

Sloppy joe pizza

A few notes:

• Obviously, my family is keeping the turkey pepperoni industry afloat.  It's a heavy task, but someone has to do it.
• A chicken and bacon pizza is about as good as it gets, especially if it's chicken parm.  
• For the sloppy joe pizza, things went in a different but delicious direction: I added some leftover sloppy joes I'd made to the sauce, which gave it some extra protein and diced peppers.  The crust is also different: I used leftover lean dough from a dutch oven boule I'd made earlier in the week.  It's an experiment that's well worth repeating.
• And just so we don't seem like pigs here, a green salad always precedes pizza,  I call it a "kitchen sink" salad because I add diced apples, strawberries, blueberries, jicama, and papaya to the typical greens, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, peapods, etc.  It's become such a habit that our three-year-old naturally expects a salad before pizza. Go figure.

Breadhead Friday: Doughnuts

I'm expanding Breadhead Friday to include all things made with yeast, and in this case, I'm adding doughnuts.  They're very time-consuming, from making the dough to letting it rise twice to cutting, shaping, frying, filling, and decorating.

But if you have the inclination and gumption, they're worth it.  

At a kitchen store a few years ago, I bought a two dollar doughnut cutter for the traditionally-shaped doughnuts (with a hole).  For the jelly-filled, I used an empty, clean tuna can with a hole in the middle to let the air out when pressing down.

The recipe I used is a basic paczki dough.  Paczki are Polish doughnuts, usually filled with cream cheese, jelly, or other fruit filling.  My only alteration to the dough was letting it do its first rise in the fridge; if I use this recipe again, I'll let it do its second rise in the fridge instead.  

Frying in a pot of oil

A different batch frying up

For the frosting, I did a chocolate ganache and a confectioner's sugar glaze, both similar to these recipes from King Arthur.

Jimmies aren't necessary, but nice to have

Unfortunately, I learned too late in the process that the doughnut-filling device I typically use went missing; it probably didn't survive one of the several moves we've done over the last few years, so I had to forego the filling on the solid doughnuts.  

Rolled in sugar right out of the fryer

By doughnut-filling device, I mean a 99 cent plastic squeeze bottle.  Like this one.  For fillings without seeds, they're perfect.  I'll have to get some more someday.

One batch of dough made this many doughnuts

There's no way we could eat the entire batch, so most of them ended up in the freezer.  They'll keep.

And, of course, the crumb shot

Breadhead Friday: Holla for Challah!

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, started the evening of Wednesday, September 24.  Jewish holidays always begin the evening before, because Judaism goes by the lunar calendar. The next day begins when the sun sets. According to the Jewish calendar, this is the year 5775.

The holiday is traditionally celebrated with challah, apples, and honey to guarantee a sweet new year.  Challah is a braided egg bread, rich and a little bit sweet.  Some people put in raisins, others scatter poppy seeds and/or sesame seeds on the surface before baking.  Me, I just like it plain.  No raisins, dried fruit, or seeds.

The dough, freshly made

The dough after two days in the fridge. Note the bubbles

I've made challah before with some success, so for this new year's celebration I decided to make it again.  Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the results, though my next batch of dough won't be quite so wet.  I get so wrapped up in the artisan bread requirement of less flour=more holes that this dough ended up a little slack and difficult to work with.

Three-braid loaf after two hours of rising and egg wash

For ease of shaping, I went for a three-braid loaf.  You can do all kinds of braids, including round 7-braid loaves, but I'm working like heck to finish this YA Halloween novel and didn't want to make too much work for myself.

Fresh out of the oven

So, Happy New Year!  Even if you're not Jewish, challah's a very tasty, flaky bread that's great for sandwiches and French toast.

The crumb shot

Breadhead Friday: Who Put the Bab in Babka?

Babka straddles the line between yeast bread and coffee cake, and when done right can be the best of both worlds.  New Yorkers are lucky enough to be able to get them at the corner bakery, but those of us living outside the Big Apple usually have to make our own.  The first time I made a babka, using a Peter Reinhart recipe, it turned out okay, but wasn't anything to write home about.  I'd done it, checked that box, and moved on.

Dough rolled out and chocolate filling spread atop

Years later, I figured I'd try it again.  This time, it turned out a lot better.  The crumb was flaky and light, and the icing drizzle created a nice sweetness that contrasted with the bittersweet chocolate.

Rolled up, put into a Bundt pan, and baked

The process is a bit involved, requiring long risings and a bit of a challenge shaping, but if you've ever made a jelly roll or sticky buns, it shouldn't present much of a problem.

Blue and white icing

I don't know why I put a two-tone icing drizzle on it.

The crumb shot

Breadhead Friday: Focaccia

The only experience most of us will have with focaccia is a dry piece flatbread served at chain restaurants as an Italian-style appetizer or part of a more ambitious bread basket.  Which is a shame, because properly prepared, there are few things in the world more delicious than focaccia.  Moist with herb oil and a tender, almost creamy crumb, you won't believe how good it can be.

By properly prepared, I mean you need to have a high hydration dough to get this to work (75%-80%).  The recipe I use is very similar to this raisin bread recipe, though I obviously leave out the dried fruit for more savory ingredients.

Before baking. Sliced tomatoes and plenty of herb oil

After baking: note the char. The herb oil cooks the tomatoes a little, too

A word of explanation about percentages: a 75-80% hydration dough means that if the weight of flour equals 100%, you need to have 75-80% of that weight in water, also.  So if you add a pound of flour, you have to add .75 or .85 lbs of water.  A more detailed explanation of baker's percentage can be found here.

Pepperoni pizza focaccia

Typically, I treat it like a pizza, and put various toppings on it.  We'd have it more often, but it's a bit time-consuming to make: lots of time and care.  But it's worth it.  Every delicious bite.  Make some.  You won't regret it.

Left: tomatoes and cheese. Right: tomatoes, sauteed onions and cheese

Breadhead Friday: Lean Bread

A lean bread is one that has very little fat or sugar in it, if any.  Most sandwich breads aren't lean breads: they're enriched, so they contain things like sugar, butter, oil, flavorings, and other such things.  They're great, but I wanted to make the lean bread recipe from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day.

The recipe is very simple: water, flour, yeast, and salt.  You mix until everything's combined, and instead of kneading it traditionally, you do the stretch-and-fold method four times, going in ten minute intervals.  It's amazing how just one stretch-and-fold can take a rough, coarse, wet mess and turn it into a glossy, springy dough.

Shaping the dough

To develop flavor in the wheat, this dough requires an overnight rise in the refrigerator.  When you're ready to bake, you take it out, shape it, and let it rise at room temperature for at least two hours.

More shaping

Typical hearth baking is next: a pan of hot water at the bottom of the oven to create steam, and bake at high heat.

The finished loaves. We both need to work on shaping and scoring

Overall, a fun project, and one that produces tasty bread.  I achieved a few larger holes in the crumb, but the important thing is that my little boy and I did this thing together.  We'll see if he picks up the bread bug.

Breadhead Friday: Ciabatta

My go-to bread recipe is Jason's Quick Coccodrillo Ciabatta bread.  The term "quick" can be a bit of a misnomer in our gotta-have-it-now society, as it takes more than three hours to make, but compared to other breads with overnight rises and a dozen ingredients, it can't be beat.

Puffy, wobbly, but on the peel

The simplicity of it is incredible.  It's only made of four things: flour, water, salt, and yeast.  And somehow it provides flavor that's way beyond what you'd expect for something so basic.  The crumb is pleasantly chewy, and the inside is almost creamy in texture, full of those big holes that artisan bakers love to achieve.

Goodness baked right in

This is the bread my favorite pizza crust recipe is based on.  There are a few tricks to it, like placing the fragile, wobbly loaves onto a peel without ruining the air pockets, but once you have that down, you have bread that truly unlocks the flavors trapped in the wheat.

Your obligatory cross-section

The dough's terribly wet and sticky, and doesn't behave the way you'd like it to.  You can't really shape it, but if you wanted, you could put it on a parchment-lined French bread pan and make a cylinder out of it.  It needs the flour to grab onto, so you can't just oil everything for this one: you need to dust the parchment and the dough with plenty of flour to get it right.

Look, look!  I got the big holes!

If you like good, simple bread, make this ciabatta.  I've done a little experimenting with putting herbs and powdered garlic into the dough, but the best treat is just eating it straight.  You would not believe that plain white flour, salt, water, and yeast could taste so good.

Breadhead Friday: Pizza Sauce Recipe

Pursuant to the post on making pizza at home, I want to give out my recipe for pizza sauce.  It's easy, quick, and tasty.  There's a brightness to it from the red wine vinegar, a little heat from the red pepper flake, and enough spices to give it great flavor, but not overwhelm the toppings and crust.

And the best part is that you don't have to cook it.  The sauce cooks on the pizza itself.

This recipe is the product of trial and error across dozens of pizzas, and will make enough sauce to cover five (5) average-sized pies.

Ingredients
1 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes
1 28 oz. can of tomato puree
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 and 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tbsp basil
1 and 1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp black pepper
A few shakes of red pepper flake
Salt to taste

Mise en place

All you have to do is put the ingredients into a bowl and mix them with a whisk.  Couldn't be easier.

In the bowl, ready to be whisked

Once you've got it mixed together, give it a little taste.  I know it's not cooked, but it'll be okay, I promise.  The tomatoes have been steamed as part of the canning process.  If it needs salt, add salt.

All mixed up

If you use the pizza recipe linked at the top of this post, you'll see that the pizza is baked at a pretty high heat (500 degrees F or higher).  So you don't need to cook the sauce: it's a thin layer on the dough that will get cooked as part of the baking process.

The sauce is on the pizza - REPEAT: the sauce is on the pizza

Portion out the sauce into five containers and freeze or refrigerate them as you see fit.  You may want to make this sauce a couple hours before making the pizza to allow the flavors to meld.

The distribution of pepperoni here is reminiscent of the Tunguska Explosion of 1908

There you go.  Now you've got one less excuse to go to Pizza Hut.  Not that there's anything wrong with Pizza Hut.