Wild Yeast

The birds, from my mental To-Try list:

1. A flatbread
2. More rye bread
3. A bread that doesn’t take a whole day (or longer) to make
4. A recipe from Daniel Leader’s new book, Local Breads
   

And the stone:

Leader’s Rye-Fennel Crackerbread from far northern Italy was absolutely painless to make, a real treat to eat, and a welcome break from boules and batards. It wasn’t quite 100% crisp, but I’m more than willing to attribute that to baker error (like maybe underbaking a little, and forgetting to pierce them before baking.) And in under two hours from start to finish, there’s just no excuse not to try it again soon.

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I often refrigerate my loaves after shaping, letting them finish up their final proof in the fridge overnight, for example, so that they’re ready to bake first thing in the morning, or whenever. This has proven to be a wonderful technique for controlling my baking schedule so I can fit a few other activities in (you know, little things like work and sleep).

If I have more than a couple of loaves, though, that can take up rather a lot of space in the refrigerator. When someone on The Fresh Loaf recently brought up the subject of retarding (refrigerating) the dough during its initial fermentation to save on fridge space, I realized that was a pretty good idea, which I had not considered before, especially for breads that proof in a space-greedy couche (thanks, beenjamming!). Then in my recent class at SFBI, retarding was covered in some depth and it was confirmed that, yes, bulk retarding is a very fine strategy. One of the breads we made to illustrate this was a ciabatta, which recipe I have adapted here by substituting a little whole wheat flour and increasing the water to satisfy that thirsty flour.
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It’s been a quiet week here at Wild Yeast, but not a quiet one for me at all. I just finished a 5-day advanced artisan bread workshop at the San Francisco Baking Institute – my fourth at the school. The courses are geared towards professional bakers, but (lucky for me) home bakers are also welcome. Check out SFBI’s program if you’re interested in learning, in a very hands-on fashion, how to bake bread from the most passionate, knowledgeable, and friendly people in the baking industry. (And no, they really didn’t pay me to say that!)

Here are some of the breads we made this week. See more photos here. You can be sure I’ll be making many of these at home in the coming weeks… stay tuned!
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Ulrike of Küchenlatein set the task for BBD #3: bread leavened exclusively with sourdough, preferably rye. The sourdough part did not make me nervous, but the rye part did. Rye bread and I do not exactly have a long history together.

For one thing, I only recently acquired a taste for it. For another, to be honest, it scares me a little. Other than the wheat family, rye is the only grain that contains gluten, but its gluten is much more fragile than wheat’s. It can, therefore, tolerate less mixing and fermentation. The prospect of a twitchy dough made for a twitchy me. Time to be brave.

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This was going to be a post about one thing: shaping a fendu loaf. Then I ended up having to improvise a little with the dough formula, so it will be about that, too.

First, the fendu: I’ve been getting a little bored with basic batards lately, so I thought I’d do something just a bit different. A fendu (French for “split”) loaf is an easy variation that looks cool and offers a nice respite for those with scoring anxiety.

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I am a morning person. If I’m still in bed at 6:30, even on a weekend, I’ve slept in. I love the stillness before the other creatures in my household are stirring, and sometimes I just spend it over the crossword puzzle and a cup of coffee. But if I’ve started bagels the night before, I have some work to do. Just a little, though: boil and bake, and I’ve got these wonderfully chewy gems in time to take to work, or to welcome my family as they trickle out of bed.

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My mother is a fine woman, and I love her to pieces. Often, though, it seems I have the following sort of conversation with her*, and it exasperates the daylights out of me:

Mom: I can’t cook.

Me: Why do you say that?

Mom: I was having people over and I wanted a great dessert. My friend JoAnn makes wonderful rice pudding, so I used her recipe, but it didn’t turn out. And here I was thinking I’d be serving something so tasty and healthy at the same time, but it was terrible.

Me: Umm… rice pudding’s really not all that healthy. Not that I don’t love it.

Mom: Well, I wanted it to be low fat, low calorie, and high fiber. So I substituted nonfat milk for the cream and cut the sugar in half, and instead of white rice I used half brown rice and half quinoa. Oh, and I was out of cinnamon but nutmeg was on sale so I used that instead.

Me: OK then.

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The BreadBakingDay #02 Roundup is online. I thank Becke (Columbus Foodie) for hosting this month’s event, and Zorra (Kochtopf) for founding it. And to the 32 participants who baked fruited breads from all over the world, wow! Once again, a really impressive array of creations I’d love to try. So many breads, so little time…

Ulrike (Küchenlatein) will host BBD #03, and she is asking everyone to make a sourdough-leavened bread, preferably rye. This is great, because I’ve been wanting to experiment more with rye breads. Guess I better get busy!

Kevin, Susan, and Beth at A Year in Bread (one of my favorite sites) have called for favorite bread stories. A contest, actually, but I would have written this even if there were no prizes at stake. I don’t know if it’s really my favorite story, or even a good story, but it’s one that means something to me right now.

Bread Cat

We have a cat named Stripes. (This is what happens when you let 4-year-olds name pets.) We adopted her about 12 years ago, when she started hanging around our back porch. We thought she was a stray, but we learned that she had belonged to a neighbor, and when the neighbor got a dog, the cat refused to step foot in the house ever again. (For whatever reason, this did not happen when we got a dog, a few years later.)

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Last week I wrote about some of the interesting Japanese breads I met on my recent vacation. Melon pan, a soft, sweet roll encased in cookie dough and scored to resemble a melon, captured my imagination as soon as I tried it, and I knew I would attempt to recreate this adorable little bread in my own kitchen.

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