BREAD baking

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

*still waiting for her baking peel*

In the meantime - you know that dipping sauce you get for foccacia (or at least foccacia-like) bread in the snootier Italian restaurants?

How the heck do you make that stuff? I've never found any pre-made that was any good, and attempts to date to make it myself have been unsuccessful.

My DH just likes to use our salad dressing for that bread dipping.
Our favorite salad dressing:
make a cruet of dressing using the Good Seasons dry dressing mix from an envelope. But use extra virgin robust flavored olive oil, and some good balsamic vinegar. Then I also add a couple teaspoons of freeze-dried 'salad herbs' that I keep in the fridge after opening.

ZS: a tip about the peel....don't wash it by soaking it with water! People keep saying their wood peels are warping/cracking when washed, etc.
Oh but you are getting the non-wood peel, right?- then no problem.

What I do is: when I shape the loaf/loaves, I then let them 'rest' by putting a sheet of parchment on the peel and sprinkling the parchment with some corn meal- I lay the loaves on that. When time to bake, I just slide the loaves, parchment and all, right on to the hot baking stone and bake. (The parchment is good for about two baking sessions.) When done, it's easy to again slide the peel under the parchment and remove bread parchment and all. The bread seems to come right off the cornmealed parchment with no problem, and my peel actually never gets doughy or needs washing- my Stone stays clean too. If each parchment piece is used twice, the parchment roll will last a l-o-n-g time.

I used to make lots of many kinds of bread 20 years ago- sourdough, w.wheat, pastries, white loaf bread....making it the old fashioned way with a couple of risings. But I never got such yummy chewy/stretchy bread with a crisp crust as from the basic boule recipe in the Artisan Bread 5 Minutes book! It's exactly the way I love my bread to be and I never got it that way before.
One thing though- the basic (using 6 1/3 cups flour) really only makes 3 very modest sized loaves bread- not 4 as they claim. 4 to a batch comes out too tiny, and 2 to a batch are too large and don't rise as well. 3 seems just right!

[GLC1968]

Lisa - I wonder if our books are different versions? I could have sworn that my recipe says that the basic boule makes three loaves, not four. I'll have to look again when I get home tonight. If so, that would be REALLY odd, don't you think?

I don't wash my peel. I just wipe it clean and so far, with enough corn meal, it's fine. Same for the stone - which is actually a pizza stone and it also works great. I'd love to get a long square one so that I can make different shaped loaves, but so far the round has kept me busy enough. What benefit does the parchement serve? Do you still use cornmeal with it?

Oh, and ZenSojo - before I got my peel, I was just using a cookie sheet with no lip. Worked like a charm! I got the peel just because it's hard to make cookies when your cookie sheet always has a new loaf of bread sitting on it!

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Lisa - I wonder if our books are different versions? I could have sworn that my recipe says that the basic boule makes three loaves, not four. I'll have to look again when I get home tonight. If so, that would be REALLY odd, don't you think?

I think I remember reading on their BLOG that the recipe should read 3 instead of 4 loaves. I bought my book used- its from 2007. Maybe they updated it in a later printing?

What benefit does the parchment serve? Do you still use cornmeal with it?

Yes, I use cornmeal on the parchment, all on the peel. The parchment enables me to slide the two loaves of puffy bread right off the peel and onto the hot stone (paper and all) with minimal jostling of the loaves- helps to keep them from collapsing what little amount they have risen after the 'rest'. The bread bakes on the parchment, on the stone.
Very convenient, and I use each parchment piece twice before it gets brittle.
Doesn't stick to the bread either.

[CarefreeSpirit]

Yum that olive bread looks delish! Can you truly make bread in 5 minutes (not counting rising and baking)? I may have to purchase this book. I can just smell the fresh baked breads coming out of the oven.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Yum that olive bread looks delish! Can you truly make bread in 5 minutes (not counting rising and baking)? I may have to purchase this book. I can just smell the fresh baked breads coming out of the oven.

Hi,
I think the 'five minutes' thing is a bit exaggerated. But once you make up a batch of the wet dough (enough for 3 loaves), you simply combine the water, yeast, salt and flour and stir it with a spoon right in a tupperware box or bowl (no kneading), leave it out to ripen/rise for 2 hours (it doubles, then starts to deflate), then just cover it and stick it as is in the fridge for up to about 12 days is fine. Each time you want to bake a loaf you pull off 1/3, (or 2/3 if you want to bake two loaves at once) shape/cloak it into a ball or baguette etc, (still no kneading) then let it rest like 40-50 minutes (preheat your oven sometime during that time), then bake for 30 minutes.
That's the basic recipe, but the book has all kinds of fun creative variations on the basic idea. The bread actually tastes and comes out better if it's been in the fridge for at least two days i found.

Today I had two different containers of dough in the fridge so I pulled off, shaped and baked two loaves side by side- a plain white chewy boule, and a golden semolina loaf topped with sesame seeds. the semolina loaf is gone already, the boule is for tomorrow. I did this pretty much while weeding and hoeing my tomato patch- just brought my kitchen timer with me to know when to do each step.

[sgtiger]

I finally got around to baking a a few loaves while Dh was home. (I've only had the book for a month or so.) It really is fool-proof. I'm pretty baking-challenged and the loaves I baked turned out great. I don't have a baking stone (yet) so I placed a cookie sheet on top of my cast iron griddle and that worked out well to keep the temp stable enough to bake. I made a dip for my bread by heating up some EVOO on med. low and adding sliced garlic. Very tasty. I might trying adding some herbs next time, like rosemary, and a splash of balsamic vinegar after the oil cools. Of course, bread dipped in a good quality olive oil by itself it delicious. My "adopted" Italian grandfather taught me that.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

sgtiger- that is so cool! I want a picture next time!

I have been enjoying making bread so much that I now keep like two different batches of dough 'ripening' in the fridge at any given time, plus some sourdough starter.

My loaves always seem to be rather small, but DH loves them anyway and they taste so good! So I just solve the issue by baking two at a time.

Today I pulled out a portion of my semolina dough, and also the basic white dough. I made a plain white boule (still the favorite) and a semolina loaf. I experimented with the semolina- it traditionally is topped with sesame seeds, but this time I used black sesame seeds and I envisioned that after slashing it and it puffing up a bit in the oven, that it might look like tiger stripes, especially since the semolina flour is rather golden colored. As you can see it did indeed turn out very tiger-looking! So I'm naming that variation my "tiger semolina".




Though small, the two loaves were very lovely in both taste and texture.
I may experiment with giving them a shorter resting time before baking, to see if that increases the 'oven spring'.