I approached this week’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge with a bit of trepidation.  I have been making challah once a week for about 12 years now.  For the past five years I have been making the same recipe and my family loves it.  As the old saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  However, sometimes you have to break with tradition and try something new.  Besides, it really annoys my husband and kids when I change things up on them and it’s kind of fun to irritate them.

The recipe I have been making is actually a hybrid of two different recipes.  The first recipe comes from my sister’s cousin’s friend Elaine.  It is a very rich sweet challah topped with a crumble coating made from butter, floor and sugar.  It’s more like eating cake than bread.  I made it every week for about 2 years until I had Shabbat dinner at my friend Margo’s house and tried her challah.  Margo incorporates about 1/3 whole wheat flour into her challah and uses less eggs and oil than Elaine.  I decided to try Margo’s challah with Elaine’s topping and thus a succesful culinary marriage was made.   Elaine lives in Toronto and Margo lives here in Ottawa.  They have never met in person, although in my virtual world they are great friends!!

I decided to break from tradition and make Reter Reinhart’s challah this week and surprise my family.  Once I made my challah with dried sour cherries instead of raisins and I almost had a revolt on my hands.  This was going to be fun!!  (I know, I need a life).

I followed Peter’s recipe exactly but I decided to do a slow overnight bulk fermentation in the fridge instead of at room temnperature for one hour.  I always start my dough on Thursday and let it do the first rise overnight in the fridge and then form the braid,  let it proof and bake it late Friday morning.   Peter’s recipe contains less sugar and oil than mine but more eggs.  The dough mixed up beautifully in my Kitchenaid in about 10 minutes.

Dough mixed and ready for fermentation

I decided to attempt the double celebration design (a little braid on top of a big braid).   When I was a little girl, I had short curly hair and my mom would not let me grow it long.  I never really mastered braiding until I grew up and started making challah.  I never even braided my Barbie’s hair.  I used to cut my Barbie’s hair all off , just leaving a fringe around the outside with a bald spot in the middle.  I told my mom I gave Barbie a hairstyle just like daddy’s!  She never got mad at me, perhaps because when she was a child, she cut the drapes in her living room to make clothers for her doll, so she understood my creative spirit.  Thanks Mom!

The double braid requires a bit of math to properly construct.  If you have a scale and calculator and half a brain, you can do this!  Weigh the dough after the bulk fermentaion.  Use one third for the top braid and the remaining two thirds for the bottom braid.  Divide each into 3 equal weight pieces.  For my bread the entire dough weighed about 900 grams.  I rolled out  three 100 gram ropes and three 200 gram ropes.  I made the ropes for the top braid a little shorter than those for the bottom braid.  I made my ropes a little fatter in the middle with tapered ends.    For a three rope braid, Peter explains it is best to begin braiding in the middle and work your way down, braiding  towards you.  Then turn the loaf 180 degrees so that the unbraided end faces you and braid the second half.  Once both braids are done, lay the smaller one on top of the bigger one.  This is much easier to do than to write about.

After about 90 minutes the bread looked about doubled in size, so I checked to see if it was indeed finished proofing using a new tip I picked up from fellow BBA baker Phyl .  Phyl calls this the poke test.  Stick your fingertip into the bread and watch what happens next

• “If the place you poked doesn’t fill back in, the dough is underproofed. 
• If it fills back in immediately, you have allowed the dough to overproof. 
• If, however, the poke hole fills in slowly, your dough is properly proofed and ready to bake.”

The poke hole filled in slowly, so I egg washed the challah and sprinkled it liberally with sesame seeds.  Into the oven it went.  I checked the challah after 20 minutes.  I could see that the bread was starting to rise and open up.  I brushed any new exposed spots with more egg and sprinkled the naked sections with more sesame seeds.  I turned the loaf 180 degrees and baked for another 15 minutes until it registered 190 degrees F in the center of the bread.

Double celebration Challah, just out of the oven.

Double Celebration Challah, sliced into.

Although there was no uprising or outright revolt, the verdict was clear.  Our family prefer’s the Margo-Elaine hybrid.  We found the Peter Reinhart version a little too eggy and airy.  My husband said it tasted exactly like  Rideau Bakery challah.  The Rideau Bakery is here in Ottawa and their challah is considered the gold standard for many here in Ottawa.  So while it was a good challah, I won’t be making it again if I know what’s good for me.  The Margo-Elaine version of challah can be found here for anyone interested.

Wow, we’re closing in on a month of bread baking already.  In  week # 4 of the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge  we made Brioche.  I have to say there was a lot of talk and questions leading up to this challenge amongst my fellow challengers.   Peter Reinhart presents three options for this bread.  Rich Man’s brioche, uses one pound of butter in the dough (quadruple bypass), the Middle-Class version uses half a pound of butter (double bypass)and the Poor Man’s variation uses only a quarter of a pound of butter (single bypass).

It was like being back in high school when all the girl’s would call each other before the dance to see who was wearing what.  Only here we were all posting on our Google discussion page asking each other which version we were planning on making.  Some like Phyl, of Cabbages and King Cakes, made all three.  Most of the people who made the rich man’s version said the dough was really hard to work with, not to mention the calorie count. And yes, there was even a discussion thread going about how many calories hand kneading burns – although that was related to the bagel dough from last week.   The poor man’s version didn’t seem quite decadent enough for all the effort that goes into this bread.  So, I opted for the middle-class version.

I wanted to fall in love with this bread.  So much so that I was prepared to add an extra 30 minutes of cardio to my already full one hour workout.  I already had the brioche molds, or what I thought were brioche molds. They had been sitting on my basement storage room shelf forever.  Can’t remeber why or what I bought them for.  I soon realized that they are not proper brioche molds after I saw my fellow challenger’s photos of their proper molds.  If anyone knows what these actually are, let me know.

Day one begins with making a sponge from warm milk, instant yeast and bread flour.  It sits on the counter to get all active and bubbly for 2 hours.  Then the fun begins.  Time to mix the dough.  I was going Kitchen Aid all the way with this dough, no hand kneading.   I had been warned by my new “Bread Freak” friends (that’s what my son calls the BBA Challenge group) that it is a sticky soft mess.  Boy they weren’t kidding.

I should also mention that there was a Bake-a thon going on in my kitchen that day.  My 17 year old daughter had just decided to bake six different kinds of cookies as a year end gift for a favourite teacher.  She invited three friends over to help her bake.  One of the friends actually knew how to bake.  The other two were there for moral support or comic relief, I’m not sure which.  I have to say I was so proud of her.  She really did most of it by herself with very little help from me.  And the results were spectacular.  Here is a photo of the dulce de leche biscotti cooling on the counter  after their first baking.

After mixing the dough I put it on a baking sheet, stuck it in the fridge for an overnight rest and hightailed it out of the kitchen.

The next day I divided the dough into three equal parts and shaped my brioche.  I used the boule method and using the back of my hand, I divided the ball into a large and small ball, rolling down but not going all the way through.  Then very gently, I used my fingertips to round out the little ball on top. They looked like three identical little triplets going into their molds.

I carefully sprayed the tops of my brioche with spray oil and loosely covered them with plastic wrap.  I left them to do their work on the kitchen sounter while I did my time on the treadmill and eliptical trainer.  I had a shower after my workout and at the 2 hour mark they had risen but the dough had not quite reached the top of the molds yet.  I brushed them with beaten egg and covered them up again.  I checked back in an hour and discovered that the genetic mutation had begun it’s damage.

Although I had weighed the dough, divided it exactly into three and formed each one the same way, they were no longer identical in appearance.  The one in the middle had completely lost it’s little tete.  I was tempted to reform the little balls on top but decided I might do more damage than good, so into the oven they went.  After 15 minutes I had great lift-off.

In 25 minutes they were ready to come out with an internal temperature of 195 degrees F.  They were golden brown and quite lovely, even if they didn’t bear any resemblance to either each other or the photos in the book.  I was immediately taken back to my days in Culinary School.  In my baking course, after we finished the assignment of the day, we had to take our finished product up to the professor for grading.  I always lost marks for non-uniformity.  The teacher said that all items should be exactly the same size and shape.  My response was, “If they all looked exactly the same then they look like they came from a factory.  This way, they look like they were made with love.”  He was not amused.

It got so bad that I had taken to cheating.  I attended culinary school with my sister-in-law.  She would hand in her work, get graded, and then we would wait for a few more students to have their turn.  Then I’d take my sister-in-law’s items up for grading, presenting them as mine.  Almost every time, I’d get 85 % and she’d get 80 %.  We figured out pretty quickly that the teacher had a crush on me!

Here are my genetically mutated brioche.  They were made with love.

 I was fully prepared to love this bread.  But I was disappointed.  I thought that with half a pound of butter and 5 eggs it would be dense and flaky but to be honest I found it kind of light and airy.  It felt like I was eating a sponge.  Maybe I overproofed it or baked it for too long but it just didn’t taste like I was expecting.  Part of me was relieved that I was not tempted to have more than one piece.  My husband agreed with my assesment but my kids loved it.  The three brioche were gone in 2 days.

 That night for dinner I served it with corn chowder. (Click for recipe)

Tune in next week when we’re baking Casatiello, an Italian version of brioche, filled with salami and cheese.  My daughter is a vegetarian so I’m still working on what to use instead of salami.  Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Just a quick post to update the bagel story.  When I originally made the bagels last week my husband was out of town so he never got any fresh ones.  I  love him so much I wanted him to experience them right out of the oven.  Actually, that’s not quite true.  I do love him but I really wanted to try cheddar jalapeno ones.  It was all I could think about after reading Joelen’s post last week. When I was finished hand kneading, I flattened the dough into a large square and pressed in half a finely diced jalapeno and 4 ounces of shredded cheddar.  I folded the dough over and kneaded a bit more.  Then I flattened it out again and added another half of finely minced jalapeno and 4 more ounces of cheddar.  Folded and kneaded for another minute and then went ahead with dividing and forming bagels.

After a night in the fridge, they were ready for boiling and baking.  I was a bit worried that the cheddar would leak out of the bagels during boiling but all that happened during boiling  was that the water really bubbled up and a white foam formed.  The cheese stayed inside.  Not sure what the white froth was. I topped the bagels with a bit more cheddar before baking.

We were thrilled with the finished bagels.  In the oven, some of the cheddar oozed out and created a cheese crust on the bottom that was unbelievable.  The crusty cheese top and bottom and the little hit of heat from the jalapeno worked together to form one unfogettable bagel experience.

Top of Cheddar Jalapeno Bagel

Bottom crust of Cheddar Jalapeno Bagel

May 21, 2009

 It’s Week #2 in the Bread Bakers Apprentice Challenge.  This week’s bread  is Artos, the Greek Celebration Bread.  I was curious to learn a little more about this bread and so I did some research.  Artos is Greek for leavened bread but in Modern Greek, it has come to mean the bread used in church.  On Easter Sunday the priest blesses the bread and sprinkles it with holy water.  It is placed on a table where it sits for a week.  This week is known as Bright Week, often referred to as Easter Week.   Finally 6 days later, on Bright Saturday, the bread is blessed again and only then is the Artos broken and distributed among the whole congregation for eating.

If you were in my house the day I baked my Artos, there is no way you would have been able to wait a week to eat that bread.  The smell is intoxicating.

Peter Reinhart offers three variations on the Artos bread.  The master formula is an enriched bread with spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves), eggs, honey and olive oil which can be made as is.  He suggests you shape this one in a boule (French for ball). That seemed too plain for me.  The second is Christopsomos (click here to listen to my Greek friend Peter pronounce this bread’s name authentically!) and includes the addition of dried fruit and nuts.  Christopsomos is also boule shaped but it gets the addition of a cross on top, which to me looked a little like an octopus and kind of creeped me out.   The third is Lambropsomo, a braided version which, in addition to the dried fruits and nuts, includes three hard boiled eggs, dyed red. I could only imagine my children’s horror at slicing into the bread and finding red eggs.

I decided on the second variation, Christopsomos.  I could not bring myself to make the little octopus on top, so I formed my bread with the same method I use at Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) when I make a round challah.  You can see the method and results in the pictures below.  The recipe suggests glazing the bread with a water, sugar and honey mixture but I thought that would be way too sticky.  I made a cinnamon bun type of glaze instead.  It looked like a giant cinnamon bun but had a totally different flavour.

The bread begins with making a “pre-ferment”, which is basically a mixture of flour, water and yeast.  The purpose of a pre-ferment is to improve the flavour and structure of the dough.  It is basically a starter.  I chose to make a “poolish” starter which needs to sit on the counter for 3-4 hours until it comes alive and is all bubbly.  Then it can be used right away or refrigerated for up to 4 days.  I made mine, let is sit on the counter for 4 hours, put it in the basement fridge and promptly forgot all about it until 4 days later when I went down to the basement fridge to get some milk and saw that thing growing.  I realized I had better get my Artos in gear!

One of my only complaints about the book is that he uses all imperial measurements instead of metric .  It is especially difficult when he asks you to weigh out .o55 ounces of yeast.  Most scales will weigh in quarter or half increments but this is even less than that.  Most scales allow you to switch to grams, so  here is a tip for those who are not educated in the ways of metric.  Multiply the ounce number by 28.  In this example it would be .055 ounces x 28, which equals 1.5 grams.  A calculator comes in handy with your scale!  I just bought a new Salter scale and I love it.

Here is my mise en place all ready to go.  I guess I learned something in Culinary school after all.

I decided to use raisins, toasted pecans and dried sour cherries.  They looked so good, my daughter got into them before I got them into the dough.

   Oops, just realized that I forgot to take the Poolish (starter) out of the fridge an hour before making the dough.

 Have to wait an hour before making dough so I decided to kill the time by cleaning out my kitchen drawers.  Long overdue.  It’s amazing the junk that collects.

 Finally time to add the poolish.   It’s very sticky.

I mixed the dough in the kitchenaid on # 2 speed for about 6 minutes.

Then I decided to hand knead in the fruit and nut ingredients. Here is my method which works really well for getting an even distribution of ingredients.   Gently flatten dough out and add about 1/3 of the ingredients, and press them into the dough.

 Fold the dough over, covering your additions and add another third of the ingredients on top.  Press them in, fold again and repeat with last amount of fruit and nuts.  Then give the whole thing a minute of kneading, before setting aside to ferment.

Dough goes into a  greased container for the ferment (first rise).  Thanks to  a tip from fellow BBA Challenger, Paul, I now use disposable shower caps to cover the dough instead of plastic wrap.  I can wash and reuse them many times.

The dough doubled in about 90 minutes.  I gently punched down, weighed the dough and divided it into 9 equal pieces.  I formed 7 smaller boules and combined the last 2 pieces to form one medium sized boule, for a total of 8 boules.

  I lined the bottom and sides of a 9 inch cake pan with parchment and arranged the 7 smaller boules around the edge and the larger one in the center.  Another 90 minutes for proofing and this baby was ready for the oven.

After 20 minutes I couldn’t resist a peek.  Great oven spring

Bread just out of the oven.

I decided to mix up a glaze:

2 cups icing sugar

1/4 cup warm milk

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon lemon huice

pinch of salt

Poured glaze all over bread.

Let cool and sliced into it.  The verdict:  my daughter loved it, my son hated it and my husband and I would have liked it better without the cloves and allspice.

For dinner that night we had a tomato, chick pea, buffalo mozzarella, cucumber, and basil salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  I usually add olive bread croutons to this but not tonight.  We’ve eaten enough bread for one day.

Next week:  Bagels!

Thanks for visiting my site.  I’d love to hear from you.

May 19, 2009

Several weeks ago, I accidentally stumbled across a wonderful food blog called Pinch My Salt , by Nicole Hamaker.  Nicole was about to embark on an exciting journey, baking her way through Peter Reinhart’s book, “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice”, one recipe at a time.  She was looking for company.  I have to admit, I’m not really a goal oriented person, but I felt compelled to join up.  I was # 109.  Now we are 200 strong baking our way from “Anadama Bread” all the way through to “Whole Wheat Bread”.  Yes we are going alphabetically.  We’ll tackle one bread a week and communicate through e-mail, blogging,  Twitter, a Facebook group, Flickr and  a Google group. 

Two weeks ago, I didn’t’ even know what blogging or Twitter was, and now I have set up my own food blog and joined Twitter. I still have not yet figured out how to actually Twitter (or is it Tweet?), and I am now very nervous as I already have 9 followers and have not led them anywhere yet.  When I told my 3 teenage children (19, 17 and 16) what I was doing, they mocked me and told me I really need to get a life.  I told them, if they continue to mock me, no bread for them.  They quickly stopped.  So if you’re interested in my journey, join me each week as I chronicle my bread baking adventure.  By the way, if you haven’t figured it out yet, the white powder on my camera was flour.  Food blogging is messy.

Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge # 1 Anadama Bread

The first bread I made originated in New England. There’s an old legend that tells of how the bread got it’s name.  A Massachusetts man was left by his wife.  Not only did she leave him, but she also took all their belongings and left him with only a pot of cornmeal mush and some molasses.  The husband  was so mad he mixed the  mush and molasses together with some yeast and flour and muttered, “Anna, damn’ er!”   Highly unlikely.  If I did that, my husband would call for take-out, but it makes a good story.  Making this bread is not that complicated but it does take 2 days.  Day 1 begins with mixing cornmeal and water together in a bowl and leaving it overnight on the counter to soak. I managed that without too much drama but there was quite a discussion on our Google site about what kind of cornmeal to use -coarse, medium or fine grain. I used coarse.  On to day 2.

 The recipe calls for molasses which I find kind of cloying.  So I made an executive decision to substitute honey for some of the molasses. Instructions are given for kneading by hand or in a stand mixer.  I love my Kitchen Aid so I kneaded by machine.  It was a beautiful elastic dough.  I let it rise in a big bowl for an hour, then formed my loaves and let it rise a second time in the pan.  Here are the loaves ready to go into the oven.

After 40 minutes my bread was done.  I love this book because the instructions are so detailed.  Most bread recipes tell you to bake until the bread is golden brown and makes a hollow sound when thumped on the bottom.  I have never understood what I am supposed to be hearing.  What exactly does hollow bread sound like?  Peter Reinhart tells us to bake it until an instant read thermometer, inserted into the center of the bread, registers 185 to 190 degrees F .  Mine registered 189.  Here is is right out of the oven.  For some reason, the bread on the left had a bit of a valley down the middle, while the one on the right rose perfectly.

Now the hard part.  Waiting one hour before slicing into the loaves.  It was worth the wait.   It’s a soft bread but a bit crunchy because of the cornmeal.  For dinner that night I fed my family bread and butter.  No complaints.  We all liked it even better toasted the next day for breakfast, with salted butter and American Spoon sour cherry preserves.  Here is the bread sliced before the hordes got home and attacked it.

Stay tuned for my next post, “Artos”, a Greek celebration bread.  Feel free to leave a comment in the space below.  I’d love to hear from you.