Loaf 9

This one came out nice. Used the poolish method again.

I did my best to ball up the dough before proofing it, but it still spread out in the bowl.

Also I couldn't get it off the parchment paper cleanly and wound up deflating it. I wet my hands this time and it was easier to handle, reballed it and dropped it in the hot pot. It rose higher as a result.

Whatever. It's a beautiful brown, with cracks and crevices all over. Looking forward to cutting into it tomorrow morning.

Update: NO TASTE. None. Well maybe a little in the crust. If anything it had an off taste. It looks fine, the crumb texture is fine, but it's like eating nothing.

I'm going to try one of the Peter Reinhart recipes from his Artisan Breads Every Day book.

Baguettes a la pizza stone

This time I made them on the stone in the middle rack of the oven, rather than in a french bread pan. The loaves rose much more. Nice and fat. But they needed more time in the oven to get brown. I baked them for about 30 minutes total.

It still wound up quicker, because I was able to bake 3 at a time, rather than 2 in my 2-loaf bread pan.

They look and smell terrific. I made sure they were nice and brown before I took them out. I'm sure they taste great.

I used a razor to score them. I will score deeper next time, and hopefully cleaner too. One loaf had nice clean scores and the score lines look good, even though they aren't very deep. The others look torn more than scored. I'm really nit picking here, trying for perfection. Objectively they are great.

I'm making another nk bread - I have it rising in the microwave and will bake it tonight, eat it tomorrow. Although the baguettes have more taste, the boule is better for sandwiches.

I'm reading Peter Reinhart's book - Artisan Breads Every Day. He recommends making the dough and leaving it in the fridge for up to 4 days to build flavor. Once we get rid of some of the T-giving leftovers and have room in the refrigerator I'll give it a try.

I'm far from an artisan, but my bread is consistently edible.

More baguettes

I don't have a good tool to cut the dough, so I have been using a sissors, which makes a funny looking bulge. But the loaves taste great and look pretty good otherwise.

Haven't made another nk bread, and even though the baguettes are more hassle, I don't intend to make another nk, at least for a while.

The library is holding 3 or 4 bread books for me. I should be able to find something in there to bake. Amy Scherber's (Amy's Bread) book is in there. Can't wait to see if she divulges anything.

The CIA gives layman's classes for about $250 a pop. I'd love to take one. It's pricey though. Maybe one day.

Baguettes 2

We only had one baguette left (half of one actually after breakfast) so I decided to make them again today. As usual I screwed something up, or my scale is going wacky. The poolish looked fine, and I measured the remaining ingredients carefully. But I took a look during the kneading period and noticed the dough was way, way too wet. It looked like soup.

I added a few spoonfuls of flour until it started to look like yesterday's dough. It wound up wetter than yesterday, and I thought about tossing it, but decided to just see how it would go.

After an hour I'm supposed to turn it, but it was so wet that all I could do was make a mess. After the second hour it had a little more body, but not much. I added some more flour on the board while I cut into 3 pieces it and shaped the baguettes. With a little more flour I was able to shape them, but the dough was not as pliable as yesterday and still kind of sticky.

None of the loaves rose as much as yesterday in my makeshift couche, but I baked them anyway.

I tried a different technique. Rather than use a cookie tray filled with water to add steam, I just poured water over the loaves in the french bread pan. The pan is perforated so that extra water ran off before I put it in the oven. This time I sliced the dough more parallel than yesterday.

The result was actually pretty good. The crumb, if anything was better than yesterday, although the loaves were pretty thin. The crust was about the same as yesterday, so my guess was right - the cookie sheet with water does nothing.

Overall a success. I managed to repair whatever was wrong with the dough preparation and the loaves came out just fine. I finished one, and the other two are in the freezer.

We went to dinner last night to an italian restaurant. A family place, not fancy. They serve bread on the table and my wife remarked it wasn't as good as mine! I felt a surge of pride until I tasted the bread. Wonder bread is better. The restaurant bread was stale, hard and tasteless. So much for pride. My bread is better than bread that was so bad it was basically bird food. Hurray!

Baguette

I wrote so much about how great the baguette recipe is that I decided to make it. Two are out of the oven, and one is still in.

They look pretty good. I use a bread pan, that only has room for two - the three loaf pan doesn't fit in my tiny oven.

Can't wait to taste them.

I tried to get some additional steam in the oven by putting a cookie sheet on the lower rack and pouring 2/3 of a cup of water into it after I put the loaves in. I think this adds to the baking time. The loaves came out lighter than I remember and I had to leave them in another 5 minutes or so to brown the crust.

Update:

Well done, once again. Tastes great. Because the crust to crumb ratio of a baguette is higher than a boule you get some crust in every bite, which adds to the flavor. Saltier and sour-er than the nk bread.

Appearance-wise, probably should have cut the loaves lengthwise more than I did.

Crumb was light and fluffy, with small holes. Not like Amy's version, which had big holes and a creamy crumb that was more like the crumb in the nk bread. My baguette crumb was kind of white-bready. But still good - soft, and tear-y.

The experience of making baguettes is totally different from the nk bread. The nk is a marvel of minimalism. The baguette takes more effort and equipment. You have to fold the dough during its rise, cut it, shape it, prepare a couche (I did one out of parchment paper that worked great), pour water into the oven. And yet, the bread is done a lot quicker than with the nk. I let the poolish proof for 12 hours overnight, then added the rest of the flour and started the process in the morning. The poolish was done at 6:30am and the bread was out of the oven by 10:45am. It was edible by 11:15am.

If I had made a nk bread and put it up at 6:30pm on day 1, it would have been out of the oven at 5:30pm the next day, and not edible until 8pm at the earliest.

That's quite a difference - more effort, but the bread is done nearly 9 hours sooner. And frankly, it tastes better.

Amy's Bread

Took a family trip to NYC yesterday. We started out at Lombardi's Pizza, where we had to wait about a half hour for a table. Not too bad, but we never had to wait before. The pizza ... again, not bad, but not the awesome pie we've had before. The fresh mozz was gummy and the crust not crispy, but burned on the edges. It was good, just not the high quality we've had before.

Then we headed over to the Chelsea Market, which was just fun to be there. Lots of interesting people of all stripes. Mostly everyone was eating something. If they weren't eating, they were shopping. We had some gelato and some terrific hot chocolate from a new Jaques Torres store.

And then we went to Amy's Bread. There are a number of bakeries in CM - some sell bread, most sell cakes and desserts. Amy's space is huge, most of which is taken up by the industrial part of the bakery, which is all visible through the glass walls. The actual store is quite small.

I just bought one baguette. The price - $2.25. That's it! Just $2.25!!!

The bread was perfect - crusty and chewy at the same time. Saltier than my bread. Ton's more flavor. The crumb was moist, like mine, but more delicate.

It's not right to compare a boule to a baguette, I suppose. But her bread had way, way more taste than even the last loaf.

Her baguette bag was funny. It's a long paper bag (the baguette is about a yard long), and lists the ingredients as Wheat Flour, water, yeast, kosher salt and a poolish. I wonder why she added the "poolish" part, since it's made from the same ingredients. Does she think of it as something else? Maybe I'll get her book and find out.

So .... I'm a little depressed. Here I thought I was making bread, as good as bakery bread according to Jim Lahey, and that just isn't so. Looks wise, texture wise, maybe. Taste wise, not even close.

Loaf 8 - the poolish

I know I said I would only number the first few, but I like it. Maybe I'll quit counting them once I stop messing around with the formula.

This time: I tried a poolish (pre-fermented dough). I used 1/8 tsp of yeast, and 5.25 oz each of water and bread flour, and let it sit overnight. Weight-wise, that's 150 grams each for the water and flour. The next morning I added the remaining ingredients, per the NK bread recipe - the rest of the flour, water, the salt and another 1/8 tsp of yeast. I left it to rise for about 12 hours.

The point? I used this poolish to make french bread baguettes, per a recipe from the King Arthur Flour site, which tasted amazing. So I am hoping the poolish fermentation will do the same for the NK.

It's baking now, and I can't wait to find out how it tastes.

Update: It looks pretty good. I baked it until it had enough color and didn't bother to test it with the thermometer. Not going to cut into it tonight. Too bad.

It's still flatter than I want it. Nitpicking, but I guess I need to proof it in a smaller bowl, or make the dough ball smaller before I start to proof it.

Update2: Cut it open the next morning. There is a definite taste difference due to the poolish, but it's subtle, not the blast of taste that I remember from the baguette recipe. It's a clear improvement, and I don't know why I wouldn't keep doing it this way. It has a slightly sour taste, kind of like rye bread. The texture of the crumb, the size of the holes, and the crust are unchanged by the poolish. It just enhances the taste.

The crumb was still a bit moist even after cooling/drying overnight. The crust became a little tough and chewy. My guess is that the drying process moves moisture from inside the bread to the outside, via evaporation thru the crust. The crust must absorb some of that moisture and loses its crispiness. That's not really a big deal, because I just put a couple of slices in the toaster oven for a few minutes, not long enough to toast the bread, and it dried out the crust. I got back that "shattering" crispy crust.

This is the closest to perfect loaf I've made so far. The next one - I will try to get the loaf to rise a little higher, by balling it up tighter for it's final proof. I watched the Jim Lahey/Mark Bittman video again, and Jim uses a lot more flour than I do when he's folding the dough. I guess I can use more too. It will make it more manageable/less sticky. I think I'll use more flour on the parchment too, so it will just flop out into the pot, rather than peel off. I don't mind if there is flour dusting the loaf when it comes out of the oven - makes it look that much more rustic. As long as I don't get uncooked flour inside the loaf, like I did with one of the early loaves, it will be fine.

The timing with the poolish seems easy to work around.
Day 1 - Put the poolish up after dinner. Let it sit overnight.
Day 2 - Add the rest of the recipe before I leave for work in the morning. Start proofing it after dinner in the evening. Bake it, and let it cool overnight.
Day 3 - Enjoy the bread.

Making these loaves have been fun, and the results tasty. Other than the french bread baguette recipe, this is the best bread I ever made, and it's a lot less fuss than the baguettes.

I'm taking my family into NYC (we live about 50 miles from the city) tomorrow. The plan is to have lunch at Lombardi's Pizza, down near Little Italy, then maybe make our way to the Chelsea Market (home of the Food Network). The "market" is just a building, with some shops in the lobby. There is nothing much to see there, but there is an Amy's bread store, 1 or 2 gelato places, a restaurant supply shop, an amazing butcher, and some fish and vegetable places. For a lobby, actually there is quite a lot, but it's not a food cornucopia, like Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Maybe we'll have time to visit Jim Lahey at the Sullivan Street Bakery.

Speaking of Arthur Avenue, we have to get back there one of these days. The bread is amazing, the bread sticks ... Amazing, the pizza ... Amazing and best of all there is a fresh pasta place, I forget the name, Borgatta's I think. It's across the street from the church on 187th street. They make fresh pasta and sell it by the sheet, slicing it to whatever width you like. They make their own fresh pasta ravioli. The place always mystified me. The pasta is spectacular, melt in your mouth, best thing you ever ate. But they charge practically nothing for it. I would think that they would have people lined up out the door 24 hours a day if they moved to Manhattan. But instead, it's just a neighborhood place, never that crowded, and they don't charge enough. Just one of the gems of NYC.

We used to visit Arthur Avenue all the time, when we lived 20 minutes away in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The Arthur Avenue Bread Co. supplies bread all over the city, and the smell of the bread baking in the evening was magical. Speaking of not charging enough, the bread co., should have charged for breathing their air. I would have paid.

Arthur Avenue is not far from the Bronx Zoo, and given that we lived so close, we went to the zoo with my son all the time. One year he was there 14 times. Now that we live so far, and the kids are nearly grown, we hardly get over there. The zoo does a nice job around the holidays, with festive lights and toasted marshmallows. Maybe we'll get back there next month.