BBA #18 - Light Wheat Bread

Here's a nice, simple loaf of bread. No pre-ferments, nothing fancy. I doubled this recipe to make two loaves, since I had need of one to give away.

I was surprised at some of the add-ins for this bread. I guess I didn't expect it to be enriched. The honey makes sense, but the really weird one was powdered milk. Go figure. But it tastes good, so I guess it works!

This bread was very relaxing to knead. It was quite smooth - no dealing with sticky-ickyness. Since I'd doubled the recipe, there was a LOT of it, though! Look at that monster!Here are my lovely loaves, cresting the pan just before baking.Nothing better than a slice of warm wheat bread with honey butter!

BBA #17 - Lavash Crackers

Here's a BBA first for me... I liked this recipe so much that I went off and made a whole 'nother batch the very next day! But I'm jumping the gun a bit here.

This formula is very simple. Essentially, it's a pita dough. Flour, honey, oil, yeast, etc. In fact, you can make pitas with this, and I did use half of the dough for that.

After mixing, kneading, and one rise, this dough is rolled out into a paper thin rectangle. And I do mean paper. It's shocking how big such a tiny ball of dough can get! When you're first mixing the flours and other ingredients together, it's definitely the smallest amount of dough we've worked with thus far.

Anyway, the resulting rectangle is carefully transferred onto a pan (not as hard as you would think) and sprinkled with spices. I used a base of maple pepper and cayenne, with some poppy seeds, sesame seeds and sea salt for contrast. The crackers are then baked at a low temperature for 20 minutes or so. Once they cool, they are nice and crackly. You can shatter them after baking or slice them pre-bake into the shapes you want!

I don't really like crackers. But I could eat these all day! They're great with some port salut spread on top, but even better just plain.

BBA #16 - Kaiser Rolls

Yet another dough with preferment. The preferment really is a great idea though, so little work for so much more flavor.

Honestly, this dough was nothing special, so this post will be brief. The best part was shaping it. Traditional kaiser shaping involves complex folding and layering. Modern kaiser shaping involves buying a tool specifically for that purpose. Fortunately, BBA gives us a middle of the road opportunity, which does not require extreme amounts of work or any amount of money, yet still looks pretty darned good.

To shape these rolls, each section of dough was rolled out into a rope. The rope was then knotted, and the free ends tucked around again. I was dubious at first, but they look fantastic!

As far as taste goes, these are alright. Challah rolls are still my favorite for sandwiches, though.

The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread

BBA #15 - Italian Bread

It's been a few weeks, thanks to the annual Anchorage Folk Festival (which is tons of fun, by the way!), but I am back with BBA! The fifteenth bread is Italian bread. This bread is very similar to the previous French bread, but the dough is enhanced with a bit of sugar, a bit of olive oil, and a bit of malt powder.

I started with a biga, which is a preferment very similar to last time's pate fermente. Refrigerated overnight and everything. My biga came out of the fridge with several large bubbles - I don't know if that was supposed to happen!

After letting the biga warm for an hour or so, I chopped it into bits and mixed it with the rest of the ingredients.
I found this dough to be fairly stiff. After 16 minutes and no windowpane test, I gave up and set it to rise. It doubled very quickly, so I split it in half and shaped each half into a batard and left it to proof again on my nifty bread thingy while I got the oven ready. Once the bread was ready, I slashed it - fairly awkwardly, I might add; I need to work on that - and popped it in the oven.

The bread browned nicely and is quite soft. The holes in the crumb are tiny, at least on the loaf I sliced open. I have higher hopes for the other loaf - it looks puffier!