Beer Bread (simple to make! Eventually.)

(Originally appeared in the ENJ)
“You said you weren’t going to drink beer again.” DW stands with her head cocked to one side, her good eye jumping about as agitation builds.

“I’m not drinking beer.” I grumble. “Beer is disgusting.” I continue to eye the array of bottles on the rack in Gettysburg’s remodeled Giant supermarket where a beer garden replaces the old coffee shop, much to DW’s disgust. She used to enjoy a hot cuppa on our way home from shopping there.

“Then why are you looking at beer?” Her eye is now spastic in its jittering.

“I got a recipe for beer bread.”

She sighs. She used to think I was crazy, as my interests would jump from photography, to fish keeping, to gardening, to leather crafting, to… well, whatever caught my attention. Her eventual acceptance that I am crazy makes life simpler. That I tend to rein in my sudden enthusiasms, I’m only a year and some months from turning 60 (gods, how did that happen?), has also made her life easier as I’ve gotten practical in what I take interest in. Gardening has the potential to feed us, someday. Archery (now that I’ve settled into the type of shooting I enjoy) gets me out from under foot as I go off to watch over the IWLA kids a couple times a month during warm weather. Fermenting sugars into alcohol keeps me out of bars. Bread building fills the house with mouth-watering fragrances and tempts us to eat a food best gifted to others, neither of us needing the weight we tend to put on when I’m caught up in a bread making frenzy. (The current frenzy has run for several months and shows no sign of abating.)

“Beer bread? I hate beer. But go ahead.” Another long sigh. Turns out she hates beer bread made with dark, full flavored stout too. Nor is she wild over the wine bread I made a few days later.

Ever since my decision to sit among the pagans and listen to their philosophies I’ve been finding the universe opening door upon door upon door to lead me ever farther from the beaten path. What I have recently discovered as I step through these doors are rooms I’ve been in before, only now I’m seeing them from a different perspective.

Yes, beer is disgusting. During the ten-year inebriation, I drank a minimum of 3,600 bottles of beer and thought all but maybe a dozen of them disgusting. As I wasn’t chasing their flavor, I didn’t see the people around me who were. Now that I’m looking for shortcuts in bread building, (beer is a great shortcut for adding flavor to bread) I’m finding beer aficionados stepping up with suggestions of what they would like to see in bread I build. (And surprise! I’m not so far off the beaten path. There are more than a few local bread builders ahead of me.)

One home brewer (working at Gateway Liquor store outside of Thurmont), after sampling bread I made using a Polish beer he’d suggested, got so enthused he now wants to make beer for my bread! A customer standing at the counter asked if she could taste the bread. Eyes wide, she allowed the bread had to be on her table next Christmas.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share this recipe would you?”

I happily turned her frown to a delighted smile when I told her I’d found the recipe online and would print out a couple copies for her. (Should she not find time to make the bread herself I’d happily build as much bread as she needs for her seasonal feast. And why not? Her son works in that store, and like everyone else I’ve met there, has begun to suggest other forms/carriers of alcohol I might try in future bread.)

Not long after the Mad One tells me I should consider building bread professionally, Cousin Luke informs me one of his high school friends will be attending our next weekend feasting.

“Jack, he used to have a bakery.”

I find myself sitting with a once-upon-a-time baker as he finishes a plate of Paleo chicken with which the Mad One dazzled us. He uses a chunk of ciabatta I’d built (it’s the Mad One’s bread of choice if I give her a choice) to mop up the sauce. We’ve talked about food and wine, his bakery and why he isn’t baking for a living (no money in it). He mentions working part-time for a bakery/pizzeria in Biglerville. He’s cleaned his plate of sauce, the ciabatta no longer flavored with anything but my effort to give it life.

“What do you think of the bread?”

He studies it briefly. Takes a bite, chews and swallows. “This is good bread. Did you refrigerate the dough?”

I’m impressed. I had retarded the ferment overnight in the fridge.

“How can I improve it?”

The universe opens another door.

The baker, younger than I, clean-cut, soft-spoken, apparently a good Xian (possibly even a Christian, though I’d not go that far on such a short time with him) is about as opposite me as one can get. Yet we share a passion that allows us to consider the other favorably. He’s read most of the bread building books I have and a few I haven’t. He’s worked with master bakers in Phillie, toured the bakeries of Europe and has built a wood-fired oven in his backyard. (He seemed pleased that I recognized the design and took to urging me to bring him dough we can ready for the oven as he seldom has time to build bread these days.)

We got to talking about where I might go with this interest in crafting bread. He suggested I consider a commercial venture. I allowed the idea appeals to me, but I don’t want to make pig food.

“What you call pig food is bread made from mixes and shaped to look like artisan bread. It has additives to give it shelf life. The few bakeries in your area also use mixes, as far as I can tell from the breads I’ve had of them. What you make is NOT pig food. You need to learn the bakers’ percentages and make ten or so loaves at a time so the handling and shaping becomes easy. You have a passion for this. I can teach you the rest.”

“What do I do with ten loaves of bread?”

“What do you do with the two or three loaves you make now?”

“Hmmm… I guess I can find ten people to gift bread to?”

“There you go.” He smiles. “It isn’t the finished bread we’re concerned with. It’s the making, the building, the constantly striving for better bread. Isn’t it?”

Yes. Yes it is. Now, I have to learn to create and keep a sourdough starter.

Adding a bottle of beer is so much easier. Which reminds me! I have three beer doughs ready for the oven and an olive oil bread to start building. And a cake. Honey cake! Gods, the frenzy be upon me!

In Spite of Allergies!

( Originally appeared in the ENJ)

Twenty-eight years ago, it entered my head that I should sober up and get on with living. The hangovers had stretched from a few hours into days and what was left of my mind stubbornly refused to let me suicide by any means quicker than drinking myself to death. With a sigh of resignation, I looked about for something to live for. Having spent the past twelve years as a drunk, I hadn’t much recent experience outside of that scene so I considered the time before alcohol. The twelve years of schooling offered little beyond frustration and anger so I jumped beyond them to my preschool years. What in those dim memories could be conjured to inspire a new run at life?

The fragrance of Mom’s homemade bread filled my head. My mouth watered. I knew I had a starting point. Not a reason to live, but a goal to focus on while I rebuilt a life mostly wasted at that time. I would attempt to recreate the white bread Mom had enchanted a five year old with. (Years later I would realize the god Yeast, has long influenced my life. First, as a major facilitator of bread, then the creator of alcohol, and back to bread again.)

I had a mission. Decades later, I have not built Mom’s bread. It eventually penetrated my addled pate, via a dozen bread books covering all aspects of bread from grain fields to glazes, that a couple of things were no longer available to me. Whatever flour Mom had used, the wheat for it is no longer grown. The milk certainly isn’t the same. (Cream graced the upper portion of the bottles she poured the sweet liquid from, nothing like the thin, chalky joke called “whole milk” today.) Perhaps even the yeast strains had been tweaked. And the butter I use was, in her kitchen, some brand of long forgotten margarine.

Disasters (in my eyes) followed me from bread book to bread book. I finally gave up on Mom’s bread and turned to artisan breads at librarian Sue’s suggestion. Which was a leap of frustration more than of faith. Most people who attempt bread building can make an acceptable white bread. Though many home bakers I’ve talked to pale at the thought of working with wet, gooey dough that can take days to build and often flops at the moment before entering an oven. Sue, being on a bread-building path herself, took to sharing her efforts and inspired me to reconsider just what I wanted from bread.

For ten years, I played with recipes, getting close to something I actually liked, though each loaf was found lacking in one quality or another. Then in October of this year, everything came together. Breads began to turn out close to perfection. Especially breads I don’t like, but others find delightful. It seemed I could do nothing wrong even when I screwed up a recipe or tweaked it by switching flours, mixed building methods because of scheduling, or (even more likely to end badly) adjusted ingredient amounts and time tables to get what I wanted when I wanted it! I had reached a wall and passed through it, or over it.

The Mad One has been my harshest, most earnest critic. No other individual has sampled more of the breads I’ve built, nor urged me onward, nor chastised me more often. The last breads I presented to her eager, but skeptical eyes, were at once tore into chunks to be devoured alone, dipped in some sauce, swiped through a gravy, eaten with cheese, savored with sips of wine.

Staring at me over a handful of bread, she allowed, “This is real bread. All the breads you have brought me these last weeks have been real bread. Now you have to decide. Are you going to continue playing or are you going to get serious and take the next step?”

I stare back at her. The next step is commercial of course. I considered the breads good enough, but wondered if it was ego or fact. Fact, according to the Mad One.

“Stop experimenting and focus on several breads, each for a different purpose. Perfect them so you can make them with little effort. You’ve made some good cake, add another desert or two and you have the basis of a business. Emmitsburg is the wrong town for such a business though. You will have to move. Sophia would be a good place to open a bakery. My sister says the bread there is horrible now. The old ways of doing things are being lost to the European Union.”

I don’t see myself in Bulgaria, but I never saw artisan breads on the horizon, or the Mad One either. Nor did I see a developing wheat allergy that leaves me groggy, sinuses clogged, eyes burning and cramps in the intestines after only a few mouthfuls of bread.

I’ve new goals I struggle toward. Making an income from bread is not one of them. (I’ve stood on a farm and watched tons of commercial artisan breads be unwrapped, ground and fed to pigs and cows. Why would I put my heart and energy into making pig food?) No, I’ll work at perfecting the recipes I’ve gotten good at and gift them to people I know will appreciate them.

I would like to try building breads in a kitchen with commercial equipment someday, before the allergy gets so bad I have to remove myself from a floury environment. (Perhaps I’ll even offer them at some future bake sale.) Gods, I hope the Mad One understands. I’ve seen her challenge dragons and the dragons back down! Maybe I can teach her to make bread, if she hangs around another twenty-eight years?

There is a goal worth working toward. I now have flour from Europe to use in the recipes the Mad One and I favor most. She tells me she has no talent for bread building, just a passion for eating it. That’s all I started with, a passion so great I set aside much else I could have more profitably pursued. She wants me to teach her so she can teach her mom, who (of course) makes the best breads in the Mad One’s life. But not like the ones I build.

Sadly, the Mad One’s mom will not always be there to build such memorable breads. The Mad One, stubborn as she can be, will learn the recipes and techniques from me so she can go home and learn more from her mother. Knowing I’ve passed something valuable on to someone else seems the best way for me to proceed. Perhaps someone not on the Mad One’s horizon will learn bread building from her.

Focaccia, maybe.

It's been awhile since I've posted here. (Been doing the Facebook crap because that's where I thought I needed to be. How wrong can one get?) I need to focus on what's important to me and FB is mostly distraction, and egos almost as bad as my own. So it's back to the blog and BREAD!

This attempt at bread building is out of Peter Reinhart's "The Bread Baker's Apprentice". I've been building poolish versions of Ciabatta for the Mad Bulgarian who is usually furious with me for deviating from the leanest of recipes! Focaccia, made with a poolish, allows me to add whatever I like, even to the point of turning the bread into a pizza! I'm also leaving small amounts of poolish in the bowl as I begin each bread. I rebuild the poolish from the leavings, not that I'm worried about the cost of yeast, I'm trying to establish the habit of baking from restarted poolish so I can invest in a packet of French bread starter yeast and bacteria. THAT stuff is expensive so starting a new bread from the leavings of past starters makes sense, provided I get into the habit of baking often enough to justify buying the first packet of starter.

So Focaccia. (I weigh the flour and spoon or cup measure most everything else.)
Poolish:
11.25 ounces of all-purpose flour
1.5 cups of room temp water
1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast

I mix them with a dough whip, though a large spoon would serve. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and leave to ferment at room temps for about 3 hours. Then chill overnight, or up to 3 days before using. Before using set out to warm for about an hour.

Focaccia dough:
all the poolish
2 teaspoons of salt
2 teaspoons of instant yeast
6 tablespoons of olive oil
2 cups of water (room temp)
I use a mixer, beating everything together, then letting it rest 30 minutes before mixing at medium speed for 7 minutes. The dough should pull free from the sides of the mixer, but be attached to the bottom of the bowl. Add a bit of flour if it seems too much like a batter. Heavily flour a counter top and scrape the dough onto it.

Dust the dough with flour and pat into a rectangle. Let it rest 5 minutes then pull one side out and fold over the top. Stretch the opposite side out and fold over the first. Spray with cooking oil, dust with flour and cover loosely with plastic wrap. let be for 30 minutes then repeat the stretching and folding. Spray with oil and dust again. Recover for 30 minutes then repeat once more. Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit a 17' x 12' pan. Coat with olive oil and gently spread the dough on the paper. This is what you end up with:

While the dough was resting I added onion, garlic, black pepper and oregano to some olive oil and heated it for 30 seconds in the microwave. As the dough relaxed I poured the herbs and oil all over the dough as I spread it out to fill the pan. A final sprinkle of shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, sea salt and some cracked pepper and into the 500F oven it went. The heat was turned back to 450F. 10 minutes then I rotated the pan 180 degrees for another 5 minutes.

And here it is after 15 minutes in a 450F oven, on the middle rack.

Look at the big holes. They should be all through it, but I'm please with this first attempt.

If the bread has a fair flavor I'm likely to add pizza sauce the next try. ;-)

Well, hell (nearly a year later)

Being the addict that I am, I occasionally succumb to wheat bread lust and drop a couple slices of store bought white bread in the toaster in the delusional hope they will make the outsides of a bacon cheese burger worth the clogged head and the following near coma that wheat bread is for me. Delusional is the keyword.

During the warm seasons I can avoid wheat, mostly. But once the air becomes chill the urge to play with flour, heat the house by way of the oven and fill our lives with the fragrance of bread overwhelms me. Even our son, who suffers the wheat allergy more so than I, has asked when I will bake bread again. He doesn't eat my bread, though his wife snatches loaves and sneaks off to their apartment to nibble at them like some hording hamster. He just wants to inhale their fragrance as it reminds him of how things were in his early childhood when mom and dad had life under control and he was mostly safe and free to do as he pleased.

So between the urge to bake and a son's request followed by his wife's need to nibble, how can I not break out the bread books and start building?


This bread was a "white" bread recipe I added yogurt to in place of milk. It also has a large egg yolk and a 1/4 cup of European style butter in it. I didn't care for the result, though my FIL says it's the best bread I've ever brought him. DIL seized the half loaf I had left on the cutting board and ran off muttering "Precious. My precious." Women are so strange.

A second bread recipe was made with yogurt added to give it a less sweet taste. It was such a flop I didn't bother to take pictures of it. Our three dogs all but inhaled that bread. Which reminds me of something a friend once told me. "You're breads are delicious. You're too picky about them. Just enjoy each for what it is."

But I can't. To accompany my wheat addiction is a streak of perfectionism. In damned near every other aspect of my life I settle of mediocrity. But bread? I'm my son's father and I too recall those childhood days of bread in the oven, steaming on a cooling rack, sliced hot so butter melted as it was spread and all the world was safe and mine.

Well, hell

I knew it was coming! And it finally did. My wheat allergy got bad enough to set me on a wheat free course!

The second week of the new year found our household going down with clogged heads, phlegmy coughs, sore throats, chills and fevers. As the nasty stuff settled into my chest I began to notice that every time I ate noodles, or bread, my head clogged up and I felt much worse overall. Feeling miserable enough, I decided I was done with wheat! At least eating it. I still need to make noodles and bread for those who can eat the toxin without obvious distress.

Fortunately, my friend in Texas convinced me to begin making sausage at home. I complain constantly that the stuff I buy from the local stores is either tasteless or inconsistent in flavor. The sausages above are from a "breakfast" recipe she sent me. Delicious sausage! As I'm not one for faux breads made with anything but wheat, I decided cabbage leaves would serve as wrappers. I like cabbage so that works out quite well for me. I'm going to try collards and chard come warm weather. I'd like to grow as much of what I eat as I can.

I also play around with Asian rice noodles and bean threads so using the Asian rice noodle in place of traditional pasta wasn't a big step for me. (The rice/corn pasta that is supposed to be a substitute for wheat pasta is simply disgusting to me. I find there is no substitute for wheat!) I've been able to enjoy my tomato sauces over Asian rice noodles though as well as using the noodles in nontraditional lasagna, which I've found to be superior to traditional anyhow! (I use Alfredo sauces, and cheddar and Provolone cheeses, as well as whatever sausage recipe I'm playing with.)

Stepping away from the standards and exploring the available foods I'm finding or making has been a gift from the gods! Using a little psychology (very little, I haven't much of a mind to work with) I've managed to convince myself that wheat products are poisons that I find disgusting and deadly! I walk through the pasta, baking and bread aisles of the supermarket making the sign of the Cross and muttering "By the power of Christ I command you! Stay back!" Poor DW hisses at me to stop it, but it works. The smell of store bread sickens me and their pasta long ago stopped appealing to me.

DW thinks I've lost my mind. She might well be right. I have fresh egg/wheat noodles hanging in the kitchen. The fragrance is causing me to drool, but I have no desire to even taste them. My sinuses began to clog as I rolled the dough and I itch now that they are cut and hanging. But half of the noodles'll come off the rods and go into bags to be taken to the friend who gave me the eggs from her "run of the property" birds. The other half go to Florida, to a Net friend who loves them more than I ever did and I used to think fresh egg noodles walked on water!

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!