breadsecrets blog

I’ve made ciabatta lots of times, usually with my own version of Carol Field’s recipe in “The Italian Baker” (an excellent book for Italian cakes and biscuits/cookies as well as bread. You can buy the book here.

This time, I made the poolish version from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. A poolish is a wet pre-ferment - Italian bakers would probably use the word biga for all pre-ferments, whether wet or firm. There is little difference between the two recipes, except that Field uses all-purpose/plain flour while Reinhart uses bread flour. Italian bakers would use Tipo 00 flour which is lower in protein than US/UK bread flour, and therefore will have less gluten in the dough, making it more tender to the bite. I tend to use either all plain/AP flour or a mixture of plain/AP and bread flour. This time I made the poolish with plain flour and added bread flour for the final dough. I left the poolish in the fridge for about 36 hours.

Reinhart’s recipe specifies adding 3oz of liquid (I used milk, to help tenderise the crumb) plus as much extra as needed to produce a wet sticky dough that sticks to the bottom of the bowl during kneading. I didn’t weigh exactly, but I used around another 3oz. Having seen the finished bread, I should have added more - the dough would have been harder to handle but I’d have got a more authentic result with the typical large holes in the crumb.

A few words about handling and shaping ciabatta: firstly, you can use absolutely loads of flour on the worktop and your hands to stop the wet dough sticking - so long as it is not mixed into the dough, it won’t spoil the texture of your bread. A dough scraper (flat metal or plastic blade with a handle) is an absolute must for separating and moving this kind of dough (I’ll put an amazon link on here when I have time!). Try not touch the dough with the very tips of your fingers, and when you do touch it, imagine that it’s red hot and you don’t want to burn your fingers.

While finishing the shaping of the ciabattas, I like to use some durum wheat flour (Dove’s Farm organic pasta flour) which, unlike ordinary wheat flour, will not dissolve into the surface of the dough, thus giving a nice floury rustic look to the finished loaf.

When you bake ciabatta, do be sure to leave it until you have a thoroughly browned crust to get the best flavour. Here are a couple of photos of my results this time: as I said, I should have added more liquid to get bigger holes, but the bread still tasted excellent, with a pronounced rich flavour from the preferment.

Sorry for the blurry photo!

Obviously I’m spending more time baking than blogging with this challenge as I’ve made three more recipes since my last post.

I’ve made the bagels from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice quite a few times. It’s enough of an archetypal recipe to deserve its own entry on the main site here: Bagel Recipe. This recipe is my own variation on Reinhart’s - there’s not a great deal of difference: primarily, I’ve rounded the quantities to metric and lengthened the fermentation of the sponge, then eliminated the final retardation of the shaped bagels in the fridge for two reasons - firstly, the dough will mature just as well before shaping as after; secondly, I hardly ever have room in my fridge for a dozen shaped bagels (and I have a large fridge by UK standards, although the typical home fridge in the US is a lot bigger).

The next task in the BBA challenge was brioche. I opted for “middle class” brioches containing 50% butter:flour (the rich version contains 87.7%) as well as five eggs and a little sugar and milk. The butter is introduced gradually, making a very soft and sticky dough which does not feel anything like any other bread dough I’ve made. After an initial rise, I shaped 6 petites brioches a tete in moulds, and used the remaining dough for a sandwich loaf.

(Please excuse the blurry pictures, I couldn’t find my usual camera.)

After about one and a half hours, the dough had risen impressively.

I gave the brioches a quick egg wash before baking for about 20 minutes. The oven spring was spectacular, particularly on the sandwich loaf (unfortunately I didn’t get a picture).

I ate one of the brioches while it was still warm. Yummy! As someone else has said, it’s like a light buttery cloud. Shared some with some friends, gave some (spread with nutella) to my children. Had another one a couple of hours later with a cup of tea. Still yummy! Had another one for breakfast the next day. Ugh! Too eggy. Tried again later that afternoon, and threw the remainder to the birds. I think this is one bread you really have to eat fresh - I thought maybe all that enrichment would help it keep, but it really didn’t. I think I’ve been put off brioche for life - interesting process, all the same. Nothing ventured, and all that …

So, perhaps I should have realised yesterday that I wasn’t going to enjoy Casatiello too much - it’s basically brioche (albeit with less butter than the other recipe) with some added sausage/cured meat and provolone cheese. I’m vegetarian so I used Redwood Food Company’s “Cheatin’” chorizo style and pepperoni style, and I couldn’t find provolone, so I substituted a mixture of mozzarella, mature cheddar, and parmesan, all coarsely grated. It didn’t have the spectacular oven spring of the brioche, and when I tasted the first couple of slices, I really liked it. However, this morning, I had another piece and there was that slightly eggy taste once again. However, I did freeze half of it as soon as it was cool, so maybe that part will still taste as good as it did straight from the oven.

The next challenge is challah, which is another egg enriched bread. I’m going to skip it and go straight on to Ciabatta, which I’ve made plenty of times. I usually use the recipe (or at least my version of it) from “The Italian Baker” but perhaps this time, I’ll go back to Reinhart to compare.

Artos is the general term for a Greek celebration bread, usually enriched with eggs. The variation I baked from the Bread Baker’s Apprentice (buy the book here) is called Christopsomos (literally, Christ bread) and is normally eaten at Christmas. As well as the enriched dough which contained sourdough starter (as well as regular bakers’ yeast), olive oil, milk, egg, honey, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, orange zest, and almond extract, this version contains dried fruit and nuts. I used sultanas, dried cherries, dried figs, and walnuts.

Making the dough was straightforward - I decided to have the decorative cross free of fruit and nuts to give it a contrast from the main loaf, so I removed about 1/4 of the dough before adding the dried fruit and nuts (the book said to use 1/3 of the dough for the cross, but I thought it would look better with slightly thinner “ropes”). I incorporated the fruit and nuts in the main part of the dough by flattening the dough, covering with a third of these ingredients and rolling up, then repeating the process two more times. The un-fruited portion for the cross stayed in a bowl in the fridge while the main portion rose. The dough rose more slowly than I’d expected, despite the extra sugar from the honey, which I’d thought would give the yeast a boost. When it had risen, I shaped the main part into a boule:

The book says to divide the smaller portion of dough into two and form them into two ten-inch ropes. I tried this, and they just weren’t long enough to go over the boule with enough left at the end to form the scrolls, so I had to roll them out further. I found the ideal length was around 19 inches. (Humorous comments are left as an exercise for the reader …) This process took quite a few minutes as the gluten caused the ropes to shrink, so I had to stretch and roll them then let them relax several times.

I split the ends of the ropes with a dough scraper, and coiled them into scrolls as shown before putting into the oven.

I baked the loaf for about 30 minutes before applying an egg wash glaze - other people on the challenge had said the recommended honey glaze was rather sticky, so I decided to make a substitution. After glazing the main part of the loaf and sprinkling with sesame seeds, I brushed the egg wash on the decorative cross, so there was a contrast between the seeded & unseeded parts.

So, the finished loaf looked pretty good, if I say so myself, and smelled great. When I cut it, the texture was slightly more closed than I’d expected, and it tasted very much like English tea bread, which I used to eat frequently as a child. Haven’t seen any for sale in years - maybe it was just a northern/midlands thing? It was particularly good toasted, although it burns very quickly due to the high sugar content.

Next week’s challenge is bagels: I’ve made these many times, and will be using my own adaptation of Peter Reinhart’s recipe, which I’ve always found very successful.

The first recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice (buy the book here) is Anadama bread. The recipe originates from New England and contains cornmeal (polenta) and molasses (I used Lyle’s Black Treacle, which has a runnier texture and slightly less bitter taste than raw molasses, but is close enough).

As other bakers in the group have found, I needed to add about 3oz/100g (I didn’t weigh it) more flour to get a firm, tacky dough. The dough rose quite quickly - the recipe uses a fairly generous amount of yeast, and the molasses/treacle will no doubt have made it very active - and there was a good oven spring. I dusted the loaves with polenta before baking, which makes for a nicely crunchy top - I might start doing this on other loaves.

The crumb has a soft, close texture, and I think it is slightly moister than standard loaf tin bread, possibly because of the molasses. It tastes good - the molasses flavour is perhaps more dominant than I’d like. So far, I’ve only had it toasted with butter. Someone else mentioned that it’s good with peanut butter … so perhaps I’ll have to nip out to the shop before lunchtime.

This week’s challenge is a traditional Greek Christmas bread called Christopsomos, I’ll post my results next week.

I’ve always wondered if the more expensive premium brand or organic bread flours are worth the extra money. So, yesterday I put three brands to the test by making the same recipe with each sort. The flours I used were: Tesco own brand strong white bread flour (12.6% protein, around 75 pence for 1.5 kg); Allinson’s Premium very strong white bread flour (13.9% protein, about £1.30 for 1.5 kg = 73% higher than the Tesco flour); and “Bio Bake” organically grown strong white bread flour from my local health food store, Daily Bread in Cambridge. There was no protein content listed on the bio bake, but the label said, “made from a high protein hard wheat from North America - a professional’s flour”. This one cost £1.29 for 1kg, which is 158% higher than the Tesco flour, weight for weight.

The recipe I used was a lean French style bread, direct method, as follows:
400g flour
240g water
8g salt
1 tsp instant yeast
Mixed ingredients with dough hook in a stand mixer on minimum speed until flour was all wet, then turned up to 1/3 maximum speed for five minutes. Each of the three different doughs would just about stretch to a windowpane at this point. I tested them again after twenty minutes, and they all formed a very thin windowpane very easily. Covered bowl, left to rise at cool room temperature for three hours. Gently degassed dough, stretched and folded, left to rise for another hour. By this time, the dough made from the Tesco flour felt noticeably softer than the other two. Shaped into batards, covered with lightly oiled cling film and left to prove in a warmer room for about one hour twenty minutes. Unfortunately I misjudged this step and the Tesco flour loaf (on the left in the picture) was clearly overproved and had started to flatten and sag.

Loaves were baked in electric fan oven at 230 celsius + steam (I have an electrolux oven that has a steam + heat function) for 10 minutes, then 15 minutes without steam.

This is not a great photo of the finished loaves, but there is some indication that there is an increase in height matching the increase in price of the different flours. You get a better idea from the slices - order is as before: Tesco, Allinson, Biobake.

My wife and I took it in turns to do blind taste tests. Here’s what we thought on each loaf:

Tesco: slightly rubber texture (probably from the overproving), pleasant but not pronounced flavour, very little crust
Allinson: Good flavour in the crumb, fairly firm texture, reasonably crunchy crust
Biobake: Very firm texture, noticeably resistant to the bite; thicker and crunchier crust with excellent flavour which dominated the overall flavour - the crumb probably tasted great too, but I’d have to try it without the crust to comment further.

So, to some extent, you get what you pay for. The lower protein content in the Tesco flour translated to less gluten elasticity in the dough, so it overproved in the time it took for the others to be ready for the oven (I baked the Tesco and Allinson ones together, then the Biobake, so in fact the Tesco loaf did have an extra ten minutes rising because it was mixed first at the beginning of the day. The shape and texture of the Tesco flour loaf were almost certainly not as good as they would have been if I’d only been using that flour, and I have used it very successfully many times. However, even if we take that into account, I think the other two flours produced superior results in terms of flavour and crust quality. Will I be paying 158% more for all my flour in the future? Probably not, at least most of the time - I don’t think the gain in flavour is worth the extra money for “general purpose” bread for toast and sandwiches. However for sourdough and other fancy-schmancy breads, I think I will probably go for the Biobake as an occasional treat.

Here’s a great idea from PinchMySalt - a group of bakers and bread bloggers are going to work their way through the whole of Peter Reinhart’s great book “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice”, at a rate of one recipe per week. Count me in! I’ll be posting pictures and descriptions here (but not all the recipes). If you want to join in too (and you’ll have to be quick, the aim is to complete the first recipe, Anadama bread, by May 18th) you can buy the book here.

This recipe is by the Michelin starred chef of “The Fat Duck” in Oxfordshire, England, voted best restaurant in the world a few years ago. His TV series “In Search of Perfection” showed his experiments with some popular dishes that many people cook at home (spaghetti bolognaise, pizza, baked alaska, trifle, etc.). Until now, I’ve not had much luck with recipes for soft bread rolls, they always turn out crusty on top. Don’t get me wrong, I like crusty - but sometimes it’s good to have a change. The recipe is from Heston’s book “Further Adventures in Search of Perfection” which you can buy from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com.

Preferment:

400g very strong bread flour - I used Allinson Premium Very Strong White with a protein content of 13.9%
400g cold water
1g (a good pinch) of instant dried yeast

Final Dough:
700g prefermented batter (there will be some left over which can be incorporated into another bread recipe)
200g egg yolks - I weighed out eleven yolks from large organic eggs!
60g water at 20°C
400g Very strong bread flour
100g unrefined caster sugar
70g skimmed milk powder
15g salt
14g instant dried yeast
60g browned butter, strained and cooled (see note below)
30g grapeseed oil
35g Trex solid vegetable oil

Egg Wash:
1 whole egg
1 egg yolk
5g water
2g salt
Sesame seeds as needed.

Method
To make the preferment, combine the flour and yeast and water and mix in a mixer with a dough hook on low speed until a liquid batter has formed. Cover with cling film and refrigerate for 24 hours.

Weigh out 700g of the preferment, add the egg yolks and water and mix on low speed with the dough hook until evenly mixed and very liquid. Sift the flour, sugar, milk powder, salt, and yeast into a separate bowl and then add them gradually to the wet mixture, keeping the mixer on low speed. When all the dry ingredients are added, increase the speed to medium and continue to mix for 2-3 minutes. The dough will still be very wet and sticky.
Brown the butter in a pan over a low heat until it has a very nutty aroma. Strain out the solids and discard, and allow the liquid to cool, then add it to the dough with the grapeseed oil and Trex. The recipe in the book didn’t make it clear if you’re supposed to start with 60g of butter and use what’s left after the solids have been removed, or to use enough butter to get 60g of liquid once it has been strained. I hedged my bets and used 80g of butter, which left around 50g of liquid after straining. Continue mixing the dough with the fats for another 3 or 4 minutes, until everything is well combined. Stop the mixer and let the dough rest for 10 minutes to absorb the liquid, then continue to mix on medium speed for 4 more minutes.

Cover again with cling film and refrigerate for 30 minutes. The dough will firm up during this time.

While the dough is refrigerating, cut a piece of baking parchment to fit a large baking sheet, and prepare 8 rings from aluminium foil, as follows. For each ring, cut a sheet of foil 50cm long, and fold it in half lengthways, repeatedly, until you have a strip 50 x 1 cm. Tape one end over the other with some overlap, to make a ring 12cm in diameter.

When the dough has chilled, weigh out eight 85g portions and freeze the remaining dough for use another day. Roll each portion of dough into a small ball with lightly floured hands. Put the ball in a ring on the parchment. Wet your hands and lightly pat the balls down flat, then cover with oiled cling film and leave in a warm place for 1½ -2 hours.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 225°C/425°F/Gas mark 7. Mix all the ingredients for the egg wash except the sesame seeds. Wet your hands again and lightly flatten the dough balls within the foil rings. (I didn’t get a picture at this stage, but the dough had expanded widthways to fill the rings, and nearly risen to the top of the rings.)

Before baking, pour some water into the oven to generate steam to prevent the crust getting too thick and cracking on top.

Bake the buns for 7 minutes, then remove and brush with the egg wash and sprinkle generously with sesame seeds. Return to the oven for a further 7 minutes or until done. Cool the buns completely on a wire rack before cutting.

The verdict …
So how were the results? The buns were very soft and light as a feather. The tops looked overcooked - I cooked them at 210°C in a fan assisted oven - but they didn’t taste burnt. I will try a slightly lower temperature next time. On their own they tasted rather eggy. With a burger inside, however, they were strangely like a really good version of the dreadful buns you get from fast food places, so full marks to Heston for authenticity. It was an interesting exercise in making a really enriched dough, and in handling probably the wettest dough I’ve ever used, but I don’t think the results were quite exciting enough to make me want to repeat the process regularly. There are just too many other recipes to try out there …

Last week I was lucky enough to have a holiday in Paris, home to more artisan bakeries than you can shake a baguette at. Indeed, I quickly got the impression that there was a bakery on every street corner that would have been the best bakery in my home town of Cambridge (UK). Guided by Peter Reinhart’s “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” (see here to buy the book), I visited two of the most renowned: Gosselin, home of the famous Pain à l’Ancienne baguette, and Poilâne, home of the even more famous, but very different, Miche Poilâne.

Boulangerie Gosselin is a smart, modern, shiny shop on a busy street corner near to Musée d’Orsay. The baguettes I bought were labelled “Tradition” rather than “Pain à l’Ancienne”, but this was definitely the bread I had come looking for. (Click on the pictures to see full size.)

I’m regretting not taking more pictures showing the crust, with the excellent bloom of the slashes. Perhaps I was just too eager to eat the bread! Note the big holes in the crumb, indicating a very wet dough - and yet it has a proper oval cross section rather than being flat, due to being its having been proved on a couche (cloth) and the baker having the confidence and experience to put it into the oven at just the right time, without over proving. Note also the shiny, semi-translucent quality of the crumb, showing that it has been properly baked, long enough for the starches to gelate (you’ll have to click on the picture to see enough detail).

What makes this baguette so special is Gosselin’s invention of a severely retarded fermentation, using iced water and refrigeration, allowing the enzymes in the flour plenty of time to break down some of the starch in the flour into simpler sugars, bringing out lots of flavour and natural sweetness. I’ve made the recipe from Reinhart’s book many times, and the results have been comparable to the “real thing” in terms of flavour. The difference between my home produced efforts and the original lie mostly in the very crisp, crackly crust, which I have yet to reproduce - despite trying many different ways of getting steam into the oven. I think the oven temperature might be relevant too: my domestic oven goes up to 230° C, I suspect Gosselin’s oven will be somewhat hotter.

As if the delicious baguettes weren’t enough, Gosselin also produces beautiful cakes and pâtisserie, as you can see here. (Yes, those cute children are mine!).

My other destination, Boulangerie Poilâne, is on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, a charming street full of a wide variety of stylish and interesting (i.e. expensive) shops.

The shop front is understated and elegant in natural colours. In the window, unlike the chic coloured cakes on display at Gosselin, are traditional loaves, biscuits, and tarts. Inside, the staff are smartly dressed in aprons bearing the Poilâne logo. My eye is drawn to a row of miches on a shelf: some have an ornate letter P slashed through the flour revealing the darker crust. Others are decorated with ornately sculpted bread fish.

As I was handed a sample butter cookie by one of the staff, I explained in my best schoolboy French that I was an amateur baker and very interested in their bread and how it is made, and wondered if it would be possible to see the famous oven. Unfortunately for me, this was only possible with an appointment, and this was our last day in Paris. I shall just have to go again next year and be more organised! I was soon consoled, however, by one of the Poilâne tartelettes aux pommes, which was possibly the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. It was just a simple apple tart on puff pastry, not much to look at, but the combination of sweet/sharp/caramelised flavours with the rich buttery, flaky base … I almost have to go for a lie down just thinking about it.

Of course, I also bought a miche. This is a large (2kg), dense, round sourdough loaf made with organic wholewheat flour. The flavour was rich and complex with only a very slight sour note at first - this was more pronounced a couple of days later. As with the pain à l’ancienne, I have made Peter Reinhart’s version of this bread (from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice) several times. Again, I feel the results have been comparable in flavour and texture to what I bought from the original bakery, although (again) the crust was not as thick and crunchy when I made it. I think this demonstrates the point that home made bread really can be as good as that made by the professionals: we amateurs differ only in our ability to produce bread in large quantities and with consistently predictable results.

Rachel Allen’s TV show “Bake!” was shown on BBC1 yesterday. What a wasted opportunity. She used sugar and warm water from the hot tap (Yuck! Water that has been sitting in a tank is not for cooking with!) to activate the yeast, then left the bread to ferment in a warm place for two hours before shaping and proving. Also, she slashed some of the loaves right after shaping, rather than just before they went into the oven, which is just wrong.

If you’ve read the main site you’ll know that the best tasting bread comes from a long, slow fermentation. Adding sugar, and putting the dough in a warm place just speed fermentation up, giving insufficient time for the flavour to develop.

There’s definitely a good TV series to be made by a real artisan bread baker … maybe Dan Lepard or Andrew Whitley? They may not be as pretty and smiley as Rachel Allen, but they know what they’re talking about when it comes to making good bread. Or if any TV producers would like to contact me …

Being a native of North Staffordshire (UK), I was brought up on these, and make a batch every week or two (the ones you can get from the supermarket are OK but not as good as those from a proper oatcake shop, or home made, of course). So, imagine my surprise when, having made a batch this morning, my wife pointed out the “In praise of Staffordshire Oatcakes” editorial in today’s Guardian newspaper. However, they didn’t include a recipe, so here’s mine.

One Dozen Staffordshire Oatcakes

8 oz/225g fine oatmeal (if you can only find medium oatmeal or porridge oats, blitz them in a food processor for a couple of minutes - you should be able to get them through a sieve with only a little bran residue at the end. Tip the residue in as well.)
4 oz/112g wholemeal flour
4 oz/112g plain flour (called “all purpose” in the US. Don’t use strong bread flour)
15 fl oz/430g skimmed or semi skimmed milk
15 fl oz/430g water
1 teaspoon “easy blend” dried yeast
1 teaspoon salt
Vegetable oil for frying

Mix all the ingredients in a large jug or bowl. You can use an electric whisk to get the lumps out. Cover with cling film/plastic wrap, and leave at room temperature for at least two hours. The flavour will improve if you leave the batter covered in the fridge overnight.

You should now have a bubbly, runny batter, more or less the same consistency as normal pancake/crepe batter but grainy because of the oatmeal. From here on, you’re just making pancakes. A good pan is really important - you can find a non-stick crepe pan cheaply at many supermarkets or kitchen shops (mine only cost 7 UKP; I bought two so I can cook two at once), or a “tava” from an Asian supermarket is also ideal. Oil the pan lightly and heat it until you see smoke coming off - it must be good and hot. Wipe the oil over the pan using a wad of paper towel, so the whole pan surface is coated with a thin layer of oil.

Pour in a ladleful of batter and quickly tilt the pan around so it is covered with batter. Cook until the top has solidified and is darker and very slightly translucent, then loosen with a spatula and toss. You can flip the oatcake with a spatula if you like, but they do break sometimes, so it’s worth learning to toss them properly.
The cooked side should be evenly browned like this:

Cook the other side until well browned.

After every two or three oatcakes, add a drop more oil and wipe round again. Do NOT wash the pan afterwards, and never use it for anything else other than pancakes/oatcakes.

The classic way to serve oatcakes is to put cheddar cheese on the top (that’s the side that was cooked second) and put under the grill (broiler if you’re in the US) until the cheese is melted. You can then add other savoury fillings of your choice: bacon, ketchup, HP sauce, sausage, mushrooms … then roll them up and eat. Or you can have them just with butter, or with jam, honey, nutella, etc.

Hope you enjoy making and eating this traditional food - let us know how you get on.