Il Forno

July 27, 2004

Chestnut and rosemary bread

I can hardly believe it has been almost two months since my last bread baking post, I should seriously think about changing the blog's caption. Not that I haven't been baking in the meanwhile but I've either made stuff I wrote about already or backed from books I've mentioned before, mainly Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery and Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme. I don't want to turn this blog into the Alberto/Nancy or Alberto/Pierre project, and since I lack the slightly histeric wit and catching writing style Julie Powell has, I prefer to give it a miss and not concentrate on only one source. So nothing too interesting has been going on inside my oven until I came up with something of my own last week.

I had made Nancy Silverton's Rosemary Olive Oil bread (beside), a nice rustic bread with a mild rosemary aroma a few weeks before. As I said, nice, but missing something. After I made castagnaccio I got an idea: rosemary is great with chestnuts, so let's try a bread with both. I replaces some bread flour with my remaining chestnut flour, increased the rosemary and oil and started my little project. If I wanted to be fancy I'd call it Tuscan Fall bread, actually that's exactly what I should call it, as it tastes very much like early fall. The end result is quite different from the original rosemary olive oil bread, since rosemary behaves quite like rye flour. Therefore the bread crumb looks greyish, even a bit unappetising by today's standard, the whole structure of the crumb is more compact than your white sourdough bread and the taste has a slight sweet note. I'm not completely happy about the way the crumb looks (really nice crust though), but the taste is great. Rosemary, olive oil and chestnut all there, instead of cancelling out the slightly bitter rosemary taste balanced by the sweet chestnut. I tried the bread out with a few cheeses and meats and it works great with ripe cheeses (what some might call stinky) like taleggio, a ripe camambert and similar.

Tuscan Fall bread

250 g water
177 g starter
410 g bread flour
75 g chestnut flour
1/4 cup wheat germ
2 tsp salt
3 Tbs extra virgin olive oil

Sieve the chestnut flour and mix with bread flour and wheat germ thoroughly. Mix with the starter and enough water to get a slightly sticky dough, the amount given is only approximate. Be careful since the chestnut flour will make the dough stickier than usual, a bit like rye flour does. Wait 30 minutes than knead in the salt for about 2 minutes than rosemary and olive oil, a little at a time to avoid it splashing out. Transfer to an oiled bowl and let rise till about doubled (it took 4 hours for me on a relatively hot day). Once ready pour the dough on a floured working surface and deflate slightly. Shape into a round boule and transfer, smooth side down, in a floured banetton. Wrap inside a plastic bag and transfer to the fridge. Proof for 8 hours (Mine proofed 10 and wise slightly over-proofed). Remove from the fridge and let it rest at room temperature for 1 hour. Meanwhile heat your oven at 250C (480F), and, if you own one, put your baking stone in the oven now. Once the time's up, remove the bread from the banetton and transfer on a floured peel. Wait 10-15 minutes to slightly dry the outside of the bread, than score the bread in the way you prefer with a razor blade or very sharp knife. Transfer the bread to the oven and reduce the temperature to 230C (450F). In the first 10 minutes of baking you might want to spray the walls of your oven with water to improve crust and oven-spring. Let bake another 20 minutes, rotate the bread back to front to be sure it bakes evenly, and bake another 15-20 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack and wait till cool before having a taste ;-).

Posted by albiston at 11:19 PM in Bread | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 02, 2004

Nancy Silverton's rustic bread and breaking my head on ciabatta

A few weeks ago I baked for the first time bread from Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery. I chose probably the least time consuming and easiest of the lot two start, the rustic bread, her own version of the Italian ciabatta (slipper in Italian, because of its shape). I intended to write about this bread at the time but my blog posting backlog (still growing) delayed at least in part this entry. What played an even further role was trying to understand what a ciabatta is and where it really comes from. The bread I baked, although delicious, had nothing to do with the ciabattas you get in Italy and this is not the first time I notice this. Recipes from other US, UK and German baking books I tried before gave varying results, some to die for other to kill (the book's author) for, but never anything like what I was used to. So why is this bread so popular (there's even a nice German blog called Chili und Ciabatta) if we're actually talking about completely different breads?

My curiosity tickled, I started searching for information on ciabatta. After all sort of contrasting information I stumbled on this page from a very informative baking web site called The Artisan. I also remembered I had bought Slow Food's L'Italia del pane (Italy's bread) which gave some good info too. There's quite a few points that remain unclear but here's what I found out:

-Ciabatta is probably a quite old Northern Italian bread. It might, according to Profumo di Pane by Erika Pignatti, have originated in Trentino. Other sources claim the bread is original of the area around Como (Lombardy). A traditional bread called ciabatta seems to exist in both places making the origin unclear.

-The modern, widespread version of ciabatta, called ciabatta Italiana, was developed only in 1982 when the Mulini Adriesi company registered the farina tipo 1 Italia, a gluten-rich flour, ideal for long rising and proofing and allowing a greater hydration. Not only the flour but also the method for making this bread is trademarked.To help the spreading of this bread and method the company even organises courses bakers can follow to learn the procedure.

-There are a few basic differences between the two breads. Most noticeable of all is the one regarding the crust: the ciabatta from Como has a very crispy crust, absent in the ciabatta Italiana.

-Throughout Italy ciabatta has been adapted to local tastes so even here there is not a "true" ciabatta. I guess the ciabatta I was looking for was only the one I was used to. So I'll stop scratching my head when I see breads that IMO have nothing in common with ciabatta sold under this name.

But now, curiosity (I hope) satiated, let's go back to the bread I baked: I followed the original recipe to the letter without too many problems. Too late did I found out this movie showing Silverton and Julia Child having a go at it. After seeing this I noticed my dough was a bit too wet. I'm seriously starting to believe this depends on the gluten-"poor" European flour, at least the one we amateurs can get our hands on. I used the same proportions the recipe suggested but clearly my flour didn't manage to take up the water as well as it should have. This made the dough more bitchy to work with but didn't really alter the end result.

The bread once cut had a very irregular hole structure, as expected and wished, and it really tasted great. I made two, each weighing a kilo and brought one to some friends, still warm. After an hour only the crumbs were left. Guess the jury liked it ;-). Still I wouldn't call this bread a ciabatta: it tastes much more like the so called pane pizza a somewhat more rustic version of pizza bianca common in southern-central Italy.

Posted by albiston at 11:44 PM in Bread, Italians do it this way..., Wild yeast! | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 25, 2004

Some serious bread baking

Since I started this blog I have had a mixed feeling about the compliments I receive about my baking posts. On one hand I'm really pleased about them, they're a great morale booster and mood-improving. On the other I know there's quite a few people out there who are much more serious than me and much better bakers. Don't get this wrong, please continue with your nice comments ;-). It's just that I'm well aware of the fact that there are too many interesting things in the food-drink world for me to keep concentrated only on baking. A few days ago I received an e-mail regarding my blog entry about baguettes with a very good recipe from Petra. Petra is definitely what I mean with serious baker. She keeps, since 2002, an incredibly good baking website, sadly for most of you out there, only in German. It contains around 140 recipes, concentrating mostly on wheat flour based breads and containing a large rolls and buns section. Even if you can't read the German text I'd have a look: most recipes come with a mouth-watering bread pic.

Petra was kind enough to answer a couple of questions I had about her interest for bread. She explained to me how her passion for bread was stimulated by tasting breads abroad, so different from those she was used to. She then tried to reproduce them at home. It was really interesting to find out that her source of recipes and inspiration is, like mine, American baking books. It's funny that countries as Italy and Germany that do have an Artisan Bread tradition (long proofing, starters and so on) don't manage or want to spread the knowledge to amateur bakers. I, like Petra, turned to American books frustrated by the lack of decent baking books in my mother language. Given my weakness for books, this "inspiration" can be at times critical for my account balance :-). At least now I can go to Petra's website for some free ideas... I think I already have two or three to try out.

Posted by albiston at 10:13 PM in Bread, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2004

Happy Easter!

An Easter bread of some form is something that many European cultures have in common. It may be sweet or savoury, flat, dome shaped or plaited, but it always plays a central role in the Easter lunch. In Naples me and my friends would visit each other's houses and inevitably have a taste of tortano or casatiello (and of course the sweet Pastiera, but that's another story), the two classic Neapolitan savoury Easter breads. Each one of us would have his or her favourites but inevitably for all of us the end of Easter holidays always brought a few more kilos on our frames. It would have been bad manners to refuse a taste, or not? This year I was really tempted to bake one of these two breads but one bread, in a German baking book caught my eye. I bought the book on impulse, sadly I must say, since all the recipes I tried have been disappointing and the recipe amounts often silly. On the other hand the book's stuffed with loads of potentially nice ideas so maybe it wasn't all wasted money... Oh, but that Easter bread! I just couldn't get it out of my mind. So I took the recipe, changed it trusting my (limited) experience with brioche-like dough and for once the result was quite nice. At least looks nice, doesn't it? And tasted good too!

The recipe is, in a certain sense, a blatant disrespect to the glorious traditions of Greek cuisine. I mean, take a traditional Greek Easter bread, called tsourakia or lambropsomo. This SWEET bread usually has (at least from my info) either one or five RED boiled eggs as a decoration. Now give the recipe to some German editor who wants to make a fashionable baking book. He or she will turn this into a SAVOURY bread with BLUE eggs on top. The result is actually better than one could think, although I would perfectly understand any Greek who feels really annoyed about it. I, for once, hid my principles about authentic food under the carpet and went on not only to bake but also to enjoy eating this bread.

For the recipe itself, first make a sponge starter with 200g (7 oz) bread (or 550) flour, 200 ml (6.8 fl oz) milk and one package active dry yeast. Let rise till very bubbly and doubled. Mine took something like 40 minutes. Meanwhile cook 60g (about 2 oz) finely chopped onion with very little butter, till translucent then add 40 g (1.4 oz) finely diced bacon or dry-cured ham (like Parma or Serrano, but possibly some less expensive one), and sautee for about 2 minutes. Set aside. Boil 3 eggs for about 5 minutes (they'll cook some more in the oven) and dye them blue or any colour you like, it doesn't really matter.

Once the starter is ready knead together with another 300 g (10.6 oz) bread flour, 1 egg, 1 tsp salt and 1 Tbs honey. Add just enough milk to let the dough come together(in my case 3 Tbs were enough), it will be quite firm. Once you have a rough dough add 75 g (2.6 oz) soft butter, in small pieces, and knead into the dough. Knead till the dough becomes nicely elastic (about 7-10 minutes) and leave to rise covered till doubled. At this point divide the dough into four equal pieces. You'll need to roll three of them into 60 cm (24 in) long ropes and the last one about twice as long (and half as thick). You'll need to stretch and roll each rope a bit, then let it rest while you stretch the next one another bit, and so on till you reach the desired size. Plait the three thick ropes together. It helps if your hands are a slightly wet at this stage to let the ropes stick better together. I must admit I'm really bad at explaining how this should work and the links I found on the net are not clearer either. Maybe you're lucky and have a bread book that explains it with some nice pictures, which makes understanding how it works a lot easier.

Once you have your plait place it on a greased sheet. Use your hand to create a sort of dent along the middle of the bread. Space the three dyed eggs evenly on the bread and use the last, thin rope to enclose them letting the rope run around the eggs in a sort of sine wave (gosh maths!). Or, looking at the eggs in a row parallel to you: over the first egg, under the second, all around the third one, over the second egg and finishing under the first one (not really clear is it?). Let the bread rise for about 1 1/2 to two hours. Glaze with egg yolk and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake at 200C (400F) for 30 to 4 minutes. Let it cool and tah-dah there's your Easter Greek-German bread!

Posted by albiston at 03:19 PM in Bread | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 06, 2004

The baguette challenge: part 2

About two weeks ago I wrote about my problems with baguettes. Writing that post only made me more determined to bake a good baguette myself. If you wonder why such obsession with the famous French stick, let me explain the reasons. Since I started baking for fun I felt the need to build a certain repertoire of bread "classics". A bit like learning to play jazz: you need to hammer in those classic if you want to go free-style. Having to stay home with little Saami for a week (hit by chickenpox) I took the chance and played around and tried as many different baguette methods as I could in the time available. I think I'm finally quite happy with the baguettes I made at the end. I also found out one or two tricks to baguette making that work in my conditions (i.e. in my oven). But most of all I have to admit that what really helped was baking each day some baguettes, in two occasions even twice a day. As usual, silly as it may sound, practice, practice and again practice are the best tools to improve.

I'll skip the recipes that worked so and so and go straight to the "winner". In the end the recipe that worked best came from a book I mentioned in the last post, Peter Rehinardt's Crust and Crumb. He has two methods, a straight yeast one and one with old dough, inspired by the method made famous by Raymond Calvel. The old dough one was by far superior although both gave nice bread especially when the final proofing stage was retarded overnight, as Rehinardt suggests, by placing the shaped baguettes in the fridge. I had to modify a few things here and there to make the recipe work for my conditions (oven size/flour type/etc). The first thing I changed was the old dough "recipe". Rehinardt has you prepare some old dough extra. Since I was trying his straight yeast method anyway I decided to save some of that and use it as old dough.

The straight dough method is practically always the same. The quantities: 1 kg flour (possibly type 55, or half bread and half all purpose flour), 660 g water, 1 package active dry yeast and about 20 g salt (or in percent 100 flour, 66 water, 2 salt, 0.5 yeast). Rehinardt has you add 1 tsp of malt extract or brown sugar (to ca. 1 kg flour). This certainly seems to give a nicer, darker crust to the breads though I'm not really convinced that the yeast need this extra food at all. So to start I made a large batch of the plain dough, let it rise for about 90 minutes and split it approximately into thirds. One third to use as old dough (went into the fridge), one to make an oval loaf (keep forgetting how they're called in French) with the overnight fridge proofing method and one to make baguettes straight away, just to compare the results with and without the overnight step.

Since the dough I took for making baguettes straight away was too much for just one loaf I split it into two 300 g (about 10 oz) pieces, quite a bit less than the 16 oz to 19 oz suggested in the book and which I used before. Because of this necessary change I found out that this size (300g) seems to be the ideal for my home oven, which is not that deep. With the bigger amounts my baguettes always tended to expand too much on the sides and be more flat-ish (even when under-proofed) than round/oval in section. I imagine the problem comes from the shaping. I guess that when using 16 oz dough I couldn't really roll and stretch the baguette as much as I should have, otherwise it wouldn't have fitted in the oven, and so the surface skin was not as tense as it should be. BTW someone kindly pointed out to me that my fantastic ;-) building blocks creation for baguette proofing is not necessary. French bakers have used for ages a linen cloth, dusted and then folded upwards to separate the rising baguettes and that's what I used this time. It's a bit more practical, I have to admit. The baguettes, baked for about 25 minutes at 230C (450F) and sprayed with water three times in the first 5 minutes, came out with a nice crust and irregular crumb (as I hoped) but the taste was not too exiting. Also the slashing of the dough could be a bit better, still have to improve that.

Next morning I went on an baked my loaf, which had proofed overnight in the fridge inside a banetton. The dough was quite clearly over-proofed and the bread came out a bit flatter than expected. My fridge is quite cold but 14 hours seemed too much. I found out afterwards that between 8 and 10 hours fridge-retarding is ideal, at least in my case. On the other hand the crust was great, full of little blisters typical of over-night retarded breads, and with a great crunch. Rehinardt talks about the sound of the crust of a good loaf as something magical, which you'll long for each time you bake. I couldn't describe it better: when I manage to bake a loaf with a nice crackly crust I always feel really satisfied. The retarding also improves the crumb flavour, giving the bread a very slight sourdough-ish aroma.

And finally, if you made till here, I made the baguettes with the old dough method. The quantities are the same as in the basic baguette dough plus 50% pre-fermented or old dough, i.e. 500g old dough to 1 kg flour. The dough mixing is somewhat different. First all ingredients except salt and old dough (which also contains salt) are kneaded till a rough dough forms. At this point there is a 20-30 minutes rest phase to allow autolyse to happen. If you're wondering what autolyse is follow this link and scroll down till the last entry under A, there's a quite good explanation there. Then salt and old dough are added and the dough kneaded till smooth and stretchy (full gluten development). After this the procedure is as for the straight dough bread: rise, shaping, overnight fridge proofing (this time 10 hours) and baking. Rehinardt suggests to take the dough out of the fridge about one hour before baking, to let it warm at room temperature. Other authors skip this step but I found it lets the dough bloom in a more regular way once in the oven. Another good tip is to let the dough dry out a bit in the last 15 minutes before baking to make it easier to slash. Especially with a soft dough as this, I found it helped quite a bit

I baked some baguettes till blond and some I left a bit longer. Both were really nice. I preferred the darker ones while Daniela liked the lighter ones better. Both had a nice crust, full of blisters, as you can see from the opening pic, and the crumb had a nice irregular structure and a great flavour. Now I've got a freezer full of baguettes... I think I'll take a pause from French bread for a while :-). Time to move to the next bread challenge... focaccia sounds quite interesting...

Posted by albiston at 12:30 PM in Bread | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack

March 19, 2004

On Baguettes, cups and... building blocks

In the past week I've been trying out baguette recipes, four different ones to be precise. The main reason for this is that the ones I can buy here are OK, but nothing more than that, and the ones I baked in the past ranged from so-so to only decent. So I bought a big bag of type 550 flour, took out my baking books from their shelf and got to work. I'm still far from getting a baguette I like, so no recipe or method this time. Hopefully that will happen sometime in the near future. On the other hand I've made two important (for me, and maybe for other baking nerds like me) discoveries:
1) I'm never going to use cup measurements again. NEVER, EVER! If I do kick me in the shins. Please :-). From now on, only mass units here.
2) You can use kids building blocks to build your own baguette pan, at least for proofing. IF your son/daughter lets you ;-).

First of all the "measuring with cups" half disaster. The first two recipes I used come from Joe Ortiz's book The Village Baker. I have had both successes and failures (in part my fault) following the recipes described. I noticed though that following the recipes closely is quite important for getting good results, so that's exactly what I did. I measured everything out (Note: IN CUPS), measured water temperature and started. Soon enough I noticed something must be really wrong. The dough, which was supposed to be "soft, moist and sticky", was actually a batter. So I added just enough flour to get the whole thing together, kneaded it a bit further, as instructed, and proceeded with the recipe. The end result was an hybrid between a baguette and a ciabatta... a bagu-atta or a ciabb-ette :-). Tasted quite nice though.

Frustrated, I leafed through the book and found out that hey! there's a professional baker section at the end of the book with percent of weight figures (flour is 100%). I used these numbers the next day and got a "soft, moist and sticky" dough, as expected which baked into a pleasant baguette (the ones depicted at the start of the post). The moral is: cups are just too unreliable. When a recipe says 2 cups flour for example... is that tightly packed or loose? Are my cups really measuring 1 cup or not? Are my measuring cup UK or US cups? No clue. So I'll just stick to grams from now on. If you want to have even further info on why scales are better you might want to read The kitchen scale manifesto (via eGullet).

Now to the baguette pan. Most artisan baguette recipes call for a rather soft dough and for the use of a baguette pan for proofing and baking. Some do mention that you could let the baguette proof free-form. I've tried this a few times before and inevitably ended with a quite wide flat-ish loaf since during the proofing stage the loaves expanded in width instead of in height. Since I have no baguette pan I had to resort to some other solution. After some thought I ended up with a "baking paper-building block" creation:

How to make this? First take a piece of baking parchment and fold it to obtains as many "half-pipes" (yep, like the skateboarding ones) as baguettes. On the outer sides place a row of building blocks you nicked form your son's toys box. Be careful not to let him see you otherwise he'll come and want them back. And, as every parent should now, in these cases the little ones can be very persuasive :-). Once finished shape the baguettes and proof them in the hand-made baguette pan. The only limitation is that you can't really bake with this, so before going in the oven you'll have to remove the building blocks and increase the space between the baguettes a bit. I guess it's quicker to buy a baguette tray if you can find one ;-).

P.S. Now excuse me but I'll go home and see where Daniela is going to take me out for my birthday tonight :-)

PP.SS If anyone has a nice tried and tested baguette recipe: your help would be really appreciated!

Posted by albiston at 02:32 PM in Bread, Tools for cooks | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 20, 2004

Bakeries: local favourite(s)

I've been thinking about posting this for a while. I guess most of you out there will find this irrelevant, but maybe it might tickle the few Germans reading out there. I wanted to tell you about my favourite bakery here in Jena, and in short about a couple of other ones I like too. Now, bread in Germany is usually quite nice, at least in its traditional forms: rye bread, whole grain bread and so on. I don't mind the compact, heavy texture of the traditional breads. But every now and then I feel like something else, something a bit less down to earth, more frivolous maybe: Italian and French breads. Sadly most bakers either don't produce any of these breads or offer really pale copies. So I was quite happy as, a few months ago, I discovered a market stall selling good looking French and Italian breads. The stall was that of the bakery Panetoni, a bakery from the nearby town of Apolda.

From that day on I've more or less sampled most of their production and have become an admirer of their bread. They offer a few bread sorts, different rolls and a small selection of sweets. The breads on offer (2-3 kinds every day) are usually what would be called rustic: olive bread (in the pic above), tuscan, sourdough, ciabatta and a few others. As I write I'm trying their new rosemary potato bread, a nice moist bread with potato chunks with well balanced rosemary flavour. Would be great for chicken sandwich! The bread,in general. reminds me a lot of those found in American artisan bakery books.
I almost like the rolls even better: tomato an basil, sourdough, pumpkin seed and cheese and Tessiner, a row of rolls baked together to form a sort of loaf. The sweets/pastry products are mainly of French inspiration: a few kinds of buttery brioche, croissant and some nice tartlettes filled with some sort of delicious custard (I have to find out how it's made!) topped with apple slices (very nice) or strawberries (even better). The only minor criticism I can make is that the croissant are often baked a tad too long, till quite dark: still they're flakey and buttery as they should be, no match with the pale imitations sold in other bakeries. If you live around here give them a try. In Apolda - Bergstrasse 26, in Jena look for their stall at one of the entries of the Goethe gallerie.

For those who might be more interested in more traditional German breads I'm lisiting a few of my favourites. For rolls, a must for a true German breakfast, especially on the WE, the best bakery is Kwak (yep, just like the duck) (Karl-Liebknecht-Str 50 and 15). Their small, compact doppelte (double rolls) are delicious and if you want to buy some for the WE you either have to wake up early or order some in advance. For traditional German bread I really like the Czech bakery (Karl-Liebknecht-Str 1a, Magdelstieg 73, Nollendorfer Str 24), well made tatsty, plus it's a family business and not some gigantic chain. My favourite is their Quark-Fuenfkornbrot, a multigrain bread made with quark, a sort of cream cheese. They also make nice cakes. Another place for good cakes is the bakery Altengonna (Erfurter Str 4, Otto Schott Str 34), although I personally don't really like their buttercream cakes. But me, me no likes buttercream. Sooner or later I'll have to post about Turingian cakes.

P.S. These here are all judgements coming from my own personal experience. I'm in no way linked to any of the business listed above. Apart for the fact that I like them clearly :-).

Posted by albiston at 01:34 AM in Bread | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 28, 2004

The crumb strikes back: pane Siciliano

Recently I seem to be attracted to breads covered with sesame seeds, I just find those little seed give a great flavour to the bread. The bread I baked on Sunday is no exception. Pane Siciliano is a sesame dusted bread made with a high percentage of semolina flour, plus, as fun factor for the baker :-), it comes in unusual shapes. I've been a few times in Sicilia and although I've often seen bread shaped this way, it always seemed to be made with normal bread flour. Reading the very interesting L'Italia del pane from Slow food I found the bread I baked is quite similar to the so called pane casareccio di Lentini, typical of the province of Siracusa. The bread was a success but not perfect in its looks (my fault, as usual).

Making the bread is quite easy. I took the recipe from a small but information-full Italian book Pane e Roba Dolce from the Simili sisters (also quoted from Carol Field in her The Italian Baker). I slightly modified it, reducing, as usual the yeast, and letting the rises go on a bit longer. For the dough I took 350 g. (11 oz) semolina flour, 150 g. (5 oz) all purpose flour, 300 g. ( about 1/2 pint) water, 1 tsp malt, 2 Tbs olive oil, 2 tsp salt and 1 tsp active dried yeast. This got mixed and kneaded as usual, till the gluten was well developed.

I wasn't able to find any semolina flour in Germany (loads of semolina though), although I had been looking for a while so I bought some in Italy over Xmas. Something funny happened as I paid the stuff. The guy at the cash counter looked at me and told me that the flour I was buying was only to make pasta, not bread. I pondered for a while if I should have told him something like "and what will you do if I bake with it? shoot me?" but decided that a ill-disguised grin and a thank you were better.

The dough took about 3 hours to rise after which I divided it in two pieces, each getting rolled into a long thin rope, about 50-60 (20-24 in) cm long and 3 cm thick (slightly over 1 inch). The first piece got shaped as occhi di Santa Lucia, Saint Lucy's eyes: each end gets rolled on itself till the two resulting coils are side to side, a bit like an S. The second was shaped as mafalda: the dough rope is coiled in a zigzag pattern and leaving a piece free that goes across the top (harder to describe as to shape!). Both breads got brushed with water and sprinkled with sesame. They went onto a baking sheet (oiled and sprinkled with cornmeal) and into a big plastic bag to proof. I waited about two hours but I guess that wasn't enough. The breads expanded a lot in the oven cracking a bit on the sides, which as far as I can tell depends on the bread being under-proofed. If you have a more exact idea on what went wrong please tell me, this problem is something I quite often run across when baking bread. The bread took about 35 minutes to bake, 10 at 230C (450F) and the rest at 200C (400F).

This bread has a few things I really like and one major flaw. The flaw is that the crust is quite thin. I like a thick crust. On the other hand the sesame gives it a great flavour. What's really great about pane Siciliano is the crumb: tasty and golden from the semolina flour and "strong" without being too compact. By strong I mean that if you press it (not too hard) it will spring right back. It almost fights back! I know just the panino I'll make with this bread....

Posted by albiston at 12:25 AM in Bread | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 20, 2004

Daktyla: Greek finger bread

Finally some bread baking. I've had problems in the past few weeks in finding the right schedule and time to bake bread but I hope I'll be doing this a bit more often in the next weeks. Making bread has such a great relaxing power. Back to the bread. After my post on Eric Truille and Ursula Ferrigno's book Bread I decided to pick a few interesting recipes between those I hadn't tried out yet.

And here's the first "experiment": daktyla or Greek finger bread, or better my slight modified version of it. This is a rustic bread made from normal bread flour mixed with some cornmeal and some whole wheat flour. The bread turned out really nice, with a nice crust, moist and compact (but not heavy) crumb, slightly gritty from the cornmeal, nutty tasting with a slight corn aftertaste. From the aesthetic point of view, it didn't exactly look as it should have. One should be able to see some "space" between the fingers, as you can see from the two end-sections of the bread. The "fingers" stuck a bit too much to each other, probably because I left them to proof with not enough space between each other.

To keep the Greek theme I made tsatsiki and one of my all-time favourites,Greek salad, to go with it. Tomato salad in winter is not what it would be with summer tomatoes (I usually don't even consider buying them between November and May) but I was lucky to find some acceptable Roma tomatoes to make the salad and so the end result wasn't too bad. Both went quite well with the bread, especially the "sauce" left from the salad. Don't you just love to mop up that stuff with some nice bread? ....sheesh, I must be the only person who matches his food to his bread and not the other way around!

So, for the bread:
350 g. Bread flour
75 g. whole wheat flour
75 g. coarse cornmeal (in the original recipe fine cornmeal, but I had none)
1 tsp active dry yeast (half as much as recommended)
1 tsp salt
1 Tbs olive oil
1 Tbs honey
1 Tbs milk plus more fro brushing
sesame seeds for decorating
250-300 ml water (see below)

I first dissolved the yeast in a bit of water and then mixed all the dry ingredients together. Once the flour mixture looked uniform, with no patches of cornmeal or whole wheat flour I added the yeast, then oil, milk and honey and finally the water, gradually. I added enough water to get a soft-ish non-sticky dough, although that's a bit incorrect as dough with whole wheat flour tend to remain a bit sticky no matter how little water one adds. After kneading the dough for about 10-12 minutes, till the gluten had developed nicely.

The dough took about 2 1/2 hours to double. One could double the yeast and reduce the time but I find that gives a too yeasty taste to the final bread. For the shaping: I divided the dough in 6 equal pieces which I rolled and left to rest, ca. 10 minutes. I then shaped each into an oblong "finger", placing them in a row. Here I should have left a bit more space between them, just enough to let them touch, instead I pressed them a bit too close causing the fingers to remain stuck together during baking. The bread proofed 1 hour after which I brushed each finger with milk and sprinkled them with sesame seeds. The bread baked about 40-45 minutes the first 15 at 220C(430F) and then at 200C(400F). In the first ten minutes I sprayed the oven walls thrice with water to steam up and develop the crust.

As usual the hardest part was waiting for the bread too cool down. The thing that I liked about this bread, apart the very nice flavour, is that it keeps quite fresh for 2 days (could be longer but I ran out of...eh.. experimental material?). It also tastes great toasted. My toasting expert, Daniela, who would toast any bread at any time :-) forced me to try some... wow that was a nice surprise!
If there's any Greece expert or Greek reading, I'm sorry for eventual murderous changes I might have made to the bread, feel free to comment and point out my mistakes.

Posted by albiston at 03:03 PM in Bread, Cooking around the world | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 14, 2004

Bread books: "Bread", my own playground

In the original idea I had about this blog I intended to put my cooking/backing book mania to some use and post every now and then about books I found interesting. I sort of forgot about it (with one exception), till today. So to start I decided to pick Eric Truille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread. This is the first bread book I bought and also the first cooking book written in English to land on my shelves. I've cooked through quite a few of the recipes but there are still more I'd like to try: after looking again through the book before writing this post I found at least 10 breads I haven't tried before that looked interesting. Who knows, maybe they'll get a post of their own soon.

As with almost every Dorling Kindersley book, the layout and pictures are great (except maybe the baguette photo). The book is divided in three main sections: an introduction to baking ingredients and tools, an intro to baking technique and the recipes. Before I take a look at the recipe a few words on the intro section. In general it's quite well made, although it doesn't go too deep but let's not forget this is no bread-expert book. I found the bread shaping part quite helpful, especially as I started baking: descriptions give you a clue but I think you need pictures like these to understand fully "how it's done". One BIG problem with this section of the book is IMO how little the importance of kneading is explained. Just by looking at the pictures I can say that the gluten in all the doughs in this book is well developed, i.e. very stretchy dough. To get this you can't really rely on how long you knead. It can take more or less depending on how strong one kneads, which flour is used and so on. This is very important for the finished bread structure (air bubble distribution in the dough) and the crust but If you have no clue about it you might just overlook it as I had. Looking back probably some of my first not too successful tests failed probably because I didn't knead enough. Also pointing out clearly that with dough exact water flour ratios don't exist would not be a bad idea.
The recipes themselves are divided according to bread type: simple breads (i.e. only flour water and yeast), sourdough (plus starter breads), enriched, flavoured, flatbreads, quick breads (i.e. with baking powder or soda), festive breads and a small section of recipes using bread. Having tried a few from each chapter, except the festive breads I can say that some recipes work well and others just don't. Great successes were the best baguette I baked to date (tried at least other 5 recipes) and nice and easy naan; the biggest failure the pumpkin bread, a very moist and heavy bread, not light (as described) at all.
Of all the recipes chapter the sourdough one is very disappointing: all the starters include commercial yeast, so no sourdough at all. I can't really judge the authenticity of any recipe except the Italian ones. There are a quite few typical Italian breads in the book: most recipes are, as far as I can say, correct or at least quite close, but some are just wrong like piadina. Why take a very easy recipe and make it more complicated? In the focaccia department I had the feeling the authors went a bit "creative", although still keeping Italian ingredient combinations. There is one spelling mistake in the book that makes me laugh every time I read it: one of the breads is presented (at least in my edition) as Pane Casalingua. The name should really be Pane Casalingo, home-style bread. In Italy casalingua is only to be found in porn movie titles! It is actually a word game between casalinga (housewife) and lingua (tongue) to intend housewives with a preference for a certain type of sex practice (you certainly know what I mean, I don't have to spell it for you, do I?). Wonder if someone in the printing dept. wanted to have a bit of fun :-)!
All things considered I believe this is a good bread book, but, at least on its own, not for absolute beginners. It has some flaws and not all recipes work. I'm not the only one who's blogged about it: Deb and Angela (look at the comments) have also expressed their opinions on the book and tested some of the recipes. On the plus side the book has some very inviting bread recipes, even if just used as inspiration, and the recipes that do work are very good. Maybe the best compliment I can make to this book is that 6 years and 8 bread books later I still often turn to this book for ideas.

Posted by albiston at 11:40 PM in Books, Bread | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 02, 2004

Dough stretching

This post is the first of four on the dishes I prepared for our New Year's Eve dinner. I decided to have a bit of fun and, for the occasion, try to put together a nice menu for us and our friends. So I took the chance to try a few recipes that were waiting in my "to try when you feel fit for them" list and also to try and develop my plating a bit inspired by Blue's tips. Following the order in which the dishes were served I will start with our appetiser: grissini stirati con prosciutto e tuiles di Parmigiano Reggiano, i.e. "stretched" bread sticks with dry cured ham and Parmesan chips.

Grissini are quite easy to make. The very important thing is to get a quite dry but very stretchy dough in the kneading phase. For the dough I took:

500 g. Flour (3 and 3/4 cup)
1 1/2 tsp. Salt
2 tsp. Malt syrup
2 Tbs. Olive oil
Enough water to get a firm non-sticky dough (slightly less than a cup)
1 tsp. Active dried yeast

Once the dough was kneaded properly I left it to rise covered till about doubled (ca. 1 1/2 hours). At this point I patted it gently to form a rectangle about 20x30 cm (8x12 in). I cut the rectangle into four pieces (10x15 cm) and each piece in 5 or 6 stripes. Each strip was stretched to become as wide as my oven sheets. Some strips resisted a bit so I moved on to the next ones before continuing to stretch them. Others stretched much more than needed so I had to cut them to size. Unfortunately these bits and pieces can't be kneaded and stretched again so I used them to make a little roll I ate as a snack... baking makes me hungry :-)!!!
I stretched the strips and placed them with about 1 cm distance from each other till my oven sheets (sprinkled with cornmeal) were full and covered the remaining dough to prevent it from drying out. The stretched grissini were brushed with oil and dusted with poppy seeds: next time I'll use some other topping as poppy seeds don't seem to be very "sticky" even when pressed into the dough. I baked the grissini for 20 minutes at about 200C (400F).

I made the grissini the day before the dinner which was maybe not a too good idea as they lost part of their crunch after one day. Therefore I had to "toast" them briefly in the oven before serving. Not a problem as such but the thinnest sections of the grissini became quite crunchy. Well I always learn something new.
The Parmesan tuiles are very easy and quick to make. I took the recipe from a book I got for Christmas, La cucina di Nadia e Antonio Santini, a recipe book from a quite famous restaurant in Italy, "dal Pescatore". You just need some grated Parmesan and a slightly buttered non-stick pan. Take about a tablespoon Parmesan per chip and spread it in the pan. Quickly the parmesan will melt and start to "bubble". Take the pan from the fire, wait just a few seconds and then pick up the chip. I found a toothpick works very well. Put the Parmesan chip on a rolling pin, wooden spoon handle, or similar to give it a curved shape (actually one could play quite a bit with shapes) and to cool it down.
To serve I wrapped some dry cured ham (Spanish Serrano as I could not find Parma ham) on the tips of two grissini and placed them across the plate. On the lower part of the plate I put three Parmesan tuiles and dropped some real 18 year old Balsamico around them.
Apart the few "crunchy" spots in the grissini the dish was well received, at least judging from the speed at which it disappeared :-). I was also quite pleased as afterwards I had to recognise that the dish is a good re-interpretation of a classical Italian style appetiser: the grissini and ham in a classical paring and the Parmesan chips a modern touch. Plus Parmesan and Balsamico are just great together... mmhh.... :-)

Posted by albiston at 11:11 PM in Bread, Italians do it this way..., Snacks | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 03, 2003

Old fashioned tastes

As promised I'm posting about some traditional Neapolitan cooking, baking actually. The first recipe I made from Jeanne C. Francesconi's book is Pizza di Scarole, or escarole pizza. The name pizza is in this case confusing as this is more a savoury cake. Still the term pizza is used in Naples both for the flat classic pizza and for several savoury cakes. The "modern" version of the recipe calls for escarole flavoured with olives, capers and anchovies as stuffing. I opted for a more old fashioned filling using a mix of pinoli (pine nuts), capers, raisins, black olives (all in the same amount, about a fistful) and a 1 clove of garlic, one anchovy and some hot pepper to flavour the greens. This is an old (probably XVII century or older) and traditional mixture used for a few vegetables (great on pan fried peppers) and for linguini di scammaro, the traditional lent pasta in Naples, in which case green olives and bred crumbs are also added, with or without tomato sauce (in which case no bread crumbs). This mixture probably came from Sicily. It might have arrived there with the Arabs, but since I'm not really strong in middle eastern cooking I could not say.

To start I chopped the garlic and anchovies and pitted and halved the olives. I was lucky enough to have some Gaeta olives, delicious small purple olives with a slight bitter taste, used in Neapolitan cooking whenever black olives are needed. Meanwhile I washed and chopped the escarole. In Naples this is sold as small baby plants, as big as an extended hand. Here in Germany I only found some as big as a salad, meaning that the leaves would be inevitably tougher. In a pan I dissolved the anchovies in some hot olive oil, added hot pepper and garlic, waited till the garlic turned golden in colour and then toasted the pinoli in the mixture for one or two minutes. Before I go on with the recipe let me digress for a second. I would like, one day, to find out why pinoli are called pignoli in the States. I guess it probably comes from north-eastern Italian dialects as in Italian pignoli means stubborn people! Going back to the recipe; once the pinoli looked slightly darker in colour I added the cut escarole and let it cook/braise (I would say stufare in Italian) covered. At first the amount of greens in the pan looks enormous but soon it reduces in volume to a more "normal" size as the leaves become soft. At this point I added olives, capers and raisins (softened in warm water) and salt and uncovered to let the little liquid present evaporate. If too much liquid is there one could simply pour it off the pan, important is that the stuffing is not wet or it will soak the bread dough casing. I really love the colour the escarole has at this point, a beautiful green (hope you can see it in the pic below). Together with the olives, etc. it almost looks like an abstract painting.

Beforehand I prepared some simple bread dough, enriched with a bit of olive oil. I rolled (gently) 2/3 for bottom and sides filled it with the braised escarole and used the remaining dough to make a lid, which i brushed with olive oil. The pizza di scarole baked at 180C/360F for 25-30 minutes. After it cooled a bit it was ready to eat. It tastes good still warm but it is even better if left to cool so that the flavours can blend together.

If you try this and REALLY hate raisins you can leave them out, otherwise, even if the combination sounds weird, try it. It might positively surprise you.

Posted by albiston at 03:00 PM in Bread, Italians do it this way... | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 30, 2003

Stuffing but no turkey

I recently managed to buy a book I wanted to have for a quite long time, "la cucina Napoletana" (Neapolitan cuisine) written by Jeanne Carola Francesconi. This is sort of a "bible" in regards to classical Neapolitan cooking, full of classic, curiosities and information. This means you'll probably find a bit more Neapolitan cooking on this pages in the future :-). Francesconi, as her first name hints, comes from a family with French roots. This should not surprise there is a strong connection between Naples and France since (maybe even before) the Anjou dynasty ruled in southern Italy. Neapolitan cuisine was also dramatically influenced. Famous chefs were called Monzu (from Monsieur) and many French classics were adapted to the Neapolitan taste. I took inspiration from the book to prepare one of these "French" dishes, stuffed brioches, also called Danubio in Naples (Danube, as the river, no clue why). There are a few stuffed brioche recipes in the book (salami and cheese, vegetables, financiere). They might look like modern inventions: all are actually adapted from an early XIX century book, "Cucina Teorico Pratica", written by Ippolito Cavalcanti. It would be interesting to know if something similar is also baked in France. I went for the salami and cheese ones, because I like them and because I didn't have the ingredients for the other recipes.

To make these stuffed brioches I first made a normal brioche dough. I started with 400 g. bread flour (12.8 oz.), 4 eggs, 1 1/2 tsp dried yeast, 2 tsp sugar and salt (to taste). I let the dough rise 1 hour then mixed in 200 g. butter (6.4 oz) and let the dough rise 2 hours. Meanwhile I cut some salami and some smoked scamorza into small cubes. You can actually use ham or salt cured ham instead of salami in the stuffing, and well drained mozzarella or even emmenthaler as cheese. When the dough had finally doubled I started shaping the brioches. One could shape individual ones or, as I did, let them all bake together in a big cake mould. You take some dough, flatten it out in a circle, put the stuffing in the middle and then close the dough all around the stuffing. You can decide how big the brioches will be varying the amount of dough and stuffing. For a party I would make many small ones. Here I was making something to eat at work for lunch, therefore I went for a quite bigger size. Once the brioches are all shaped brush some diluted egg yolk on all of them and let rise for at least an hour. One of the reasons why I love making this kind of recipes is the quite childish pleasure I get from the "before/after" effect in the last rise. When the brioche had risen enough I brushed them again with the egg yolk and baked them for 20-30 minutes in the pre-heated oven (180C, 360F), till golden brown on top.

Once cool the finished brioches have a tasty filling made of the salami and melted cheese in their middle as you can see in the pic above. In my case the dough should have been a bit more salty as I forgot to taste if the salt was enough. The recipe is a bit time consuming but mainly because of the long waits in-between rises. Ideal for a rainy weekend afternoon.

Posted by albiston at 02:46 PM in Bread, Italians do it this way..., Snacks | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 17, 2003

Panmarino

There are quite a few breads (and sweets) that catched my eye while reading Carol Field's The Italian Baker. The one that intrigued me most was panmarino, a white bread loaf flavoured with olive oil and rosemary. I have to admit I never heard of this bread before. This is not so strange; after all talking about Italian breads is like talking about Italian cuisine, there is none. There are many regional cuisine families and a few nation wide dishes. Similarly for bread there are a few widespread breads (focaccia, rosette, pane pugliese) and hundreds of local specialities. Field says this bread is the (re-)creation of a baker from Ferrara (if I'm not mistaken, I don't have the book at hand now), which is quite some distance away from Napoli (where I come from). This possibly explains my ignorance.

I modified the recipe a bit since I find that Field uses much more yeast than I would. I also increased oil and rosemary for a slightly stronger taste. There should be no problem therefore for me to give you the recipe.
I used:
450 grams bread flour
4 Tbs EV olive oil
1 Tbs dried rosemary
1 Ts dry yeast
1 1/2 Ts salt
1/2 cup warm water
1/2 cup milk
coarse salt as topping

The yeast went in with water and milk till dissolved and flour, salt and rosemary got mixed together. I added the oil to the yeast mixture and then the flour and kneaded for about 10 minutes. The dough rose for about 2 hours. Then I carefully flattened and shaped it in a round loaf which I left to rise 45 minutes, slashed it with a star, or better said, asterisk pattern on top on which I sprinkled the coarse salt and baked it. It baked 10 minutes at 230C and another 20 at 200C. Field says that it should not rise till doubled before you bake it otherwise it will not properly bloom in the oven. I guess my loaf could have done with a bit extra rise. Instead I rushed it a bit, since it was quite late already. Not that I have anything about staying up late. But, when you have a little one waking you up every day at 5 AM, staying up baking till 2 AM loses a bit of its charms :-)). Still no disastrous effect. The bread only bloomed a bit less than it could have.
The taste was really nice, olive oil and rosemary evident but not too strong, the crumb dense and golden (from the oil). I think it is a great bread for meat sandwiches and that's exactly how I used it the next day for a quick lunch.

Posted by albiston at 03:10 PM in Bread, Italians do it this way... | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 10, 2003

Sourdough 2.0: the exploding bread

This week-end I tried baking sourdough bread again. This time the results were much better (see my first try) but still not perfect. Instead of having a flat bread I had a slight exploding bread problem. By that I mean that my bread expanded a bit too much in the oven, so much actually that the crust popped open in one place. I found out that probably my first bread was way over-proofed and for that reason so flat. I also changed the method this time and used the one explained by jackal10 in the eGullet culinary institute.

This method requires a "runny" starter: therefore I took my starter and diluted it with equal quantities of water and flour (resulting in a thick batter), refreshing it at the same time. It started to bubble quite quickly, maybe a bit quicker than I thought. After one night I made a second refreshment of the starter waited about 6 hours and mixed the dough together. In the mixer went 3 cups of bread flour, 1 cup of starter and 1 cup of water and kneaded it a few minutes. The dough was really wet, a bit more flour went in there, and super stretchy. Ever played with that green stuff, slime? Almost like it. Not exactly appetising but at the same time a good sign of gluten development. After 30 minutes rest, which serves a specific purpose which I did not get too well (something to do with amylases) I added 2 tsp salt and kneaded again. The dough was left to rise for about 3 hours. It hardly increased in size but I could already see small bubbles in the dough, the product of my wild yeast working. Yay! At this point I shaped the dough: I poured the sticky gooey mess (The Blob!) on a floured board, patted it very gently round (I will not have any of that squeezing air out of the dough here!) and simply folded the left and right sides towards the middle. To give it a round form I turned it around and stretched the dough while turning it. And then up it went in a floured banneton and into the fridge for the night.
I woke up the next day and started baking, just could not wait. I flipped the dough onto some baking paper and slashed it. Then straight in the pre-heated oven (around 230C). In the first 5 minutes the dough expanded very little than I left the kitchen for five minutes and BAM! (am I turning into Emeril?) the bread had expanded so much one corner had exploded letting dough out. I believe I probably did not slash the dough deep enough, not giving the dough enough room to expand. Or maybe my starter is too active? If you have any other idea pleas tell me, your help is welcomed and wanted! The bread was done after 40 minutes. Apart form the explosion I was not really happy with the crust, a bit too thin this time. Still the crumb had a great irregular open structure and, most important of all, tasted really good. A bit mellower than the first bread but with still a nice sour note.
Now I have found a method. Next goal: perfect it.

Posted by albiston at 10:41 PM in Bread, Wild yeast! | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 02, 2003

Sourdough 1.0

My first attempt at sourdough bread from scratch was not a complete success. Ok it was not a failure either but a few things could have definitely been better. The main reason for the "problems" was mainly my lack of attention in a crucial point of the recipe. From this follows: if you've been out eating and drinking (quite a bit) with friends and want to shape your bread (or similar) always check everything one extra time... and then once again.

Back to the bread making. Friday (holiday in eastern Germany) I refreshed my starter in the morning for the third time, using, this time, a mixture of whole wheat and white flour. I let it rise for about 8 hours till it doubled in size and then mixed the final dough together. I dissolved the starter (more or less the size of an orange), keeping a small piece for next breads, in 1 cup of water. I poured 3 cups of flour on the working surface, made a well in the middle, and added the dissolved starter slowly incorporating it to the flour. When almost all the flour was mixed in the dough i added salt (2 teaspoons) and kneaded for about 10 minutes. The dough turned smooth and springy, maybe it should have been a bit drier. I put it in an oiled bowl and left for dinner (more about this in a future post). And here I made the first mistake: I completely forgot that wild yeast needs a higher temperature to ferment than commercial one. Therefore my turning off the heating in the kitchen and tilting the window open was not the most friendly of gestures to my dough. We got back from dinner, as mentioned, under slight alcoholic influence. I waited till midnight shaped my dough and put it in a bannetton to rise overnight. Here I made the 2 or maybe even 3 mistakes that I should avoid next time. First I just did not check if the dough had risen and how much. If I had I would have found out that the temperature was too low. Second, I put the dough in a banneton too big for it, meaning that instead of rising as a nice round loaf it remained quite flat and wide. and last I maybe shaped the dough not tight enough, not stretching the gluten enough, but I'm not sure.
As I woke up the next morning I went to check my dough, ready to bake it and... f---, just imagine my disappointment as I noticed the dough had barely risen. I checked the temperature and the mystery was solved. So I let the bread rise for another 8 hours in a warm place and then baked it in a 230C warm oven.
How did the bread turn out? First the good stuff. The crust was great, crunchy, tasty, mmhhh. The bread tasted good, slightly sour, and full of nutty flavours too. The crumb also had the irregular structure one expects from sourdough breads. The no-no points were those mentioned: loaf too flat, slightly under-proofed (chewy crumb). After all an encouraging start. I'll try again...

Posted by albiston at 01:54 PM in Bread, Wild yeast! | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack