Goth Panda

When Mike asked me what this week’s bread was, he misheard my response as “Four Cheese Bread.” I wish! I am looking for a good cheese bread recipe. But after he tasted this, he was glad I made it. He thinks this is one of the best breads of the challenge so far.

I am pretty sure I have never had Portuguese Sweet Bread before, but I was willing to give it a shot. This is one of the rare BBA breads that can be made all in one day. You start with a sponge, and you wait until it gets nice and bubbly.

Like so. Then you put arrange all of your other ingredients. Seeing as how this is a sweet, enriched dough, there are a lot of other ingredients: sugar, powdered milk, shortening, eggs, butter, and three different kinds of extracts. Then you add in your sponge and flour, and mix it all together.

PR says this dough will take longer than usual to knead because of all the extra ingredients. I kneaded it for the proper length of time in the mixer, but when I took its temperature at the end of the kneading, it was lower than it should have been. Instead of kneading more, though, I took it out and set it aside to rise, which may be why it took FOREVER.

It was supposed to double after two hours or so, but that did not happen. I let it go three hours, and still only had this much rise-osity:

Not good. But I couldn’t let it go any more, since I had to get it baked before we went out on Saturday night. So I divided it into two little boules and put them in my Pyrex pie pans. After Thanksgiving, I have approximately 3,962 of these.

They did a little better on the second rise, but still didn’t get anywhere near “filling the pans fully” or “overlapping the edges.”

I washed them with the egg wash, which pooled around the bottom of the boules and turned into a crispy lace after they were baked.

I baked them for 50 minutes, but had no problem getting the right internal temperature. The crust got very dark, but it was relatively thin.

You can see where the egg wash hit and where it missed.

Now, when the bread came out of the oven, both Mike and Rob were in the kitchen. It was almost time to go out for dinner, and we were all starving. After sitting in the house filled with the sweet aroma of baking bread – complete with vanilla, orange, and lemon notes – there was not a lot of sympathy for my suggestion that we let the bread cool for 90 minutes before slicing it. The argument, “But Peter Reinhart says so,” did not exactly cut it.

So, yeah. I think this poor loaf might have lasted twenty to thirty minutes cooling before it was unceremoniously sliced into.

I liked this bread, too, but it wasn’t one of my super favorites. It reminded me a lot of the Artos. It had a nice flavor, but I think sweet, enriched breads just aren’t my thing. As I said, though, Mike loved it. It didn’t seem to stay soft for very long, but that might just have been because we sliced the loaf without letting it cool all the way. The crumb was already feeling a little stale to me just a few hours later. I haven’t done it yet, but I can see that the suggestion to make it into French toast is a good one.

I think this one gets four stars, but I am combining my opinion and Mike’s to lift it up that high. Without his rave review, I would probably give it 3.5 stars.

I realized after these were finished that I had made a mistake. The recipe calls for 7 ounces of poolish; the recipe for poolish in the beginning makes 23 ounces. Rather than have extra poolish lying around, I only made a third of the poolish recipe: 106 grams of bread flour, 153 grams of water, and 1 gram of yeast. I was a little worried about such a small amount of yeast, but it seemed to turn out all right. However, a third of the recipe was still a little more than 7 ounces, but I forgot to measure out the poolish, and instead threw it all into the baguettes. That said, I still think the recipe turned out fine, somehow.

The main difference between these baguettes and the ones we’ve done in the past was using sifted whole wheat flour in the recipe. I used (of course) King Arthur Flour’s Whole Wheat flour.

I sifted it with my fine-mesh strainer and ended up with a fair amount of wheat bran.

I just threw the bran away instead of saving it for the future, though.

I made this bread last week, and one of the sad, sad things about posting so late after baking is that I have forgotten some of the details of process. I don’t remember this bread giving me any trouble, though.

Unlike the Portuguese Sweet Bread, which I made a few days ago, I didn’t have any problem getting it to rise.

I think I am getting a little better at shaping baguettes, but clearly I still have a long way to go. Several of these kind of unfurled after baking, as you will see.

I did have a breakthrough of sorts with slashing. I realized that I was holding the lame facing in the wrong direction. Once I turned it the right way, my slashes were instantly easier and looked a lot better. Unfortunately I have now forgotten what the right way is. Help me out, readers. Should it curve like a “C” when you hold it, or the other way around? Like this: ( or like this: ) ?

Look at these loaves. I think I have to take back what I said above about progressing in regards to shaping. I think I need Remedial Shaping 101. Lucky for them they still tasted good.

This bread was yummy, and I liked the whole wheat flavor. It didn’t bowl me over with its awesomeness, like the bagels, or focaccia, or pain de campagne, but I thought it was a very good recipe for a whole wheat baguette and if I wanted a whole wheat baguette, this is where I would start. So I’m giving it 4 stars.

Meanwhile, I made the Portuguese Sweet Bread two days ago, and the Potato Rosemary bread is cooling on the rack while I am typing this. So I need two things: time to post about these two before I move even further ahead, and people to take these breads of my hands. I still have a loaf of Pane Siciliano in my freezer, for goodness sake.

So I am back home after the long Winter Road Trip, and I have added a significant number of new states to my states visited list:

I have only a few more states to go before I have dominated the entire Eastern seaboard. Maybe eventually I’ll even get to some of the rest of the country.

I have been home for a few days unwinding since I don’t have to go back to work until tomorrow. So I took the opportunity to make the next BBA Challenge, one I have been waiting for: pizza.

I have a favorite pizza dough recipe already, and it is here. I have tried several other versions, including one using King Arthur Flour’s special Italian Flour that is supposed to come close to the Italian 00 flour. But none has worked as well as Giada’s.

However, it contains olive oil, and Peter Reinhart says in the introduction to Pizza Rustica that adding olive oil is not authentic. True Neopolitan pizza dough is flour, water, yeast, and salt. He recommends all-purpose flour, but then gives an alternate version with bread flour and olive oil that he says is easier to handle. I went the hardcore all-purpose, no olive oil route, and that was a mistake.

The dough itself couldn’t be easier. You mix, knead, and divide it.

PR recommends putting the dough into plastic bags, but I went the reusable route with little plastic tubs. I sprayed them with olive oil and put the divided dough in. I used a scale to divide so I got roughly even weights of dough, although they were a little less than 6 oz. a piece.

They were also too sticky to be accurately called round.

Five of my plastic tubs I put in the freezer for future use. The other one I put in the refrigerator for the next day.

The next day I patted the dough into a little circle, sprinkled it with flour, and let it sit for two hours. I was a little worried about the size of the dough; it seemed too small to make an adequate pizza. I was hoping it would rise significantly, but it didn’t really.

When I tried to shape it, I got annoyed very quickly. I am not a pizza dough shaping expert. With the aforementioned favorite dough recipe, I usually spread it out on a piece of parchment paper, rather than stretch and toss the traditional way. I tried to stretch and toss with this dough, following Reinhart’s instructions, and my dough soon developed holes all over it. I stopped several times and started again, and I could never get the dough to stretch without breaking. Finally, I resorted to my usual method. I stretched it as far as I could, put it on parchment paper, covered it with olive oil, and pushed it out by hand on the paper until it was fairly thin. I got a small pizza this way, and I started to wish I had left two dough containers out of the freezer instead of just one.

I covered it with sauce and cheese, popped it in the preheated oven, and eight minutes later, a pizza was born.

This pizza tasted great. For some reason, the crust didn’t brown as much as my usual dough, but it was a nice thin crust — my favorite kind. I would like to make this dough again with the bread flour and the olive oil instead of just all-purpose flour to see if I can get a true pizza stretch and toss. But first I have to use up all of the dough in my freezer. I would not recommend making the “authentic” version unless you have serious pizza skills.

This challenge gets a temporary 3.5 stars, but I might revise it once I try the other option.