“Better than the focaccia from a restaurant.” That’s what Adam said when he took his first bite of this bread. And he’s totally right! When I took this out of the oven I could hardly believe I’d made it myself . . . it looks beyond professional! And it really wasn’t very difficult at all.

I decided to go with the Poolish version for the sole reason that the refrigeration step takes place before the spreading-on-a-sheet step. My fridge is 3/4 sized and always packed to the gills, so it’s quite a challenge putting a sheet pan in there! Fitting a bowl in is much easier so therefore the poolish version was easier, too.

I have to say that this bread, while definitely strange while you’re making it, is not at all difficult. It’s similar to the ciabatta in the folding method used in place of kneading, but it’s easier than the ciabatta because you don’t have to worry about squishing it or even moving it too much. In fact I totally manhandled mine while transferring it off the counter onto the sheet pan and no one was the wiser! So don’t bother being too gentle with the dough, it won’t be noticeable in the end.

Oh, and my coworkers loved it, too. This one is definitely going into regular rotation!

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.

Do you have some food items that you’ve not only never considered making from scratch but that you don’t even think of as something that gets made at all? As in, “this food item just exists”? Like take Eggo’s for example. Or better yet: Twinkies. Same with English Muffins. I’m pretty sure I’d never before seen an “english muffin” that didn’t come out of a package with an orange logo on it. And I’d certainly never heard of anyone making them, let alone considered making them myself! I’m reasonably sure that I’m not alone in this belief given how surprised Adam was when I told him what the next BBA bread was: he’d never thought of them being homemade before, either!

But let me tell you, these are so worth making. The really-flat things full of holes that come from that orange-labeled package? They don’t even come close. When you compare them to these scrumptious little bread cakes, the packaged kind seem rubbery and just plain sad. I wish my word association weren’t so strong for the term “English Muffin,” because what I made really doesn’t seem to fit that term at all. In fact, I’m struggling not to rename them every time I write it out! I like the name “scrumptious little bread cakes” maybe . . . although that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well.

In any case, hangups over names aside, read on for step-by-step photos of my first (but certainly not last!) attempt at making scrumptious little bread cakes English Muffins from scratch.

When I finished mixing the wet and dry ingredients together in my mixer, I was surprised by how stiff the dough was. When the book says the dough shouldn’t be stiff, I expected it to be really soft! I think that because I used shortening instead of butter, and 1% milk instead of buttermilk (hey, that’s what I had on hand!), that my proportions were probably off. Here’s how the dough looked after mixing:

During the kneading I ended up adding a few more splashes of milk to try to loosen the dough up a bit. It ate a bunch of dough off the counter so I’m not sure my adding milk did anything in the end, but by the time the dough passed the windowpane test (it took a good 15 minutes or more), the dough looked like this:

I have to say it was kind of refreshing to knead such a small ball of dough for once! All the BBA recipes are for huge amounts of bread so this was a really nice change. Other BBAers had lamented getting only 6 muffins out of this recipe, but I found that awesome! No leftovers and no need to pawn off bread onto unsuspecting coworkers . . .

After fermenting, the dough had doubled:

I used my scale to measure out 6 pieces weighing 3 oz’s each (was I ever happy to find out I had the right weight of dough!) and shaped each into a cute little boule:

The boules proofed very nicely, see?

Next came the scary part: the griddle! I used this double-burner griddle that we got from Crate & Barrel which, quite honestly, is a pretty crappy piece of kitchen equipment. Everything sticks to it! When I bought it I thought it was cast iron, but after the first few times I used it and had problems, I looked it up on the C&B site and found out it’s aluminum. No wonder it doesn’t perform like I thought it would! In any case, it was the most reasonable thing I had to cook these on. If I had an electric griddle like Nicole, I definitely would have used that instead!

I tried to be really gentle with each muffin as I transferred it from the sheet pan to the griddle:

(sorry for the picture quality, this one and the next one got totally blown out and I was in too much of a hurry to shoot multiples!)

After about 5 minutes, I carefully flipped them over:

They look right! Yeah!

Because I was using the oven for something else, I ended up finishing these in the toaster oven instead. It worked really well actually, I could fit exactly two muffins on the griddle (I used only one burner) and exactly two in the toaster oven, too! I gave them about 5 minutes on each side on the griddle, then about 5 minutes in the toaster. After I finished them all I had to remove myself from the kitchen to keep from prying one open immediately to see how the insides looked! I was dying to find out if I had the typical texture inside.

As you saw from the opening shot, I totally did get the “nooks and crannies”! The texture isn’t as pronounced as the out-of-a-package-with-an-orange-logo ones, but it’s definitely there. Once I opened them up I realized I’d slightly undercooked them, but they were absolutely perfect after toasting. Totally delicious with a bit of butter on top!

The next morning, Adam made me an egg and cheese sandwich on one:

How’s that for a partnership, huh?

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.

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.

When I saw that this week’s bread was another sweet one, and one with raisins in it (raisins are #2 on Adam’s most-hated list, #1 being licorice), I knew immediately that my coworkers or neighbors were going to be enjoying the fruits of this week’s labor. Luckily it turned out that my dad is in town for the week and he loves raisins, so he got a whole loaf for himself! He said it was good, but I tried a slice or two and didn’t think much of the texture. I probably should have let the bread rise more, it looked like it still needed time but I ignored that and popped it into the oven after the prescribed rising time . . .

The best part of making all these sweet breads is that none of them requires starting a day ahead! You can decide at the last minute (in bread talk, that means 5 hours before you want to be eating bread!) to make the bread without having to wait until the next day to enjoy it.

Like all the other sweet breads, this one starts out by mixing the dry ingredients:

Then adding the wet and mixing:

I decided to mix by hand because my mixer bowl was dirty and I didn’t want to wash it before starting . . . and it turns out this bread is an easy one to mix by hand! Good to know!

I dumped it out onto a floured cutting board (that clear film you see on the counter) and started kneading. Because I’d mixed by hand and used shortening that was solid, I had to knead a lot more than I probably would have had to had I mixed with a mixer. For breads of this texture, I find that kneading by pressing and flipping doesn’t do enough. They really need to be pulled apart and folded back into themselves to expose all the still-too-wet sections inside. The dough ate a bunch of flour while I was kneading it but finally almost passed the windowpane test.

At this point it looked a bit dry to me:

But it matched the description in the book so I went with it.

The next step was to get all those raisins and walnuts into the dough somehow. I looked at the pile and looked at the dough and knew immediately that I couldn’t just dump the raisins on top and hope to knead them all in that way. So I did it backwards!

First I mixed all the raisins and walnuts in a big bowl.

Then the dough got plopped on top.

Then I mixed them in by rolling, punching, and folding the dough. It was hard! The raisins kept trying to escape, and I was worried they would land on the floor and Arnold would scoop them up (did you know raisins and grapes are poisonous to dogs? They can’t break down the sugar in them and it can actually kill them!). After I’d gotten as many of them in there as I could I dumped everything back onto the counter and tried to knead a bit more to distribute evenly. In the end the dough looked like this:

See the raisins strewn all around? Those were in the dough but popped out while I was kneading. I tried to stick them back in but they didn’t want to go!

Now it was time to ferment, so I put the dough in the same (greased now) bowl:

And covered it with plastic wrap and waited. It was really hot that day and the dough grew A LOT!

I decided I wanted to make the swirl bread, so I split the dough in two and rolled each section out:

Sprinkled cinnamon sugar on them (I used 1/2 cup of sugar plus 2 tbsp cinnamon split between the two loaves):

Then rolled them up and plopped them seam-side-down into greased loaf pans:

After proofing they had grown nicely:

But when I poked one, that section collapsed and I wasn’t sure what that meant. Generally when you poke dough at this stage, you’re looking for the poke to make a dent that fills in relatively quickly (but not too quickly!). If you poke and the dent stays depressed, it hasn’t proofed enough. If you poke and it fills back up immediately, it’s over-proofed. But I’ve never had a dough respond to the poke test by collapsing! I decided maybe it was because it’s a sweet bread and just stuck it into the oven when the oven was ready.

As you can see, the loaves really were quite beautiful when they came out of the oven:

I especially liked the end of the one that showed its swirling:

When I sliced into the bread I found out that I really hadn’t done the rolling thing that well, because there was a huge hole in the middle of the loaf!

(Sorry this picture isn’t in focus, but it does show the giant hole in there!)

No matter though, it still tasted pretty good. A bit on the dry side, and the dough definitely looked like it needed more time to proof once I cut into it. It seems that I got pretty good oven spring (again, the giant hole) but the dough on the bottom looked much more compressed than the dough on the top. If anyone knows what that means, please let me know! I baked them until the insides registered 190 degrees so I don’t think they were under cooked . . .

While I generally don’t think I’ll be making this bread again in the future, I may just try it one more time, with a wetter dough, to see if it comes out more moist inside. Even though I don’t eat much of this type of bread, the ones I’ve had in the past were way more moist that this one, so it seems to me I did something wrong. And since the dough seemed dry to me after kneading, that seems like the most likely culprit!

The next bread in the challenge is the Corn Bread, but after reading everyone else’s tries at it I’ve decided I’m going to skip it. It sounds pretty awful in the descriptions, and again, we’re not fans of sweet breads. Adam actually loves corn bread, but he loves the kind that’s not-very-sweet and is pretty dry on the inside (more like a corn muffin). The recipe in this both doesn’t fit either criteria, and I’m pretty sure Adam would not call it corn bread if he had it! For me, the idea of super-sweet corn bread is kind of nauseating . . . so that one’s clearly out the window. I’m moving on to the cranberry bread next!

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

It’s really random that Elissa ended up making cinnamon rolls when I was supposed to be making them for the BBA Challenge . . . but it means two posts about almost the same thing, very close to eachother! I thought we could do a compare and contrast between the two recipes, but it turns out they barely resemble each other at all. Who knew you could make cinnamon rolls in so many different ways?

As far as I know/remember, I’ve never actually eaten homemade cinnamon rolls before I made these. Growing up, cinnamon rolls were a too-sweet thing you purchased at Cinnabon in a mall food court (hey I grew up in Jersey, where malls are king!), and which my sister and mother loved but that my dad and I couldn’t eat more than a few bites of before feeling nauseous. Fast-forward to this crazy challenge of ours and I found myself wondering just what a homemade version of those things would be like. I’m happy to say there were delicious, not too hard to make, and wonderfully received by my coworkers!

I was really happy when I read through this recipe and realized I could make it in one morning instead of over the course of two days! While I initially intended to make a half-batch, I totally forgot about that when I started measuring ingredients and so ended up having to make a full batch (or start over, which I didn’t feel like doing!).

I decided to use shortening instead of butter to see what that would do to the texture. The first step is creaming the wet ingredients together:

Then the dry ingredients are combined separately:

And mixed in:

I though the dough seemed a bit too sticky so I decided to first knead it in the machine and see if it behaved. After about 8 minutes of kneading it was still sticky and couldn’t pass the windowpane test, so I dumped it out on the counter to knead by hand:

It ended up sucking up a lot of flour during the hand kneading and after a few minutes passed the windowpane test. I put the dough in a bowl covered with plastic wrap to ferment and went off to run some errands for a while. When I came back the dough had grown very nicely:

(You just have to believe me because I didn’t take a “before” shot for some reason!)

Following the instructions in the book, I sprayed the counter with spray oil and dumped the dough out. A quick roll with my $1.50 rolling pin from Pearl River Mart and I had a nice pizza-like layer:

Then I covered it with the cinnamon sugar mix:

And started rolling it up:

Very quickly I had a log!

I wasn’t sure how tightly the log had to be rolled, and I was worried that I might have made the dough too thin, but I decided to stop obsessing and just move on. Next I cut the dough into slices:

And laid them out on a parchment-lined cookie sheet:

I was annoyed at how much cinnamon-sugar fell out of the rolls when I lifted up the pieces:

See how you can tell exactly where each roll was by the lines of cinnamon-sugar left over? I briefly considered sprinkling the leftover sugar on top of the rolls, but then I remembered just how unhealthy these already were and decided they could survive without the added sugar . . . which is totally true by the way . . .

After a little over an hour’s rising time, the rolls had grown nicely:

While they baked, I whipped up the glaze:

I’d made glaze a few times before, but never quite in this way. In the past I’d made glaze on the stove and added the sugar to the milk. The recipe calls for no heat, and adding the milk to the sugar! I tried it the book’s way and I have to say it was exponentially easier. I’ll be making glazes this way from now on! What you see here is enough for a half-batch of glaze, which turned out to be plenty (for my taste!). By the time I was done with the glaze and had cleaned up some, the rolls were ready to come out of the oven:

I was so impressed when I saw what came out of the oven, I yelled to Adam to come look! I’m not sure what I expected but I was really happy with how they came out, believe me!

After about a 10-minute rest, I drizzled glaze over them using the whisk to scoop up and drizzle the glaze on the rolls:

If possible, the rolls looked even better once the glaze went on top:

At this point I had to figure out a way to get the rolls out of the cookie sheet so they could cool on a rack. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it until I remembered that there was parchment paper underneath all that gooey goodness . . . I ended up just grabbing a corner of the parchment paper and pulling it horizontally as quickly as possible, while wishing I had an extra hand so I could cross some fingers while I did it. Surprisingly, all the rolls stayed together while I did this and the entire thing transferred to the cooling rack without a problem! Those of you who haven’t tried these yet, don’t worry too much when it comes time to transfer the rolls to the rack, it really will work itself out.

Once they were cool enough to eat, we dove right in:

They were awesome! The texture of the dough itself was definitely crispier than a commercial cinnamon roll usually is and I’m sure that’s because I made them with shortening instead of butter. Next time I’d like to try the butter to see how the dough changes! Either way I’m 100% sure they’re better than the stuff we got at the mall growing up . . .

I took 8 of these to work with me on Monday morning and they were all gone by the next day. Doesn’t sound like much but you should know there are only like 10 people in my office, and I didn’t eat any myself! I think that sort of coworker response speaks for itself, don’t you?

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.

Moving right along in my apparent quest to bake all breads at least twice, I tackled Casatiello for the second time this weekend. You may remember that I pretty much hated this bread the first time, but this time, done right? It was amazing. The texture was exactly what you’d expect after reading the description “savory panettone,” and the melted cheese throughout, plus the salty bits of great salami, well . . . what’s not to like!?!?

The two main things I changed ingredients-wise were the meat and the milk. In my first try I used 1% milk because that’s what I had on hand, but for the redo I used buttermilk. I could tell right away that the buttermilk added a certain richness to the dough, even the uncooked dough smelled delicious! But the change was probably subtle in comparison to the other ingredient change: the meat!

I decided to go with the right meat this time, Italian dry salami, one of my favorite things ever. It surprised me how little salami I needed in terms of volume, I guess it’s much heavier than I realized? I weighed it in one big hunk and then diced it up:

And sauteed it to a crisp in the frying pan. Since I’ve already posted the process of making this bread, I figure I’ll just skip to the end . . . here’s the dough done fermenting:

Because I was jealous of everyone else’s gorgeous Casatiellos made in cake pans with parchment paper sides, I decided to do the same for this try:

I used an 8″ cake pan and made sides out of parchment paper so that the bread could grow vertically far beyond the top of the pan. And grow it did! Look at it after it finished proofing:

When it came out of the oven I was even more surprised to find how much oven spring it had! Compared to my last attempt, well . . . there is no comparison!

I thought it was funny that the bread came out with a sort of hourglass shape, I have no idea what I did that caused it! Isn’t it funny-looking?

In this picture you can see that it grew so much, the top actually touched the oven tray above it and got an indent!

Taking a slice out of the cake, uh, I mean, bread, was heaven. The cheese had spread all over and was integrated with the crumb but there were still little pockets of it every so often. The bread itself was moist and soft and fluffy. And the little salty bits of salami were like the icing on top, just enough of a kick of flavor every so often to make you feel like you had to eat every last bit.

I will certainly be making this again in the future. Only next time, maybe a half-recipe?

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.

Success! Holey Ciabatta!

For the “officially-scheduled” Ciabatta week for the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge (I just squeaked in under the wire by making this yesterday!), I decided to go with the mushroom variation. I’d actually already made the regular Ciabatta recipe during the Artos week because Artos required the same poolish starter but didn’t use it all, and I didn’t want to waste the leftover. Considering that was what, week 2 of this bread journey? It’s no wonder the holes in my first try left a lot to be desired! There’s no comparing this:

To THIS:

Wouldn’t you agree? Read on to see what I changed!

For the Mushroom Ciabatta, first you prep your mushrooms (duh) of which you have some dried:

And some fresh:

While we’re on the topic of mushrooms, I just have to complain for a minute: Why oh why are there no volume or weight measurements for the dried mushrooms in this recipe!?!?! Everything else in this book is so specific that I couldn’t believe there was nothing at all about how much dried mushroom to use. The description “5 mushrooms” really doesn’t cut it when it comes to a standard measurement, don’t you think? I ended up using about 5/8 oz of dried mushrooms for mine, in case you want some sort of number to work from . . .

Anyway, you prep the dried mushrooms by soaking them in a bit of water:

And the fresh mushrooms by sauteing them with some oil and garlic:

The mushrooms will release lots of liquid, which you drain out into the dried mushroom mixture and save to use as the “water” in the recipe.

Now comes the part where I changed things from Try #1 to Try #2. I made two big changes:

1. Used more water than called for
2. Used AP flour for all the flour except the flour in the poolish.

I made these two changes after reading some discussions online and in the BBA group about other Ciabatta recipes that yielded bigger holes. If you read the sidebar in the book, it says that you can experiment by adding more water and tells you that “more is better” when it comes to water in this recipe, so I decided to use all the liquid that came out of the mushrooms. First I mixed up all the non-mushroom ingredients, then I dumped the mushrooms with all their liquid right on top:

And mixed it up until it looked like this:

I tried mixing this with the spoon but quickly found that it wasn’t working right, there were unmixed sections rolling around between chunks of mushroom and dry bits of flour. I ended up having to stick my hands in there and mix it up by hand, that way I was able to feel the unmixed parts and break them up with my fingers. As you can see, the dough was VERY wet. If you decide to mix by hand when you do this recipe, I have a killer cleanup tip for you which I picked up from the Baker’s Banter blog (King Arthur Flour): To get the wet dough off your hands, stick your hand into the bag of flour so that dry flour sticks, then rub your hands together over the trash can. Bits of dough will fall right off your fingers!

Oh, and my own tip for working with very-wet dough: Scrape as much of it as possible off the bowls before washing them! Trust me you do not want to see what a sink pipe clogged with dough looks like . . . don’t say I didn’t warn you!

As I was saying, the mushroom version was a very wet dough. Compare what it looked like after one “folding”:

With what the first ciabatta looked like at the same point:

No comparison! The mushroom one was a big blob and you could hardly tell which part was folded over the other. I think it’s possible that I went overboard on the hydration with the mushroom ciabatta, but the other one was clearly under-hydrated.

When it finished fermenting, the blob had grown so big that it spilled right off the counter onto the floor (no pictures of that, I have to draw the line somewhere!). It grew so much!

Compare how it looked set up on my brand-new couche:

To how the first try looked set up on a lowly kitchen towel:

Again, no comparison! The Mushroom Ciabatta dough was so wet that I was afraid I’d never get it off the couche. I ended up lining the couche with plastic wrap (covered with flour) before putting the bread on, just in case. The other one? Wasn’t even wet enough to hide the left-to-right folds that shaped the loaves!

I actually ended up adding a sheet of parchment paper under the loaves on the couche because I realized there was no way I was going to be able to transfer the bread from the counter to the stone without a sheet of paper to use as a peel. I just rolled each loaf onto its side using the plastic wrap, then slid the paper underneath and rolled the loaf back to its original spot, with the couche wall in between the two:

This proved crucial as dealing with a 500-degree oven is quite intimidating! You do not want to be messing around putting the bread into the oven, trust me!

I followed the instructions to make a steam oven using a pan with hot water and spraying the sides of the oven with water, but it was very nerve-wracking (just as much as it was the first time, actually). In the future I may try making one loaf without steam and one with to see if I notice the difference, I’m sure there is a good reason why this is called for but I’m not sure it’s worth doing for me personally. Too much room-for-error for my klutzy self, I could end up with a serious burn and/or a broken oven door!

When the loaves came out of the oven, I thought they might just be winners:

Compare how good they look vs. the last attempt:

Not actually ugly, but doesn’t look like ciabatta!

And the proof was in the crumb! The mushroom version was moist inside (perhaps too much? I can’t be sure) with nice big holes. The crust was crusty but not too hard to slice through. On the first attempt, each loaf was block-hard and it took a lot of effort to slice into the bread. I think it’s possible that I over-cooked the first one and slightly under-cooked the second, and in my opionion under-cooking is the way to go for this recipe! Interestingly enough, we thought that both needed more salt.The mushroom flavor was spot-on though!

Next time I make this I’m going for the onion version and will keep the other mods the same . . . or an olive version might be really good, too . . .

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.

SUCCESS!

I’m sure you all remember (you do hang on my ever word, right?!) that my first try at the Anadama bread for week 1 of the BBA Challenge was a complete failure. What I haven’t told you yet is that I actually tried again only a week later and on the second try, it came out wonderful! I don’t know why it took me so long to post about it, but here it is a month later, time to document for posterity! Looking at these pictures makes me want to make this bread again, it was really delicious!

First things first: Ingredients! After the fiasco of the first time, I wondered whether some questionable ingredient choices might be to blame. For this redo I decided to buy new cornmeal, because the stuff I used the first time was really old and not the thick “polenta” style called-for in the recipe. After consulting with my fellow BBAers I didn’t replace my decade-old molasses, though, everyone assured me it would be fine since the bottle had been sealed all this time. I really do think that the change in cornmeal made a huge difference in the finished product!

Last time, I didn’t quite achieve a windowpane, but I chalked it up to the bits of cornmeal. After hearing from others that their windowpanes were very nice despite the kernels of cornmeal, I decided to knead the heck out of the bread when I redid it. Look at the difference between the dough when I turned it out onto the counter:

And after 15+ minutes of kneading:

It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? The book says there’s very little danger of over-kneading bread, so I figured I would just go for it. My windowpane was very nice, but unfortunately there was no one home to help me take a picture of it so I have no pictures to prove it. Just trust me!

I set the dough to ferment in my awesome dough rising bucket from King Arthur Flour:

The best part of using a bucket like this? You can clearly see just how much the bread grows!

The first time I made this bread, I only baked one loaf. This time, I decided to bake 3, even though I don’t have 3 loaf pans of the right size. The recipe makes either 2 big loaves or 3 smaller loaves, but I have 2 smaller pans and one larger pan . . . so I decided to just use all 3 and not worry about different-sized loaves:

For this bread I didn’t use the book’s loaf-shaping technique, I just made log shapes and plopped them into the pans. I’m not sure it would have made much difference honestly, but I may experiment next time and shape the  loaves using different techniques to see what happens. My gut says that some techniques might yield better oven spring than others, but I have no scientific evidence to back up that thought!

As you can see, the loaves grew very nicely this time, much better than they did last time:

When they came out of the oven, I knew they were going to be awesome!

I gave one loaf to my neighbor (the one who’d given me the molasses), took one loaf to work, and Adam and I devoured the third one.

Doesn’t this crumb just make you want to rip right into a slice?!?

The texture of this bread was very unique due to the polenta cornmeal, and the flavor was rich and hearty, like something you’d eat in Vermont in the winter (I’m totally making that up, I’ve never even been to Vermont!). Even though there’s molasses in it, it’s not sweet at all which was surprising. We both particularly liked it toasted with butter, but it was plenty good just plain. I’ll definitely be making this again in the future now that I’ve figured out how to do it right!

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.

I’ve been tweaking things all over the blog during the last few days, trying to get everything set up and all the cooking posts trasfered over from Chiagu. I think everything’s going pretty well, but please let me know if you see something weird or broken!

I’ve also been gearing up to start on the BBA Challenge that Pinch My Salt has organized. There are 200 of us participating, and we’ll be working our way through every bread recipe in the inspirational Bread Baker’s Apprentice book. I just got the book today and realized I have a LOT of reading ahead of me! I’m really looking forward to reading all the non-recipe content in this book, I think it’s going to completely revolutionize my bread-baking, and maybe even allow me to come up with my own bread recipes. I’ve been playing with a garlic and herb bread recipe that isn’t quite ready for public use, but I’m sure with this book I’ll be able to finish it!

The first recipe we’re doing in this book is called Anadama and I have the dough rising right now . . . will be sticking it in the fridge to actually bake tomorrow, otherwise I’d be up until 1am making bread!