Pugliese, revisited

The heart of most of Reinhart's breads are the starters. Like this biga he requires for the Pugliese. I used Gold Medal "all-purpose" flour to make the biga because it is the best of the cheap flours I can find in this area. At about $3 a five pound bag I've found it to be as reliable and flavorful as some of the $5 a five pound bag of "bread" flours!

I mixed up the biga and gave it 4 hours at room temperature before placing it in the fridge for the night. I gave it two hours on a counter this morning to get it back up to temperature. Next time I make a biga for this recipe I'll try to leave it cooling its heels in the fridge for at least 48 hours to more fully develop its flavor.

Once the biga is mixed into the rest of the ingredients (the rest of the flour was a 50/50 mix of GM "all-purpose" and King Arthur durum flour) a 30 minute rest is required to allow the flour to absorb the water. Half the mixing seems to be done at the same time! I do run the electric mixer at one third power for 5 minutes before turning the dough onto a well floured counter. Folding, oiling and dusting with flour every 30 minutes for an hour and a half produces a lively dough that fogs up the glass bowl and tries to squeeze out from under it!

When I scraped the dough loose from the counter I forgot to turn it over so the smooth side was up. Working with wet dough can be a challenge if you forget to keep chilling your hands and scrapers with ice cold water! This ball of dough was smooth and well rounded after a 2 hour rise at 76F.

After shaping the loaves and giving them 90 minutes to rise, I ended up with this bubbly beauty! It and the parchment paper it rose on slid onto a baking stone in a 500F oven. There was a cake pan with hot water simmering on the rack below the stone. I sprayed warm water into the oven every 30 seconds for a minute and a half before turning the heat down to 450F. The bread baked for 15 minutes. Then I removed the parchment paper from between the loaf and stone and gave the bread another 10 minutes.

Not bad. Not bad at all. The fragrance was a mouth watering as ever!

The Bulgarian stopped by to snatch the loaf on the right. She would have begun eating the bread where she found it except I happen to mention I'd just finished grinding a pig shoulder into a breakfast sausage. She pulled the bowl of raw meat from the fridge and started eating gobs of it. (gag) "Not bad." she says. "Nice blend of herbs and spices."

Eating raw pork? Sheesh! Making East European style sausages at her house next month should be interesting! I wonder if she'll eat the raw dough when I start teaching her to build breads after we've made several yards of sausage?

Pugliese, please!

Still working out of Peter Reinhart's "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" I built these two of three (I ate one) loaves of Pugliese, a fairly wet dough, 85% water! I need to ask the local librarian what type and brand of flour it was that she gave me to make these from. My test guinea pig (The Mad Bulgarian) loved the bread and was jabbering at her mother in Bulgarian, via Skype, how good the bread was. I found myself trying to explain how the bread was built to a woman who spoke no English (let alone American!) via a translator who was so excited over having good bread to eat that she kept asking me questions in Bulgarian! (I had enough trouble trying to speak in English instead of the more confusing American.)

I don't know if the Mad One would have been as pleased with the Pugliese if DW hadn't placed them in a plastic bag for the 15 mile drive to present them. The short trip caused the once crisp crust to soften. I prefer wrapping such loaves in cloth or tucking them in paper bags. Transporting them in wicher baskets would be even better, or at least more picturesque?

DW also placed two loaves of Tuscan bread, made from the same unknown flour as the Pugliese, in plastic bags. Old habits die hard. (sigh) DW and DIL ate most of a loaf of Tuscan between them. I managed to get 4 slices for sandwiches and while I thought the bread was tasty, I didn't care for what keeping them in plastic did to the crust and crumb. I ended up giving the second loaf, still in a plastic bag, to DW's father who doesn't care what bread I'm making so long as he gets some of it. HE came to work the next day and began heaping praises on the best bread I'd ever brought him! He ate half the loaf the evening before and didn't think the other half would see another day.

Between the Mad One's rolling her eyes and smacking her lips as she ate Pugliese sandwiches slathered with Mayo and horseradish and stuffed with slices of smoked turkey, and FIL's going on about the Tuscan bread, I'm tempted to say I've achieved Arete in bread building and move on to some other venture (like making a perfect sausage?) Now there's a laugh! As I understand Arete, I'm not supposed to attain perfection, only to struggle toward it. Besides, I have an idea as to what perfect bread is and I haven't made it yet!

Now I need to get back to the kitchen where I have some pretty passable egg noodles to finish making so I can send them off as Christmas gifts. Three batches to a friend in Florida and one back to the person who gifted the dozen free range/grass fed chicken eggs! Yum!

Sprats for breakfast!

Parmigiano Reggiano and sprats (a type of sardine the Bulgarian buys at the Russian store near Baltimore) make up the bulk of the toppings on this leftover bit of pizza dough. The rest are cracklings (the solids leftover from rendering lard from fatback), Bolivian Rose sea salt (because it happened to be in reach), a dusting of thyme and some thick slices of garlic I thawed from the leftover cloves that weren’t suitable for the garden.

Something odd about these frozen cloves. Some of them become almost translucent and gelatin like when I thaw them while others are as much like fresh garlic that I can’t tell the difference. I wish now I had taken time to bag each variety separately so I’d know if certain varieties freeze better than others do. Something to play with after next summer’s harvest!

About 15 minutes on a pizza stone in a 500F oven and things were turning golden. Looks yum!

Well, I can’t say much for the crust other than it holds the toppings. I wasn’t impressed with it as a traditional pizza crust either. I want everything I use to make a meal to have character of its own! Pizza crust should be able to stand alone as something worth eating! This one doesn’t. I’ll make up a batch of the Tuscan Bread dough, tweak it some more and see how it fairs as pizza crust.

The rest of the flatbread? OMG! I love sprats and the sea salt abides well with them, as does the cheese. The garlic is almost lost in those flavors as is the thyme. The cracklings are a surprise when I bite into one of them. So out of sync with everything else, yet so delightful a contrast to the fish and salt! I think this topping is worth keeping!

I guess I should learn how to make a pizza look nice while I’m at this? Then again… I’d rather it taste great!

Tuscan bread, day two

Boy am I glad we bought a decent bread knife! I don't know how I'd cut this bread else wise. The crumb is so soft! Even after sitting out all day and night the loaf was still exceptionally suited to making a sandwich.

As the Mad Bulgarian brings me Sprats from "the Russian store" somewhere down Baltimore way, I figured I'd use them in a quick and simple sandwich. I'm hooked. Simple as that. This is the bread recipe I've been searching for. Nothing else has come close to this bread, though I still need to tweak it here and there to get just the flavor I'm looking for.

It's easy, inexpensive and possibly manipulable to whatever end I might require. I'm almost disappointed I seem to have reached my goal of prefect bread so quickly. If I have, well there is always the perfect sandwich to pursue!

Tuscan Bread, take two

Okay, I was impressed enough with the first attempt at making this bread to try tweaking the recipe to get a flavor I like better. I used butter in place of of olive oil and I added a teaspoon of salt the original recipe does not call for. Then I shaped the dough to fit bread pans instead of baking it as boles on a stone. I want sandwich bread, not soup sopping bread.

What came out of the oven was once again a surprise. The crust is soft, the crumb even softer. If I didn't have a good bread knife I couldn't cut these loaves! It's like trying to cut store bought white bread!

The loaves are once again a long ways from pretty. They looked nice in the pans and I should have left them alone, but I scored them just before setting them to bake. The tops deflated a bit. Not a big deal, or surprise as I've yet to get the dough to match the recipe's description of tacky, but not sticky. Both attempts at building this bread have been very sticky. I'm guessing a tacky dough would be a firmer dough? I need to work on that. This batch of bread was made with a KA bread flour starter and finished with Wheat Montanna's white flour. The first breads were started with Gold Medal all-puropes flour and finished with KA bread flour.

I also need to deal with the sweetness that is the finished bread. There is no sugar, honey, or molasses in the recipe, yet the bread is almost too sweet. I added a teaspoon of salt to this second batch and barely noticed a difference in flavor. I'm guessing the sweetness comes from using cooked flour as a base for the dough? I don't know anyone who's ever used cooked flour to make bread, so I'm not sure if I'm getting what I should be.

The bread is so close to the texture and usability I'm looking for that I have to keep working with it. The next loaves I'll double the amount of salt. If that doesn't give me what I'm looking for I try using half as much cooked flour.

Then again, I may stay with the basic recipe and use the lard I rendered from this fatback as a replacement for the olive oil the recipe calls for. There is some magic between lard and flour that doesn't happen with any other fat and flour. I might even work some of these cracklin's into a loaf! If I notice much of a difference I'll render some of the leaf fat I have to make a purer lard, though I'm leaning to saving that fat for puff pastries and candies!

Of poolish and biga

As usual I rushed through the building and baking of my breads. I started out with the best of intentions, but distractions always seem to turn up. Thankfully ciabatta tends to be forgiving and while the resulting loaves are far from pretty they are very close to what I hoped for flavor and texture wise!

These two were made with the biga. they were a little smaller and firmer than the poolish based loaves. I cut the smaller loaf into sections this afternoon and stuffed them with hamburger, bacon, jalapeno cheese and mustard. Yummy! The flavor survived the stuffings and the texture was very good for sandwich use. I should take my time next batch and stretch the dough so it doesn't rise quite so high. That's a lot of sandwich to get teeth around. but I've a big mouth so I managed.
These loaves were built off the poolish. They were much wetter than the biga dough and spread out more than they rose, though they are still a bit much for comfortable sandwich bread. I'm sure they make an excellent soup sopping bread! I haven't cut a chunk yet. the flavor continues to improve with time, though the crumb degrades. Like most "living' foods, it's always a balance. When is it perfect?

Tuscan Bread

The boiled water/flour starter was a real mess as far as I'm concerned. Even after I added the other ingredients the dough remained very sticky. I had to keep stopping the mixer and scraping down the sides of the bowl with a cold spatula. After the kneading I had to run cold water over my hands to get the dough into a ball so I could set it to rise. Cold, wet hands work perfectly for handling wet doughs!

This is the dough before it was covered and set aside to rise. I didn't think to take a picture of the risen dough. (I was busy racking cyser and mead.) Our kitchen is around 70F and the dough needed punched down about an hour and a half into its 2 hour rise.

My son tells me I need to learn to shape loaves properly. He works in a commercial kitchen where presentation means something. I don't. I can focus on crust, crumb and flavor. Once I have them where I want them I'll worry about what my bread looks like!

Out of the oven and cooling. I tapped their bottoms. They sounded hollow, but I should have used an instant read thermometer! I think they are a little underdone.

I was a little disappointed with the crumb. As gaseous as the dough had been I'd hoped for big bubbles. Still, the loaves would be great for sandwiches if Peter had suggested a little salt! He did suggest the recipe was a starting point and bakers should work from there. Remembering that, I can't complain too much about the result. Nice crust, crumb is very nice for sandwiches. A little sweet? Maybe toasting it would help?

DW cut several slices and ate them as they were. She allowed a bit of salt would have made them better. I'm thinking a slather of mayo and some fresh cracked pepper, maybe the slightest sprinkle of salt? Some imported Tuscan ham roasted with rosemary? GA! I'm making myself hungry!

Not a bad result my first time through the recipe. I was very surprised with what I got each step of the way from beginning to end. I've never used cooked flour in a recipe before. I'm thinking I might try it alongside the ciabattas I make next week from the poolish and biga I have in the fridge.

Of poolish, biga and ... what the heck is that anyhow?

So here's where I begin. I've been using Gold Medal "all-purpose" flour for my white breads and I have made a few artisan breads with it just to see if the flour makes any great difference in the finished loaf. It does, but not as I'd thought it would so I'm back to trying every recipe using each flour all over again. (sigh) I can say, for my taste and needs, Gold Medal is pretty fair and a good bit cheaper! As I have the KA I might as well use it up. Same with the Wheat Montana I have in the freezer.

The starters below will end up flavoring one of my favorite breads- Ciabatta!

A poolish with 2oz of rye flour

A biga, also with 2oz of rye flour.

I have to mark the time,

as I can't remember my name most days, let alone when I started a ferment!

WTH? This is from Pete R.'s "Tuscan Bread" recipe. Boiling water and flour? Mix until smooth and let sit at room temperature over night?

Okay Peter, you haven't misled me yet.

I'll make the Tuscan Bread tomorrow. The poolish and biga need a few days in the fridge before I use them to build the ciabattas. As the Bulgarian will be gone for the weekend I guess I'll hold off baking the bread until Monday. If she isn't back until Tuesday, she'll not get the loaves fresh from the oven. Not that she cares! How she hoards the bread (for as long as a week), nibbling them instead of gorging on them is beyond me. When they're fair to middlin' good, they seldom last two days in our house!

Oo, that reminds me. I need to get the Bulgarian to teach me how to make a few soups in our Polish tureen. Ciabatta, that has a few days on it, is great for sopping soup!

Bread-building!

Arete (a Greek word), meaning excellence of any kind. In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was the act of living up to one's full potential. (paraphrased from Wikipedia)

This is the bread-building book I’m starting from.

Arete in bread building is my goal. When I was a kidling in the early 1960s, we were living on the edge of a Midwestern city, Mom, or some mom, was always baking bread! I suppose most people of my generation and socioeconomic background grew up with the warmth of an oven and the fragrance of baking bread filling their houses and heads.

Wouldn’t you know it, I forgot the butter! Not having time to melt the delicious stuff I poured several tablespoons of olive oil into the bowl instead. Fortunately, the flour accepted it with a little extra effort from the mixer.

It sticks in my mind that a Catholic pope once ruled that during Lent bread could not be made using butter? As the story went, this ruling favored the olive oil producers, Italians mostly. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about such favoritism today. Still, the history of bread is fascinating.

Looks good so far.

I'm not much for shaping loaves yet. I figure the dough will rise enough to shape itself to the pan?

Yepper!

30 some years ago, I decided I’d have enough soft, bland white bread and took a shot at recreating Mom’s version of “basic white bread”, the first bread recipe listed in every home cookbook I’ve looked at from that time. Not only could I not eat what eventually came out of the oven, I couldn’t even cut to eat it! Since then I’ve baked loaves that actually turned the edges of an electric meat slicer, ruined an electric knife and provided family and friends with an excuse to laugh at me. I’ve also made breads those same people offered to buy from me! I’ve carried homemade loaves of herb bread, olive bread and white bread (sliced for sandwiches) along snow-covered roads so friends could have bread with their meals when the bread trucks couldn’t deliver to the local stores.

I’ve met bread builders who’s “so so” loaves have caused me to bang my head in frustration. I’ve given bread away at the local library and shook off the praises of “such good bread!” by telling everyone those loaves were my flops. The good bread I NEVER share!

I believe in balance. I don't share my good bread so my body has developed an intolerance to wheat gluten. Since I'm going to suffer a bit to enjoy a good chunk of bread I HAVE to build the best bread I can! Not being able to eat all the good bread means I have to share it. Ha! Hopefully my intolerance wont become a full blown disease the way it has for so many others I know.