First Post for 2009

Happy New Year to all. This past weekend the Farmhouse Bakery was in full swing. First off was to try the Easy Crusty Bread recipe from the December/January issue of Mother Earth News. This is a basic simple dough, flour, salt, yeast and water. After mixing it's put in the refrigerator to retard and used as needed by cutting off a piece and shaping into a boule. Made enough dough Friday for four loaves and baked two on Saturday. Took one to our neighbors that are our source for free range eggs. Not a bad exchange.


Also on Friday I refreshed the sourdough starter that had been languishing in the refrigerator for some weeks. Nancy Silverton's method is to feed three times in a day, so Saturday morning found me with a great renewed starter. Began two loaves of her sourdough bread. This has become my staple sourdough recipe, a great crust and chewy texture. This is a two day recipe where the loaves are shaped and placed in bannetons overnight in the refrigerator to retard and develop flavor. Sunday they were taken out of the refrigerator, allowed to finish rising and baked.



With an excess of starter I also baked a set of Orange/Cranberry muffins. See my post of August 17, 2008 for that recipe. It makes a wonderful fruit flavored muffin with oatmeal as an added benefit.





Finally I baked Peter Reinhart's Holiday Bread recipe. This is another of his test bakes for his new book. A rich egg and butter dough that I made into a stollen since I had some marzipan paste in the freezer. Used a 50:50 mix of raisins and cranberries as the fruit.

Playing Catch Up

The Holiday Season sort of got in the way of regular posts, so this is the catch up for the past six weeks or so. I've worked on two more of Peter Reinhart's test breads, a Struan and a Challah recipe.

Struan

Struan is a soft, enriched multigrain bread. It has corn meal, oats, wheat bran and cooked grain. My cooked grain of choice is bulgar wheat, but you could use brown rice, quinoa, millet or couscous. This is a picture of the dough before it went in the refrigerator for the overnight slow rise.



This made two pan loaves. Not as much oven spring as I expected, but a nice, dense wholegrain loaf nevertheless. This is the finished product.



Challah

What an interesting recipe. Makes a very soft enriched dough with a great golden color from 8 egg yolks! Finished up with four challah and one soft pretzel. Photos will have to wait as the loaves are currently in the freezer. They will be taken to Temple B'nai Shalom for use in the Shabbat services.

Other Breads

Along with the testing, I also made several batches of bagels, a pannetone, and several harvest grain ciabatta. The ciabatta recipe came from the King Arthur Flour website. All in all we had no shortage of homebaked breads for the holidays.

Chocolate Cinnamon Babke

This one didn't even last 24 hours out of the oven! This is the third of Peter Rienhart's test recipes and what a great one it was. Starts with a rich dough with four egg yolks, butter and sugar. This ferments for about 2 1/2 hours then gets rolled out into a square, about 1/8 inch thick. A mixture of chocolate, cinnamon and butter is spread over and the whole lot is then rolled into a log. I chose to join the ends of the log so it looked like a large donut with about a 2 inch hole in the middle. This can be a same day bake but I elected to hold it overnight in the refrigerator. After a final rise the loaf was baked at 300F for about 70 minutes. I tested the internal temperature and took it out when it reached 190F.

This is what it looked like out of the oven:



And then the final test - cut and eat!This would make a great alternate to a coffee cake or cinnamon buns. The combination of chocolate and cinnamon is a wonderful flavor.

Bagels

Peter Reinhart's recipe this week was for bagels. Now I'll be the first to admit that I have only baked bagels once before so a bagel baker I'm not! But anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. Recipe was very straight forward, and like most of Peter's recipes calls for an overnight in the refrigerator for the dough. Shaping was the big bugbear and as you will see in the photos, not a good job of joining the ends. Bagels were shaped before putting in the refrigerator.


Next day, pulled the bagels out, and after they got back to room temperature, boiled them in simmering water for 1 1/2 minutes. Then dropped the still wet bagels into poppy seeds for a garnish. 16 minutes in a 450 degree oven and they were done.


Took some over to some friends with cream cheese and lox. Wow! Were they great - good tight crumb and real chewy texture. Their verdict? "Three thumbs up". These will be a try again recipe.

Testing, Testing, Testing

Managed to get a spot on Peter Reinhart's testing panel for his new book in production. Wow! Do I feel honored. This past week was the first recipe, a pre-fermented French Dough. Basically it is flour, salt and water with a little yeast, mixed together then allowed to proof slowly in the refrigerator. Mine stayed in for 30 hours. The result can be formed directly into loaves, or used as a dough enhancer for a 'same day' French bread. I obviously can't and won't share the recipe, but I will share some photos of the finished product. The baguettes were particularly good and I will certainly use this recipe for baguettes in the future.

The baguettes and boule baked directly from the preferment.



Two batards baked using the preferment as a dough enhancer.

Mash-based Seed Culture

This week I spent time making Peter Rheinhart's mash-based seed culture. Mash is a partially cooked whole wheat flour and water mixture that partly gelatinizes the starches. This is then successively mixed with more whole wheat flour and water over 5 - 6 days, in a similar fashion to creating a sourdough starter. The final is a mother starter at 75% hydration that can be used directly in making a whole wheat loaf. This is a wonderfully vigorous starter as seen in this photo.


Today was bake day. Last night I finished refreshing the mother starter and made a whole wheat soaker. This is a mix of whole wheat flour and milk at 87% hydration. It is covered and left at room temperature over night. The starter and soaker are combined with a little more flour, brown sugar, salt, oil and yeast. Peter Rheinhart describes this as his 'epoxy' method because you are mixing essentially equal quantities of two pre-doughs, just like mixing an epoxy adhesive. The photo below right is the soaker just before combining.


The final combination felt good after kneading - no added flour or water other than a small amount of flour used for dusting. Rising went well and the dough was split into two 2lb loaves. A second rising in the pans, then into the oven they went.


Here's the finished product, just out of the oven. Not as much oven spring as I get with the multi-grain bread, but to be expected as this is a 100% whole wheat where the other has some regular bread flour. Tried one piece, tight crumb but good texture. So chalk up another success.

Multigrain Loaf

Today I finished a multigrain loaf from Peter Reinhart's "Whole Grain Breads" . I've been playing around with his recipes for some months now, and generally find them to be somewhat dry. So I decided to try one of his transitional recipes that have some regular bread flour to lighten the texture. This one has whole wheat flour, cornmeal, rolled oats, wheat bran, flax seed and a cooked grain. For the cooked grain I used Bulgar wheat. The grains are all mixed together with buttermilk and left overnight as a soaker. The bread flour goes into a biga that is refrigerated overnight.

When the soaker and biga were mixed together with the remaining ingredients this morning I had a dough that was wetter than usual, so I added a little bread flour to make a soft and slightly sticky dough. Then the dough went through a five minute autolyse and final kneading. First rise was in a ball, then shaping to a batard for the final rise.

Here is a photo of the finished product. Moist and chewy, it has a nice crust and crumb. This will definitely be on my regular recipe list.