Parisian daily bread and pear-marzipan tart

Sunday, April 6th, 2008 | Cooking

Today it happened again. I was out of bread by breakfast and rapidly growing hungry, so things needed to move rapidly in order to get lunch at a time that might just serve as a probable time for lunch. Fear not, the day before I had been skimming through Daniel Leader’s Local Breads and had seen the recipe for Parisian daily bread, in which he states that ‘There’s nothing like tearing into a warm baguette, fresh from your oven, just a couple of hours after you decide to bake.’ Now that sounds great, I can shave off several hours from Hamelman’s French bread recipe, I thought!

So, today comes around and I start reading the recipe… rest for 20 minutes, mix for 10 minutes, ferment for 45 minutes, ferment again for 45 minutes, proof for 40 minutes, bake for 20 minutes… this seems oddly above a couple of hours to me, but it still saves me a couple of hours to Hamelman’s recipe. After kneading the dough on the machine, it is supposed to receive a bit of more kneading on an unfloured desk, but even after kneading it for a bit more than 10 minutes on my mixer, it was extremely sticky and nowhere near ‘springy’. It took quite a bit more flour than the recipe called for to get it even remotely possibly to knead by hand.

So after a good three hour preparation and bake, and twenty minutes of cooling to settle everything in the bread, I was well past lunch time (oops), but nevertheless, fresh bread from the oven is good pretty much no matter what. It is quite a decent bread, but if you have two or three extra hours, the French bread recipe from Hamelman’s book beats this hands-down. Hamelman’s bread is much more of a savory bread that you can use for any kind of meat or vegetable, whereas Leader’s Parisian daily bread is more comfort food-ish—going nicely with butter, jam or cheese, but not so well with meat or vegetables. Its crumb is also a lot more dense than Hamelman’s French bread, and a bit too much on the salty side for my tastes.

Parisian daily bread crumb

As an afternoon cake, my wife wanted to surprise me with a lovely pear and marzipan tart (I simply adore marzipan in any shape and kind. I can eat it by the kilo in its raw form!), but once the alarm sounded for it to be done and it was being taken out of the oven, I hear a large crash, which mean I should rush into the kitchen, usually. Suffice to say, the cake did not really look like the lovely cake with pears lined up symmetrically and the batter spread carefully. It looked rather much like this…

Jumbled pear marzipan cake

It was quite decent, despite this accident, though.

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