Armenian "Barbary" Bread

This lovely flatbread comes from Nick Malgieri's The Modern Baker. This book incorporates shortcuts into the recipes, for the "modern" baker who may not have time for a bread recipe that requires 3 rises and 12 hours. The book jacket states that the aim was for most of the recipes to have under an hour of prep time. If you're someone who loves baking but has trouble fitting it into your schedule, this is a cookbook you may want to take a look at. Breads, cakes, sweet and savory pies, quick breads... there's a very nice selection here.



This came together very easily. A 4-to-1 mix of all-purpose flour and whole wheat flour, plus a couple of teaspoons of salt make up the dry ingredients. Another bowl gets the yeast and warm water, along with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Slowly add the flour mixture into the yeast mixture, give a quick knead, and set aside to rise for 1-2 hours. Divide the dough in 2, shape into long ovals, let it rise for another hour, and then bake for 20 minutes.

The finished bread has a wonderful flavor from the whole wheat flour and the olive oil. The whole wheat flavor isn't overpowering, but adds a nice subtle heartiness to it. We had this with beef stew, and the bread stood up to it nicely.



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Recipe: Armenian "Barbary" Bread from The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri

Space needed: Moderate
A couple of bowls and enough counter space to be able to work the dough for a few minutes. The shaped loaves rise on the baking sheets for an hour, so you also need room to stash the sheet during the rising time. I was able to fit both of my loaves on one baking sheet, so I needed less room for that.

Cost: Under $5
$3.15 as written for two loaves. The two loaves should serve 7-8 people, so one serving runs about $0.40 to $0.45. The yeast price I have here is for the 3-pack of envelopes; bulk yeast is less expensive, but only worthwhile if you do a lot of baking.

Recipe amounts: AP Flour - $1.00; Whole wheat flour - $0.25; Yeast - $1.25; Olive oil - $0.65

Scottish Baps

Slashfood posted a recipe a couple of weeks ago for Scottish Baps, a flour-dusted yeast roll. It probably won't surprise anyone to hear that I bookmarked the page.

I made these today for a snow day project. The recipe is easy to follow and very accessible. Nothing fussy; I would recommend these to someone as a "first yeast baking project" in a heartbeat. The only possible headscratcher is "caster sugar" in the ingredients. If you don't have caster sugar (a.k.a. superfine sugar), you can substitute regular table sugar.

This dough came together nicely... so nicely that I didn't even have to knead it on a flat surface. I kneaded this in the same bowl that I mixed it in. After about 5 minutes of kneading, I left it to rise for an hour. Then some shaping, and the rolls started to take form:



A sprinkling of flour gives them a nice dusty look when they're done.



The finished rolls are light and soft and airy... apparently, one traditional use is to make a sandwich with fried bacon, butter, and a brown sauce. Curse you, my sadly baconless refrigerator!



Space needed: Minimal
For mine, I used one mixing bowl, one cookie sheet, and a measuring cup. I heated the milk and proofed the yeast in the measuring cup, then melted the butter in it as well.

Cost: Under $5
Total cost for the recipe is about $2.50 for 12 rolls.

Recipe: Simply Wonderful Scottish Baps from Slashfood.com

Buttermilk Quick Bread

I decided today to break the baking lull that's been going on around here. And in honor of health-conscious New Year's resolutions, and the fact that I had buttermilk that I wanted to use up (I'll leave it to you to figure out which one figured in more heavily), I give you the figure-friendly Buttermilk Quick Bread from Cooking Light's January 2009 issue.

Let me tell you, I love baking but I don't always have the best luck with quick breads. I was thrilled to open the oven to find this gorgeously browned loaf waiting.


After a long 10 minutes, I cut into it, hoping that the exterior wasn't just taunting me. I feared finding an undercooked mess, or a dried-out crumbly loaf, or a brick...

Instead, I got this:


Lovely, moist bread. There's a nice sweetness to it from the sugar, and the buttermilk really shines here. The sweet/savory aspect reminded me a bit of cornbread.

Big points for easiness. Mix ingredients; bake. In the interests of saving myself a tiny bit of clean up, I melted the butter in the loaf pan in the oven while it was preheating. This gave me the melted butter and the greased pan in one step, and I didn't have to get out another bowl for butter melting purposes. Score!



Cooking Light's nutritional info says that this has 137 calories and 4.6g of fat in a slice. You'd never guess from eating it. Yum.

Recipe: Buttermilk Quick Bread from Cooking Light magazine, January 2009

Sweet Spelt Sourdough Bread

Oh no, she's breaking out the whole grains...

I promised healthier after my eggs and cheese and butter extravaganza in the previous post, so here's the Sweet Spelt Sourdough Bread from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking.



Spelt is a new grain for me. The natural store that I shop at carries it, and I got a 1 lb bag on a whim a couple of months ago. I haven't found tons of recipes using spelt, as it's only recently started gaining popularity. This sourdough recipe not only provided a way to use some of the spelt that I'd bought, but also gave me an excuse to poke my starter and see if it was still going strong after several months hibernating in the refrigerator (answer: Yes. Sweet Fancy Moses, yes. It'll probably outlive me.).

The recipe calls for an all-spelt levain. Bakers have a whole bunch of terms that mean "starter".. levain is one of them. It's kind of an intermediate step between your permanent starter and the finished dough. Basically, take a little bit of your starter, feed it, and that's your levain. This recipe actually calls for you to begin with a spelt starter... my starter is good ol' AP flour and bread flour, and I absolutely wasn't going to convert the whole thing to spelt just for the 2 tablespoons that are used to make the levain. I used two tablespoons of my existing starter, fed it with the amounts of spelt and water specified, and set it on my warm oven to ferment. ("Room temperature" for bread tends to be warmer than my room temperature here. Any time I see that something needs to rise at room temperature, I turn on the oven as low as possible and set the rising container on top.)

Now, here's where my fun really started. The basic sourdough recipe that I've made in the past calls for the levain to expand for up to 16 hours... my yeast does this in 4 hours. Using the (faulty) assumption that I would also have a faster rise with this one, I started its 12-hour rise at 5:30 pm on Friday. I figured, even if it took half the time called for, I'd still be able to make the dough around 11:30, nap during rise times, and take fresh baked bread in to work with me Saturday morning.

Of course, this time it took the full 12 hours to rise. I stashed it in the fridge so it wouldn't continue to expand so quickly while I was at work and then out Saturday evening. I got the levain out on Sunday morning, let it come up to room temperature, and then made my dough. This dough was hard as a rock. It sucked up all the liquid and still left about half a cup of dry flour on the bottom of the bowl. I added enough water to make a very wet and loose dough with the flour that hadn't been absorbed, and folded that into the rest of the dough. Slowly, it started to loosen up to a point where I could actually knead it.



From there, all that was left was to let it rise, shape it, slash it, and stick it in the oven. The recipe calls for one 8" x 4" loaf pan... the one size I don't have. I split my dough into one 7" x 3" and two mini-loaf pans, baked the two mini-loaves for 30 minutes each and the larger one for 40 minutes. After all the various things that had gone wonky with this bread, I wasn't expecting much, so I was very pleasantly surprised to pull out 3 nice, risen, crusty loaves of bread.

The flavor of this is completely unlike any bread I've ever had, and one mini-loaf was entirely gone within two hours. The most surprising thing to me was that, while it smells like regular ol' whole wheat bread, there's none of the bitterness that you sometimes get with whole wheat flour. The finished bread is slightly sweet, slightly tangy (from the natural starter), with a dense crumb that's not overly chewy. Great toasting bread.

Monkey Bread

This was the most "wizard" looking baked good I could think of to bring in for our mondo Hogwarts extravaganza day...



Monkey Bread from The Bread Bible, tweaked a little bit to cut down on the sticky/gooey factor. Sticky doesn't work well in a library. I didn't use all of the brown sugar/butter mixture, and I left out the raisins, pecans, and glaze entirely. Still turned out tasty and moist, but not so sweet that it was cloying. This is a nice thing to make for a large group of people; it's already portioned and everyone can just tear off however much they want.

No angel food pan here, so I made it in two standard loaf pans instead. It took about 45 minutes to bake.

I had been intending to dye the dough 4 or 5 different colors so that the individual dough balls would be different colors. Good in theory, but I ended up not having time to do it. I dyed some of the dough pink, and wound up with a nice pink swirled dough in some places.

Cinnamon Raisin Loaf

I've been wanting to bake something to bring into work, and decided to make the Cinnamon Raisin Loaf from The Bread Bible (minus the raisins). It struck me as something that would be nice to have early on a Monday morning as we're getting ready for another week of lost library cards and weird altercations in the parking lot.

And if you can't tell, yes, I'm more-or-less baking my way through this book. "More or less" because I'm allergic to nuts, and there are a few nut-heavy recipes in there.

This bread, again, starts out with a dough sponge. Even though yesterday wasn't especially humid, I ended up needing to add a CUP more flour than the recipe calls for just to get it from "thick batter" to "kneadable dough" status. This isn't one of the recipes with listed errors, but 1 3/4 cups of water plus about 4 cups of flour seems off to me. However, seeing that I was supposed to have a "soft dough", I just added flour 1/4 cup at a time until I had something that felt like the right texture.

Once the dough has risen, it goes into the refrigerator to firm up so that it can be flattened into a rectangle. The dough is then coated with an egg wash and a cinnamon-sugar mixture, rolled up, left to rise again, and then baked.

Finished loaf cooling:


Yes, that's some cinnamon leakage on the side:


Sliced, showing actual SPIRALS!


The finished bread is moist and dense; I can't wait to try toasting up a slice or two. It's not too sweet, and makes a perfect breakfast treat.

"Levy's" Real Jewish Rye Bread

Today was the day, folks. It was finally time to branch out beyond wheat-based flours. I am enough of a dork that I'm excited by that. :)

I decided to finally make use of some of the rye flour that I got a few weeks ago. This called for rye bread. Specifically, a loaf of "Levy's" Real Jewish Rye Bread out of The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

My initial impression after reading the recipe? "Wow... that's all the rye flour that's used?" I naively had been expecting a rye bread to be mostly rye flour, but this particular one is mostly bread flour, with just 3/4 cup of rye flour.

This book hasn't let me down yet, so I went with it. I gathered up my ingredients: Arrowhead Mills Organic Rye Flour, Pillsbury bread flour, bulk instant yeast from the natural market, generic honey, sugar, and salt. The recipes calls for caraway seeds, which I didn't have, so I used sesame seeds instead. "Sesame Rye" had a nice ring to it.

Like many of the recipes in TBB, this bread starts with a sponge that ferments from 1 to 4 hours. I usually jump on my sponges after barely an hour, out of sheer impatience. This one, though, I allowed to sit for almost the full 4 hours. It was very perky by the end of the 4 hours, ready to be mixed and kneaded and left to proof.



I was very pleasantly surprised to see a tan dough, with lots of rye speckles... so much for my worries that there wasn't enough rye flour. The dough doubled in about 1.5 hours, got a gentle punching down via the "letter fold" method, and then doubled again.

Shaping time. I wanted this bread for sandwiches, so I eschewed the freeform loaf called for in the recipe in favor of a loaf pan. One last 45 minute rising, and then into the oven with some ice cubes for a nice chewy crust. It baked for 45 minutes, and came out like so:



And I know bakers want to get a gander at the inside:




The crumb is dense, moist, chewy... I love this bread. It's absolutely going into my standard rotation. And since rye flour is a whole grain flour, it has all of those whole grain health benefits--excellent! :)

The Easiest 100% Whole Wheat Bread Ever

For Earth Day, I decided to do a little bit of whole grain baking. I don't know if it's really in the "spirit" of Earth Day, but it made sense in my head at the time. :)

A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally got a copy of the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cookbook (it was the featured selection for the mail-order cookbook club I'm in, and I missed the reply date to stop them from sending it). Anyway, as I looked through the book, I knew it would be staying here. I'd been wanting to use more whole grains in my baking, and this book fell in my lap at exactly the right time.

After paging through it and filling my head with too many ideas, I had a flour spree at the natural market. Rye flour, white whole wheat flour, and spelt flour... in addition to the all-purpose flour, bread flour, and regular whole wheat flour I already had on hand. I think I may have a problem.

This afternoon, I busted out a quick 100% whole wheat bread--specifically, "The Easiest 100% Whole Wheat Bread Ever". It's a yeast bread, but comes together much more like a quickbread. Everything is mixed together in a bowl, with no kneading. After mixing for a couple of minutes, you put the dough in a loaf pan to proof for an hour (although the recipe does warn that the dough will not actually "rise" at all), and then bake it for about 45 minutes. They're not kidding about the "easy" part.

Results?

Really nice, sweet flavor, thanks to orange juice and molasses in the dough. Because there wasn't much kneading, the finished bread turned out dense and moist. It fell apart pretty easily--again, no kneading will do that. And check out the color:


The recipe note suggested a light slathering of cream cheese... who am I to argue? :)

Beer Bread

Got in some baking time last night:


That's a couple of slices of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Beer Bread. I've made a few different beer bread recipes over the years, some with yeast, some without. Overall, I think I like the yeast recipes better. The beer quickbreads that I've made have come out really dense and cakey. That's fine, but with beer bread, I don't want to feel like I'm eating cake. The yeast recipes come out much lighter, although they obviously take longer because of the rising time.

This recipe has both whole wheat flour and white bread flour in it, along with a little bit of either malt powder or sugar to balance out the bitterness from the beer and whole wheat flour. I usually use a stout or a porter for beer bread, but for this one I used some Wolaver's brown ale, which yielded a lighter color bread with a more subtle beer flavor to it. Put some butter and honey on a warm slice of this... that's a couple of minutes of happiness right there. :)

Pretzel Bread

And, if there's "part 1" of homemade snackage, you know there's a part 2... I made a batch of the intriguing-sounding "pretzel bread" rolls from The Bread Bible. They're rolls crossed with soft pretzels: how bad can that be?

First, the with-flash shot of the full batch right out of the oven:



And here's the nicer natural light shot:


I take SEVERE issue with this recipe claiming that you should be able to get 12 rolls out of the amount of dough it makes. I had 8 normal-sized rolls, and they'd have to be really tiny in order to give you a full dozen.

Other than that minor problem, this was a nice recipe. I was raised on Philly soft pretzels, the ones from the street carts that are big and doughy and wonderful, and I miss them. These rolls are definitely NOT soft pretzels, but they have that same dense chewiness that I love.

I didn't do the lye glaze, because lye kind of scares me. You're not supposed to touch it with bare hands because you might get a chemical burn from it... but I'm supposed to put it on rolls that I'm going to eat? Maybe somewhere down the line, but not today. I did the same sugar/baking soda glaze used for the bagels in the book, with good results.

This is a nice, easy, fast recipe -- a yeast bread that takes 2 hours total? Yay!

Sacaduros

The sacaduros were a bit of a process, but well worth the effort. Would I make them for a huge party? No. But for Thanksgiving dinner for 5 of us, making a dozen rolls wasn't a problem.

The recipe comes from The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. It calls for a batch of the Basic Hearth Bread dough from the same book. The Hearth Bread has become my standard crusty bread recipe, so even though this was a new recipe, I was familiar with the basic dough.

Once the dough is made, you tear off pieces that are about 2 tablespoons (or, if you're me, "that-looks-roll-sized" pieces... very precise). Roll them into a ball, then flatten into a disc. You then fold the dough around a cube of butter, making a sealed package. The recipe calls for 1/2" cubes, but I thought that would be overkill, so I used a 1/2" cube for every 2 rolls, cutting the butter in half. Knowing my family, I figured that even if I told them repeatedly that the rolls had butter in them, they'd still add more butter (which is exactly what happened).

Once the roll is shaped, you place it sealed-end down into a bed of flour, and continue shaping the remaining rolls. The recipe and I differed hugely on the next point. According to the recipe, you're NOT supposed to brush the excess flour off of the rolls before baking. However, my rolls were absolutely covered in flour, so much so that they resembled powdered sugar doughnuts. I brushed most of the excess off, leaving just a dusting of flour on the tops.



They came out great. Nice chewy crust, and very moist inside thanks to the butter.

And every time I page through this book, I'm reminded of exactly how many things I still have to try out...

Naan

Last night on my other blog, I pondered about whether or not a home cook without a tandoor oven would be able to make decent naan. Naan is an Indian flatbread, and it's traditionally baked in a special oven called a tandoor oven, something that's used a lot in Indian cooking. I don't have anything even close to a tandoor oven here, and if I did, I'd probably find a way to burn down my apartment building. The things burn HOT.

I turned to Nick Malgieri's A Baker's Tour, which is a book entirely about international baking. I figured, if I was going to find a decent naan recipe, it would be in this book. It's full of savory breads and pastries, sweet cakes and cookies, all adapted so that the average home cook can make them. As luck would have it, there's a recipe for naan in this book that requires either a skillet or a grill. It's a pretty standard bread dough: 4 cups of flour, 2 tsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar, 1 packet of active dry yeast (2.5 tsp), 1.25 cups warm water, and 1.5 tbsp vegetable oil. My only real complaint about this book is that the recipes assume that everyone will be making their dough in a Kitchenaid stand mixer with a dough hook. I don't have a stand mixer, so I guessed at how long to knead by hand. Flatbreads can't have too much elasticity or it's too hard to flatten and stretch out the dough. For less elasticity, you knead less. In this case, I only kneaded for about 2 or 3 minutes. The dough rises for an hour, then gets shaped into balls and rises for another hour:

Once the dough has risen, you heat up a skillet, covered. The skillet needs to be as hot as possible in order to properly cook the naan. One at a time, the balls of dough are flattened, stretched into 8" rounds, and then cooked in the skillet, covered, for about 2 minutes on each side. To finish, you brush them with melted butter and serve.

They turned out great; not exactly like the naan I've had at Indian restaurants, but close enough to make me happy. The texture was soft and tender, with just a few crispier spots on the outside where the dough had charred. Next time, I'm going to try to get them thinner, and I may also add some garlic to the dough. Garlic makes everything better, right?

Technorati tags: Cooking, food, Indian food, naan

Sourdough

To make sourdough bread, you need two things: a healthy and active starter, and some patience.

Wild yeast takes longer to get its job done than commercial yeast. I can turn out a loaf of country white bread in about 6 hours, and that includes making a sponge and letting the dough rise twice. A bare-bones bread recipe with no sponge and only one rise takes me 3-4 hours. Sourdough? Anywhere from 30-48 hours. Starting on a loaf of sourdough means knowing that you'll be getting the end result some time the next day.

The first phase involves expanding your starter. This wakes up your yeast and multiplies it to quantities that will be able to leaven a loaf of bread. Start with two tablespoons of stiff starter, and feed it with about 1/3 cup of bread flour and 2 tablespoons of water. Let it double, then toss half of it, and feed the rest with 2/3 cup of bread flour and 3 1/2 tablespoons of water. Let it double again.


This is my starter expanding. The bubbles all around the sides are a good sign. This stage can take up to 16 hours, unless you have whatever weirdo mutant strain of yeast that I have in my apartment, which gets the job done in less than 4 hours.

So, now there's an expanded starter, and now you can actually start making your dough. Take 2/3 cup of the expanded starter, add 1 1/4 cups of bread flour, 2/3 cup of warm water, and a teaspoon of salt. Knead for 5 minutes, let rest for 20 minutes, then knead again for 5-10 minutes.

Let the dough rise for an hour, and punch it down. Repeat. Then let the dough rise until doubled.


Ok, now the dough is risen. However, it's very moist and very soft, and if you threw it in the oven right now, you'd end up with a big flat pancake...


...so the next step involves putting the dough into a towel-lined colander and letting it rise until it's doubled. This pulls moisture out of the dough, creating a skin that will hold the dough together when you bake it. (It also makes a spiffy design on the crust.)

After 25 minutes of baking...




Crusty outside, chewy inside, with a nice tangy flavor. Not bad for a day and a half, especially considering that you don't have to do anything with the dough for most of that time. I should definitely do this more often than once every 5 months.

Technorati tags: Baking, bread, cooking, sourdough