Basic Home-Style Bread

We're back, for round three!

There've been some lovely developments in our kitchen in the last couple days. Tasty things have been hanging out on our counters, like watermelon and chocolate cake.

Thanks to Rob, we've got a brand-new, candy-apple red ice cream maker!

And thanks to Sue—clearly a fan of this blog—we've got a breadbox!

We were concerned for two reason. The first is that, while beautiful and clearly practical, it's big. But even in our tiny kitchen we found a spot for it, with some minor rearranging. We may store other things in it along with bread—current thoughts include "crackers" and "rolling pin." The other concern was that I looked at it and said, "Well, this isn't airtight at all! How will it keep bread fresh?" But then I did a little research, and found that the airtight vs. non-airtight breadbox debate is alive and well! Many claim that non-airtight does a better job of maintaining the humidity necessary to keeping bread fresh. So we shall see! Half of the French-Style loaf is in there right now, and come tomorrow we'll see what we got. But very excited to give it a whirl! Thanks Sue!

Anyway, on to this week's activities. Basic Home-Style Bread, which Beard describes as a slightly sweet white bread made with milk and butter. Sold! This is the third recipe I've tried here, and the third method for combining yeast/liquid/flour. Basic White Bread was  proof the yeast in the liquid, then mix it with the flour, bam! French-Style Bread was proof the yeast, then gradually mix the flour into the yeast mixture. Now this one has me proof the yeast in some of the liquid, mix some of the flour into the rest of the liquid, then add the yeast mixture, then add the rest of the flour (way simpler than it sounds). What's up with all the variations? Does it really matter at all, considering I'm about the knead it for ten minutes anyway? I'm leaning towards it doesn't matter...

Also, I'm coming to be of the opinion that Beard is just making up quantities of flour. In this recipe the ingredients list calls for "5 to 6 cups," but in the instructions you add flour until it looks right, "usually 4 to 5 cups." I know, the quantity of flour needed will vary each time depending on blah blah blah, but what I really think is that Beard always did flour purely by feel, and just guessed when he filled out the recipes. Which is cool, I'm down with that, I just wish he wouldn't pretend. "Maybe 5ish cups flour" would give me a better idea of what to expect. But now I know. And the correct answer, in this case, was "a little over 5 cups."

In any event, this dough has a really nice texture to work with—very silky and smooth. Though it took forever to rise, both times.

The crust got super beautifully browned, check it out:

 Not especially crispy, but closer to real crust. Very nice crumb, nice flavor, makes good toast.

Though I'm not sure the product was all that much better than Basic White Bread, and it was a bit more work. So... You know. Tasty, but I'm looking for that one to come up that makes me say YUM.

In other news, Watson, our official household Dish Cleaner, likes bread dough. Win!

French-Style Bread

It's our second installment, and we've already blown the proposed agenda. Next recipe in the book was Basic Homestyle Bread, but we were having people over and I wanted good bread for spreading cheese on and that didn't seem to fit the bill so we skipped ahead. Spoiler alert: it was good.

Beard is careful to say that this isn't, technically speaking, French bread, and he surprised me by saying, basically, if you want a good French bread recipe go read Julia Child. Which, fine by me, I don't know the difference.

A few odd quirks of this recipe. One is, he has us mix the flour a bit at a time into the water and yeast, rather than mixing the water into the flour. Dunno if that made any difference to the product; didn't seem any easier or harder to me. Recipe called for "5 to 6 cups flour," which I thought was needlessly vague (and yes, I understand that different people on different days in different climates blah blah blah, but come on). The correct answer, for those playing at home, is 6. No second rise in this recipe; instead, you shape the loaves, put them on a pan covered in cornmeal, put the pan in a cold oven, and turn it on. Labor saving, perhaps? Seemed to work okay, though I think the final flavor may have suffered a little. Also, I'll have to work on this cornmeal method; this time the cornmeal not under the bread started to burn a little. Oh, and I felt this recipe was under-salted, which surprised me after Basic White Bread, which was so generous with the salt.

All that said, though, this was tasty bread. Certainly very pretty. Excellent inside texture, and respectable crust. I underbaked it just a tad, so that'd help the crust next time. Overall the quirks in the method made it a particularly easy recipe. It wouldn't be great for bread or toast, but it was excellent for having at the table and passing around tearing chunks off of for cheese and olive oil and hummus. Thumbs up.

Oh, and it was a terrific meal overall. The bread went with fancy cheese (d'Afinoise and Bucheret), fresh veggies and toasted pita with Ruth's home-made hummus, fresh corn and stone-fruit salad, and skirt steak that was just amazing. Also, Smitten Kitchen's Vermontucky Lemonade and fine beers, and we finished with Amelia's amazing chocolate cake with lemon-whiskey buttercream.

On a less successful note, I went to Berkeley Bowl today to get some of the flours we'll be needing for this project, and they had never heard of "hard wheat flour." Which is a problem, because Beard swears by it and some of the recipes require it. Laurel says it's basically high-protein flour, for which we can substitute bread flour. Which I guess we'll try? Other thoughts?

Basic White Bread

So, we (Amelia and Jarrod) were talking with our friend Laurel the other night, and she was extolling the virtues of alternate flours. And I (Jarrod) said, "That sounds awesome. But I'm not going to go buy a bunch of different kinds of flours on the off-chance that I think of something to do with them. What I need is a baking project, like working my way through some cookbook." And then Amelia said, "Why don't we bake our way through Beard on Bread?" And then here were are.

The plan, as it currently stands, is to work our way through James Beard's Beard on Bread at a rate of, hopefully, about two recipes a week. We'll see how it goes. But we'll start now! With the first recipe, Basic White Bread. Beard puts it first because it's, well, basic, and "once you have mastered the procedures given here, you can go on to more complex recipes without difficulty." But this recipe is 6 pages long, with 8 pages of notes and trouble shooting. Okay, fine, some of those pages are mostly illustrations, and he goes into crazy detail here so he doesn't have to explain how to knead the bread or proof the yeast ever again. Still, I think it's funny.

And perhaps this would be a good time to have a brief digression on our food credentials. We cook a lot, and garden some, and like to think we appreciate high-quality food. Amelia is a more accomplished bread-baker than Jarrod, and has made Beard's Cottage Cheese Dill-Seed bread many times to great acclaim. Jarrod makes Challah with a bunch of two-year-olds every Friday at his Jewish preschool. So, now you know that.

Anyway, at the moment the bread is on its first rise. I was struck by (a) how much salt Beard calls for, (b) how much butter Beard calls for for bowl-buttering, and (c) how long Beard says you should knead the bread. I suspect all of these things bode very well for the quality of the finished product.

An hour later... This is too much dough for one of our loaf pans, but too little for two. It seems we will need some different sizes of loaf pans for the project to continue. In the meantime, we tore off a little hunk and made a tasty little fry bread (with butter, oregano, and thyme) while waiting on the second rise.

Okay, it's done, and it's quite good. Moist and chewy, with a deeper flavor than you'd expect. Top crust's a bit soft, but I think that's my fault for forgetting the wash on top; bottom crust is lovely. It'd make excellent sandwich bread. Yay!

Next up: Basic Home-Style Bread (basically white bread with milk and butter in).