Wild Yeast

A (or perhaps the?) defining characteristic of Tuscan bread is its lack of salt. I have made saltless Tuscan bread before, and I was pleasantly surprised by its sweet flavor.

This “dark Tuscan bread”, a 70%-whole-wheat version adapted from Carol Field’s The Italian Baker, did not warm my heart quite as well, but I did like the soft crumb and crisp crust. I might experiment with different wheat flours to see how the flavor varies with each. And in fairness, I have to say I have so far only eaten it pretty much straight up, and Tuscan bread is meant to go with the hearty flavors of Tuscan food. Panzanella (tomato and bread salad) is traditional with this bread… stay tuned.

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See this week’s yeast spottings…

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

Well now, this is a little embarrassing. Looking over my last few Daring Bakers challenges, I see that I have chosen to do a raspberry/chocolate combination for the latest three, and four of the last six. And I wonder why my friends find it so easy to predict what dessert I’m going to order in restaurants.

Not that I’m regretting a minute of it. Chocolate and rasberries go together like, well, ice cream and cake.

And although I have never been big a fan of Swiss rolls (I’m quite certain there is an early-childhood run-in with Little Debbie lurking in my long-repressed recesses), and although my cake looks on the outside like it’s had a run-in with something or other, this bombe was the bomb.

I followed Sunita’s recipes for the Swiss rolls that form the bombe’s outer layer, and for the fudge sauce that ended up sandwiched between the two home-made ice creams inside. My ice creams, churned with my KitchenAid mixer’s ice cream attachment, were both adapted from David Lebovitz’s wonderful book, The Perfect Scoop. I added cocoa nibs (crushed unsweetened cocoa beans) to the vanilla, and I made the raspberry with Perfect Purée supplemented with a little puree of frozen mixed berries.

Of course it wouldn’t be a DB challenge if I didn’t wind up up with a list of  ”do-next-times” so here it is:

• Notice how my Swiss roll slices are rather crumby? This happened upon slicing, and freezing thoroughly before slicing would help.
• I think I’d like a fudge sauce based on cream rather than water; this became a bit icy when frozen.
• Reversing the ice cream layers (raspberry on top, vanilla on the bottom) would give a better contrast between the ice cream and the Swiss roll layer.
• Whole raspberries should go in there somewhere.

I believe some of the other Daring Bakers offer suggestions for flavor combinations that are not chocolate and raspberry. I might have to grudgingly admit that they might be good too.

Sourdough biscotti have been on my mind for a while, but they posed a bit of a challenge: with sourdough starter comes water, and extra water is not something that we usually want in any cookie dough, never mind biscotti. For these “twice-baked” cookies, the dough is formed into a log and partially baked, then sliced and baked again until dry. Extra water is just not helpful here.

The solution I came to, in addition to using a stiff (50%-hydration) starter, is to cut down on the sugar, which behaves very much like a liquid ingredient in a dough. (If you don’t believe me, try taking a basic unsweetened dough and mixing in a bunch of sugar; you’ll swear you just dumped a bucket of water in there.) So these have about 30% less sugar than you’ll see in many biscotti recipes, but interestingly, they taste plenty sweet to me. I would not market them as “diet biscotti.” They’re definitely dessert.

The dough is still plenty wet, and log-forming is a little tricky. I found a plastic dough scraper helpful to scrape up and shape and smooth the sides once the dough is on the parchment-lined pan. But even if you make your log nice and compact, it’s going to start flattening out before it even hits the oven, and after a few minutes in there will look like a praline on a hot New Orleans sidewalk. Don’t panic. It will rise (a little) and have a pretty good biscotti shape by the time it’s done.

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See this week’s yeast spottings…

Yes, they’re Beautiful, Bold, and Brilliant. But who knew that the Bread Baking Babes, whose monthly exploits take them into the far-reaching corners of the global oven, were also Beastly, Brutal, and just plain Bad? That’s the only conclusion I’m left with after undertaking my first bread as a newly-inaugurated Babe. Consider me duly hazed.

Here’s the thing: this bread contains no flour.

When you bake bread with flour, the miller has done a lot of work on your behalf. She has selected the right wheat berries at just the right stage of development, tempered the flour for the proper moisture content, and maybe added malt so the dough will ferment at the right rate. When you bake with no flour, you’re kind of on your own.

Gee, thanks, Babes! Love you too. Do I now have to streak across campus in order to be fully ordained into Babehood?

The procedure goes something like this: You don your Birkenstocks. You sprout some wheat berries. You whirl them up in the food processor with some yeast, salt and honey, and work it by hand a little to make a pretty nice dough. You let it rise a few times and bake it in a pan. You get a heavy, dense, gummy-in-the-middle but crumbly-at-the edges, whole-wheat  loaf that transports you back some [mumble mumble] years to your college co-op days when everyone wanted to volunteer for weekly bread-baking because it beat toilet-cleaning, but no one really knew how to do it.

But here’s the other thing: it’s really not half-bad, considering the no-flour thing.

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