Recently in baking Category

I started out with a overnight soak of some oats, polenta, & wheat bran.  The next day I mixed in the flour and let it rise.

We like to make homemade pizzas fairly often, so this formula came at a good time.  This dough is meant to be slowly fermented, from the ice cold water used in the mixing, to the at least overnight fermentation in the refrigerator.  Unfortunately my hand tossing skills are not up to par yet, so i ended up with the squarish pizza you see above.

As you can see, this was a uniquely shaped bread.  It also took 3 days to make.  Day 1 was for the biga (pre-ferment).  On day 2, the rest of the ingredients were mixed and the loaves were shaped.  To shape the loaves, I divided the risen dough into 3 similarly sized pieces and shaped them as I would a baguette.  Then I curled them in on opposite sides of the loaf to make the S-shape of the loaves.  A spray of water and sprinkling of black sesame seeds on top, and the loaves were placed in the refrigerator to retard overnight.

Day 3 was finally baking day and it was worth it.  This bread was amazing.  A nice nutty flavor from the long ferments.  I definitely look forward to making this again.

For this bread, we get a new ingredient to play with.  Potatoes!  I cooked up a batch of Yukon Gold potatoes (From Zuckerman Farms @ the Hollywood Farmers Market) to make the mashed potatoes for this loaf.

Peter Reinhart describes this bread as the east coast version of the popular Hawaiian style bread on the west coast.  They are both sweet breads for sure, but I think this formula at least has a little more fruit forward flavor (the citrus extracts really stay present in the baked loaf).  While this loaf uses a sponge, it does not need an overnight rest like many of the other breads I've made.  The sponge has a relatively large amount of yeast for the size of the sponge.

After the sponge is nice and bubbly, it was time to mix the rest of the dough.  First step was to mix up some of the liquid ingredients.  Eggs, some vanilla, orange, & lemon extract.

I was pretty please with how the baguettes came out.  The one on the right in the picture below ended up a little darker, probably because it was baked by itself.  These were small baguettes, ranging from 6 - 8ish inches.  One became my lunch the next day...another breakfast the day after.  This dough also made a nice pizza dough.  I split the remaining dough into two portions and attempted to hand toss them into pizzas.  I've still got some work to do on getting that technique down.  I did manage to shape one into approximately a 12" round, however it was a little thin in the middle (and probably a little over topped with ingredients).  The second portion I just couldn't get to work and reluctantly through it out.  I was just getting too tired to try and save it (plus with a 550 degree oven going for the past few hours, it was pretty hot in the kitchen.  The dough made a great pizza dough and the quarry tiles worked better than the pizza stone since I didn't have to try and aim it correctly on the round pizza stone.

Casatiello is a Brioche inspired bread.  The brioche-like dough is flavored with a cured meat (in this case Soppresetta) and a soft meltable cheese (Provolone with a bit of mozzarella).  Definitely a meal in a slice. 

I've been making pastrami sandwiches for a lunch lately, so I was pretty excited to make some rye bread to complement them.  Plus there was the added fun of a marbled bread!

The tricky thing with a marbled loaf is you need to have both doughs having similar fermentation time.  For this reason having everything mise en place is especially important for this loaf.  Each of the doughs, are essentially identical, except the darker one has an added coloring agent.  I used unsweetened chocolate dissolved in water as my coloring agent.