My Bread Baking Adventures, Part 3: Crusty Cheese Bread

So, this bread from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day combines two of my favorite things -- crusty sourdough bread and cheese. It actually reminds me of a very different roll I used to buy at the Diamond Bakery on Fairfax in L.A. when I lived there. That roll was also filled with cheddar cheese but I believe it was made with eggy challah dough. I could never quite put my finger on what made it so special, though, until I made this sourdough bread: onions. Because they sort of melt into the dough when baking you don't get a clear, definitive oniony flavor, but it clearly has an impact. So, not only did I enjoy making and eating this bread, I got a handle on how to make a cherished favorite bread I haven't had in about 20 years.

Like Reinhart's other crusty sourdough breads, you begin with your mother starter and make a baking starter that is best refrigerated overnight. Then, on baking day, enters a wealth of ingredients not otherwise included in the levains and rustic breads I've been making from the book. Here we have milk, instant yeast, honey, diced onions, and cheese. I opted for cheddar but any hard cheese should work. I admit, I also added several cloves of minced garlic. The dough below includes everything but the cheese, which gets added later.

The dough, which was kneaded for a whole two minutes, could be refrigerated overnight or up to four days, but can also be baked on the same day and that's what I opted for. That meant it needed to rest for about 90 minutes, during which time it does an impressive rise. Then it's time to add the cheese and shape. This recipe is enough for two loaves. So, I divided the poofy dough in two, then stretched each piece into a rectangle. Unlike many of Reinhart's other doughs, this is actually very easy to work with since it isn't as wet.

Now, you can either shred, grate, or cube the cheese and add it at this point. I opted for cubing. I could also have simply kneaded the dough into the bread before shaping to avoid air pockets caused by the melting cheese, but I wanted to try Reinhart's roll-up method first.

Once you roll up the cheese into the dough, you'll shape it into a loaf and let it rise for about two hours, during which time it should swell nicely.

You can see the cheese just poking out a bit, as well as bits of onion, but don't worry about it; you're baking the loaves on a parchment paper-lined pan. Pre-heat the oven, slash the loaves, and then it's time to bake.

Yes, some of the cheese oozed out, but that's why you're using parchment paper, right? The breads were nice and crispy on the outside but very moist and with a good crumb inside. Just let the loaves cool for about an hour before slicing. It was hard to wait but worth it.

This was my New Year's Eve treat, along with a mini lasagna I'm still enjoying -- but that's another story for another day!

I hope you all had a wonderful New Year's celebration and wish you the very best in 2011!

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My Bread Baking Adventures, Part 2: Pain au Levain

 
This book just keeps impressing me more and more. Over the weekend, I made two loaves of the pain au levain, or naturally leavened sourdough bread. It's a bread that is made up of a tad of whole wheat flour with unbleached bread flour. The starter, which uses the mother starter, along with additional bread flour, wheat flour, and water, is straightforward.

Basically, this simply involves combining all the ingredients in the bowl of a mixer (or a bowl if you're doing it by hand), letting it work its mixing magic for about a minute and a half, then transferring it to a lightly floured surface and kneading for -- wow -- 30 seconds. I may use rye flour next time but here you can just see flecks of whole wheat.

I put the starter in a loosely covered, lightly oiled bowl and let it rise for eight hours. It should increase by one and a half times the original size and be nice and poofy. And, indeed, mine did and was. I then refrigerated it overnight before adding the rest of the water, flour, and salt. You can also add additional yeast, but I went for the "purist" version and let my mother starter do the work. Following Peter Reinhart's directions, you work it in the mixer briefly, then you take the now tacky soft dough out for intervals of periodic working and resting. I probably should have added a tad more flour at this point because it was still quite wet, but I stretched out the dough and folded it back on each side. Then it rested for 10 minutes. Then I did it all again. You do this three times. Then, back into the bowl to refrigerate overnight. The idea is that chilling the dough for this longer time will give it more flavor than baking on the same day. If I really wanted to intensify the flavors, I could let it sit for up to three days in the fridge.

Instead, I opted for overnight. So Sunday was baking day. I took the dough out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature for two hours. Then it was time to shape the loaves and, 45 minutes before baking, pre-heat the oven. Here's when things got dicey. I had a fairly wet dough that I put into two oiled and floured oval bannetons. I let the loaves proof for another two hours.

I probably should have added more flour to the dough earlier, but it turned out not to have mattered much given the outcome. Yes, they looked pretty awful when I turned the loaves out onto the pizza peel covered with a sheet of parchment paper. They spread, they creased. They crept into each other and I kept pushing them apart. They just didn't look like they'd turn into anything worthwhile. But into the hot oven they went and 30 minutes later...

The crust is crispy, the interior chewy and light with great tangy flavor. So, one more delicious bread to add to my arsenal. I think next time I'll also play around with olives or cheese or sauteed onions and garlic. What do you think?


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My Bread Baking Revival, Reinhart-Style

Until summer hit, I had been on a bread baking tear. Not all of it was very good. I was trying to accomplish too many things at once. On my own. I wanted breads with a crispy crust. That had a light interior texture. Lots of holes. Lots more flavor, especially my sour dough loaves. After all, I'd been nursing a starter for over a year. I was inspired by my friend Nicole Hamaker and her Bread Baker's Apprentice challenge, but for whatever reason I just wasn't paying attention to author Peter Reinhart. I was reading Joe Ortiz's The Village Baker, trying out Jim Lahey's My Bread (his no-knead tome and the ultimate bust for me), and then attempting to adapt my go-to King Arthur Flour sourdough recipe to Lahey. Wet dough, lots of proofing time (as in days), a cast iron Dutch oven. Well, it worked. Sometimes. But I couldn't figure out what I was doing that made it work or fail.

And then came summer and it was just too warm for me to bake bread. Sadly, I also let my starter languish. So, by the time I was re-energized to start again, I needed a new starter (I like the King Arthur Classic Fresh Sourdough Starter). And, I definitely was ready for a new approach.

Enter Peter Reinhart. I have both the Bread Baker's Apprentice and Artisan Breads Every Day. For whatever reason, I just hadn't really dipped into them and never got around to baking from them. My bad.

But, I picked up the latter a couple of weeks before my starter arrived and found his 50 Percent Whole Grain Rustic Bread and Pizza Dough recipe. Perfect! My mom adores whole wheat bread and I could bring it to our Thanksgiving dinner. It calls for a combination of whole wheat and unbleached bread flours, kosher salt, instant yeast, honey, water, and olive oil. That's it. Except that Reinhart offers a formula for turning the whole grain into a multigrain. I picked up a package of Bob's Red Mill Five Grain Cereal and, following Reinhart's instruction, substituted 20 percent of the whole wheat flour with the cereal. And, I think one of the keys to success with this and all other bread baking was that I measured the ingredients by weight not volume.

The loaves, which are baked to his Pain a l'Ancienne Rustic Bread -- essentially a ciabatta -- were easy to make and delicious, even though the dough for this and all the others are wet and sticky. But Reinhart has figured out the best and easiest ways to work with them so the results are a cause for celebration not frustration or heartache. These loaves were light and full of complex flavors. My mom ate half a loaf at one sitting, so I consider them a success.

It was time to move onto another recipe.

Of course, it had to be a sourdough. By now I had my starter made -- although I will also try Reinhart's version in the future. I picked his San Francisco Sourdough Bread. He has two options here: one with just his wild yeast starter (which includes the mother starter) and the other that also includes instant yeast. I went purist because I wanted a more complex, tart flavor. Adding commercial yeast would produce the bread more quickly but with that reduced time for the bread to ferment, you lose some flavor.

Now my only complaint about this book is that you start out using one recipe but you end up directed to other recipes in the book for further instructions for shaping the breads, sometimes directed from one to another to yet another -- so keep some paper bookmarks handy. You'll need them. But that's my only quibble. Reinhart's instructions are clear, the processes are simple and there's almost no kneading; instead, easy turning and then proofing -- and the results are fabulous. See?

This shot was taken when the loaves were just out of the oven. I was tickled at the rise and the apparent crispiness of the crust. But how would they taste and what would the texture be? It was a long 45 minutes of letting them cool before I could cut into one of them. But, I was delighted with the results.

I so appreciate many of Reinhart's tips. He sprinkles olive oil on his work surface instead of flour to keep the dough from sticking but without adding more flour to the dough. He keeps a bowl of water by his work surface and dips his bench scraper and hands into it to keep the dough from sticking to them. Instead of sprinkling cornmeal on a pizza peel, he uses parchment paper on the back of a cookie sheet and the bread just slides with the paper onto the preheated baking stone in the oven. Marvelous!

So, I'll be making many more recipes from this book and trying out those in The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I can't wait to try making his bagels!

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Seeing Red on Valentine's Day

Valentine’s Day food is just too easy to categorize. You have your aphrodisiacs like chocolate, honey, oysters, and ginger, your suggestive fruits like figs, and your liquid enticers like champagne. But, if you’re someone who just likes to play with your food and associates Valentine’s Day with all things red, break the mold, head to the markets, and have some fun.

It's easy to create gorgeous dishes with red foods, plus you’re giving yourself and your loved ones some wonderful antioxidant nutrients, most prominent of which is lycopene. It can dramatically lower the risk of developing prostate cancer, lung, breast, and stomach cancers, and age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s.

When we think of red foods, what first comes to mind, of course, are tomatoes, apples, watermelons, beets, red onions, and radishes. You can make a magnificent roasted red pepper soup or a divine cioppino with fresh seafood. You can bake an apple pie topped with toasted red walnuts from Terra Bella Ranch at the Little Italy Mercato.

But branch out a bit. Stunning sour cherry preserves found at our Middle Eastern markets are sexy and delicious spooned on a couple of scoops of French vanilla ice cream. Blood oranges make a colorful mimosa or margarita. Buy a bag of Trader Joe’s Golden Berry Blend of golden raisins and dried cherries, cranberries, and blueberries to create an eye-popping batch of scones or muffins.

Whether you’re preparing a special romantic dinner or having a group of friends over for Valentine’s Day, how about an appetizer of peppadews stuffed with lavender and fennel pollen-infused Cypress Grove Purple Haze goat cheese? Peppadews are a sweet piquanté pepper pickled in vinegar with salt and sugar. You can pick them up at Whole Foods and Bristol Farms, and sometimes at Taste Artisan Cheese, which is where I bought the goat cheese. Mary Palmer, who owns Taste with her husband George, offered a couple of useful tips for making these little treats. Make sure you thoroughly dry the peppers and simply cut a hole in the goat cheese package to  squeeze the cheese directly into the pepper halves. I topped each half with heart-shaped micro cabbage sprigs and a sprinkling of Alaea Hawaiian sea salt that I picked up at Specialty Produce.

In fact, Specialty Produce is a bonanza for finding red foods. They sent me home with a variety of micro greens and flowers from San Marcos-based Fresh Origins. I’ve got beet greens, dianthus, orchid blossoms, miniature radishes, opal basil, the micro cabbage leaves… All make beautiful garnishes not just on solid food dishes but for cocktails.

I also brought home some sweet little red carrots, red scallions, and a head of petite Pirella lettuce. With these I made a finger salad using each spear of lettuce as the utensil. Since the color of red carrots is only skin deep, I trimmed them and peeled just a couple of strands of skin, placing one carrot on a piece of lettuce. Then I sprinkled the plate with the Golden Berry Blend and slices of red scallions. I made a blood orange vinaigrette spiked with chipotle morita flakes, drizzled that over the salad, and finished it with a sprinkling of more chipotle morita. By the way, these chilis are a dark reddish purple variety of chili. They’re not smoked as long as the typical “ahumado” chipotle made from dried, smoked jalapeños, so they’re not considered to be the same quality as chipotles but they’re still very delicious and the flakes are colorful. 

The salad can be a prelude to a dish of baked polenta rounds topped with sundried tomato pesto. It’s an easy dish to make. You can make polenta from scratch and pour the batch into greased ramekins. let them set and unmold, or just buy a tube of prepared polenta at the market, and slice half-inch rounds. Brush each round with olive oil and then slide them into a mound of grated parmesan cheese. Cover them completely in the cheese and place on a greased pan. Bake at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes. While they’re baking, in a food processor blend drained sundried tomatoes from an eight-ounce jar with a couple of cloves of garlic, Marsala wine, grated parmesan cheese, toasted walnuts, pepper, and enough olive oil to get a creamy consistency. When the polenta comes out of the oven, top with the pesto. You can also use the pesto to stuff chicken breasts or flank steak, toss with pasta, or even top a baked potato.

Of course, you need dessert. Pick up some gorgeous strawberries now growing in Carlsbad at your local farmers market and make my friend Susan Russo's beautiful "Seductive Strawberry Zabaglione." You can also substitute or mix in raspberries. It's easy to make and who doesn't love a rich and creamy dessert? And, if you still feel you need that hit of chocolate, pick up some truffles from Eclipse Chocolat.

We’ve been talking dinner, but this year Valentine’s Day falls on Sunday. How about brunch? French toast with homemade challah is a perfect and perfectly easy dish (try the wonderful challah recipe from Peter Reinhart’s masterful cookbook The Bread Baker’s Apprentice). And, sure you can top it with maple or blueberry syrup, but let’s stick to our red theme and go with a gorgeous raspberry puree. Make this a day in advance and then bring it to room temperature. All you need to do is combine a pint of fresh raspberries, ¼ cup of sugar, a tablespoon of blood orange juice, and a tablespoon of cointreau (or just double up on the orange juice) and a small saucepan. Stir in a cup of cold water thoroughly mixed with two tablespoons of cornstarch and bring the whole thing to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for five minutes. Let it cool and then either use an immersion blender to puree the mixture or put it in a blender or food processor. You can then strain it through a sieve if you want a pure liquid sauce or enjoy the texture as it is. When you’re ready to serve the French toast, simply pour it over and garnish with some extra raspberries.

 

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