The Bread Bible: Traditional Challah

Well, here we are finally at the 2018 Bread Bible Bakers' schedule. Only a month behind now if you don't count the Banana Feather Bread I still have to make from the 2017 schedule. I'm not counting it.

The January bread is the Traditional Challah. We made challah early in this bake-through but for the first challah we used the recipe from Rose's website at her suggestion. The first recipe uses a biga which sits for three days in the fridge and, since I didn't need it to be pareve, I used butter rather than oil.

January's Traditional Challah uses an overnight starter and a great many eggs (5). I used oil instead of butter this time since I thought I should try the traditional pareve version. It is also moistened by quite a lot of honey although I ran out and topped it up with some golden syrup I had on hand. (you know things have got completely out of hand in your kitchen when you find yourself with two containers of golden syrup)

Although it was quite some time ago that I made the first challah, I still remember how soft and moist it was. The second challah did not compare as favourably. Although it was quite soft and had a lovely flavour, it didn't have that brioche-type softness of the first. I have to say, this didn't stop one of my colleagues commenting on the delicious smell as I toasted a piece for second breakfast one morning.

Rose suggested we use the website recipe specifically because it was 'new and improved' on the Bread Bible recipe. However I suspect that the use of butter instead of oil would also make a difference to the Bread Bible recipe.

Since I had already tried out the four strand challah shape I made a slightly smaller three strand loaf and a one strand loaf. The four strand is more spectacular but the three strand is pretty good. I had to fit it in my toaster oven so it doesn't have the desired tapering at the ends. 

I forgot to take a photo of the one strand loaf. I really like this shaping method - it was satisfying in the way that cleverly designed packaging is (or maybe that's just me).

I also forgot to keep on eye on the larger loaf and just caught it before it went from burnished umber to undeniably burnt. One thing I'm wondering, after my two attempts at challah, is why I get those striations on the dough - they happen when I'm rolling out the strands of dough before I plait them. Perhaps I'll go and google it.

The February bread is Spicy Herbed Breadsticks which I hope I get done before the end of March :) You can have a look at how the other bakers went over here.   

The Bread Bible - crumpets

If you hadn't read the title of this post you might wonder what the blob in the photo is. It was meant to be a crumpet. I've made these before with modest success during the bake-through of the Baking Bible. This recipe is from the Bread Bible and the main difference between the two is, as Rose notes in the introduction to the crumpet recipe in the Baking Bible, there is more liquid in the latter. (Although I didn't read that until after I'd attempted these crumpets.)

This is obvious when you make the Bread Bible crumpet batter which, for me, was more like a loose bread dough. It certainly didn't 'pour' into the crumpet rings. I used the scalded milk option for liquid in this recipe instead of the alternative low fat milk powder and water. I'm not sure if this affected the density of the batter also. 

The good news is that despite the slightly more bready than crumpety texture of the crumpets they were extremely tasty (straight out of the frying pan with  bit of butter). This is an extremely easy recipe (liquid issues not withstanding) requiring only patience while the batter proofs a couple of times.

This post was a catch up (I'm in perpetual catch-up) for Rose's Bread Bible baking group. Have a look at the main baking group website to see how the others are going. I've made the January Traditional Challah (post coming soon) and am next on to February's Spiced Herb Breadsticks.

The Bread Bible - Walnut Fougasse

I tried to make Walnut Fougasse and instead I modelled the face of a seven-eyed alien - potentially the next Dr Who nemesis (Evil Dr Fougasse, perhaps?). Apt since I wasn't overly taken with this bread. I'm not sure if I did something wrong but the dough had an odd texture when I first mixed it. It improved upon proving but the process was finicky and then I found the end result too rich and greasy for my taste. So, unfortunately not a success for me, which was a shame because it looked and sounded so exotic.

I ate some with pea and ham soup I had in the freezer (the soup was in the freezer because I wasn't overly taken with it when I made it...). While not the best meal I've ever had I did achieve that virtuous feeling you get when eating two homemade things you're not that fussed about.

I'm way behind the Bread Bakers schedule but I think I'm up to pizza next. Yay!

The Bread Bible - Flaxseed Loaf

I spent absolutely aaaages searching on the internet for the pumpernickel flour which you need for this recipe. In the terrible, time-wasting way that the internet seems to inspire, I kept searching long after I had made the decision not to order it from overseas (which seemed to be my only option for true pumpernickel flour, although it's possible I could have sourced a freezer-busting 5 kg bag of dark rye within Australia). In the end I used the ordinary rye flour I had in the freezer from another Bread Bible project. 

The difference between the ryes, I seem to remember from my web travels, is that the rye is toasted or cooked in some way to make the pumpernickel which is what makes it the darkest, densest rye flour. Anyhow, after all the floury hoohaa, my loaf turned out really well and was particularly delicious toasted, as Rose points out in the recipe. It has a really lovely nutty flavour and is satisfyingly robust.

The flaxseed, which I don't remember having seen up close before, is a pretty, glossy brown seed. It wasn't immediately obvious in the recipe but it needs to be cracked before use for this loaf.

How many food processor attachments does it take to crack flaxseed? Hint: it's harder than it looks. The small food processing bowl didn't even make a dent on the flaxseed. The little grinding attachment was more successful.

There's also plain white bread flour and wholemeal flour in this, so this is another loaf which gives you that smug, healthy feeling. This was a very easy and quick loaf to make. I was too lazy to get the loaf tin out of the overstuffed drawer, so I made a boule shape which turned out very well. Another loaf to be (quietly) proud of. 

Next up is the Walnut Fougasse which is apparently a bit like focaccia with walnuts.

Bread Bible - Olive Bread

I can't remember many of the details of making the olive bread, it was so long ago. I think it was pretty delicious from memory but not my most successful loaf. Not much oven spring and it looks a bit spongy in the photo below. Maybe the oven wasn't hot enough. I should try it again, and if I did I would double the dough because it makes a very small loaf.

I don't know what this photo was about - maybe the texture of the dough? It looks silky smooth.

A makeshift banneton using a tea towel.

The olive bread is the last of my catch-up posts. I have Flaxseed bread cooling on the bench right now so hopefully I'll post about that this week. Or at least within three months :)

Bread Bible - Levy's Real Jewish Rye Bread

My memory of baking this bread is hazy in the extreme, but judging by the number of photos I have of the finished product, I was pretty happy with it. I do remember Rose saying that this type of rye bread was a favourite when she was young. I was surprised by that because it's very strongly tasting of caraway, which is not a taste that children of my acquaintance are fond of (and one I wasn't keen on when young). Luckily I'm keen on it now and I made short work of eating my loaf. It's not at all heavy with rye, with just enough to leave you with a smug aura of healthiness (as you slather on the butter).

I'm pretty proud of my slashes and the oven spring I got with this loaf. If only I knew how I did it...

Still to come in my catch-up posts - Olive Bread.

Bread Bible - Ginger Scones

Late last year, with the maelstrom that is Christmas, the end of the work year* and the beginning of summer holidays, I missed a few of the monthly Bread Bible projects. I've caught up with some of them - including my current favourite, the Basic Hearth Bread. Next on my list is the November 2016 project of Creamy Ginger Scones. 

I made these a while ago now but with the demise of the weekly discipline of the Baking Bible bake-through, my blogging mojo (always pretty tardy) has almost completely faded away. I have two other Bread Bible posts lined up to finish, hopefully I can whip up a bit of enthusiasm and get them out before I forget all the details.

These scones are really delicious. I mean really delicious. I urge you to make them. Unless you don't like ginger, in which case, don't. I'm going to make them next time I visit my parents because my mother would absolutely love them. She's always been a devotee of those old fashioned Chinese vase-like containers of glace ginger. Something I wasn't keen on as a child but now appreciate.

As I remember these were easy to make. I used glace ginger in the scones instead of the recommended crystallised ginger. This is only because I read the back of the two packets (i.e. glace and crystallised), while standing at the supermarket shelf, and the glace one had a 'perfect for baking' label on it, and a recipe for scones on the back (not as good as this recipe). So glace it was.

I was waaaay too lazy to whip the cream before I mixed it into the dough. This is meant to make the scones airy-er. And it might do. I'll never know.

I'm thinking that next time I might try then with milk rather than cream because for me they were overly rich. However, providing yet another reminder that it's all in the beholding, my colleagues thought otherwise. One of them asked for the recipe and another told me he 'really liked the stodginess' (thanks Che).

I also loved these scones because it gave me an excuse to show off my new Christmas-present-teapot (thanks J & M).

*Or that's how I like to think of it even though, disappointingly and in actual fact, work keeps rolling on.

Next up I'll be posting about Jewish rye bread and olive bread.

Bread Bible - Hearth Bread

I realise that this is a bit over-the-top but I'm in love with this bread. I can't tell you how happy I am to know that I can produce this chewy, dense type of bread with a great flavour. This is the bread I have been waiting for all my life, or at least since I started baking bread about two years ago. And I didn't have to fiddle-faddle around with a sourdough starter (I've never had/used one but it sounds tricky).

Making this bread is a pretty straightforward process, using a starter which ferments, in my case, overnight in the fridge. It makes a reasonably wet dough but not one that's difficult to deal with at all. I read Rose's tips for success with this artisan-style bread and tried to make sure the bread didn't proof too fast. This can be a problem in Darwin's hot climate. There can't be too many people reading this who have to put their bread dough closer to the air conditioner to keep it cool.

It's obviously not perfect - I know that artisan style means a big holey texture which I haven't quite achieved - but it's mine and I love it anyway. The only issue was that I couldn't stop 'trying' piece after piece. 

My dough developed a pimple or two on the last rise. I'm not sure if this means it's over-proofed?

You can see the wildly uneven slashes on the top of the bread. I'm always so nervous about cutting into the top of my lovely risen bread dough - in my mind's eye I see it deflating like a balloon - so I panic and end up slashing it like a newbie serial killer.

I was so happy with the crust when I took it out of the oven. My new baking stone had worked like a charm and the crust was thick and hard. It didn't stay crisp in the humidity but it was still lovely and chewy. 

Next up are the Ginger Scones.

Bread Bible - Herb Spiral Bread

I have a few breads to make (four to be exact) to catch up with the Bread Bible Bakers' monthly schedule. I got a bit behind at the end of last year. I did make this herb version of the Cinnamon Spiral Bread last year just before I went interstate for Christmas. And when I say just before, I mean a few hours before I caught the plane. Which is why I forgot to take a photo of the finished bread.

I made the cinnamon version for the Baking Bible bake-through so I decided to try the herb alternative. It's a very easy bread to make and I didn't have any problems either time. I used a mixture of spring onion, chives and parsley in the spiral but it turned out to be too oniony (my own fault for using both chives and spring onion). I think it would have been better with cream cheese or something else to smooth out the herby taste.

This is a nice bread but, as a savoury bread, it's not really sturdy enough for my taste. I really like the rustic rip-it-apart-with-your-bare-teeth kind of bread. I'm looking forward to making the hearth bread the beginning of which is currently fermenting in my fridge. But up next on the blog will be the Irish Soda Bread.

Caramel Sticky Buns

The Bread Bible recipe for July was the delectable Caramel Sticky Buns. The name really says it all - how could they be anything but good? I really enjoyed baking these, as I do with most yeast recipes, and they turned out to be delicious. I did find their degree of deliciousness was affected by their treatment post-baking. The first small batch I baked (seen in the photo below) were tipped out and eaten after a very short while. You can see the caramel sauce is on top of the buns. The second larger batch (which I don't have an upside down picture of) I took out of the oven and turned upside down into foil where they sat for a couple of hours. When we came to eat them they were soaked in caramel, all the way through. That batch won the deliciousness stakes hands down.

I made a few substitutions just for convenience's sake, using dark brown sugar instead of muscovado, walnuts instead of pecans and brandy instead of rum (I found the little bottle of rum later). I don't think they would have made much difference to the end result except perhaps for the dark brown sugar which resulted in a very dark caramel. 

I always post way too many photos of bread recipes but I can't help it - I love watching the dough puffing up into something that is so much more than the sum of the ingredients.

Caramel. It's been talking to its close cousin, toffee, and now it hates me too. Rose loves it and I'm baking through two of Rose's books. So I'm stuck between a rock and hard place. 

I had to add water to thin the sugar mixture before the sugar would melt properly. Just before I did that I was pretty sure the sugar was starting to burn. I guess it could have been a result of using the dark brown sugar but I'm just going to take it personally.

The caramel is poured into the bottom of the tin/s. The instructions (later on) are to carefully place the walnuts on the bottom of each bun after shaping. I think to myself - can't I just put the walnuts on top of the caramel in the tin? Guess who chose the less finicky path? In this case I don't think it made a difference to the finished product, lucky for lazybones.

I didn't take any photos of the bread dough process because it's the same brioche dough I've made several times before now. It does take a lot of time to make and it can be quite challenging to fit all the chilling and rising phases into your day. I did manage it over a couple of days without letting the dough over-rise which was my main concern.

Once the dough is ready to shape, it's rolled out and sprinkled with  sugar, cinnamon, walnuts and alcohol-soaked sultanas. Then it's rolled up and cut into little rolls which are set into the caramel to rise for the last time.

Wow. Did I mention I love to see the dough rise?

Oh wow.

I wasn't sure about the juicy, translucent look of the sultanas after soaking overnight - they looked a bit like those slugs you sometimes dig up in the garden which have never seen the light of day. But once they were cooked they just melded into the moist, caramely bun.

This little enamel tin is so cute. These buns were glazed before they were baked. The second batch weren't glazed because I put the pan of glaze back on the stove to warm it up and then promptly forgot it. Luckily I smelled it before it burnt onto the saucepan.

This second larger batch were baked without (the now burnt) glaze and had a few minutes less cooking time since I thought the first batch might have been dryer than than they should be.

The big pan I took to share with friends while we were helping a friend move house. They sat for an hour or two in foil and they were soaked in caramel and soft when we finally ate them. Strangely there are no photos. They got a definite thumbs up from the 7 and 11 year old movers. And the adults came back for seconds too.

In August we're baking the Cinnamon Raisin Loaf from the Bread Bible. I baked the recipe a few weeks ago from the Baking Bible in an attempt to catch up with a couple of Alpha Baker weeks I missed. But I think I'll try the Bread Bible recipe too, for the benefit of domestic science, you understand :)

Flaky Scones

If you're going to test out a new (-to-you) recipe, you probably shouldn't do it when you're tired and 'just trying to get it DONE'. On the other hand if you wait to bake them at a good time it might never happen. This was the circumstance in which I made the Flaky Scones from the Bread Bible.

And the short version of the story is that they weren't that successful. Being too slapdash meant that I rolled them out too thinly and generally handled them way too much to maintain the flakiness the recipe is intended to produce.

The resulting scones weren't that bad but they weren't that good either. My pride wouldn't let me take them to work which was a problem because the recipe makes a very large amount. Actually I found it much harder to handle this volume of dough gently. So I consigned them to the freezer.

These scones are richer and sweeter than classic English-style scones. They were certainly very tasty (and I've now eaten quite a few). They're not the kind of scones that need any condiments added. I think they're best served straight out of the oven. They'd make a nice comforting afternoon treat to serve to friends on a cold day with a cup of tea.

If I'd taken more care at this point, things could have been different. For someone who tends to have a heavy hand and gets carried away with the rolling pin, it might have been better to skip the multiple business letter folds and just press out the dough while it still had flakes of butter.

In July the Rose's Bread Bible Bakers are making Caramel Sticky Buns. Yum!

Raspberry (not blueberry) Muffins

The Alpha Bakers' Bread Bible project for May was Blueberry muffins. I made raspberry muffins because I'm not that fond of blueberries. These were great muffins - light and delicious with a bit of a tang from the raspberries in contrast to the sweetness of the cake. These are definitely on the make again list. In fact I would have made them several times recently except that I (luckily) don't usually have sour cream in my fridge.

The recipe only makes six muffins so if I made them again I'd at least double it. But since it was such a small amount I creamed the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon, as the recipe suggests. It wasn't that difficult but while I was doing it I thought of all the cooks pre-mechanisation, who used to to whip up large cakes by hand. They must have had some big arm muscles. No need for the gym.

The cake part of the mixture was truly delicious - possibly the influence of the sour cream? I used frozen raspberries which worked out fine despite some of them being a bit icy. I love the colour of raspberries, or any berry really. It's not only the birds their bright colours attract.

I found some shop-type paper cases in the supermarket which were very easy to use and looked quite nice. I have some left over which need using up...muffin anyone?

In June the Bread Bible Alpha Bakers' are making Flaky Scones.

New Zealand Fig and Almond Bread

It's been so long since I made the New Zealand Fig and Almond Bread I think this post will just have to be a pictorial. I can't remember too much about making it except that it wasn't too tricky. The results for me were disappointing. The flavour was nice but the texture was crumbly and dense. A nice rise and bready texture on these type of wholemeal loaves seems to elude me. I guess practice makes perfect.