Year of Bread: Butter-loaded Brioche

large briocheFor a while there it felt like brioche was one of those culinary buzzwords that you couldn’t get away from. Brioche burger buns, brioche French Toast, brioche croutons- while none of them are bad ideas (unless you consult your cardiologist), sometimes it felt like restaurants with heavy-handed inclusion of brioche on the menu might be covering up a lack of creativity or desire to cater to the “more decadence is better” crowd. Nevertheless, brioche is a good shorthand for “we’re not fucking around with health food around here.”

brioche dough - mixing

Reinhart includes 3 basic brioche formulas– Rich Man’s Brioche, Middle-Class Brioche, and Poor Man’s Brioche. Did you know that Marie Antoinette’s famous (and probably wrongly-attributed) reaction to the plight of the French poor was actually “Let them eat brioche”?  Quite befitting of a French queen’s table, the Rich Man’s brioche contains an unreal 70% butter to flour ratio, which sounds practically like a pie crust baked into a loaf.

Bread for the Bourgeois

I went with the Middle-Class recipe, which requires a relatively measly 50% butter. As if a full stick of butter wasn’t enough enrichment, I also added 3 eggs and a bit of milk (whole, of course). Because it’s so fat-laden, this dough didn’t require as much intensive kneading as leaner breads (yay!). It was, however, incredibly fickle in the face of any amount of heat.

16299139049_72eaef63cd_kThe consistency was almost to the point of being a really thick pancake batter rather than a dough. As such, the dough requires a deep chilling before shaping. I spread it out on my trusty SilPat and stuck it in the fridge for about 4 hours before taking it out for a quick shaping into boules. It was nearly impossible to shape well, so I just rolled it into neat balls and hoped that was sufficient shaping. And here’s where I messed up — I read the instructions incorrectly and stuck the dough BACK in the fridge for a few hours to chill it up again, where I should have left it out to proof and go right into the oven. Gah.

Mistakes are Fixable!

Luckily, when I realized this 2 hours later, I pulled my dough out to proof for 2 hours. It didn’t rise as vigorously as a French loaf would have, but it still expanded a bit. When it hit the hot oven, though, my little boules grew substantially. Yay! Success after all.

16483671411_0ce234cd91_zAs enticing as hot-out-of-the-oven brioche sounds, I found that the petites tasted better the next morning — a little less of a face-punching butter taste and more of a rich, balanced bread taste. You don’t really need to put anything on this bread, especially not butter– although something like jam or apple butter would probably cut the richness of the bread nicely.

Flavor Intensifies: What I’d Add Next Time

brioche-above

I’d love to try this another time with something mixed into the dough. Maybe a brown butter brioche for extra nuttiness, or a bit of orange extract in the butter to give it a bit more complexity? Chocolate swirl, caramel, or bacon bits would also be pretty awesome, but wouldn’t do anything to help the hearty-healthiness of brioche. But if you’re eating brioche, maybe you should accept the fact that your diet has been déraillé.

Next time I’ll be making a cousin of brioche, the Casatiello, which is like brioche but has cheese and meat baked in! 

Year of Bread: The Best Bagels I’ve Ever Had

bagel-dough-ballsI have made this recipe before, back when I discovered a version on my favorite blog for foodgawking, Smitten Kitchen. They were and still are the best bagels I’ve ever had. They’re chewy on the outside, fluffy and soft on the inside, and have an amazing flavor that pairs wonderfully with anything you smear (or schmear) on them.

Slow, Slow Rise

bagel-dough-risen Unsurprisingly, Reinhart recommends a slow fermentation for bagels. I think this is actually a benefit rather than an impediment, because it makes it easy (relatively speaking) to have fresh, hot bagels for breakfast without having to wake up crazy early to make them. I made the dough and shaped the bagels the night before baking, which runs about the same way as making a loaf of French bread, except with the added step of separating and shaping the bagels at the end. The shaped, slightly-proofed bagels just chill  in the fridge overnight and come out right before they’re ready for boiling and baking.

Bagels Fresh Out of the…Pot?

bagel-dough-roundsThe idea of intentionally putting dough in water is kind of weird to me. Boiling water seems so violent, and bread dough can be such a delicate substance. In the end, I find it easier to think of bagels as weird giant noodles during the boiling stage. In fact, the method used here actually has a lot in common with another favorite carb of mine: ramen. As with ramen noodles, a good bagel should be nice and chewy. Adding something to make the water more alkaline helps the dough take on a chewier consistency.  I added a tablespoon of baking soda to a big pot of water after it came to a boil. Science! The dough rings are boiled a few at a time, for a minute or two on each side, then pulled out and put back onto the baking sheet to get ready for the oven.

Topping It Off

bagels-coolingThis time I went with pretty simple toppings and didn’t do any dough mix-ins, because I was too lazy to do more prep than that. Marla Bakery here in SF has amazing salted bagels, so I followed suit and sprinkled a few of mine with sea salt. The sea salt stuck fine, but the bagels I topped with sesame seeds as well ended up  mostly naked as soon as I started handling them at all. There’s gotta be a way to give the seeds more sticking power– maybe a light egg white wash or something to “glue” them down a bit? I ended up just scooping the fallen seeds off the cutting board and sprinkling the on cream cheese when I ate one, but  the sesame seed ones were my favorite. They had a nuttiness and texture that really leveled up the flavor of the bagel overall.

Text[ural] Analysis

bagel-crossFresh out of the oven these bagels were absolutely delicious, with a nice chewy exterior and a soft, fluffy center. But I did feel that they baked up a little less impressively than they did the last time I baked them. Some of them were very bubbly/porous inside. A lot of them seemed to flatten out a bit more than usual. I think this might have been a result of letting them sit out on the counter too long this morning before I boiled them (waiting for the oven to heat up and the water to boil). This also made them very soft and flexible, which is not the greatest when you’re trying to peel them off the waxed (and oiled) paper that they spent the night on. Next time I will most definitely use well-sprayed parchment paper AND leave the bagels in the fridge until a minute or two before they go into the pot. Long story short: a quick warm up is good, but getting back to room temperature seems bad.

Breakfast is Served

bagel-lox-closeBack in college my roommate and I used to have bagel breakfast days, usually soon after a Costco run that resulted in a fresh haul of groceries. We loaded them up with cream cheese, tomatoes and lox. It was our decadent weekend breakfast of choice. I topped this weekend’s bagels with a similar spread of cream cheese, lox and a sprinkling of capers– maybe not creative or original, but pretty damn tasty all the same.

Year of Bread: New England Anadama

anadama-breadI’ve been watching The Mind of a Chef a lot lately, and am totally entranced by the baking genius of Christina Tosi (of Momofuku Milk Bar). Watching her make corn cookies is almost enough to make me want to enroll in culinary school. Corn isn’t really an ingredient I think of when I think of cookies, but considering the sweetness of fresh corn and its long-standing association with a healthy pat of butter on the cob, it makes a lot of sense. I guess that’s the essence of innovation in food, when it comes down to it — creating something so new, so unexpected that people are surprised — but when you think about it, you wonder why it didn’t exist all along.

anadama-1Corn was also the bassline of my bread this week, the first alphabetically in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. When I was a kid we used to go to the farmers’ market to buy loaves of “squaw bread,” which was dark and sweet and grainy and delicious by itself and for a sandwich. Anadama reminds me a lot of that bread — it’s lightly sweet, with a texture that just screams “please spread something on me!” …In the most PG way possible. The sweetness of the bread comes from an overnight cornmeal “soaker” and a few tablespoons of molasses, a fun ingredient that looks super cool as it rolls down the mini mountains of flour in a bowl.
anadama-2I’ve made a lot of grainy breads in the past, and one problem I almost always run into is a soft, lifeless crust, or lack thereof. This is probably related to my subpar kneading time (windowpane test strikes again!), so this time I tried to knead the dough to a much stretchier consistency than I usually do. Maybe it has to do with the relative heat wave we were experiencing this week, or the sugar in the corn that had been soaking for 12+ hours by the time I added the yeast, but this dough rose super well. It was a three stage building process to make the dough (soaker >> sponge >> finished dough), so maybe that also helped.

Anadama is usually a pan bread, which is a little easier to handle because you just plop it in the pan and let it rise until you stick it in the oven. It also gives a nice, sandwich-ready shape to the loaf, so the end result pretty versatile. I ate it mostly with peanut butter and honey. Even after a good soaking, the cornmeal gave this bread a nice texture without being gritty– I’d definitely add this bread to my weekly baking lineup.

This Week’s Lesson

Learn to think of old ingredients in new ways — and post weekly blogposts in a more timely manner.

 

Year of Bread: The First Loaf

bbaAs one of my food resolutions for 2015, I’ve decided to bake my way through Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, of which I received two copies for Christmas. The book really provides everything you’d want in a guide for making better bread, and with a little over 40 recipes it’ll make a feasible weekly challenge for this year. The introduction alone — a few chapters on the science and techniques behind good breadmaking — clocked in at over a hundred pages of info-heavy text. I can already tell that Reinhart is going to keep me on my toes from week to week.

For my first baking project, I decided to skip ahead to the French bread recipe. I had a couple reasons for choosing this as my maiden loaf. First of all, I wanted to take advantage of the bread/pizza stone that I also got for Christmas :). Secondly, I wanted to start with a recipe with which I was already somewhat familiar. I’ve made simple French baguettes before, so the process, ingredients, and “feel” of the dough aren’t entirely new to me. Since I was using new tools and some new techniques, I wanted to be able to focus on those new aspects of my baking setup rather than struggling with a new recipe. Here’s what I’ve learned from my first Reinhart baguette.

Making Bread is a Sciencepate

For producing a relatively simple food item, the breadmaking process is pretty fussy. There are a lot of factors that come into play, some which a baker has control over, and many which they do not. Learning to recognize the signs of a properly developing dough are helpful to keeping yourself on track– things like knowing whether it’s too wet or dry during the initial mixing and adjusting accordingly, or using in the windowpane test as a sign of proper gluten formation.

Making Bread is Slow

proofing baguetteReinhart is a big advocate of the slow fermentation process that is getting a lot of love these days in the bread world. I’m not expert enough to say that it does or doesn’t provide a higher quality loaf in the end, but one thing it definitely does is increase the amount of time it takes to go from mixing bowl to table.

I started my pre-ferment on Tuesday evening, let it hang out in the fridge overnight after an initial rise, then spend another four hours on Wednesday afternoon mixing, kneading, rising and shaping the dough before it ever even got close to the oven. Baking a good loaf of bread takes some forethought and planning, which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s probably not in-line with the way most people cook these days.

Making Good Bread is Difficultfinalbaguette

The funny thing about learning new skills is that the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know shit. I thought I had a relatively good handle on baking, at least at the “advanced beginner” level. Now I’m not so sure. I totally skimped on the windowpane test, which is something I need to learn to be more patient about. I also need to be more aggressive about my scores – mine were a last-minute addition that pretty much just melted back into the bread unhelpfully.

Reinhart also suggests a much more complex oven set up than I’ve had previously: a pan of hot water and periodic spritzing of the oven sides to create a steamy environment for superior crust formation. Of course cranking up my oven to 500°F during preheating had the fun bonus effect of causing my extremely sensitive smoke detector to freak out, repeatedly. This was also the first time I’d used the peel method of getting the bread from rising spot to oven — usually I do the final rise directly in a bread pan or sheet, and just stick the whole thing in the oven. The process of transferring my loaf from couche to peel (read: terribly high-tech version consisting of an upside down cookie sheet dusted with semolina flour) to ultra-hot baking stone without degassing, dropping, or otherwise bothering the dough was nerve-wracking.

This Week’s Lessons

  • Trust the windowpane test — I’ve never been good about kneading until my dough passes the windowpane test for extensibility. I got it almost there this time, but next time I’ll try to not let my impatience get the better of me. This gets back to my note on bread being a science — getting the gluten to the correct level of stretchiness is what gives a baguette its deliciously crusty exterior.
  • Score aggressively — As I mentioned, my scoring work was hasty and sub-par. Next time I’m going to be less timid about it — those slashes are functional, after all, and not just cool-looking.
  • Let it rise — The consistency of my baguette was good, but not great. I wish the crumb had been a little more open and holey, as you find with professionally baked French bread. I think if I had been a little more careful about not bothering it while it was rising or rushed through the process of getting the dough into the oven, then I probably could have gotten the consistency I was aiming for.
  • Eat your mistakes — They’ll probably be pretty tasty all the same!