Weekend of local eating

Yesterday was a fantastic day from the food point of view.

For lunch, we made sandwiches with homemade bread, homegrown roasted peppers, homegrown lettuce, homemade ketchup, local balsamic vinegar, and some stuff that wasn't homemade or homegrown (or even local, bah): mayo, mustard, and tuna. They were so delicious.

Dinner was Leek and roasted pepper risotto (leek and peppers from the garden), and a lettuce and pepper salad with homemade bread. Yum yum yum.

I went to the garden, but didn't have time to do much work. I picked eggplant, lettuce, peppers, basil, and parsley. We had something like 12 eggplants (small ones), so I made eggplant parmesan for later in the week, and Loris is supposed to make a caponata/eggplant stew-type dish one night as well.

I also made up a new whole wheat bread recipe, which looked wonderful when I baked it yesterday, but I haven't tried it yet. I'll post a recipe after I've done a taste-test.

Bread

I spent the weekend baking bread. I promised pictures, but I was way too busy to take any. I made two loaves of Royal Crown Tortano from Maggie Gleazer's Aritsan Baking book, and six loaves of my own daily bread recipe. It took all day, and the really tricky part is remembering the timing for all those different batches.

The Royal Crown Tortano is a fantastic bread, a huge, round, donut-shaped loaf with a dark golden crust that's not too crunchy, and a soft, well-structured crumb full of big holes. (I know, I need to take pictures). It calls for potato, honey, and a starter you make the night before. While it takes a LOT of time (you pretty much have to be home all day), it actually requires very little hands-on work. And while the dough is wet compared to your standard sandwich loaf, for an artisanal loaf it's relatively easy to work with, and forgiving of mistakes. And it's delicious, and lasts for a few days before drying out. I highly recommend this bread, it's one of my favorites.

Although this makes a really large loaf, I had no trouble mixing up a double recipe in my Kitchenaid stand mixer (note - I have a professional size - don't try it in one of the standard sized ones). I then had to stagger the rising and baking times because I can only bake one at a time. In the meantime, I did two large batches of basic bread for a total of 6 loaves.

The reason I made so many is that I'm freezing them, now that we have our fantastic freezer. This is working out great - I dobule-wrap them in plastic and stick them in the freezer after they cool off from the oven. Then when we need some bread, we turn on the oven, put in a frozen loaf, cover it with an aluminum roasting pan, and voila. Fresh-tasting bread, with a crispy crust.

So far I've only done it with my daily bread, but I've just tried it with the tortano, so we'll see how that turns out.

Basic bread tutorial

While I have been following bread recipes for many, many years, I have also been through several periods of making up my own. The best bread is usually made from just flour, water, salt, and yeast, and once you have a good technique, you don't really need a recipe any more. Good bread is really much more dependent on technique.

The amounts given will be for two loaves, with the amounts for three loaves in parentheses, and six loaves in brackets. Keep in mind that these amounts are not exact - it's not important to be perfectly precise. Start with 1.5 (2.25) [4.5] cups warm, wrist-temperature water. Add about .75 - 1 tsp (1.25 tsp) [2.5 tsp] active dry yeast, and wait until the yeast activates, about 5-10 minutes. Add just enough flour to absorb into all the yeast, to make a sort of batter or very wet dough. Set aside for about 20 minutes, to allow the flour to hydrate, and the yeast to start its work before adding salt, which acts as a retardant for yeast. After 20 minutes, add about 1.5 tsp (2 tsp) [4 tsp] salt and mix in. Add more flour as necessary until you get a very wet dough. You want it to hold together, and to stick to your fingers, but not so wet that you can't handle it at all. It takes some practice to learn the right amount of hydration. Mix or knead the dough for a good 10-15 minutes.

Let the dough rise in a large bowl, covered, for several hours. For the first two or three hours, you will want to fold the dough every 30-45 minutes, for a total of 2-4 times. Scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a well-floured counter-top. Flatten it, then fold it as follows: fold the top part down to the middle, fold the right side into the middle, then the bottom part up, and the left part over. Fold the dough in half again if necessary, then form into a ball and place back into the large bowl and cover. When you're done with the folding, allow the dough to rise undisturbed.

If you want to let it rise overnight or even up to 24 hours, place it in the fridge AFTER you're done folding, then remove it about 30 minutes to an hour before you are ready to proceed.

Scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a well-floured surface. Shape it into a ball by stretching it and pulling the edges down to the bottom, then tucking them under the ball. The idea is to create surface tension, which will prevent the wet dough from just flattening out. Here's what it should look like. If you're making a baguette or torpedo-shaped loaf, you should then elongate the ball (I didn't take a picture). Cover it with a towel and let it rest about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to at least 425.


Turn the ball of dough over so the smooth side is down, and flatten it into a rectangle, like so:


Fold the bottom third of the rectangle up, like you're folding a business letter:


Fold the top third down (again - like a business letter):


Use the side of your hand to press the dough along the center to seal it, and to form an indentation along the length of the loaf.


Fold the dough in half along in the indentation, and use your hand to seal it together into a long, skinny loaf. This isn't a very good picture, but you can get the idea:


Make sure the loaf is well sealed. Tuck the ends under, if necessary, to get a nice, smooth, round end. Space the loaves evenly on a sheet of parchment paper, cover them with a towel, and let rise for 30-60 minutes.


After the bread has risen, slash it with a VERY sharp knife or a razor. Make three slashes at an extreme diagonal - don't just go horizontally across the loaf. The slashes will expand in the oven and let your bread rise when it is exposed to the extreme heat. It will rise quickly, and the length of the slashes will allow the crumb to become light and holey.


Slip the bread into the oven and bake for 30-45 minutes, rotating half-way through if it is not baking evenly. If you tap the bread, it will sound hollow when it is done. Because my oven does not do a great job of creating a crispy crust, I have tried various tricks to achieve it. This last time, I turned on the broiler for the last couple minutes to really brown the crust. Let the bread cool on a rack.


Enjoy! Especially with homemade butter!

In which I remember my bread-baking origins

I've been baking bread for more than 10 years, but my hobby has changed dramatically since I first started in high school. My mother bought a bread machine when I was younger, and I remember delicious, fluffy loaves coming out of it. The only issues were that the paddle left a big hole in the bread, and it tended to be a bit soggy because it had a cooling off period inside the machine where it would basically steam itself after the baking cycle was done.

My family was crazy about challah, the sweet braided Jewish egg bread, typically covered with poppy or sesame seeds (poppy seed were our favorite). The bread was really expensive, so we tended to eat it as a treat. My mother bought a few bread machine recipe books at one point, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could actually make challah for a fraction of the price of buying it.

I honestly don't remember my first attempt to make challah, but I suspect it went well or I may not have stuck with it. The recipe I used was extremely easy and forgiving, and yielded excellent results despite my occasional mistakes or my forgetfulness. Since the machine mixed the dough, the only thing I needed to do was braid it, let it rise, do a quick egg wash with a sprinkling of seeds, and stick it in the oven. After 30 or 40 minutes, we almost always pulled a hot, sweet, delicious poppy-seed covered loaf from the oven, and my family would devour it eagerly, most of us with a huge spread of "butter" (I'm a child of the 80's - as far as we were concerned, margarine was butter and we used the terms completely interchangeably).

I do vaguely remember my later attempts to diversify my portfolio, most of which failed miserably. Challah was probably halfway between a cake and a bread, and the eggs and copious amount of sugar made for an excellent texture despite my lack of technique. Making real bread, on the other hand, was a disaster, leading mostly to what my dad called doorstops. I especially liked whole wheat bread, which has an even greater tendency towards heavy, dense results.

Over the years, my skills have been honed quite a bit, thanks in large part to the likes and dislikes of my Italian husband who is very particular about his bread and continues to offer me plenty of encouragement - and who will eat what I bake no matter what. I eventually gave up my bread machine for a mixer (since I never used the machine to do the actual baking anyway), then acquired an even bigger more powerful mixer after I burned out the engine on my standard-sized one (but I really miss the beautiful yellow color of the old one).

I also purchased a fibrament baking stone, which I love dearly, and which I honestly believe has helped compensate for my 70's era electric oven.

Thanks to a few books and a few websites (see sidebar), I learned a LOT of new techniques, and I've come up with a really basic "recipe" I'm using these days for some simple, white Italian-style bread with what I hope is good flavor, light holey crumb, and a crunchy crust. My husband seems to approve, and I'll take whatever appreciation I can get.

Artisan bread and bruschetta recipe

One thing I've neglected writing about lately (partly because I've neglected doing it lately) is making bread. For a traditional bruschetta recipe from Piemonte, I created a partly whole-wheat chestnut bread. To make it, I dissolved active dry yeast in warm water, then added equal parts bread flour and whole wheat flour and a bit of salt (equal to yeast, or a bit less). I tended to add a lot of yeast, b/c both the chestnuts and the whole wheat flour make this bread a difficult rise. Then I chopped up a bunch of canned chestnuts and tossed them in, mixed it up, let it rise for a while, shaped it into long loaves, let it rise again, and based until brown and hollow-sounding when tapped.

To make the bruschetta, we sliced the bread and slathered on a layer of cream cheese and then a lighter layer of creamy gorgonzola, then topped it with chopped walnuts. Bake/toast until the cheese melts. Heavenly!

Tonight, I am making a pre-ferment for a recipe from Maggie Gleazer's Artisan Baking. The recipe is for Royal Crown's Tortano, a beautiful large round bread with a hole in the middle (like a donut). I have had a lot of luck with this bread in the past, in terms of delicious flavor, great texture in the crumb, and a wonderful crispy, crunchy crust, which is notably difficult to achieve in my old electric oven. It involved making a pre-ferment the night before, and then requires about 7 hours in mixing, rising, and baking time the next day. It's well worth making on a weekend day when I'm at home anyway, though, and with the crazy storm we're having right now, there's no reason not to spend a lovely day at home baking some delicious bread.