Goth Panda

The end is in sight. I have two more weeks off and only five breads more to bake. And best of all, the last five breads are ones I am excited about baking: Vienna Bread, White Bread, Whole-Wheat Bread, and the two “extra” breads, Potato, Cheddar, and Chive Torpedoes, and Roasted Onion and Asiago Miche. All of these sound delicious, and it seems like forever since I have been excited about the BBA recipes I was baking. I think that’s part of the reason I have been taking so long to bake.

So back to the Swedish Rye and Tuscan breads, the last of the breads I was not too excited about making.

One of the things I have discovered in this challenge is that I am not a big fan of breads with molasses, and one of the things I already knew before going in was that I am not a big fan of licorice flavors. The Swedish Rye has both molasses and licorice flavors (anise and fennel), so I knew going in that I would probably not be a fan of this bread. As it turns out, the Swedish Rye is the only BBA bread I baked that I did not even taste. I gave it my mom (who is a fan of licorice flavors) and she brought it with her to my brother’s house for Christmas, where there were not many people besides herself who liked it, apparently. I remade the BBA Bagels for our snow day today, and my brother complained on Twitter that I should have sent some of those to his house instead of the Swedish Rye.

The Swedish Rye starts with boiling water, molasses, dried orange peel, ground anise, ground fennel, and ground cardamom. The good part about this recipe is I finally got to use my spice grinder to grind up the whole anise and fennel seeds. That was fun.

After letting the mixture cool, you add some “barm” and rye flour, let it become foamy, and then refrigerate it overnight.

Mine was still kind of bubbly the next morning:

Then you mix up the dough with the starter, flour, yeast, salt, brown sugar, and melted shortening, and you have to be careful not to knead it too long because of the rye flour.

I think I have mentioned before that I have been having problems getting my bread to rise because of my cold house. This time I had somewhere to go in the afternoon, so I was hoping to finish shaping and baking the bread before I left. But the bread just was not rising. I tried moving the bread into different locations in my kitchen, and in my living room, but no luck. I started to wonder if my yeast had expired or if I had accidentally killed the yeast by adding the melted shortening before it had cooled enough. Finally, I used my tried-and-true method of turning on the oven and putting the dough on top of it, right before I left. When I got back, the dough had finally doubled. I think it took six hours to get it to this point:

I shaped it as one loaf. Another thing I have learned through this challenge is that I prefer one large two-pound loaf to two one-pound loaves. Also, look at my aggressive slashing! I am quite proud.

I put the pan on the oven while it was preheating for the second rise.

My mom was here to pick up the bread for the final photo, and she insisted that I put it on my pretty Christmas towel to make the photo nice. Unlike how I usually take photos, with the scenic backdrop of my dishwasher.

As I said, my mom liked this bread but there were not many other fans. The licorice flavor was noticeable. My mom said she used it for toast, and then made ham sandwiches with it.

I was also not looking forward to Tuscan bread, since the defining attribute was that the bread contains no salt. I don’t particularly like salty foods, but I knew enough to know that bread without salt was not going to taste all that good. Peter Reinhart says that the Tuscans pair this bread with flavorful garlic and white bean soup, so I thought I would make that to go with it.

First, you make a flour paste with bread flour and boiling water. It looks kind of like mashed potatoes.

The next day you make the dough with bread flour, yeast, olive oil, water, and the flour paste. But no salt!

I set it to rise on my oven, which is the only place dough will rise for me. I didn’t heat up the oven this time, but it still seemed to work. Maybe the pilot light is enough to make it warm.

It only took two hours to get to this point:

I shaped it into boules.

When they rose a second time, I slashed them and sprinkled them with flour:

I had to bake them for the full 30 minutes to get to 200 degrees inside.

These loaves looked so pretty, but as I anticipated, the taste was seriously lacking. I made Giada De Laurentiis’ Tuscan White Bean and Garlic Soup and used this bread instead of ciabatta to make the grilled olive oil toasts. I still really didn’t like them that much, until I sprinkled them with one of my impulse purchases from Penzey’s: Brady Street Sprinkle. With the olive oil and the Brady Street Sprinkle, there was enough flavor to overcome the lack of salt.

So one thing that I didn’t think about when I decided to change the order of the Panettone is that the next bread after it in the list is Stollen — not just another fruit and nut bread, but also one that is almost the exact same recipe. After making the Panettone, I was not exactly excited to begin on the Stollen, and to make matters worse, the next two breads (Swedish Rye and Tuscan) I am also not too excited about. All of this is basically my excuse for not baking this bread earlier.

Stollen is a Christmas bread and I have three weeks off from work for the winter holidays. As I Tweeted earlier today, after the Stollen I only have seven more breads left in the BBA Challenge. One of my plans for the break is to finish the Challenge, so I planned to make the Stollen today.

First you make a starter by warming up milk and then whisking in flour and yeast. The first time I tried this, the results were not so good.

I misread the Celsius temperature on my thermometer for Fahrenheit, so I let the milk get much too hot. Then when I tried to whisk in the flour, it clumped up, and the yeast just stuck to the outside. I thought this was not what it was supposed to look like, so I tried again.

This looks a little better. I was supposed to used whole milk, but I didn’t have any so I mixed 1% and half and half to get an approximate.

I also mixed the King Arthur flour fruit mix with Bacardi and orange/lemon oil. The BBA recipes have been, in my opinion, almost too full of add-ins so I only put one cup of fruit blend in and not the extra cup of golden raisins, and later I added only one ounce of almonds instead of two. That was because I only had one ounce of almonds left. I ran out of orange oil in the middle of the tablespoon, so I topped it off with lemon oil. I think those were all of the changes I made.

Last week I made a trip out to the Penzey’s store in Chestnut Hill. I had ordered from Penzey’s over the internet before, but hadn’t been to the store, even though I am lucky enough to live pretty close to one. One of the things I picked up was Indonesian Cinnamon, which is supposed to be a milder variety than the usual. I thought I should try it, since I am not a huge fan of strong cinnamon flavors.

After an hour, the starter was very puffy:

I mixed the dough, but once I added the the fruit and liquor, the dough needed a lot more flour:

I think I had to add almost an extra cup of flour to get the dough to be “tacky but not sticky.” Then I put it aside to rise.

I have been having a problem because I am keeping my house fairly cool in the winter, and my bread dough has not been rising well at all. After 45 minutes, I was not surprised to see not much difference in my dough.

I divided the dough in half, shaped them into batards, and curved them on the sheet pan.

I let them rise again for an hour and a half. For the last half hour, I put the sheet pan on top of the preheating oven to encourage more rising.

I baked them for twenty minutes, turned the pan, and baked them for another twenty minutes. They measured over 190 degrees when I checked them the first time.

I brushed them with oil while warm, and used a sieve to sprinkle confectioners sugar all over the loaves. I think the confectioners sugar topping went a long way towards giving the Stollen the edge over the Panettone in my book.

I let them cool before cutting into them.

As I have said before, I am not a fan of fruit and nut breads in general, but I did like this bread much better than the Panettone. I don’t think decreasing the amount of fruit and nuts added in had a negative impact on the bread, and the confectioners sugar really helped the deliciousness factor. Despite the fact that I put off making this bread, I ended up liking it more than I thought I would. It was also a plus that the recipe could be done all in one day, which is rare for the BBA breads. I give it three and a half stars.

I have finished the Sourdough section of Bread Baker’s Apprentice and I am heartily glad to be done. The last two in the section are Pumpernickel and Sunflower Seed Rye. I also went back and did Panettone, which I had skipped way back in December because I hadn’t turned my firm starter into a liquid “barm” yet.

The pumpernickel bread suffered from a problem I have run into before with this book: it was strangely sized. I followed the instructions and ended up with two one-pound loaves, but these seemed miserably undersized. I would have preferred to have one two-pound bread than two tiny ones.

I don’t think I can blame all of my problems with this bread on the recipe, though. This is the first bread that I really tried to accommodate to my schedule, by keeping the starter and the dough refrigerated longer than it says in the recipe. And I don’t think it turned out so well.

I didn’t really care for the taste of this bread, either, and I love Pumpernickel. So this was another disappointment from the Sourdough section.

Next up was Sunflower Seed Rye bread, which sounded promising. My problems with this bread was in shaping it. I don’t think I put enough of a hole in my couronne so the finished product ended up looking like a giant bagel.

The book recommends that you make the indentations with a dowel rod or thin rolling pin, neither of which I had. I just pressed into the dough with the blunt side of a butter knife, but that didn’t work out so well. I probably should have just slashed it with a lame.

When I took the lid off of the pumpernickel flour soaker the next day (after leaving it out at room temperature as instructed), I thought, “Oh no. I am going to hate this bread,” because the soaker smelled unpleasantly sour and bitter. In the end, I thought the taste of the bread wasn’t that bad, however. It definitely wasn’t one of my very favorites, but compared to some of the other sourdoughs, it was pretty tasty.

I have commented many a time on my indifference towards fruit and nut breads, so going back to make Panettone was not something I was looking forward to, especially since this week I have its close cousin Stollen to make. I didn’t have golden raisins, so I used plain. For the candied fruit blend, I used King Arthur Flour’s Dried Fruit Blend (and I apologize for the bad lighting in this photo):

For the flavorings, I used rum, lemon oil, and Fiori di Sicilia, and contrary to my sometime practice, I did add the almonds. This bread looked and smelled terrific.

I had a little problem when it came to shaping it. I wasn’t going to buy special panettone papers, since I don’t really like fruit and nut breads. But I didn’t have the sizes of pan that Peter Reinhart recommends otherwise. So I just used assorted shapes of smaller cake pans, and followed his muffin tin suggestion of filling them halfway. I didn’t even really shape them all that much, and they turned out fine, for the most part.

These are two 5-inch cake pans, two 4-inch cake pans, two 3-inch cake pans, and four “babycake” silicone molds.

I am hoping to give most of these away, so I wrapped them in foil and froze them before taking any photos. Luckily I left out some of the babycakes to photograph and eat.

To tell you the truth, these weren’t as sweet or as buttery as I was hoping they would be. I have never had panettone before, so maybe that is how they are supposed to be.

Oh, people. It has been a long, long time since I baked a bread for the BBA Challenge. I think the sourdough section is defeating me. You see, most of these breads take two days to make, and because you need to feed the sourdough the night before, it is effectively three days. And if I forget to feed my sourdough, then my whole schedule is thrown off. And as you can tell, I have frequently forgotten to feed my sourdough. Also, the last bread I baked (the Sourdough Rye) wasn’t that great, and I was not impressed with this one, either.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Poilane-Style Miche is the huge bread on the cover of my now very battered copy of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. The day after I fed my sourdough, I made the starter.

First you sift some whole wheat flour. This recipe uses only sifted whole wheat flour.

The recipe has you mix and knead everything by hand because of the amount of dough, but I did the starter in the stand mixer.

Then I put in my proofing bowl and waiting for the magic to happen.

My starter rose fine:

And then I popped it into the refrigerator.

The next day, I sifted more flour. A lot more flour.

Then I added salt, water, and my starter. There are not a lot of ingredients to this recipe.

Appetizing, yes? It’s all right, you can say no.

As you might be able to tell from the photos, this was a lot of dough. I started mixing it with my dough whisk, but then gave up and just mixed it with my hands. Then I turned it out on to the counter and kneaded for fifteen long, long minutes. My hands were covered with dough, so there aren’t any photos of that part. Finally, I took its temperature and got a windowpane, and I was done.

I got a nice rise here, too. I think it took four hours both times, for the starter and the dough to rise.

Shaped

Now I faced a problem. I have a round banetton, but I was pretty sure that there was too much dough for it. I don’t think it would have fit before it rose a second time. So I improvised.

Plastic Chip Bowl from Target, $6.99

Add a couche and poof! It’s a proofing bowl

My seams never stay together

After it rose again, I had a bowl full of dough.

I flipped it out onto my pizza peel covered by a sheet of parchment.

I slashed it, but my slashing skills have clearly deteriorated.

I thought it was interesting that although we were supposed to “prepare our oven for hearth baking,” we didn’t do the thirty second spritzes of water like usual.

I baked it twenty minutes, then turned it 180 degrees and took out the parchment. Then it baked for 30 more minutes, and the internal temperature was over 200 degrees.

The slashed didn’t look so bad once it was baked. I thought these loaves looked very pretty, but I wasn’t so enamored of the taste. Like the Sourdough Rye, this a dense, heavy bread with an aggressive sour taste. I love sourdough, but I am starting to think I prefer white flour sourdoughs to the other flour varieties. Mike and I both agreed that this is the kind of bread that you could pair with some kind of deli meat to make an excellent sandwich. But this doesn’t help us vegetarians. Maybe egg salad?

Two more whole grain sourdoughs to go. If any meat-eaters out there would like to give them a shot, I am sure I will have plenty to give away.