Goth Panda

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.

Sourdough rye! I confess, I didn’t know what to expect from this bread.

I made my firm rye starter out of my normal starter, with some added white rye flour and water. I had to special order the white rye flour and the pumpernickel flour from King Arthur Flour. I don’t know how people survived before the internet came along.

I also made the soaker, which is just pumpernickel flour and water.

I fermented the starter for the full four hours, until it looked noticeably puffier:

The soaker, however, didn’t change at all, of course:

Then I combined everything together to make the dough, and set it out to rise.

I came back after four hours, but this is what I saw:

Not much difference, is there? I let it keep rising for about two hours more, and I also moved it to a more sheltered spot in the kitchen.

Much better.

I shaped it into two batards, which was kind of difficult. The dough didn’t feel much like wheat dough. There wasn’t the elasticity and flexibility there normally is. This dough felt more like clay than dough. I’m not sure if this is to blame, or if it is my inferior shaping skills, but my batards turned out very long and skinny, more like baguettes.

So they turned out kind of small for sandwiches. The crumb looks nice, and the taste was…interesting.

They were very dense, and I didn’t exactly like them, but didn’t exactly not like them either. They weren’t my favorite, let me put it that way.

I ended up finding a good use for them. I cut them into cubes and baked them into croutons, which seems to make them more palatable. I don’t think I can recommend ordering special ingredients and going through the trouble of baking the bread for the sake of croutons, however. I don’t think I would make these again, although the recipe seemed to work well. I will give these 2.5 stars.

People, can we discuss the intro to this bread? As a vegetarian, I was kind of grossed out by PR’s loving descriptions of his childhood deli sandwiches. I don’t think I needed to know that chicken fat can be used as a sandwich spread. Rob (who also grew up in Philly) remembers the Chuckwagon PR references on City Line Avenue, but I have never been to any of the three places he mentions.

I love rye bread, so I was looking forward to this one. I made the starter, and I definitely did not forget to add the onions.

The next day, I combined the dry ingredients. I did not forget the caraway seeds, either.

Then for the mixing and kneading:

You are not supposed to knead rye bread for too long since it has a different kind of gluten than white bread does. However, this dough was wet, and I kept having to add more flour. I think the dough turned out stickier than I would have liked, but I was afraid to continue kneading it in order to add more flour. I popped it in my bucket to rise.

Which it did with no problems. I decided I wanted these to be sandwich loaves, partially because I was looking forward to having onion rye sandwiches, and partially because it would give my soft dough more structure.

I realize I don’t have a crumb shot! You can believe me when I say the inside was as yummy as the outside.

When I was growing up, a common party appetizer was a hollowed-out boule of rye or pumpernickel filled with an onion dip, and the scooped out middle was cut into squares of bread to dip. Eventually the entire bread bowl was torn apart and dipped, too. This is exactly what this bread tasted like. There was the sweetness of the onions, the tang of the rye and the caraway, and the sour of the sourdough all mixed together. We ate these slices by themselves, and the only problem I had with this bread is that I couldn’t come up with a sandwich that would complement the strong flavors. I think maybe PR is right that it would take roast beef or corned beef — or even chicken fat — to stand up to it. And as a vegetarian, I don’t have those options. I still have one and a half loaves of this in my freezer waiting for me to come up with a good use for it. I give this bread 4 stars.