Year of Bread: Tsoureki (Greek Celebration Bread)

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greek-bread-spicesLast year I read a book on the history of the spice trade, and it threw a lot of ideas about “traditional” flavors out the window. Even modern standards like black pepper and cinnamon were once exotic, extravagantly priced and often hard to come by in the average person’s kitchen. That’s why I think it’s so interesting that today you can not only buy everything from saffron to paprika to allspice on the same shelf in grocery stores, but that some places even give the stuff away for free. Single-serving pepper packets are a fast food staple, and coffee chains often put out shakers of cinnamon and nutmeg for customers to use at-will. Spice culture has come a long way in the last few centuries! This week’s bread is a kind of tsoureki, labelled in Reinhart’s book as “Greek Celebration Bread.” You can tell that this loaf is meant for special occasions, because it’s chock-full of spices and takes a bit of extra effort to come together.

Poolishes, Bigas and Barms, Oh My!

(Sorry for the lame heading, everyone.) Technically speaking, this bread was a piece of cake (ha). I started with a poolish the night before, then added the rest of the ingredients and did the standard kneading and two rises. While I was aware of what pre-fermentation was before I started this baking project, I had no idea how many different kinds existed. Next time I do a bread post maybe I’ll do a run-down of the different types of types of pre-ferments, but for now know that a poolish just has a slightly higher water percentage than other common starters.

greek-bread-doughThis tsoureki is enriched with eggs, milk, oil and honey, and is generously flavored with orange rind, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and almond extract. It smells awesome, from the first step to the last. Other versions of this bread include more substantial additives like raisins, walnuts, dried fruit and even hard-boiled eggs, which would be interesting to try out.  You can see in unbaked bread just how much spice went into this dough– it’s visibly flecked with goodness.

Shaping the Loaf

There are a few different shapes that these loaves come in, depending on the occasion. Although it’s usually reserved for Christmas and has different set of flavoring ingredients, I picked the cross-shaped Christopsomo because it looked cool without being too labor-intensive to create. The prebaked one looked pretty wonky, so I was worried that I’d chosen poorly. Luckily, once it came out of the oven it looked much more symmetrical.

Glazing Up

greek-bread-glazeAfter I baked the bread, I immediately gave it a wash of honey, sugar, water and orange extract (I didn’t have a bottle on-hand, so I simmered some minced orange peel with the honey mixture to give it an orangey scent and hue), as well as a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds. The glaze does make the crust stickier than I usually like my breads to be, but the sweetness really balances out the dense, flavorful loaf well. In the future I might up the water to honey and sugar ratio to make it a little less sticky.

 Closing Thoughts

greek-bread-sideThis bread was really fun to make! Sometimes the ingredients in a loaf of bread can feel pretty boring, since it’s often a conduit for other foods with stronger flavors. One thing that my pictures don’t really convey is how MASSIVE this bread baked up to be– it’s impressively large and I can see how it would make a great centerpiece for a holiday meal. I’d love to try miniature versions of this style to eat as a breakfast bun or a sandwich.

Year of Bread: New England Anadama

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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

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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!