BBA Challenge #11 – Cranberry Walnut Celebration Bread

Doesn’t this picture just take your breath away?

The 11th bread in Bread Baker’s Apprentice is the Cranberry Walnut Celebration Bread. When I read “celebration bread” I expected it to be another foreign recipe, but then Peter Reinhart mentions that it’s perfect for Thanksgiving and I got so excited to learn of an American celebration bread! I had no idea this bread even existed (I suspect it’s not a widespread tradition to make this bread for Thanksgiving) but I am definitely introducing it to my family’s Thanksgiving celebrations. Last year I baked 2 loaves of plain, no-name bread to bring to Thanksgiving . . . this year, armed with the BBA Challenge, I’ll be bringing some way fancier bread, including this one!

Since the first few steps of making this bread are just like any other (mix ingredients! Pour onto counter to knead!) I decided to skip them this time. The only ingredient worth mentioning is the extract, I used orange extract because I happened to have it and I was shocked at how strongly it smelled. I was worried that the bread would have an overwhelming orange taste and smell!

Here’s the bread ready to knead:

I added only a splash of water to the dough to get it to this consistency, but I wasn’t sure if it was at the right level of hydration. Sometimes I think I err on the side of dryer dough (rather than wetter) and I’m starting to think that it might be worth experimenting with wetter doughs to see if they work out better. But that’s a story for another day!

Back to the Cranberry Walnut bread: I kneaded the dough on the counter until it got to this consistency:

Then I wrestled all those cranberries and walnuts into the dough, popping them back in as they insisted on jumping back out onto the counter. Luckily I only dropped two or three on the floor, or Arnold would have been stuffed full of nuts and dried fruit! When I got all the dough to stay together without spitting out nuts or cranberries, it looked like this:

I would estimate that at this point, it was 50% dough, 50% bits! No wonder it was so hard to knead everything in, this dough is chock-full of bits!

I set it to ferment:

And after the fermenting time was up, it had grown very nicely:

I toyed with the idea of just making loaves because I wasn’t really in the mood for full-on baking (95 degree days will do that to you!), but then I remembered how impressed I was with the loaves from my previous attempts at braiding bread and I decided to go for it. The braiding part is probably the most fun part of bread-making . . . well, second-best behind the eating part that is!

First I divided the dough into 4 sections by just eyeballing it. This isn’t what the book says to do, the book says to make 3 10-oz pieces and 3 4-oz pieces. I decided that I would just divide into 4 roughly equal sections and then weigh each section. As I expected, one section was heavier than the other three, so I divided that one into 3 pieces and ended up with the required 6 pieces, in two sizes! This was easier for me than worrying about making 5 cuts of the right proportion from the dough.

Here are the 6 logs, ready for braiding:

I started by braiding the larger, bottom braid:

For better step-by-step photos of bread braiding, please see my Challah post!

This is the finished large braid.

And the finished small braid (isn’t it cute!!??!).

I plopped the small braid on top of the large one, and that was it! Here’s a side view:

The last step before proofing is to eggwash the whole thing:

My loaf took a bit longer than the prescribed time to finish proofing, and in the end I think I probably could have given it another 10-20 minutes of proofing time, but it still came out very nice. For some reason, the bread didn’t grow/spring in an even manner, and that resulted in the small braid ending up off-center!

See what I mean? It somehow moved over to the left! If you check the picture above you can see that the small braid started out centered, but it definitely wasn’t by the time the bread came out of the oven! I have no explanation for that but I assume it must be that one side of the big braid was thicker than the other and therefore proofed more and had more oven spring.

No matter, lopsided or not, this bread was delicious! The orange flavor was not at all overwhelming in the finished loaf, in fact the dough itself had a wonderful flavor. I don’t know if the batch of cranberries I got were particularly mild or if somehow baking them into bread takes out their bite, but we were both surprised to find they weren’t very tart at all.

Even Adam, who doesn’t generally like bread with chunks in it, proclaimed this one a winner. And look at just how many chunks there were in there!

This is not a subtly-chunked bread, that’s for sure!

I got good oven spring on this loaf (you can see it in this crumb picture and also in the picture above where the un-egged sections between the braids shows) but the resulting bread was still very dense. I think next time I make this I’m going to try it with AP flour instead of bread flour . . . or at the very least NOT use KA’s bread flour, which is even heavier than regular bread flour.

Speaking of, I had this idea to bake 3 loaves of plain white bread at the same time, each using a different flour, to see how they differ. But then I thought that someone else must have already done this . . . anyone have a link for me? If I don’t find something I’m going to do it (and of course post about it!), but it’s going to have to wait until the weather cools down a bit. Running my oven during a heat wave was literally painful!

Want to join us in the BBA Challenge? Get yourself a copy of Peter Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice, the incredibly comprehensive how-to-book for bread, and play along! Full details on the challenge are here.

Tagged as: BBA Challenge, bread, bread baking, cranberry, walnut