I love bread of all kinds, and I certainly wasn't going to stop eating it just because it's unreasonably priced, so I started making bread at home. I try to eat a diet that's at least somewhat healthy, so I began by trying to do a 100% whole wheat loaf. I grabbed a recipe for whole wheat bread out of my trusty Joy of Cooking, and it was an unmitigated disaster. The recipe recommends using only 25% whole wheat flour and 75% bread flour, and that's for a very good reason. Apparently, it's not so easy to get a good rise on a whole grain bread using a simple quick-rise recipe like the basic one in Joy.
I experimented with reducing the salt to avoid retarding the yeast, but of course, the salt is there for a good reason. Un-retarded yeast causes the bread to rise too fast, and it can collapse in the oven. Over the past several years, I've converged toward a multi-grain sourdough recipe that gets a very long rise after shaping. Next week, I'll walk through the recipe I've developed in greater detail.
In the weeks to come, I plan to document a new project that I'm starting. I'm going to bake my way through The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. It contains approximately 40 different recipes for advanced bread bakers. The plan is to bake one recipe per week and to post about it. Depending on how that goes, I might continue exploring other bread recipes from different sources, but that's a question for next year.
Occasionally, I'll also post a bonus blog discussing some technical aspect of bread baking. These will be drawn from my own experience along with research from the internet and from The Bread Baker's Apprentice.
Today, however, I'm going to do something totally different. This is my first bonus post, and I'm going to just present two things that I baked for my family Thanksgiving this week.
First, here's my apple pie. I love eating pie, and I have fun baking it, but as you can see, I'm not particularly skilled at making a pie that looks beautiful. It tasted good, and we liked it, which is the best I could have hoped for. I might eventually try to really master the art of pie baking, but that's a project for another time.
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| Before |
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| After |
One pie baking trick that I have figured out, however, is to place the pie plate on a hot pizza stone. If you place your pizza stone in the oven while it pre-heats, the stone will warm with the oven, and it will conduct heat into the bottom of the pie plate much more easily than the radiative heat from the un-augmented oven. This is a quick and easy way to avoid the dreaded "soggy bottom" without having to blind-bake your pie. For a two-crust pie like this one, this is especially helpful, because blind-baking a two crust pie is a next-level challenge. It's apparently possible, but I've never tried it.
The second item for my Thanksgiving special edition is stuffed bread rolls. These rolls are an old family tradition. The recipe for the dough comes from my mother's grandmother, and my aunt used to make these every year at our family Thanksgivings at my grandmother's house. The stuffing, however, was a new experiment this year.
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| Dinner rolls |
The rolls are stuffed with shredded mozzarella and a cilantro pesto. You might notice that the tops of the rolls have caught a bit. That's because I didn't think through the baking process when I was planning these. The added stuffing meant the rolls took longer to cook through, so when I first pulled them out of the oven, they were still raw inside. I had to put them back in for an extra 10 minutes, and they over-browned.
This was the first year I've tried these, and I'd call them a qualified success. I liked them, and so did my partner and our friend who spent Thanksgiving with us, but I think they could be better. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to cover them with foil for the first half of the bake next year.
Actually, I'd better go add an annotation to Granny's recipe so I don't forget next year. Next week, I'll do a deep dive into my standard bread recipe that I make every Saturday.
Until then, I remain your,
Dauntless Baker
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