Over this past year, I have been testing recipes for Peter Reinhart’s new book, artisan breads every day. The goal of this book was to find a way to get the full flavor that delayed fermentation offers, but to make the preparation time shorter. Or something. I don’t know, because with the delayed fermentation plan, you mix the dough and then bake the next day. Not a lot of involvement in the middle.

But one thing that this book did offer was something along the lines of the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day style of making a bulk pre-ferment and then using a part of it each day for up to five days and baking a fresh loaf from that. This actually makes some really good French bread. One of my favorite recipes was the “same day french bread”, which uses a pre-ferment to pull in extra flavor. It is called same-day because you don’t count making the pre-ferment for some reason (maybe because you can also use it for the next 4 days). But that was some of the best French bread I have ever made. And in the process of testing these recipes, I learned the importance of the “stretch and fold” technique. This is the best way to strengthen the gluten in a very wet dough. Even a dough that has 70% or more hydration can become smooth and workable with the stretch and fold. After doing this, I found that my freestanding loaves gained 50% in height, rather than being so flat.

Part of the reason I though I would write this was that I chose to make some sourdough pizza dough from this book for our Friday night pizza night yesterday. Mmmmm. I do love good sourdough. The dough turned out to be very tasty, though I think next time I will leave out the honey since I think it made the crust brown too quickly. Our old oven died about three weeks ago and our new oven can bake at up to 550°F, which is about where you should be cooking pizza, but not having experience with those extra 50 degrees is making pizza baking interesting. As far as the rest of the family goes, they say they prefer the original Pizza Napoletana recipe from Peter’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice book. That is a darn good pizza dough recipe, so it is hard to beat it. But I have to mix it up every now and then or we wouldn’t ever know if something better came along.

I will likely write more about Artisan Breads Every Day another time, as I find time to work through the recipes. Can anyone say Chocolate Croissants?

Finally a crust and crumb that I can brag about. This is a loaf that I started as part of a Toastmasters speech. The speech was about how to make the best pizza dough ever. Since for demonstration purposes, the pizza dough and the pain a l’ancienne dough are identical to start with, I figured nobody would notice. Really the only difference is that the pizza dough has slightly less water in it, which makes it less sticky to the point that you can handle it. The pain a l’ancienne dough is so sticky that you really don’t want to touch it unless you are armed with copious amounts of flour.

The first and only time previously that I made this recipe, I found myself just a little bit rushed (smaller holes) and slightly over cooked them (dry crumb). This time, rather than shaping them as baguettes, I shaped a fat batard, which puffed up nicely. And differently than other batches of bread I have done, I did my final shaping right on the foil I was going to bake it on so the final transition to peel would not degas it. I think this was especially important on this loaf because the dough was so wet.

To round out the meal (It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone) Lauren made a batch of delicious beef stew with home-made noodles. I am telling you, we eat like kings (and queens) in our house.

About one week after I checked out Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads book from the library, I decided to start my own wild yeast whole grain sourdough starter. I figured this was some easy business since people have been using wild yeast starters since the beginning of time. Oh, not so, my friends. My first try failed. I am going to point my finger at the vinegar bottle as the culprit. You see, I was trying to follow the ‘Pineapple Juice Method’ but I didn’t have any unsweetened pineapple juice (or sweetened for that matter). The reason for adding the juice in the first place is to raise the acidity level of the mixture so the leuconostoc bacteria won’t take over before the lactobacillus and wild yeast get a good start. I figured one acid was as good as the next and substituted a diluted acetic acid solution for the citric acid solution. After 10 days, all I had was a funny smelling slimy goop. I decided to start over. This time I used diluted lemon juice instead. After about 6 days I had definitely captured some wild yeast.

I nurtured it with care and when it came time to refresh the starter, I figured I could make a loaf of something. I chose a Rye Meteil, which I botched, but it was a good starting place. I think most of all, it helped cement into my head that I need to follow the recipe a little bit better. When it failed, I was a bit discouraged. The bread smelled great, looked fine, but tasted about like cardboard. Even with my ‘sourdough’ starter. I was planning to make it again to see if I could do it any better, but in the mean time, I took a chance and wrote an email to Peter Reinhart asking him if he had any ideas on what could have gone wrong. He responded very quickly with a very positive email saying that one thing I should check is whether or not I left out the salt from the final dough. That is very possible. As for the lack of sourdough flavor, I did not realize that this takes even more time for the starter to develop. Now at about one month old, my starter is just starting to get a rich sour smell and a mild sour flavor. So it may just take some more time. A big thumbs up for Peter. Great book and a great heart to help out a struggling wannabe baker.

The breads I have made out of the Whole Grain Bread book are only getting better. The sweet, almost nutty flavor of the breads is irresistible to me. All I can say is at least they are whole grain, so all the better to gorge myself on. The 100% whole wheat sandwich bread is a favorite, as well as 100% whole wheat bagels, which I tried recently. But so far, I think the most flavorful bread I have made from the book is the Multigrain Struan. Struan is a word derived from Gaelic meaning “the convergence of streams”. The bread’s multigrain recipe was originally made with whatever grains the harvest brought in. By weight, it is about 25% mixed grains. I used brown rice, cracked wheat, polenta and quinoa (my harvest was a half-hour playing in the bulk-foods section of WinCo). In the soaker I also used buttermilk, which really made the soaker have a quite questionable smell, but it turned out to taste terrific in the end. I also used wild yeast sourdough starter instead of the biga. I think I have found my struan. With the wealth of possibilities to change this recipe, it could very well be one tasty loaf after another. I am considering quitting my job and making homemade bread full time for the rest of my life. Much less stressful and much better tasting.

I think the title says it all. After having read The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread, by Peter Reinhart, I really started making some tasty breads. I have tried the Pain a l’Anciene, the amazing Pizza Napoletana, Foccacia, Pugliese, Anadama bread, and Multi-grain Bread Extraordinaire. They were all very wonderful (and I plan on continuing to make them) but I was left feeling somewhat unfulfilled. For several reasons: I want to eat healthy, and too much white bread is not good for the body; I have more whole grains on hand than white flour and it would be nice to know how to make tastier breads with just the whole grains; people before G.A. Bockler survived without white flour, why can’t I?

I found my answer when bumbling around on Amazon, looking for things to round out my wishlist. I was rating items so Amazon could give me better suggestions of things I might like (which it does a fairly poor job at), when I came across Peter Reinharts’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor. Wow! Does he ever deliver. I love the science of bread that he puts into his books. Not being a chemist, I think the actual chemistry behind all the reactions in the dough is a little beyond me, bit the deconstruction of the bread, the nitty-gritty how it works is what really intrigues me. I am an engineer. I love to take things apart and see what makes them tick. When things are broken, I want to fix them. I have a deep need to see how the puzzle fits together.

Yesterday I made four loaves of 50-50 wheat/white bread from the recipe that my mother-in-law uses. It is a very tasty recipe that I have been using for the past 5 years. My technique has gotten better and I think the four loaves from yesterday were the most uniform and best tasting loaves I have made from that recipe. But it still bugs me that there is a requirement for 1 1/2 cups of white flour per loaf. I have tried substituting whole wheat flour for the white flour to varying degrees of success, but it never turns out as good as the original recipe. It is always more dense and the flavor isn’t quite right either. I even took the advice of one recipe book that said to use less wheat flour when substituting and also increase the leavening to compensate. But it still wasn’t quite right.

Yesterday was also the day that my time on the library waiting list for “Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor” was up and I got to take it home. Almost before the four loaves of bread were fully cooled (and one half eaten), I had read half the book and started on the first recipe, 100% whole wheat sandwich bread. Almost all the recipes in the book use two pre-doughs, a soaker and a biga. According to the science content in the book, the soaker provides flavor and a good environment for yeast production while the biga provides more flavor and the needed acidity to control the enzymes in the soaker before they do too much of a good thing. Put the two parts together, add a little more yeast for leavening and you have one tasty, tender bread. So today, after the soaker and biga had had plenty of time to do their parts, I finished the single test loaf. I just cannot get over how good that bread was. And that was my first shot at the recipe. Hold on while I drool as I imagine how good it will be after five years of practice….

I will certainly be back with more stories from my time in the kitchen.