BBA Slow & Steady #7: Ciabatta roundup

Those of us in the Slow & Steady subgroup of the BBA Challenge might still be in the "C" section of Peter Reinhart's book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice (on our way to the end of the alphabet - and the book!) but we're not discouraged, nope, not one bit. We've been too challenged by the current bread, Ciabatta, to even notice that several more breads are still ahead before we escape the wily grip of the third letter of the alphabet.

Ciabatta is a rustic hearth bread which hails from Como, Italy - it takes its name from the region's dancing shoes which it vaguely resembles. Aside from that flat slipper shape, Ciabatta is also characterized by large shiny holes in the crumb. The loaf pictured up top demonstrates the holey nature; in fact that one is pretty much one big hole surrounded by crust! Now before anyone gets their hopes up and/or becomes despondent, that loaf in that picture was not baked by anyone in the BBA Challenge; it is a loaf of Ciabatta that I bought at a local bakery (Ciabatta accompanies dinner at our house nearly every evening).

To a greater or lesser extent, all of us had the goal of baking our Ciabattas with large holes. Read on to see how we fared in our quest.

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Di, of Di's Kitchen Notebook, parlayed her new square of linen (for making a couche) and her substantial experience with wet doughs into two lovely loaf of ciabatta, one of which harbored these gorgeous holes in the interior
Here's Di's post: the hole (short) story

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Kayte of Grandma's Kitchen Table was delighted to find that her bread looked exactly like the dancing slippers from the Como region of Italy that give this bread its name, and her family was delighted with the taste of the bread, dipped in herbed olive oil (yum!). She's already plotting to try this bread again, to see if she can get, guess what? Right, bigger holes! Her post: BBA: Ciabatta.

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Leslie of Lethally Delicious was very disappointed in her ciabatta experience; her dense loaves left her wondering what went awry, but I know she will be back in the bread saddle just as soon as her wrenched back will let her (feel better, Leslie!)
Read about her experience here: BBA - Ciabatta FAIL

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After a false start where a batch of dough almost broke her mixer, Audrey of Food From Books switched to a food processor and successfully mixed her bread dough. In true apprentice style, Audrey figures it will be a few more tries until she gets the interior crumb (holes!) that she'd like. I'm sure her new linen couche will get lots of work making beautiful hearth breads! Check out the full post: Bread Bakers Apprentice #7: Ciabatta

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Jessica of The Singleton in the Kitchen had stiff competition from some amazing restaurant Ciabatta as her benchmark; luckily her version garnered compliments from her brother. She has made Ciabatta in the past from another recipe, so I'm attributing the sizeable holes in her bread's crumb to the practice she's had! Read her post: BBA SOS: Holla for your Challah!

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Welcome to a new member this week, Margaret of Tea and Scones, who found that her bread was wonderful for dipping in flavored olive oil (check out the fennel in that picture - tasty!). She's hoping that a bit of practice will produce, say it with me - holes!
Her post: Slow and Steady BBA - Ciabatta!

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I had the benefit of Cathy's wisdom (see below) when I wrote my Ciabatta post (because my post was so late) and I realized that I should to be content with the fabulous taste of my bread rather than fret about whether the crumb had the right type of hole. For the most part, my loaves had a fairly close crumb, but you can rest assured that as I was cutting the bread whenever a hole appeared, I whisked the bread to the nearest natural light and snapped a picture, like this one:

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Cathy of The Tortefeasor, despite the restrictions of One Sentence Blog Post Week, managed to describe three lessons she learned from her "insanely delicious" bread; her post served as a reality check to me and is a fitting reminder as I conclude this round up that when a bread is as good as this ciabatta was for nearly all of us, the hole size really shouldn't matter!

Here's her post: BBA: Ciabatta

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We will be back on the sweet side of the bread street with our next challenge: Cinnamon Bune and Sticky Buns. Look for the roundup here in about 2 weeks.

Garden Tomato Bread

When I received a Tweet from @SunsetMag linking to a page of tomato recipes I immediately fell in love with the picture of Garden Tomato Bread (whole wheat, herbs, and garlic along with a healthy quantity of ripe tomatoes and their juice - recipe here) so I earmarked some ripening tomatoes on my counter just for the bread and baked it this week; I had a few mishaps in baking a half recipe of the bread (in the excitement of converting to fresh yeast, I forgot to halve the water), but thankfully "bread is forgiving" and I was rewarded with two small hearth loaves of savory bread that was delicious with seasoned olive oil and even better as a grilled cheese (with aged cheddar) and my husband, who had earlier pronounced that "tomatoes belong in sandwiches, not bread" found the bread "surprisingly, good," although to him "good" does not mean "very good" or "fantastic" or, apparently, "I'd like some more," so I gave one loaf away and will be finishing the other loaf - happily - all by myself!

[This post is part of the One-Sentence-Blog-Post-Week Challenge! Also, the bread is going to Yeastspotting hosted this week by Macheesmo, look for the roundup on Friday. Some of my Twitter buddies baked this bread at the same time, see their posts here and here]

Ciabatta {bba}

There are times when a reality check is in order: thanks to The Tortefeasor’s recent bread post I realized that I could indeed write about my Ciabatta (the next bread in the BBA Challenge, mine is the poolish version) in one sentence, and, more importantly, she made me see that I should glory in the superb taste of this bread, the best to ever come out of my oven (narrowly edging the fabulous bagels), rather than be disappointed in the lack of characteristically large holes inside; apparently my family members agreed because when I had apologized for the smallish holes in the bread they said, “So what? It tastes fantastic!” (and now I hope to bake all of the hearth bread for our dinner).

BBA Slow & Steady #6: Challah roundup

The stalwart members of the Slow & Steady subgroup of the BBA Challenge continue our way through all of the breads in Peter Reinhart's book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. Although we're still in the "C's" in this alphabetically-arranged book, we are making progress. Really we are!

The current bread is Challah, an egg bread that is traditionally baked for the Jewish sabbath. It's an enriched bread, with eggs and oil, but no dairy. Typically it is a rich golden color from the whole eggs and egg yolks used in baking it.

Sarah, of Blue Ridge Baker, needed some buns to bring to a July 4 get-together, so she whipped up a batch of Challah, baking one braided loaf and forming the rest of the dough as buns (see the picture, up top). She reports that the bread made fantastic french toast as well. Get the details in her post: BBA Challenge: Challah.

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Cathy of The Tortefeasor turned out some professional-looking braided loaves, which she is used as a base for other recipes: croutons and French toast. Clever use of an abundance of bread, Cathy! Here's her post: BBA: Challah

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Leslie of Lethally Delicious found that she learned a ton of lessons while making a loaf of Challah that her husband found irresistible. For example, don't braid your dough before you've had your coffee! Luckily, even with a bit of over-hydration (too much water), Leslie's bread turned out beautiful and delicious. Read about her experience here: BBA - Challah

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Di, of Di's Kitchen Notebook, wrote a lovely post about reading with her girls, which she tied in very nicely with baking the challah. Her bread, although not a favorite in the taste department, was equally lovely, which Di attributes to all the practice she's had braiding hair. I guess when you come from a family of girls and have a family of girls, braids sort of happen naturally. Here's Di's post: Feeding body and mind

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Although Kayte of Grandma's Kitchen Table might tell you her middle initial is "B", I'm convinced her middle name is "Determination!" Not satisfied with her braiding technique on her first Challah loaf (aka "Wild Child"), Kayte baked the bread a second time, and ended up with a much better behaved dough and a beautiful loaf. See both versions: BBA Challenge: Challah.

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Audrey of Food From Books made a little hydration error (oops, too much water!) while mixing her bread dough, but luckily a little bench flour smoothed out the problem. Audrey's braided loaf looks professional, and although she found the bread pretty easy to make she found the taste a bit bland. Check out the full post: Bread Bakers Apprentice #6: Challah

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Melissa of From Laptop to Stovetop baked a braided loaf that is a work of art. She loved the taste of this bread and is thinking of making the dough into pull-apart rolls next time! Check out her post: Bread Baker's Apprentice: Challah

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Faced with an empty freezer and a modicum of free time, Jessica of The Singleton in the Kitchen managed to bake three bread recipes in one afternoon! The best part of baking Challah? Memories of baking with her BaBa, and popping the air bubbles in the dough. Two enormous Challah braids later, Jessica's freezer is no longer empty... Read her post: BBA SOS: Holla for your Challah!

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Despite its pronounced resemblance to a plucked barnyard fowl, my Challah was fun and quite tasty as well. I'm not sure it matches the epic homemade Challah I ate on my babysitting job in my teenaged years, but I enjoyed eating it (and baking it, too) nonetheless. Here's my post: Challah {bba} or, Chicken and Egg Bread.

We will have a couple more bread bakers joining the Slow & Steady subgroup of the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge. Look for all of our loaves of Ciabatta in the next roundup!

Challah {bba}, or, Chicken and Egg Bread

When I was a teenager, nearly every weekend would see me babysitting for a family of three children. I loved the parents, the children were adorable, and generally well-behaved. One of the side benefits was the late evening snacking after the children were asleep. The mom, L, kept a case of Tab and a large package of Chips Ahoy in the fridge for us to share. She also baked Challah every week for the family's celebration of the Jewish sabbath, turning out perfectly braided, golden brown loaves. "There's fresh Challah," she'd say, "enjoy it!" And enjoy it I did - cutting off thick slices of the still-warm bread. L also showed me how she roasted a chicken (I remember it involved sprinkling paprika) and cut cucumber spears for a party (meticulously cutting off the strips of seeds).

So I was excited and just a bit apprehensive about tackling Challah last week (it's the current assignment in the BBA Challenge). Could it possibly live up to L's great bread? I'd braided bread once before, when making Artos, and knew that my technique needed work. I was also interested in seeing how the recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice would taste.

Unlike many other enriched European breads, Challah has no dairy ingredients (it contains no milk, and uses oil rather than butter.) What it does have is lots of egg, which gives Challah its distinctive golden hue, inside and out.


n.o.e.'s notes:

- I didn't need much more bread in the house right now, so I made 1/3 recipe which was easy to scale (with the help of my digital scale).

- I used a duck egg, which has a bigger yolk than a chicken's. I reserved some of the white for the egg wash, using 40g of egg total in the dough. I'm guessing this gave me approximately the same proportion of egg-to-white as the recipe specifies for a full loaf.

- This bread was fairly easy to mix in the food processor. As usual, I pulsed the dry ingredients first. After adding the liquid, the dough was crumbly and dry, which seemed really odd. Then I noticed a little puddle of water on the scale and counter - it turns out that my metal bowl had a pinhole in the bottom and some of the water had leaked out. I had no idea how much I'd lost, so I added a little bit of water in small stream while pulsing, until the dough pulled into a ball in the food processor.

- I used olive oil.

- The dough was gorgeous to work with - so supple and satiny.

- After kneading I had about 1 cup of dough, made into a boule (round) shape for the first rise. It easily and quickly doubled.

- I divided the dough and had a bit of a hard time getting the strands to stay the length I wanted them - the dough was very elastic. I'd roll and pull each strandlong and thin and it would snap back to short and fat. In retrospect I should have let the strands rest for a few minutes so the gluten could relax, then stretch them thinner.


- Right after I took this picture (thanks for lending a hand, J.D.E.!), I noticed that the braid strands on the right end had come unstuck and I pinched them back. They kept coming loose and I kept pinching them back. I did everything short of stapling the dough together, but in the oven that one end popped apart again. It actually seemed that the right half of the bread rose more than the left.

- Scrolling down, the bread starts out looking fine, but then you see the whole thing, and realize that it looks exactly like...

a whole chicken, doesn't it?

(Maybe I should have trussed my bread braid like I do my chickens!)

the verdict:

This was delicious bread; refined yet chewy. I think my crumb should have been a little more closed, but we loved it just the same.

I don't think that this bread tasted as wonderful as the mythic Challah of my adolescence, but all the same I was proud that in my own kitchen I was able to produce even an approximation of that egg bread. Even if it did look like a roasted chicken.

BBA Slow & Steady #5: Casatiello Roundup

The BBA Challenge marches on (although a bit more like a stroll for those of us in the Slow & Steady subgroup) as we continue our way through all of the breads in Peter Reinhart's book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. The current bread is Casatiello, an Italian version of brioche - rich and buttery and stuffed with cheese and salami. In a pinch, this bread could be a meal in itself! Our little Slow & Steady subgroup members were split between those who made loaves and those who made rolls, but all of us enjoyed the taste of this one. As it turns out, the loaves are first and then the rolls:

Di, of Di's Kitchen Notebook, and her husband belong to an Italian-American genealogy group, and Di was excited to find a bread that she can share when they attend the group's next pot-luck dinner! Di had a lot of fun playing with the recipe, baking one salami version and another "pizza" version with sun-dried tomatoes, asiago and mozzarella (pictured up top). Read her post, Now that's Italian.

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Kayte of Grandma's Kitchen Table made lovely sandwich-style loaves of bread, studded with salami and cheese. Her family loved this bread plain and in sandwiches. A little birdie told me that Kayte has made this recipe again (and again!) as rolls and they just flew off the table at a swim meet. Kayte's post: BBA Challenge: Casatiello.

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Audrey of Food From Books found the bread's dough to be quite lively at each stage of the breadmaking, rising (even quadrupling at one point). A breakfast chicken sausage sounded delicious to Audrey, so that's what she added to her bread in lieu of salami, along with some dried apples. Audrey got great loaf-shaping practice in making her dough into 4 mini loaves that she could pop in the freezer for later enjoyment. Check out the full post: Bread Bakers Apprentice #5: Casatiello

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Leslie of Lethally Delicious has joined us this month. Even though she's quite new to bread-baking, Leslie has taken the yeast world by storm. Her all-cheese version of casatiello is stunning, and she found it perfect for sandwiches or alongside lentil chili. Yum! Here's her post: BBA - Casatiello

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Melissa of From Laptop to Stovetop uses words like "YUM", "YES!" and "delightful" to describe this bread, so it's safe to guess that it was a hit at her house! She baked her casatiello as a pan loaf, but I'm guessing that she'll be experimenting with the paper-bag variation sometime soon...
Read about it here: Bread Baker's Apprentice: Casatiello

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Jessica of The Singleton in the Kitchen found out that making this bread in single-serve portions suited her singleton lifestyle quite well - she made adorable little rolls in paper molds that she'll pull from the freezer as needed.
Jessica's post: BBA SOS: Casatiello

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Sarah, of Blue Ridge Baker, is a lifelong vegetarian and was going to skip this bread, but then she was inspired by not one, but two, substitutions for the salami. This time she used cheese and toasted walnuts, and next time she'll use sun-dried tomatoes (and there will be a next time, because she loved this bread!) Get the details in her post: BBA Challenge: Casatiello.

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I was pleasantly surprised at how much I loved the bacon and cheese rolls that I made with this bread formula. My best stab at what they would be called in Italy is "casatiellini." Here's my post: Bacon Casatiellini {bba}

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Cathy of The Tortefeasor baked this bread weeks ago, and even though her second career as party planner (!) has kept her too busy to post it yet, she sent the fabulous picture just above. About this bread (which her family found yummy) she says: "Nothing will make you realize that it's not an orange cranberry muffin faster than a bite of pepperoni."

Bacon Casatiellini {bba}

It's time for the next bread in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice. As part of the BBA Challenge, I am baking my way through the book, from beginning to end, which in this case means alphabetically. (We've baked the "A" and "B" breads already. Sadly there are not breads for every letter of the alphabet, but the early letters are well-represented at least!) This week's bread is Casatiello, which according to the book's author Peter Reinhart is "a rich, dreamy Italian elaboration on brioche".

In truth, I cannot say I was super-excited to be making more brioche, seeing as I'd just baked the BBA brioche, and the most recent Tuesdays With Dorie choice was a brioche-crusted tart (posted on my other blog, here). But "in for a penny, in for a pound" as they say; the Challenge is to bake each recipe in order, so that's what I'll do.

A few things turned around my attitude on this recipe:

1. I was amazed and inspired by what Holly, of the blog PheMOMenon did with her casatiello - she made mini loaves in little white paper cups (known sometimes as nut cups) Bingo! I could make individual rolls for...

2. My book group was having a summer dinner. Baking casatiello as dinner rolls was sounding like a great plan. The main course was fried quail, and I was excited to see...

3. One of the variations suggested by Peter Reinhart is for bacon casatiello. I've had a love affair with Benton's bacon (that began with a wonderful creamed corn that I made for last year's book group summer dinner) and was excited to experiment with it inside of homemade bread..

I figured that bacon and cheese dinner rolls would be a great complement to the dinner menu: fried quail, tomato pie, and spinach salad (brownies and ice cream for dessert).


n.o.e.'s notes:

- The word Casatiello is singular, and is used for one loaf. I know that the plural is Casatielli, for more than one loaf. My guess is that a bunch of tiny breads would be Casatiellini, but if you know Italian let me know in the comments if I'm right or wrong!

- Unlike many of the breads in the BBA book, which require an overnight rest, this bread is made with a quick 1 hour pre-ferment. I mixed buttermilk into my "sponge". It got very bubbly very quickly, but at that point life intervened and it was much longer than an hour by the time I got back to it. The sponge had separated and I wasn't sure how it would do, but I just gave it a good stir before mixing with the other ingredients and it was fine.

- The food processor did a great job of mixing the dough (dry ingredients first then add sponge/wet.


- Instead of 2 chicken eggs, I used one huge duck egg plus a bit of egg white from the fridge.

- The Benton bacon has a pretty smoky, intense bacon flavor. I didn't want to overpower the rolls, and finally settled on 4 oz of uncooked bacon, which I keep in the freezer already chopped into lardons. I cooked it slowly for fat to render, and it ended up slightly less than 2 oz when cooked.

- For fat/liquid, here's what I added:
2 oz butter
2 oz bacon grease
2 oz skim milk (I had fun listing that as an ingredient!)

- For the cheese, I chopped very small dice of the following:
2 oz Västerbotten cheese
4 oz le Gruyere.

- I formed the rolls into balls and baked them in muffin tins. I got a little lazy with my math, so ended up with 2 sizes: twelve at 2.5 oz each, and six at 1.75 oz. You can see the difference in the picture just above.

- All the rising times were much faster in my kitchen.

the verdict:

These rolls were perfect! They had a lovely soft moist crumb with little melted cheese pockets and a smoky bacon flavor. I think they would make a great breakfast or brunch bread, with scrambled eggs. I'll definitely make these again!

Update: I'm sending these to Yeastspotting, a weekly roundup of all things yeast-y. Check it out each Friday!

See the melted cheese over to the left edge? And the crumb on these rolls was outstanding.