Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Feeling peckish

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

I have so far gotten the hang of creating bread for our daily consumption by baking four .5 kg loaves once a week, freezing two of the loaves and taking them out of the freezer as needed. It’s a nice, relaxing routine to bake Hamelman’s straight dough French breads, and they have such a lovely taste. So as part of the celebrations of my oldest sister’s rite of confirmation, I offered to bake some bread and cakes to remove some of the stress from my parents as they were having the house filled with guests.

Being a fairly small family, I just had to bake for about 16 people, but then it started to nag at me… what if there isn’t enough food? So I cleaned out the kitchen tables and got ready to bake some cake.

The recipe I chose for the cakes was Fudgy Brownies from the most awesome chocolate book Crave by Maureen McKeon. This is the book for chocolate lovers. As I have remarked before I really do not like underbaked cake, so I usually give the cake a wee bit more in the oven than is given in the recipes (enough so that there is no batter left on a fork when I put it all the way through the cake and lift it up again). To liven it up a bit, I went to a specialty store and got candied violet leaves to decorate the cake.

I made a quadruple portion of the cakes, you know, just for good measure. Over a kg of sugar, over a kg of chocolate and lots and lots and lots of oat-based cream to avoid any fun moments with us lactose intolerant people. This is one heavy cake. The candied violet leaves worked wonders.

Of course, this was the easy part. The fun part was to bake ten .4 kg loaves so no one would leave the party hungry. Not taking any chances I went with my tried and tested straight dough French bread from Hamelman’s Bread.

Is it just me or does this make you want to go ‘Ferment, my babies, ferment!’ in a good, classical cheap television production Frankenstein voice too?

Baking the French bread involves a lot of times where you need to fold the bread, it needs to be divided, shaped, scored, and baked, and the bread better not overproof or everything might be ruined! Three doughs meant that I had run out of alarm clocks to signal when I needed to do what! Fortunately, salvation was only 60 lines of Python away, and my laptop sat happily on the kitchen table, reminding me to do all the things in the correct order, at the correct intervals, and fortunately I timed everything so that none of the foldings, shapings or bakings got in the way of each other. I would feel daunted by trying to run a bakery and having to interleave not only three doughs, but thirty or fourty doughs!

So, feeling peckish?

Tags: baking, cake, chocolate, white bread

French bread with pâte fermentée

Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

After having read through several bread baking books and websites there is one common thing I keep hearing, namely that breads baked with sourdough is the epiphany of breads, giving it a delectable, nutty taste. I must admit I have tried a bit of this and that, be it a poolish or a biga, and this time I have tried the pâte fermentée sourdough.

The pâte ferments for about 12 to 16 hours before it needs to be used in the ‘actual’ dough. And while the bread that comes out of this dough is good, I still think the taste of my french bread has it beat with some margin. The bread is still airy, though, but a slight bit more dense than the straight dough french bread.

I guess I will just have to keep experimenting with the preferment breads until I come up with those delectable breads everyone is talking about, but until then, I will most likely keep making the straight dough french bread as my daily bread. Yummy.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Parisian daily bread and pear-marzipan tart

Sunday, April 6th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

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.

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…

It was quite decent, despite this accident, though.

Tags: baking, bread, cake, dessert, marzipan, white bread

French bread, take two

Friday, April 4th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

It is one thing to make a good bread once, but making it consistently is the goal here. Of course, my old statistics professor would tell me that two samples is a horrible basis for any form of statistic, but let us ignore that for a bit (I used to doze off in her classes anyway, not the most riveting topic).

I attempted Hamelman’s straight dough French bread recipe again yesterday, but got started a bit late due to work. The dough is a bit on the sticky side and my mixer has a bit of strouble actually kneading it properly so I have to after-knead it a bit more, which tends to be a bit annoying since it means that you have to use slightly too much flour when you shape the breads, leaving flour residue on the bread once you bake it, and this residue will generate some grayish streaks on the bread. It does not detract from the flavour, it just isn’t so pretty.

I would have shot some photos of the crumb as well, but once the bread was ready and had cooled just the slightest bit it was past 8 pm. Word of advice: Never get between a pregnant woman and her dinner. Ever. It’s scary!

The crumb was somewhat denser than the last time I made it, a fact that I attribute to my somewhat failed attempt at making steam in the oven. The ice cubes did not even remotely fizzle when I threw them in a pan with hot water. Also a baking hearth would probably aid tremendously, but I think I get decent results from the metal baking pans I have now. I will have to do some more trial and error, but the breads rose nicely, even after being put in the oven, however they did not develop the hallmark very crispy crust that the French bread in our local bakeries have. It was still an extremely tasty bread, though.

To serve for dinner we made a series of bruschetta-inspired breads, although we might have aberrated a bit from the traditional Italian recipes. A slice of bread with fried mushroom and parsley, with hard-boiled eggs and tomatos, with coarsely chopped tomatos, finely chopped garlic, whole leaves of basil and a bit of extra virgin olive oil served with a slice of serrano ham (we did not have any prosciutto handy to stay in the Italian cuisine). Gorgeous dinner if I have to say so myself.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

French bread

Monday, March 31st, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

All the breads that I have featured here have, so far, been recipes collected by two Danish food journalists and they have been published by one of the largest Danish publishers around. There is little competition for their book, there are only one or two other real contenders for bread and pastry recipes. Despite the fact that Denmark has experienced a flurry of interest for cookbooks of all sorts and kinds, the diversity is still rather depressing compared what you may find if you venture abroad into English books. The largest detractor for this is, of course, that there is an annoying tendency to measure everything by cups in these books, which is extremely unfamiliar to us Danes as most of us have very good scales at home—even the cheapest kitchen scales here measure within a gram of the actual mass. Anyway, not shy of having to do a few conversions, I ordered some baking books in English, one of which is Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread. This book is fairly much intended for the rather advanced home baker or, more likely given the content, for the professional baker, so I was a bit overwhelmed by it, considering I have only really been baking for a month or two, but I persevered and kept reading through the book, trying to make sense of everything. Fortunately Hamelman lists everything not only in imperial and metric measures, but in percentage measures as well. Very nice way to list ingredients! So today as I was a few breads short of having a lunch, I thought it was time to try one of his ‘straight doughs’, the classic French bread.

The French bread is ubiquitous in Denmark, almost to the point that it is synonymous with a white bread. Fortunately, it is also possible to find Spanish country breads, Filone breads, or Ciabatta breads (although not usually in slipper shape), that haven’t had milk added to them (yes, I know, it’s an egregious sin to add milk to French bread, but seemingly a lot of bakers here do so).

The French bread recipe is, as far as I can reckon, one of the easiest ones in Hamelman’s books, but even then it is a good deal more involved than the recipes I have followed to date.

My shaping skills leave a bit to be desired, and even though I have got something that is sort of oblong shaped, the breads are way too loose, and as can be seen vaguely in the picture, I have unfortunately left a bit too much flour residue on the top. I almost forgot to score the breads, so I had to pull them out of the oven again after having put them there for half a minute, and the knives I had were not entirely sharp enough, which caused the bread to fall a bit more apart, unfortunately, causing the few blisters that can be seen in the photo below. Also, the gray streaks that can be seen is due to the excess flour that I did not manage to remove. I will have to be a bit more careful another time.

Despite the visual shortcomings of the bread, the inside looks moist, and the crumb has that slightly shiny quality that supposedly good crumbs have, and even the crust crunches ever so lovely when you squeeze the bread carefully, despite the fact that I did not use any steam at all.

While all the breads that I have baked to date have been decent, there has always lacked a certain ‘something’ from the breads that I could only get if I bought it from one of the many bakeries that are close to my house. But not with this one. It was like tasting French bread again for the first time. Bon appétit.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Olive oil bread

Thursday, March 27th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

We had just bought a new spring form a few weeks before baking the lovely torta con le mele, and naturally it would have to be leaking a bit of liquid, so yesterday after my wife had gotten up at 5 am and surprised me with bread rolls I woke up to smoke everywhere in the kitchen and the smoke detector going off. Oof. The rolls were pretty good, but had a faint scent of twistbread. I guess that is one way to wake up.

Despite this, the rolls were so good that they disappeared entirely before I even got a chance to take a photo. So, another day, another bread, and this time I took on an olive oil bread with some wholemeal flour, giving it a bit more coarse texture than pure wheat breads.

The crumb and the crust on the bottom turned out fairly decent, but the top crust is much too thin and flimsical. I will definitely need to either add some steam the next time I make this, or alternatively bake it higher in the oven to give the top some more heat during the bake.

Being a sucker for pure wheat breads, the tinge of wholemeal puts me a bit off just eating the bread plain, and the boring top crust does not help here, but it does go very nicely with the traditional Danish dressing: liver paté with preserved, sliced beetroots.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Canadian oatmeal bread

Monday, March 24th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

The Canadian oatmeal bread is a sweet bread, containing both sugar and syrup that is stirred together with oats, butter and boiling water. The sweetness may make it unusable for certain kinds of lunch food dressing (yes, we are one of those weird nations that eat cold lunches) as it can taste through the dressing. It is marvellously good for breakfast, though.

The bread is quickly made, as it contains a fair amount of yeast (at least according to the recipe I have), and it develops a fairly dense crumb and very soft crust. In that sense it sort of resembles a bread form of tea buns, although tea buns are normally a good deal lighter, sweeter and washed with eggs.

It goes very nicely with marmalade.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Ciabatta and Swiss country bread

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 | Cooking | 2 Comments

So these past few weeks I have mainly been baking wheat breads without any coarser cereals, but to ramp up our fibre intake, I found a recipe for a brown bread, the Swiss country bread, which is about one third rye flour and two thirds wheat flour (no reason to go overboard with a full rye bread). It is a fairly easy bread to make, but its dough is extremely sticky and it took quite a while to clean up the kitchen utensils.

The other bread I baked today is a long-time favourite of mine, although this is the first time I have tried to bake it, the ciabatta bread. It is made on a preferment that sits on the kitchen counter for about twelve hours, to that you mix Italian tipo 00 wheat flour, salt, olive oil, and water, and presto, a few hours later you have some delicious ciabatta breads. The recipe I followed gives a slightly crispy crust and a firm crumb. Very delicious with salmon. It is another ciabatta bread and a Swiss country bread that, more or less, can be made out in the background.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread, whole grain bread

Italian bread

Saturday, February 9th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

I picked up Gyldendals Bagebog, a lovely book with recipes on a long range of breads, biscuits and cakes, a couple of days ago and finally found a bit of time to try one of the bread recipes from it. I stuffed all the ingredients into our brand new Braun food processor that is supposed to be very good at kneading dough (damn these things cost a lot of money), but I had to substitute the mix of durum wheat flour and Italian tipo 00 wheat that the original recipe calls for with regular wheat flour as I didn’t have any of the other flour types. This gave the bread a much lighter consistency rather than the bit more tough Italian bread taste. Was still a great success, in my opinion. It is lovely with strawberry jam.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Calzone

Monday, December 24th, 2007 | Cooking | No Comments

Since we have bought an Italian cookbook, what better way to start trying out how useful it is than to make pizza? So, yesterday we tried making calzones, but since we were out of the ingredients listed in the book, we used fried mushrooms, garlic, chili pepper and chorizo. The end result: marvellous!

Tags: baking, bread, pizza, white bread