This Week: More Butter, More Eggs, More Flavor
Last week I mentioned that I wanted to try adding some savory tidbits to the basic brioche recipe, and this week’s bread ended up being, more or less, just that. Casatiello is an Italian version of brioche — lots of eggs, butter and milk in the dough — that includes bits of meat and cheese. I’m usually pretty wary of bread stuffed with exotic and/or chunky ingredients, since they tend to interfere with the formation of a nice crust, in my experience. But I’m baking everything in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, so I can’t say no to this one!
How the Dough Shaped Up
I used a full fat gouda and red-wine salami from Trader Joe’s– I’m sure I could have upped the ante with fancier ingredients, but since they’re just playing a supporting role in the bread, I kept things simple. Reinhart instructs that any salty, dry meat and any cheese that melts to a gooey consistency (read: fondue-worthy) can be used in place of salami and gouda.
Because it’s not quite as butter-loaded up as brioche, casatiello dough was a lot easier to work with, but it was still very wet and tacky. The sponge was very thin. Reinhart described it as “pancake batter,” but I’d say this was more like crepe batter if we’re going to be detail-oriented here. The dough came together really nicely. I mixed it up in a single bowl, and it had a relatively quick cycle of proofing compared to some of the loaves I’ve tried (I went from pulling ingredients out of the cupboard to pulling the finished loaf out of the oven in about five hours).
Casatiello Flavoring Notes for Next Time
Next time I make this bread, I’ll probably tweak a few things. I’ll cut the cheese into larger pieces, to make sure that the bread has nice gooey pockets of cheesey goodness here and there. The cheese was almost too well distributed and the texture didn’t really come out as much as I would have liked, especially once the bread was cool. I’ll also cut the salami into slightly smaller pieces. Although the pictures in the book show big hunks of salami scattered throughout the bread, an inevitable side effect is that poorly-placed hunks of meat tend to make slicing the bread into cohesive slices a bit tricky.
This would make an awesome savory muffin for brunch — the base reminded me a lot of Craftsman and Wolves’ egg-hearted Rebel Within, so maybe a casatiello muffin would make for the beginnings a good knockoff version. I think playing around with more ingredients would be fun, too — maybe salami and sun-dried tomato? Gruyere and black pepper? Olives? Roasted garlic cloves? With such a tender, buttery base, it seems like it would be hard to go wrong no matter what I threw in there.
