Whole-Meal Bread with Potatoes

Amelia here (for once). It's Hanukkah! Or possibly Chanukah. Which means that shredded potatoes are on our mind here at Casa Verde. Which additionally means that potato bread was the obvious choice for today's Adventurein Baking. In a pleasing homage to my roots, this particular potato bread is, according to Beard, "provided by the Norwegian Government School for Domestic Science Teachers."

I made half a batch; a whole batch makes two immense loaves and requires 10 cups of flour. I also altered the recipe somewhat, substituting sour cream for buttermilk.

The dough was a joy to work with once it was finally mixed -- not at all sticky, not at all crumbly, generally awesome. And of course, it being a yeasted bread with sour cream and potatoes, it smelled amazing. Like a lot of Beard's recipes, this one has the potential for undersaltitude (yeah, that is totally a word) -- I added a bit more than the suggested amount (1-2 Tbsp for a whole batch, which, again, I halved), and if I had it to do again, I'd probably add even more.

A lot of potato bread recipes (and I say this on the basis of two or even three whole minutes of browsing Beard + internet) require a significant chunk of processing for the taters -- boiling or mashing or what have you. This one, not so much -- another bonus. Grated potatoes go into the proofed yeast with the sour cream (or buttermilk if you like following recipes), followed by salt and flour. Combine. Knead forever. Rise. Knead. Rise. Bake. Et voila. All of which is to say that this is a very small amount of labor for a very large amount of awesomeness.

Here are the fruits of my labor (NB: not the actual fruits) -- post-first-rise dough on top, pleasingly crunchy finished product below.

Jane Grigson's Walnut Bread from Southern Burgundy

Yep, it's delicious. Full of walnuts (which I toasted, though I'm not sure how much it made a difference in the final product) and onion (I used red onion, and it was very pretty, and I'd use a little more next time) and walnut oil and milk. The dough was pretty sticky, but it came out okay. It made four cute little loaves! I thought they would be silly and small, but they're really perfect. They'd be great to bring to parties, or give as gifts. They smelled AMAZING while baking, really filled the whole house. But then the flavor of the loaf is surprisingly mild - rich and tasty, but not as strong as the smell led us to believe. Great texture - soft and chewy, with a nice flavorful crunch. A big winner.

Also, it was a little cold in the house, and I thought Where will I put the dough to rise? And then I remembered something someone mentioned once, which is to put the dough in the microwave with a bowl of hot water, and you've got your warm, moist, draft-free space right there (as long as you don't accidentally turn it on, in which case it'd be way too warm and moist, and way too explody, since I used a metal bowl). But it worked so great! The dough rose in no time. Look!

I will definitely use that handy tip again.

Sour-Cream Bread

Laurel, who has previous been mentioned, has been raving lately about Strauss' new sour cream. And then, aha, there's a recipe for sour cream bread! It's like kismet. We got the sour cream. It is, indeed, delicious.

See? Watson liked licking out the container. And we know dogs won't eat just any old dairy product.

Anyway, the best thing about this bread was the dough. It smelled like the breath of angels. We kept sticking our noses up against it and going, "Mmmmmmmmm." The dough was a bit soft, and didn't rise very zestily, but it all came out beautiful. See?

 Very pretty loaf, lovely crumb. But for all that rich dairy, the bread was surprisingly light and fluffy!

 So, not so good for sandwiches - too light. But lovely for toast, because it browns so nicely.

And the french toast we made with it was definitely a winner.

Easy to make, enticing dough, and very respectable product. Hooray!

Basic White Bread Not Really

At my preschool we make challah with the kids every Friday for Shabbat. It's really awesome—we make a big batch of dough, and each kid gets to make their own tiny loaf that we bake in a toaster oven in the classroom. But this year we have one child who's allergic to eggs. But we still want him to be able to shape the dough and make his own little loaf, so I decided to make him some egg-free challah (ie, white bread), which we could freeze in tiny-loaf-sized balls and bring out each week for him to use.

Then I got fancy, I guess, because I thought, well, I'll make a big batch of dough, and some will be for us at home, and some I'll take to school. And I thought I'd throw together the basic white bread, and just do it casually, because I'm an old hand at this now, right? Except apparently not an old hand enough to make sure we have flour before I put the yeast to proof. No all-purpose flour. But we have whole-wheat and bread flour! So what the hell, I'll do maybe 2 cups of whole-wheat and 3 cups of bread and we'll see what happens.

What happens is dough that's very shaggy and tough to knead and slow to rise.

 But it smoothed out eventually, and made a dense, very flavorful loaf. Excellent slathered with butter. Ate it for a few days with butter and radishes.

I don't think I'll try to improvise whole-wheat bread again, but it was a tasty experiment. I'll let you know how the child-in-question likes it.

Pizza Caccia Nanza

Okay, so this is all kinds of belated. Well, actually I guess it's just the one kind, but still. Sorry to all my hypothetical devotees.

Anyway, last week we had a potluck at work, and I thought, "Hey, bread." But I didn't want a sandwich bread, or a sweet bread, and then flipping through I found this one.

It's not pizza. At all. It was actually a lot like focaccia. Apparently the name is Italian for "pizza that you take out before," because back in the day in Italy they'd make bread in a big communal oven but they'd take some dough and make a flat bread and take it out before the other bread because, you know, it'd cook faster. Which still doesn't explain the pizza part of the name but whatever.

The other reason I chose this recipe was because were were going out to a movie, and I wanted something that would be fast and easy, and this was. Except I screwed it up! Because it was all risen, but it was time to go, so I said, I'll put it in the fridge and bake it when I get back! Except when I got back I looked at the recipe again and it called for two rises, but I had to bake it right away before I went to bed, so instead of two rises I got one rise and cold dough going into the oven. And yet: it was still delicious! I can only imagine how tasty it will be when I don't screw it up.

There's less yeast than usual in this one, and no proofing, but it all worked out just great. Shoving little bits of rosemary and garlic into holes in the top was slightly labor intensive, but it gave it exactly the right amount of flavor and scent. And coating that puppy with oil before baking gave it a delicious golden flavorful crust that was a bit messy to touch but great to pick up. Baked it longer than recommended - maybe I didn't roll it thin enough. But mm, tasty. Folks at the potluck were very impressed. It was a great bread for a side-dish, especially cut up into attractive finger-food sizes. Would be nice for an Italian sandwich too. Nom!

George Lang's Potato Bread with Caraway Seeds

We've skipped a couple here, in the name of (a) getting some less-similarly-white-bread recipes, and (b) doing some recipes I can actually accomplish. The recipes I can't accomplish include Broiled White Free-Form Loaf (which requires an oven with a broil setting, instead of an oven with broiler) and Pullman Loaf (which requires bread pans with locking lids that keep the loaf all square like). So here we are. Bread with mashed potatoes and caraway seeds!

Sounded exciting. And can I just say, I love buying spices in bulk—which is to say, in tiny quantities from the bulk bins. When you just need half a tablespoon of caraway seeds, no need to spend $4 on a whole little thing of them! Get them from the bulk bin, and pay 8¢. Literally! 8¢ at Berkeley Bowl bought me twice as many caraway seeds as I need. One year I made a turkey for thanksgiving that called for like 20 different spices for a spice rub, and I went to Rainbow Grocery and got them all from the bulk bins for a total of about a dollar, instead of the $80 I would have spent buying all the bottles. Brilliant! But I digress.

Mashed potatoes! Caraway seeds! The dough smelled really good and pungent. But man, it's a lot of dough! It called for 2lb/8c of flour! Which is roughly what I put in, and then I kneaded it for nearly half an hour trying to reach the point where "the dough is elastic and supple and has great life in it." Well, James, that point never quite came, and I kept adding a quarter-cup of flour every two minutes and it was still wet and sticky and eventually I just called it done. Phew!

The recipe calls for baking in an oven-proof skillet, but we thought this'd be a great time to pull out our big Le Creuset.

And we were right! It baked up to nearly the size of the damn pot, but it got a nice brown crust. We should have brushed the top with oil to make it match the sides, but it's still pretty.

If you can't tell from the photos, it's a HUGE ass loaf. I mean, look there, it's much bigger than our kettle. It's, well, the size of the Le Creuset. No reason it couldn't be two regular sized loaves—that'd be more convenient, and give more crust (and the crust is, again, fabulous). The only benefit of the one-big-loaf is that it looks pretty awesome, and, as Amelia said, "It makes me feel like a peasant."

Oh, and it's very tasty. Rich, with only mild flavors of potato and caraway. Great crumb, moist and dense but not too dense. The crust is crunchy but not tough. Makes great toast, pairs very nicely with butter. Beard said he likes his buttered toast with thinly sliced radishes, so I had that for breakfast and it was very nice too. I'll definitely make this bread, in smaller sizes, again.

White Free-Form Loaf

As has been noted by many scholars, now is not the point in my life with lots of available time for, say, cooking and blogging. And I persist! But I started this recipe without realizing what a time-commitment it was, and only by sheer chance did things work out for me to do all the steps. Make a sponge, which you let rise over a night or two, and then make a dough which gets not one, not two, but THREE rises! For heaven's sake, Beard, what kinds of free-time loafers (pun intended) do you think we are! He also exhorts us to line the oven with heavy tiles, which I didn't do, and a pan of water, which I did. And to line a baking sheet with cornmeal, but last time the cornmeal burnt and smelled bad, so I used parchment instead. Furthermore, this is the first recipe that has required "hard wheat" flour. Laurel assures me that he means essentially high-protein flour, and that I can use bread flour with impunity. So I did.

Verdicts on all these things:
Heavy tiles—jury's still out
Pan of water—can't tell if it helped at all
Parchment vs Cornmeal—parchment seemed fine, if less rustic
Bread Flour—didn't seem to make much difference
Three rises—honestly, I thought that (plus the very moist dough) would give the bread  some nice rustic big bubbles inside, but it didn't. Lovely, dense crumb, but no big bubbles.

Overall: Again, a fine tasting, beautiful white bread. He says to bake "until the bread is a delicious-looking dark color," and I was a little gun-shy so the bread was a bit underdone on the bottom. The dough was nice to work with and all, but took forevah. It's a nice bread, but again, not particularly better than the Basic White Bread, and way more work. Or at least, way more time. Amelia thinks there won't be a really exciting recipe until we get out of white-bread territory, so perhaps we'll do something more adventurous next time.

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).