Goth Panda

Peter Reinhart offers three different variations on brioche to choose from: rich man’s, middle-class, and poor man’s. Rich man’s contains double the butter of middle-class, which contains double the butter in poor man’s. I was wavering between making rich man’s brioche and middle-class brioche. On the one hand, I thought, this was probably going to be the only time I would make brioche in my life. This was also the reason why I didn’t order brioche molds, even though I usually jump at the opportunity to buy new kitchen supplies. On the other hand, I would like to be able to eat a piece of the bread I bake without immediately exceeding the recommended calorie allowance for an adult human.

The second consideration won out, and I prepared to make middle-class brioche. I took two sticks of butter out of my freezer to come to room temperature and I waited.

When they were ready, I started to make the rest of the recipe. Except I turned to the directions for rich man’s brioche, because the middle-class brioche recipe says to follow the same instructions. And…I followed the amounts for the rich man’s brioche, too, which are slightly different in other respects besides the butter question. More yeast, more flour, more sugar, and more salt. By the time I realized my mistake, everything was blended together and just waiting to be combined with the sponge. So I quick-defrosted two more sticks of butter (yes, you have counted correctly; ONE POUND TOTAL) in the microwave, even though that’s not the recommended way to do it. And I proceeded with my new plan: rich man’s brioche.

Here’s the sponge:

The eggs and sponge getting mixed:

The next twenty minutes of my life I recall in hindsight as an epic battle between me and the brioche dough. I didn’t like this dough and it didn’t like me. The dough started by sticking in its entirety to the Kitchen Aid paddle.

Gradually, as I added butter (a quarter stick at a time), the dough started sticking to the bowl as well as the paddle.

Every time I stopped to add more butter, I had to push it out from my paddle and scrape it off the sides of the bowl. By the end of the mixing, there was no way I was going to take this dough out to knead it, so I kept it in the Kitchen Aid for six minutes of kneading.

The dough did not resemble any dough I had ever worked with. It looked more like a very thick frosting, with strands of gluten.

I piled it on my baking sheet to spread out and put in the fridge.

Reinhart says to spread it into a rectangle 6 inches by 8 inches. This is more like 8 inches by 12 inches, because I have no sense of distance.

I put it in the refrigerator. Periodically I looked in on it. It looked exactly the same. Was it supposed to be rising in there? I don’t know. I do know this. When I pulled it out this afternoon to bake, it didn’t look much different than when I had put it in the day before.

The dough was so cold that I had to use my bench knife like an ice chipper to break it apart. It broke off into shard-like pieces as I tried to weigh it. Here is about where I started thinking this challenge was going to be my first dismal BBA failure.

I had to work the dough a little to get it warm enough to shape without breaking. I had already decided to make three simple one pound loaves, since I wasn’t going to buy the molds. I wrestled the dough into vaguely sandwich-shaped loaves, and put them in their pans to rise.

It took them three hours to look like this:

I washed them with the egg wash, let them rise another thirty minutes, and then put them in my oven.

I started to think maybe the brioche wouldn’t be so bad after they had been in the oven for ten minutes and were starting to smell delicious. I turned them halfway through, and then took them out after forty minutes, when they passed the thermometer test. They aren’t super-spectacular to look at.

This third one had a tragic accident. While I was taking it out of the pan to cool, I accidentally dropped the pan on it and crushed it. That’s the one we cut into.

Mike and I each ate a slice. Then we each had another. “This is really good,” he said. “It tastes like a croissant.” I agreed. The bread is soft and buttery and flaky. It tasted lovely. My annoyance at the brioche dough disappeared.

I’m going to give it a 4.5 out of 5, since I liked the end product so much. But I’m not sure I will make it again. I might try a middle-class or poor man’s brioche, since Reinhart says these doughs are easier to handle. And I might be able to eat more than one slice of it a day.

I was really excited for this challenge. Well, let me rephrase that. I was really excited to eat this challenge. I know bagels. I love bagels. This is more than I could say for the other two breads. I was not so much looking forward to making bagels, however. That seemed hard.

I prepared myself by ordering supplies from King Arthur Flour, including high-gluten flour and diastatic malt powder. I set to work making these a little earlier than I was planning, because I might be away this weekend, and I wanted to have bagels before then.

I made the starter: yeast, high-gluten flour, and water. Reinhart says that this will look like pancake batter. Mine did, except thicker than my usual pancake batter. Maybe a little more like cottage cheese.

I let it sit for two hours, and came back to find it bubbly. I did not actually try to deflate it by tapping it on the counter, since I figured that would happen when I stirred it up.

I added yeast and mixed it up. At this point, it was smooth and kind of reminded me of feeding my liquid starter, when it used to be liquid.

Then I added more flour, salt, and diastatic malt powder.

I was nervous about putting this on my stand mixer, but I wasn’t too enthusiastic about mixing and kneading it by hand, either, since the dough was so stiff. This is before I added the extra flour.

The Kitchen Aid got through mixing it together well, and I had it knead for a few minutes. Then, in what I guess is becoming my new trend, I took it out and hand-kneading for the last part. I think the proportions turned out perfect; I didn’t even need to flour the counter or add any additional flour or water. The dough smelled deliciously like pretzels, which I hoped was a good sign.

The dough didn’t stick and was easy to knead. I kneaded for a few minutes myself, and then tried the thermometer.

Does my dough have a fever? This is a little high, but my kitchen was warming up because I had the oven on. I got a windowpane no problem. This dough didn’t give me a lot of trouble at all, despite being so stiff.

I used my bench knife and scale to divide up the dough into 4.5 oz. pieces. They were this size, if you’re interested:

Note to self: it would be much easier to work with dough if I didn’t have such long nails. Really, the most annoying part of the bread challenge is dried dough under the fingernails. Should I sacrifice my nails for bread? I will have to think it over.

I started making rolls and realized I had nowhere to put them. So I put them on dinner plates.

You were supposed to cover them with wet towels, but I didn’t have any clean kitchen towels. I wetted and wrung out a Bounty paper towel. Butterflies for spring.

I needed to put them out of the kitchen to rise, since my kitchen was getting even hotter from the oven. So I put them in the hallway. On top of the extra G4s.

What, doesn’t every household have 4 computers for every human?

After 20 minutes, I took my rolls in to shape them. I used the poke your finger through the middle method, because it seemed like the most fun.

There is no way I could fit two half sheet pans in my refrigerator. So I put all 12 on one. Hopefully this wouldn’t cause too much of a problem.

I put the pan back on top of the G4s for another 20 minutes. This is what they looked like:

I did not notice at the time that they had gotten so much puffier. I always forget what the dough looks like to start with when I am trying to figure out if it has “doubled in size.” The photos are actually helping. Now I can look back at the last picture and see the difference.

Time for the water test, which my bagel passed with flying colors.

I covered the pan with plastic.

And put it in the fridge. See what I mean about having no room?

Fast forward to today. I put my cast iron dutch oven on the stove to boil, got out my skimmer, and preheated my oven. I added the baking soda when the water was boiling. My bagels were looking a little sad after their night in my fridge.

You see where the plastic stuck to the tops. Right about here I started wondering how I was going to do this. Do I put the boiled bagels back on to my sheet pan? Do I get a different sheet pan? I tried to pull out my other sheet pan from the drawer under my (preheating) oven. That’s when I burned myself. My first official BBA Challenge injury!

What I ended up doing is putting the boiled bagels on a few paper towels to give me a chance to put the next ones in the water. This dried them out a little, so I sprayed them with water after putting them back on the sheet pan, so my toppings would stick. All of them got kosher salt; three of them were just the salt, three I added sesame seeds to, three I added minced onions to, and three I added minced garlic to.

I dropped them into boil three at a time. At first not much happened.

But after a few seconds, it would start boiling like mad. This is after flipping, and you can see the difference in color from just one minute. I boiled them one minute per side.

Here is the sheet pan in the middle of the process. The boiled ones are in the foreground, unboiled in the background.

Soon I had a sheet pan full of bagels ready to bake. The boiling had made them slightly bigger, but they all still fit.

I timed them, and turned them, and timed them again. Here they are, all done.

People, I had to set my timer for the 15 minutes recommended cooling time so I didn’t tear into one right then. After 15 minutes, I cut one open.

I ate it. The whole thing, even though I had just eaten dinner. I didn’t put anything on it. It was warm, chewy on the outside, soft on the inside. Delicious. This is a great recipe. And looking back, I don’t think it was too complicated. You do have to prepare in advance, but the hardest part was finding room in my refrigerator for the sheet pan.

These bagels get five awesome stars. I hope Peter Reinhardt has some more wonderful recipes to come, but these are going to be hard to beat.

Artos, bread of my enemy. Not really. I have just been having fun saying “Artos” all week as if it were the name of an evil movie villain. Try it, it’s fun! Arrrtosss….

So, challenge number two was something different for me. I am glad we started with Anadama, because I had some experience making sandwich loaves, even though I’d never made that one. But I’ve never made a sweet, enriched “celebration” bread before, and that’s what Artos is. You have the option of adding different kinds of dried fruit and nuts, depending on the holiday you are celebrating, but I made mine without any additions. I also didn’t add the optional glaze. All of these choices were made because I think we will be more likely to eat it that way. Neither Mike nor I are big on fruit and nut breads.

I also chose to bake it as one big boule, instead of trying the octopus strands that are the traditional way of shaping the Christmas version. This is because I have enough trouble shaping regular bread, without even trying to get all fancy.

This bread requires either a starter or a poolish, and I happen to have a sourdough starter (last seen here in my failed attempt at sourdough bread). I have a stiff starter, and the recipe calls for a liquid starter, so I did a little feeding and converting based on Rose Levy Beranbaum‘s instructions.

Here’s my starter after sitting at room temperature for an hour.

And here it is after feeding it some flour and water

My stuffed panda watched to make sure I was doing it correctly.

I gathered it into a ball and put it in a measuring cup to rise for two hours, or to one and a half times its size.

When I went back after two hours, it hadn’t really risen that much. So I left it out for another hour.

After three hours, I put it back in the refrigerator.

The next day (today), I took it out to come to room temperature, and I left it there for a few hours. It got even bigger. To make up for the conversion from stiff to liquid starter, I weighed out three quarters of the amount specified in the recipe and made up the other one quarter by adding water to my liquids.

In my Kitchen Aid bowl, I weighed out flour. I am using KAF bread flour, as usual:

Added some salt and yeast. I kept them separated, since they don’t like each other, but I think they got mixed together anyway.

Here are my spices.

I added the starter, in pieces.

And my extracts. I used orange oil from KAF and almond.

And here are all my liquids, weighed out and mise-en-placed in my mismatching bowls. Top row is beaten eggs, water (because of the stiff starter), and olive oil. Bottom row is milk (I microwaved mine for 30 seconds to get it lukewarm) and honey. All these went in the bowl too.

Then I mixed with my dough whisk.

I put the dough on my KitchenAid mixer to knead, and found I had the same problem I had last week: the dough was too wet. I wonder if the recipes assume you will be hand-kneading the dough, since you have to add more flour to knead by hand.

I had to add more flour to make the dough come together, but I don’t think it was as much as I added last week. The dough was more slack than the anadama dough, but I found it easier to work with. I kneaded it for ten minutes in the mixer (with frequent stops to add more flour and scrape the sides of the bowl). Then I turned it out on the counter to knead for a few minutes by hand, and add in some additional flour. I had no problems getting a windowpane; it didn’t take nearly as long as last week.

I wonder why this book doesn’t have any photos or illustrations on kneading techniques. Reinhart talks about different preferred methods, but it would be nice to see some pictures since I have no idea what they look like. It seems an odd omission for a book that is otherwise so comprehensive.

I have never bothered to take a dough’s temperature before (although I always do to check if they have baked enough). I did this time, and got a decent reading.

I put it out to rise, and it had risen well after an hour.

I shaped it into a boule, which I am generally pretty bad at. I managed to get a decent shape following his instructions.

Uh oh. Except that part. The dough stuck to my counter a little and pulled away.

I set it up to proof under a high-tech little contraption that in my house we like to call the popcorn bowl.

I put it in my hallway since I then started making dinner, and my stove heats up my little kitchen something fierce. After an hour, it was huge, but I had just started the oven to preheat, so it had to wait another 15 minutes.

Here we go, into the oven for twenty minutes, turned, and took out after another twenty. It was over 190 on the thermometer, so I let it cool and then sliced it open.

This bread is soft and fragrant. The first taste was sweet, but then the sweetness faded, and the spices and extracts kicked in. I thought that it would be too fancy for using as sandwich bread, but I think you could make it work. It would be an extra-special sandwich, though. I also considered French toast, which would complement the flavors. Usually I use a sturdier bread for that, though.

Tastewise, I like this bread better than the anadama. The softness is going to give me problems with cutting it, though. How about an overall score of four out of five for Artos – my enemy no longer.