BBA CHALLENGE: Casatiello

A dangerous bread, Kayte called this. Dangerous. I pictured Casatiello as the Michael Corleone of breads, but it actually turned out to be more of the Tony Montana of breads. Because with all those pieces of sautéed salami and pockets of melted provolone hidden within? Well. Let's just say it gives "Say hello to my little friend" a whole new meaning.

Casatiello is an Italian bread, kind of the flip side of panettone, the bread stuffed with candied fruit and nutmeats that Italians traditionally serve at Christmastime. The little cubes of salami and provolone are tucked into a rich brioche dough (poor man's variety) and I have to say, I think it is the best bread I have ever eaten. Ever. Whether in a simple slice or in a sandwich, it is so incredibly good, I can see why Kayte called it dangerous.

Making this bread was as easy as falling off a log because I CHEATED. Yes, I did and I'm not sorry. I halved Peter's recipe, sitting at my kitchen table with my bangs in my eyes and my glasses perched on the tip of my nose, doing subtraction problems on a piece of scratch paper and murmuring to myself. I finally just gave it up because, if you read my review of Poor Man's Brioche, you'll know that the handmade Poor Man's Brioche recipe in Peter's book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, was identical to a recipe called "Egg Bread" in the little pamphlet cookbook I got with my bread machine all those years ago. Peter's recipe did call for a little more butter, but that was not a problem -- I just put more into the machine's baking pan.

Yes, I used my bread machine. However, I did set it on the dough cycle, so I did have to do a punch down, a short rising, another punch down and the final proofing. What? You were thinking I was totally lazy and let the machine do everything? Not me!

Since the machine was doing all the work doing the job it was built to do, I sat in the living room drinking iced tea and reading my book until I was summoned by a discreet beep-beep-beep to come and add the salami and the provolone. With that minor chore complete, I was free to do what I wanted for the next hour.

When it was time for the final punching-rising-punching-proofing sequence, I did it all with ease -- I have acquired a few skills! -- and slid the pan into the oven. I wanted to use a regular bread pan so that my loaf would come out ready for sandwiches.

And ohhhhh, did it. It came out of the oven about an hour before my husband got home and I was already hungry. I waited for forty-five minutes, which was surely a virtuous thing to do, and then sawed off the heel of one side. Oh, my gosh....the aroma! And the flavor! It was so delicious and completely different from any bread I've ever had before.

For dinner last night, then, my husband and I had big pub sandwiches made of thick slices of grilled Casatiello and stuffed with ham and provolone. Romantically, a pub sandwich would be consumed with a pint of home-brewed ale and maybe a side of mushy peas, but my husband made do with a frosty mug of Bud. If I asked him to eat mushy peas, he would rebel, although he is an enthusiastic eater of non-mushy peas. I, a total plebian, had a glass of milk. I was made fun of.

Today for breakfast, I had a thick sliced, grilled with a sliver of provolone on top.

For lunch, I had another slice, thicker, grilled on both sides and then topped with a sliced tomato that I'd picked out of my mother's garden forty-five minutes before. Then I put two slices of provolone on top and let the cheese get melty over the tomato.

I was in HEAVEN. There has never been such a lunch.

If you buy this book for no other reason (and it is a really great book, believe me) buy it for that Casatiello recipe. It is that good. And dangerous. It is a dangerous, dangerous bread.

BBA CHALLENGE: Brioche (Rich Man & Poor Man)

Brioche! The very name is exciting, making me think of trips to France I have not taken, boulangeries I have not yet visited, and breakfasts of les petites brioches with strawberry conserve and chocolat chaud that I have not yet eaten. Ah, it's a full, full world inside my head, a veritable vacation paradise, which is why I can't remember where my car keys are.

As far as the BBA Challenge goes, I've been kind of a drop in, drop out sort of baker. I really regret that, but it took me FOREVER to get my hands on a the book (The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart) and so I was behind from the beginning, a curious place to be. I baked the Anadama bread (page 108), which I reviewed here at InsomniMom -- you can click on the BBA Challenge link over to your left to read about that -- but I skipped the Artos and also the bagels. That was very naughty of me because while I was not baking those breads, I was baking others, most notably the corn bread (page 151) and the lavash (page 178, also reviewed here at the site).

So that brings me to these two brioche recipes, both of which I baked in June, which I am just now posting. What my damage has been, I do not know, but now I have not only the brioche to review, I also have the Casatiello. Whew.

First of all, brioche is a rich bread made from whole milk, butter and eggs. The difference between Rich Man's Brioche and Poor Man's Brioche, Peter tells us, is in the amount of butter used: Rich Man's Brioche called for two cups of butter, while Poor Man's requires only half a cup. And that kind of makes you laugh, doesn't it, only half a cup? My word, you can practically feel your arteries slamming shut like the door of the Bastille just thinking about it.

RICH MAN'S BRIOCHE

I made the Rich Man's Brioche first. I don't want to sound like a baby, but I was put off this recipe when reading Peter's commentary. He wrote: "When we examine the formular for rich man's brioche, one thing becomes evident: it has almost the same flour to fat to sugar ratio as pie dough." And I know this probably sounds stupid, but I don't want to eat pie dough, or more to the point, a big slice of pie crust. I prefer pie crust to be rolled very then and crimped at the edge, with some sort of filling in it, preferably cherry or chocolate cream. But mine is not to question why and all that, so I proceeded, albeit with some ill feeling towards this bread.

I have to say, it went together very easily. I had to allow the sponge to ferment about twenty minutes longer than the twenty minutes Peter called for, and I think that's probably because it was an almighty hot day that day, according to my notes, and we had the central air conditioning on, rendering the house both cool and dry. I could be wrong about that because I don't really understand the science of bread baking yet and frankly, it seems kind of math-and-chemistry oriented and I suck at both of those things.

My major problem is that I do not own a large stand mixer. CousinFest occurred about four days after I made the brioche, and when I went into Susie's kitchen, I stopped dead in my tracks at the sight of her enormous professional grade Kitchen Aid stand mixer there on the counter. It is about the size of the lunar module and looks as if it could knead your bread and kick your lazy butt straight into next week with no problemo. Awed! I was awed! Particularly because my beloved food processor almost gave up the ghost when brioche dough sneakily ran down the middle part and clogged up the mechanism.

It took me more time to clean up and comfort my trembling, hyperventilating food processor than it did to bake the bread, but that's another story. Let's just say that the food processor debacle was the point where I had my second indication that Rich Man's Brioche and I were not going to become les meilleurs amis.

I ended up having to knead the brioche by hand, which is exactly what I did not want to do: That's why I love my bread machine so much. But with my food processor not possessing a capacity that could deal with that amount of dough, I was at a loss as to how else I was going to get all the ingredients incorporated into a mass that could be baked. I sure wasn't going to throw it away, with all that expensive butter cozied up in there!

So I kneaded, with all the grace that Marie Antoinette showed when she said, according to Peter and several other sources I've found, "The peasants can't eat Rich Man's Brioche? Why, then, let them eat Poor Man's Brioche!" Not cake. Brioche.

And then I kneaded some more.

And more.

My resentment rose along with the dough, and when I finally pulled two goldy-brown loaves out of the oven (one way smaller than the other because of my inability to form two equally-sized lumps of dough), I was hardly glad to see them.

Peter is firm in his command to let the bread cool completely before cutting -- it's actually Step 11 in his twelve-step bread baking program. I think he would just know that I'd cut the bread after only ten minutes post-oven and send a higher power to my kitchen to smite me. So I waited, and when the bread was cool, the girls and I had a slice.

It was...okay. It looked fabulous, if I do say so myself, and it practically melted on the tongue. I felt that it cried out for Nutella, but we don't keep it in the house, for reasons you can probably discern. Other than that, meh. I gave one loaf to our neighbors, identical twin brothers in their fifties who are bakers extraordinaire, and we kept the other one here, where we halfheartedly ate a slice here and there until it got stale a couple of days later. I fed the rest to the dogs.

That was when I realized that my favorite kind of bread is peasanty, preferably with a whole grain. Maybe with a couple of different kind of seeds scattered on top.

POOR MAN'S BRIOCHE

I read the recipe for Poor Man's Brioche with a strange feeling of déjà vu. I knew this recipe. But how? I read it again and light dawned -- I use the same recipe in my bread machine for a recipe that was named, prosaically, "Egg Bread." The only difference is that there's slightly less butter in my bread machine recipe.

Just for the fun of it, I made both breads on the same day, one by hand, one in the machine. I had a much better attitude, because I already knew that all of us like the Egg Bread recipe. I kneaded the dough by hand again, since my food processor threatened to have a nervous breakdown if I tried to put bread stuff in it again. Once again, I found that it isn't all that fun incorporating butter into the flour, milk, eggs, sugar, salt and yeast, but at least I had less to work with this time.

Here's my thing: I love bread. I love the way it makes the house smell. I love putting the ingredients together. I love it that my family loves it. BUT I HATE KNEADING. I just hate it. Call me the anti-artisan, but throwing and punching and pushing and pulling a lump of bread dough around on my counter is just too earthy for me and please keep in mind that I had my first baby with no drugs. I don't want to do that much work. As it turns out, I didn't want to do that much work in childbirth either, so I had an epidural the second time around, but anyway, kneading bread is a major pain.

When it was finally kneaded and risen and punched down and risen and proofed, I slid the loaf pans into the oven with a heavy sigh and an adoring look at my bread machine, which was sitting there on the counter, industriously going about its business of giving me a funny-looking but yummy loaf of bread and causing me no grief whatsoever. Peter Reinhart says that he kneads all his bread by hand and I can only wonder if his mother had a bad experience with a yeast packet when she was carrying him.

Anyway, as it turns out, Poor Man's Brioche is delightful no matter how you bake it. Bread machine, oven, it comes out with a lovely golden yellow hue and is so extremely good for sandwiches or breakfast toast. It is a most delicious bread and you should make it.

In your bread machine.

BBA CHALLENGE: Pita Bread

Now that I have the book, I have been able to kind of catch up with Kayte's every-two-weeks group of bakers, only I haven't been able to make the bagels which they all posted on their websites a few days ago. I have to order some non-disastatic malt powder from King Arthur Flour (one of my favorite websites, like, evah) to make them taste like the real thing, and until I do that, the bagels are on hold. Brioche is next on the list and I've still got a couple of weeks before I have to post that, so I made some pita bread in the meantime.

The recipe used to make pita bread in The Bread Baker's Apprentice is actually to one for Lavash Crackers on pages 178 and 180 (photograph on page 179.) Since this is a cracker recipe, it makes a flattish kind of bread that has to be rolled out paper-thin, as you can imagine. However, over in the left hand margin on page 178, Peter Reinhart writes that if you divide the dough out into about four 6-ounce balls, roll the balls out to about 1/4" and bake them in a very hot oven until they poof up, and then remove them, cool them and cut them in half, you will have a very tasty pita pocket.

We really love pita pockets, so this seemed like a nice recipe to try out.

I made the lavash dough yesterday: it is a really simple one consisting of flour, salt, yeast, honey, veg oil and water, with some sesame or poppy seeds, if you want. I decided that I'd like to try to knead this dough by hand, so I did, using the push-and-fold-and-turn-and-push method that Peter talks about in the book. The instructions said that I'd need to knead (haha) for about ten minutes so that the dough would be pliable and stretchy and able to pass the "windowpane test": that's when you know the dough's been mixed long enough. In actuality, that took about thirteen minutes of kneading, but the instructions also said that I wouldn't have to use more than 1/2 cup of water, too -- I ended up needing an extra palm-full (maybe a tablespoon or two?) of lukewarm water to make the dough incorporate smoothly.

I decided that I wanted to use Peter's method of retarding the dough, so I sprayed a bowl with oil and put the dough ball in the fridge overnight. This morning, I got it out of the fridge at 7:00, having turned the oven on to 170^o , and while the oven heated, I put the ball of chilled lavash dough into my larger glass mixing bowl. When the oven had heated, I turned it off again and put the glass mixing bowl into the oven, covered by a tea towel, and left it to rise with the oven door partially open.

Since the dough was so cold, it took about three hours it to double in size. I just kept an eye on it, and noted that when I got back from picking Kieren up at the driving school, I could actually smell the lovely, yeasty aroma in the air as I came through the back door. "I bet it's time!" I thought, and upon peering into the mixing bowl, I noted that it was, indeed, time.

Now here's where things got a little hairy, mostly because I missed the part about the 500^o oven the first time around. I heated the oven up to 350^o instead, which was the temp at which the crackers were supposed to bake. I did not know this until AFTER I'd already baked my pitas and had them cooling on a wire rack, more's the pity. You know, if I could just READ THE INSTRUCTIONS and PAY ATTENTION every now and then, I might be able, with a great deal of prayer and a better attitude, be a fairly decent cook someday, but for right now, I'm going to have to say that I'm not working up to my potential and talk too much in class.

So anyway, I divided my dough up into six small balls. This made six little tea-sandwich sized pitas, which I thought would be just too cute with cucumber and a little sliced tomato. I'd like to do this again and divide the dough into four larger balls, which would make lunch sandwich sized pockets. However, the six small balls were easy to roll out into the typical circle shape. Peter said that the dough would be a bit stretchy and springy and that it might be necessary to pick up the dough and "wave it around" from time to time to allow the glutens to relax. This gave me a mental picture of running my rolled dough up a flagpole like Old Glory and allowing it to flap in the breeze, but whatevs. I just picked up each circle and allowed it to kind of stretch this way and that. I did minimal waving.

After the recommended five minute resting period -- all that flapping and waving is very tiring to infant dough -- I put the dough on my parchmented baking sheets and gave them a misting with water and gently peppered them with poppy seeds. So cute! And the slid them both onto the middle rack of my oven, which was, of course, not heated to the proper temperature.

Peter's instructions were terribly vague about how long to cook the pitas. He wrote: "Bake just until they inflate and form a pocket." Huh? Peter, how long IS that? Because, you see, I do not have a wall oven at this house and I did not want to spend a whole lot of time crouched down on the floor peeking through that little window. I made do with just setting the oven timer for six minutes and then checking to see if any little doughy balloons were waiting for me.

They were not.

So I set the timer for five minutes longer.

Nope. Still wasn't happening.

Discouraged, I set the timer for four more minutes and plopped down onto a chair to wait. At the beeping, I got up and noted that the pitas had gone pouffy (bet it wouldn't have taken as long if I'd had the right oven temp, duhhh....) so I whisked them out of the oven and put them on my wire rack.

I was crucially disappointed to find out that my darling little pitas were as solid as hockey pucks. That wasn't pouffiness I had noticed; it was just plain old risen dough, well baked.

Sulking, I let them cool down as I sat at the kitchen table with my head in my hands, and then got out my pizza cutter to slice one in half. Sure enough, it was solid. But... wait! The crust seemed thick-ish and ready to separate from the crumb, so I decided to do a little experiment, as one might do with a bagel or a Kaiser roll: I got out a fork and peeled the crumb away from the crust et voilà! A little teeny pita pocket!

They are so cute. And very tasty, too. I'm not sure how I lucked in to that totally unexpected success, but they're sitting out there in the kitchen where I can see them right now. Meelyn and I were just discussing the possibilities of stuffing them with a couple of spinach leaves, two cucumber slices and a slice of medium-sized tomato, plus a bit of mayonnaise. I think that sounds delightfully summery, maybe a nice little appetizer for a salad kind of meal. Oooh, maybe a slice of bacon, doubled in half, with the tomato and some lettuce? Mmmm!

The possibilities are endless with Peter's pitas.

BBA CHALLENGE: I finally got the book!

Meelyn, Aisling and I went to the public library today while Kieren was out on his first one hour drive with the instructor from the driving school. My sole purpose, other than getting another couple sacks of books, was to see if The Bread Baker's Apprentice had ever been returned (it's been, like, WEEKS) and if it had, to find it, and if it had not, to put a hold on it at the circulation desk.

Can you imagine my joy when I found that it was actually upstairs on a shelf? Waiting for me? And it truly was a glorious day, because the employee at the information desk not only looked the book up for me on her computer (the stupid computers that serve as the card catalog were down) and wrote down the call number on a piece of paper, she also said, "Oh, that's okay, hon. I'll run upstairs and get it for you" when I reached out to take the slip of paper from her hand. I know! The days of miracles are not yet over!

It was truly a delight to finally get my hands on this beautiful book. The photographs are gorgeous, the recipes look wonderful, and the text itself, written by author and baker Peter Reinhold, is very interesting. I sat all afternoon with my head buried in the book.

So! I think I may now be able to not only bake some bread, but also learn about bread. There was a piece at the beginning of the book when Peter was explaining how he knows when his students start to get it about bread: how they develop a feel for it and how they start to develop an instinct for what a recipe needs, not only because they know how each ingredient develops what will eventually be a perfect loaf, but also because they just know their bread.

I got a little frisson of pleasure when I read that, because I actually have started to develop that sense. Not because I understand how all the ingredients work together, you understand. And not even necessarily because I am one with the breadmaking process. No, I would say that I am more like one with my bread machine. I know from the way it sounds if the dough needs more water or more flour. I know -- because I've scribbled notes in the margins of my bread machine pamphlet cookbooks -- that I prefer 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter in the French bread recipe, rather than the 1 tablespoon that's called for. I've found out through trial and error how much flaxseed I can add to whole wheat bread to maintain a chewy texture and a nutty/seedy taste and how much makes the bread taste like something scraped off the forest floor, made of twigs, pine cones and dry leaves.

I'm really hoping that this knowledge will translate as I try to make bread the old fashioned way. And by "old fashioned" I mean "in bread pans in the oven" because? You didn't really think I was going to knead it myself did you? Eeeek!

BBA CHALLENGE: A setback and a move forward

If, by chance, you are a person involved with the bread baking challenge offered by Nicole Hamaker of Pinch My Salt, and you have been checking here to see how the bread is turning out in my kitchen, you have undoubtedly been left with the impression that I am either a person with a bad attitude about bread or maybe that I am the laziest person in the world. Or perhaps that I am a disgruntled and uninspired dough-kneader. Or that my arms suddenly fell off, I don't know.

At any rate, you might have noticed that I haven't posted a bread recipe ever since the first week's Anadama bread.

Here's the thing: We don't have any money, so I can't afford to buy the book, which is The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. And my local library does have a copy, but the person who checked it out has not brought it back yet and even renewed it for another month when it recently came due. I believe she must be clutching it to her chest in her warm, bread-scented kitchen and cackling wickedly because she can see on the library's website that I have placed a hold on the book and am most urgently waiting for a call from the circulation desk. Whoever she is, she is really hurting my feelings.

The book is not expensive, so I think I may buy it with my birthday money at the end of June, and then join Kayte and a group of her friends as they bake their way through Peter's book at a slower pace. Nicole has been extremely understanding of the demands of everyone's schedule, so the BBA Challenge group is very loosely formed: there are no deadlines, no pictures to post, no quotas to meet. So I feel that I can just jump back in and start baking when things sort themselves out around here.

In the meantime, Kayte forwarded a recipe for Pane di Pasta Tenera Condita (Italian Knot Bread) that a friend of hers formatted into a Word document with pictures and everything. Everything I would need to bake this lovely bread! Except, maybe, for a CLUE. Because the recipe is all grammy and millilitery and asking me for things like 0.88 ounces of honey and then there's this little paragraph, which made me temporarily black out:

30 g fresh yeast (this is what I found: 18 grams of fresh yeast = 7-10 grams of active dry yeast = about 4-6 grams of instant yeast, I don't dare calculate it right now.)

What does that even mean?! Is it in English? Is Kayte trying to punk me? Because all I want to know is this: Can I just rip open a little packet of Fleishmann's yeast and dump it into the lukewarm water or not?

When I got to the instruction which read "add 450-550 ml/ 1,9-2,3 cup water, finger warm," I began to suck the ends of my hair and mutter, like Goldie Hawn in Overboard, "Buh buh buh-buh-buh...."

This recipe, thank heaven, is not part of the actual BBA Challenge curriculum and it's a good thing because I honestly don't think I can do it. I like my cooking to be a more organic sort of experience involving regular measuring cups and measuring spoons and my favorite mixing bowl. I don't want to have to haul out the digital scale I used to use for soapmaking. That sucks all the fun right out of it for me, I find, and I think I'll do better with simpler recipes. I'm sure my results won't be as spectacular, but really, all I ask of my bread is that my family can place some deli turkey on its snowy white breast, or spread some good butter on it, and eat it with the honesty and total lack of imagination that behooves our solid peasant stock.

I'm going to check around on the internet and see if I can find a recipe for Greek celebration bread, which was the second assignment in the BBA Challenge. Obviously, it won't be Peter Reinhart's recipe, but at least I'll be able to say that I'm doing something instead of sitting here feeling intimidated by Italian bread.

BBA CHALLENGE: Anadama Bread redux and complaints about science

Okay. I am trying the Anadama bread again in the machine, having reduced the yeast by half and teaspoon and the water by two tablespoons. I should know if my hit-or-miss methods of recipe troubleshooting actually worked in about two and a half hours.

See, this is what gets me: science was hard enough in school. And school was, well, one frikkin' long time ago. Which is why I'd like to register a protest that it is not fair that bread baking is scientific. I've been told that the first part of Peter Reinhart's book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, is all about the science of baking bread. I think this sounds interesting, but I'm not altogether certain I'm going to understand it. Because my bread machine and I have been such boon companions these last ten years, there are a few little things I know, but I don't know why I know them or how I learned them. And most of my bread-baking knowledge involves things that are of no help whatsoever, like how I know to add more water to the dough when the bread machine makes a certain little groaning sound.

Oh, dear. I'm beginning to think that if this new loaf turns out well, or, heck, if it turns out to be bread, it will be a miracle.

I checked out a few blogs of people who are doing the BBA Challenge, and I was so intimidated by some of them, I just timidly crept away without even leaving a comment. One person was all, "I knew I would have to adjust the amount of water due to the high relative humidity here today" and I was all, "So now I'm finding out that I have to consult the local weather report before I can bake a loaf of bread? AAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!!!!"

How have I done it all these years, just casually throwing ingredients into the machine's bread pan, sometimes measuring them in the palm of my hand?

I am worried that I was once an unsullied idiot-savant in the breadmaking world, and now that part of the idiot has been removed, my savant will be shown to be disappointingly insufficient. You might laugh, but oh....it has happened to me so often before, like with knowing how to put on eyeliner and make good sun tea.

BBA CHALLENGE: Anadama Bread (Week 1)

Here we are in our first week of bread baking as part of the BBA Challenge, started by Nicole from Pinch My Salt. Nicole originally thought that oh, maybe about four or five people would want to join her in baking through Peter Reinhart's book The Bread Baker's Apprentice. As it ended up, more than two hundred people joined, Kayte and I along with them. If you'd like to read about how the BBA Challenge started with Nicole on Twitter and grew exponentially, click here.

Meelyn, Aisling and I are still waiting for our copy of The Bread Baker's Apprentice to come in the mail, so we relied on our colleague Heather Lalley for the recipe for this week's Anadama Bread: click here if you'd like to read it at her blog, Flour Girl.

So, without further ado, I give you Anadama Bread!

ANADAMA BREAD

Anadama Bread was apparently first baked for family consumption in the New England region of the United States in 1850. The apocryphal story goes that somes grouchy old Massachusetts man, who is in some versions of the tale a fisherman and in others just regular, was dumped by his wife, Anna. In lieu of a Dear John letter propped up on the sugar bowl, she left him with nothing in the house but flour, molasses and some cornmeal mush. When the man came home for his dinner, he had no choice but to throw those items together for a meal, shouting "Anna! Damn 'er!" while he let them bake.

So sweet!

Although I have the greatest respect for bakers who enjoy the whole kneading-and-rising-and kneading-some-more aspect of bread making, I am not one of those people. Ma Ingalls and I have very little in common except for an admiration of her daughter, Mrs. Almanzo Wilder. To a point, I am much too lazy. So I decided to adapt Anadama Bread to my bread machine and let it do all the work while I basked in the results of home made bread.

Most bread recipes make two loaves of bread, so I needed to cut the recipe roughly in half. My bread machine will make a 1 1/2 pound loaf and therefore, math needed to be done.

I do not like math.

But I do like bread.

So I sat down at the table with a piece of paper and a pencil and a calculator and a worried mind. My great fear was that I would figure for too much bread and wind up with dough running all over the inside of my beloved bread machine, which I would sleep with under my pillow if my neck were a little longer. I made some chicken-scratchy marks on my paper and came up with this:

For the "soaker" (obviously Anna's cornmeal mush) I used:

1/2 cup water
1/2 cup cornmeal

The soaker sat out on the countertop overnight, covered with plastic wrap. Upon arising, I stirred it together with :

1 cup bread flour
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
1 cup lukewarm water

That mixture sat on the counter for an hour, where it fermented just as promised.

At the end of that hour, I added these ingredients together with the fermented mixture, all in the order that my bread machine's manufacturer recommends:

3 tablespoons molasses
[fermented mixture]
1 1/4 cup bread flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tablespoons cold butter

I punched the buttons to get things started on the machine and then sat back and waited on my bread, which I planned to present to my family, to the accompaniment of their admiring oohs and aahs, at dinner.

Three hours and ten minutes later, the timer went off and I scampered out to the kitchen to turn out a beautiful, tender loaf onto my bread board, so imagine my disappointment when I looked in the interior of my machine and found a "crater loaf." That's what it's called when you have walls of crisped dough that rise up the sides of the pan, with the actual bread sunk down in the middle.

"Anna! Damn 'er!" I said.

I did a little online research and found out that this condition is caused by either/or too much water /too much yeast. In comparing the recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice with the recipes in the leaflet cookbooks that came with my machine, I believe that I would have a successful loaf if I subtracted two tablespoons of water and used only one teaspoon of yeast.

The actual bread was not a disappointment at all, though. After those ugly crater walls were broken off the truncated loaf, we sliced it up and found it very delicious. I ate some for breakfast yesterday with some crunchy peanut butter and a glass of milk and it tasted like heaven.

Kayte told me that someone told her that this bread is served in sandwich roll formation at some restaurant somewhere with sliced deli turkey, lettuce and cranberry chutney, which sounds fabulous.

So! In spite of a little trouble, the four of us here found that Anadama Bread is really very good and worth another go in the bread machine, which I shall do tomorrow. If that still doesn't work, I think I'll do it the old fashioned way -- oh, my aching shoulders! -- and knead it on the counter.

The BBA Challenge (Bread Baker's Apprentice)

Kayte has dunnit again.

She knows that I can't resist the allure of joining a new internet group and meeting new people, especially foodie people. Internet groups are lovely because you don't have to leave your house to have all kinds of fun, and before you all think I am some kind of beardy-weirdy hermit with shrubbery growing over the windows, let me just say that every mother knows what I'm talking about: it's hard to find the time to get away to go to this meeting or that meeting in the evenings, no matter how much you'd like to. I mean, an evening meeting could be bunco or a book discussion group or whatever. It's just hard.

This particular internet group is going to be baking its way through the book The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. I thought this would be a nice group to join as a summer project for Meelyn, Aisling and me. Last summer, if you remember, we joined Shari's Whisk Wednesdays group at Kayte's recommendation, which is (still) cooking its way through Le Cordon Bleu at Home; we had to drop out of that group when the school year started because of the pressing demands of high school work, but it was certainly a lot of fun and we all learned a lot. I wish we could re-join them this summer, but they've all moved so far ahead of our bumbling efforts in technique, I think we'd be left in a state of constant befuddlement.

So this summer, we're going to study bread. I like this group already because it is very loosely configured. Some groups are very strict about posting results and pictures on certain days and making sure that you do a certain number of recipes, allowing for the fact that you might fall ill and have to miss a week here or there, although they do require you to write letters of apology to every single other member of the group, as well as the publisher of whatever cookbook you're using. Or I may have just made that last part completely up. But anyway, some groups are stricter than others.

I have always really enjoyed baking bread, at least as soon as I got a bread machine. I carefully checked this out with Kayte beforehand: "Will they let me use my bread machine for all that kneading and rising and kneading and rising? Because I can't do all that with my own hands."

She said that it would be okay, so I heaved a sigh of relief. I have been to Connor Prairie before and I've seen those living history docents doing all that back-breaking work with the bread and heard them tell about how many loaves pioneer women had to make to get their families through the week and nuh-uh...not for me. There is only a very faint bit of the artisan in me; I am ALL ABOUT THE MACHINE.

Since I don't yet have the book, Kayte is going to bring me the recipe for the first bread of the challenge tomorrow when we see one another. Our first challenge, then, is for Anadama bread, a New England mainstay that historians seem to feel was made for family consumption in around 1850, although it wasn't sold commercially until 1871.¹ Anadama bread's main ingredients that make it the well-known bread it is are molasses and cornmeal, combined with the usual flour, yeast, water, salt and butter.² I may have to fiddle around with the recipe so that it won't overflow my bread machine's inner pan.

The girls and I will post our results for Anadama bread here as soon as we have 'em!

You can read about our Whisk Wednesdays adventures, my experiments with Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours cookbook and our new BBA Challenge trials and (hopefully few) errors in the side bar titled "Family Cooking" -- just scroll down on the left hand side of this page to find it.


Citations:
¹"Anadama Bread", Food Timeline: Breads, May 11, 2009
²Ibid, May 11, 2009