Artos: Greek Celebration Bread

Greetings, bread fans!  This week, I'll be discussing the bread I baked for our Christmas feast.  My family usually prepares my great-grandmother's bread recipe, formed into rolls, for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I did Granny's rolls for Thanksgiving, but by happy chance, I ended up with a celebration bread on the baking schedule right near Christmas, so I tried that instead.

My modestly successful attempt at a Christopsomos

This week's bread is artos.  It's a catch-all term for several different variations of Greek celebration breads prepared for different festivals.  It's an enriched dough that's prepared using milk, egg and spices.  Some variations also include fruits or nuts worked into the dough.  In traditional Greek households, the prepared bread is often taken to the local Orthodox church to be blessed before baking.  Sometimes, it's even stamped or sealed, and some holidays include hidden treasures like eggs or a gold coin.

The variant I prepared is called a Christopsomos loaf, which is the traditional Christmas bread.  It's decorated with a cross on top of the risen loaf.  Unfortunately, my attempt at decoration was only partially successful, as you can see.  Nevertheless, I'm quite pleased with the flavor and texture of the bread, so I'm calling this attempt a qualified success.

Like most of the recipes in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, the artos relies on a pre-ferment stage to bring out the flavor of the flour.  This particular recipe uses a poolish.  The flour-to-water ratio of the poolish is about 3:2 by volume, so the finished product is very liquid.  I prepared the poolish ahead of time.  Then, on Christmas morning, I pulled it out of the fridge to warm up and activate the yeast.  After about an hour, the yeasts went to work, and I got a really nice bubble going.

The activated poolish

Alongside the poolish, the dough includes milk and egg to create a delicate, rich bread.  It's also flavored with traditional, holiday aromatics like cinnamon, cloves, and orange zest.  After adding all the ingredients and finishing the mix, I discovered that the dough was extremely wet.  This is the second consecutive dough that's come out much looser than I expected, so I suspect that my flour storage is leaving the flour more aerated than usual, altering the flour-to-liquid ratio in my initial mix.  Jessica bought me a kitchen scale for Christmas, so I'll have to do some experimenting to see if that's indeed the case.

The finished dough after the first prove

After adding considerably more flour and working the dough for a good 10-15 minutes, I finally arrived at a smooth, elastic, and slightly tacky dough.  Then it was off for a long winter's nap 😉.  An enriched dough needs longer to prove than a typical loaf using commercial yeast, because the extra fat makes the dough softer and less springy.  Eventually, I got a nicely risen loaf, and the warmth generated by the metabolizing yeast must have activated some of the oils from the spices, because my kitchen smelled amazing by the time the dough was ready for shaping.

To make the Christopsomos loaf, I was supposed to add a bunch of nuts and dried fruit during the dough assembly.  Oops!  I forgot!  Still, I was excited to try my hand at a decorated loaf, so I followed the instructions to separate the proven dough into two pieces, one about twice the size of the other.  The small piece went into the fridge until the large piece rose into a finished boule.  Then, I rolled the small piece out into two long strands, separated the ends, and decorated the risen boule as shown.

The risen boule with decorative cross

At the decoration stage, it became apparent to me that I had overcompensated for the wet dough and added too much flour while I was working it.  The decoration strand didn't stick to itself the way it should've, so instead of tight spirals at the base of the loaf, I ended up with loose, dangling ends.  This is the part of the process that went least well.  Nevertheless, the finished loaf ended up looking okay, and it tasted amazing.  The aromatics in the dough make it taste exactly like Christmas.  It tastes similar to gingerbread, but the flavor is more subtle, and the yeasty taste—combined with the distinct lack of molasses—makes it just different enough to stand out.  It almost has a wonderfully soft crumb.  In short, it's about halfway between a regular white bread and a cake.  I love it, and I would definitely make this bread again.

The completed loaf, fresh out of the oven and glistening with butter

The recipe called for an optional glaze, but I was feeling lazy after my first glass of wine, and I decided to take a short cut and butter the top of the loaf instead.  It gave the bread a delicious, buttery flavor, even if it doesn't look quite as amazing once it's soaked into the crust as a real glaze would've.

The crumb.  Notice the different structure in the decoration
strand, top right.

This bread has been delicious.  It's reminiscent of the cinnamon-raisin bread my grandmother used to keep when I was a kid.  As a result, I was expecting it to make great toast, but I was rather disappointed.  Most of the wonderful aromatics that give the bread its flavor got lost among the toasting.  It was good toast, but not as amazing as the bread itself.  Lesson learned.

Next week, I'll attempt that most difficult of New York traditions: the bagel.  Wish me luck, everyone.

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Dill & Onion Herb Bread

Greetings everyone on this, the second full day of winter!  Happy Yule, Happy Chanukah, Advent Greetings, and other holiday wishes that I can't remember.

First, I have to apologize.  I've had a lot of beautiful holiday celebrations with friends and family this weekend, and I simply forgot to photograph my bread until it was going into the oven.  As a result, I have photos of the finished product this week, but that's it.  As I promised last week, today's recipe is a dill bread out of Joy of Cooking that I've been wanting to try for a while now.

A finished loaf, out of the metal bread pan

The original recipe is a relatively straightforward enriched dough, and it can be completed in about 3 hours.  Knowing that this recipe is relatively quick in its basic incarnation, I elected to improvise a lot of it.  I kept the fillings the same and retained the proportion of water to flour, but I did make some fairly substantial changes.  I built the dough around a biga—one of several possible pre-ferment stages—rather than using the simple dough contained in Joy of Cooking.  This in turn altered the amounts of flour and water needed in the final dough, so I had to feel my way through a lot of it.  It's therefore a pleasant surprise that the finished bread came out reasonably well.

The base recipe builds an enriched dough that uses both egg and cottage cheese.  I didn't have any cottage cheese, so I substituted plain Greek yogurt for the cottage cheese.  This change, along with the need of some extra water to loosen the biga prior to mixing meant that the dough started out quite slack.  I added a bunch of extra flour to bring everything together, but even then the dough remained relatively sticky, unlike the tacky dough described in the recipe.

Despite these changes, the bread came out quite tasty.  Between the onion and the yogurt—which gave the dough a rich, tangy flavor—the finished product ended up smelling and tasting a lot like a really good Thanksgiving stuffing.  The high water content, in addition to the yogurt, also meant that the finished dough ended up soft and wonderfully fluffy.  It makes great toast or sandwich bread.  Jess used it to make some absolutely delicious grilled cheese sandwiches after we got back from an evening out, and I definitely vote to have those again!

A nice open crumb from a pretty good rise

One lesson I learned from this bake is that the material a bread pan is made from can make a noticeable difference.  This recipe, once modified to use a biga, made two normal-sized loaves.  I have two different bread pans—one glass and one metal—and the loaves that came out of each one ended up looking somewhat different around the bottom.  See if you can guess which loaf came out of which pan.

The finished loaves after buttering the tops

If you guessed the loaf on the right came out of the metal bread pan, you're correct!  The loaf baked in the glass pan didn't brown nearly as well as the one baked in metal.  Both pans sat on top of my pizza steel, so they should both have come up to temperature relatively quickly.  Nevertheless, the glass pan didn't conduct the heat into the loaf nearly as well (science!), so the Maillard reactions don't proceed as easily with the glass pan.  I love a nice, rich, crispy crust on my bread, so I lament the limited browning from my glass bread pan.  Nevertheless, it is nice not to have to worry about the rust that always threatens my cheap steel pan.

I suppose the advantages of each pan mostly balance out, but I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to buy another glass bread pan in the future.  And behold, my bread-baking project has already borne fruit!  I've learned something about pan selection that I never knew before.

Let's hope this trend toward success continues into my project for this week.  As promised, I'll be baking a Greek celebration loaf called an artos for Christmas.  It's a decorated loaf, which I've never tried before, so I'm a little nervous.  This post is going up later than I hoped for, so tomorrow is already Christmas Eve.  I'll be starting the pre-ferment of my Christmas bread and trying to make a mince pie, something else that I've never baked before.  Wish me luck, internet!

Until next time, I remain...well, you get the idea.

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Anadama

As I promised last week, this weekend I worked through my first recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice.  It was a version of anadama, a traditional New England style loaf that includes corn meal and molasses for a richer flavor than a standard white bread.

The recipe I used employs an overnight soaker to bring forward the flavor of the cornmeal.  I won't be giving out the details of the recipe, because it comes from a copyrighted book.  However, I am going to show you a few of the stages along the way from raw ingredients to the finished product.  After sitting in my refrigerator overnight, the corn meal in the soaker was fully hydrated, but there was still a bit of water left over.  That might be my corn meal was relatively old.  I've kept it in the freezer, but even then, it probably picked up some extra moisture over time.

The soaker immediately after mixing, approximately 24 hours before baking

In retrospect, that extra water was probably at least part of the reason for the trouble I had getting the dough to come together properly, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  After the soaker sits overnight and hydrates the corn meal, it becomes part of the sponge starter that forms the basis of the bread.  The yeast, more water, and some of the flour gets added to the soaker.  Then we wait a while for the yeasties to get to work.

The sponge immediately after assembly

 The photo above shows the sponge immediately after mixing all of the ingredients.  Then below, you can see what it looked like about 40 minutes later after the yeast had time to activate.  If that seems a bit slow, remember that the soaker had been in the fridge overnight, so the mixture started out pretty cold.  You'll notice that the second image has more bubbles, and the whole mixture has puffed up slightly.

The sponge, after the yeast has gone to work.

 Once the sponge is ready and the yeasts are awake and active, that's when the rest of the flour goes in, along with the salt, molasses, etc.  I had quite a bit of trouble at this stage.  Mixing of course is easy enough, but the dough ball came out much stickier than called for in the recipe.  During the kneading stage, the dough just vacuumed up the extra flour, and it took forever for it to really firm up.  In the end, I had to work in at least a cup of extra bread flour to bring the dough to the desired consistency.

If you work with bread, you'll know that needing extra flour to get the consistency right isn't that uncommon.  It was the actual amount of extra flour I needed that really surprised me.  Yesterday was extremely humid—as in, can't see more than half a block due to the fog, humid—so it's no surprise that team water began with a head start over team flour.  I suspect that my soaker had more water than strictly needed to hydrate the corn meal, and together, these two factors led to my difficulties getting the dough to firm up.

In the end, I finally managed to work in enough flour to get a good dough ball.  After that, I had to cheat!  Jessica and I met a bunch of friends for a white elephant gift exchange.  (Happy Yule!) That meant that I couldn't bake the bread on the prescribed schedule, so I had to cover the dough, put it back in the fridge and cross my fingers.

My improvised long ferment worked well, or at least it didn't ruin the dough.  I got home about five hours later to a dough that had significantly more than doubled in size.  I punched it down and shaped it into loaves, and at that point all I could do was wait and hope.  Had the very long first ferment starved my yeasty friends?  Would my dough remain uprisen in the loaf pans?

Dough in loaf pans prior to final rise

But my worries were unfounded!  After coming up to room temperature, the dough rose enthusiastically.  Jess got a batch of chocolate chip cookies going, and by the time she was finished, the loaves were ready for the oven.

The finished loaves

The crumb on the finished loaves

Anadama is a soft, springy loaf, and it has subtle hints of the corn meal and molasses that go into it.  It makes a very nice sandwich bread, but that's about all I can say for it.  If I'd bought it from a grocery store and used it to pack lunches for myself, I'd be enthusiastic, but I was expecting more.  A friend of ours who tried it had nice things to say.  Jess also gave it a positive review, but we both prefer the wholegrain sourdough from last week.

On balance, I'm not sure if the anadama was worth the long prep time, and I doubt I'll be making it again.

The next recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice is artos, a traditional Greek celebration bread.  It's an enriched dough that's perfect for Christmas.  As such, I'm going to push that one back a week.  I'll make it for our family Christmas and then report on it in two weeks.  In the interim, I'm going to attempt a really delicious-sounding dill-bread that I found in the Joy of Cooking a while back.

I love herb breads, and I've been wanting to try this recipe for a while, so I'm pretty excited about it.  Check back next week to see how it turns out.

Until then, I remain your Dauntless Baker.

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Multigrain Seed and Nut Sourdough

This week, I'll be taking you through my workhorse multigrain bread.  I make this bread every week, and it makes great toast for breakfast, a dinner-time accompaniment, or an anytime snack.

Finished loaf, formed in a traditional loaf pan

There's a good amount of research that suggests a Mediterranean diet, which includes moderate amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids like omega-3 and omega-6, can be good for your cardiovascular health.  There's also research—though more difficult to gather and therefore somewhat less reliable—that the same diet can help reduce your chances of Alzheimer's disease.

I'm a vegetarian, so the traditional sources of omega-3 like fish aren't open to me.  Instead, I've tried to incorporate more seeds and nuts into my diet.  The recipe below includes walnuts and flax seeds, both of which are good sources of omega-3.  However, these are a relatively recent addition.  The original motivation for this sourdough project was my desire for tasty, well-risen, whole grain bread.  The fiber in whole grain breads is important for heart health, and it promotes a healthy gut microbiome.  I try to consume whole grain foods wherever possible.

As I indicated in my previous post, I've been working on a pure (or nearly pure) whole grain loaf for a while.  This loaf is approximately 90% whole grain (by volume).  Getting a loaf of bread made with so much low-gluten flour isn't easy, and it's been a long-term project of mine to really get it right.

Here's the recipe that I baked today:

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2 c. sourdough starter*

1 1/2 c. cold water

2 c. whole wheat flour
1/2 c. whole wheat flour

2/3 c. bread flour

2/3 c. dark rye flour

2/3 c. red fife flour**

2 Tbsp. raw sunflower seeds

2 Tbsp. raw pumpkin seeds/pepitas

3 Tbsp. raw flax seeds

1/4 c. toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped

3 Tbsp. salt

* This recipe assumes a starter that is 67% flour and 33% water by volume.  If you prefer a looser starter, you will need to adjust the amounts of water and flour in the rest of the recipe.

** Red fife flour is a heritage strain of wheat that I get from a local farmer's market.  You will probably be fine replacing this with any whole grain cereal with a moderate amount of gluten.

Thoroughly mix sourdough starter and water in a large mixing bowl

Add 2c. whole wheat flour along with bread, rye, and red fife flours.  Make sure to completely cover the stater/water mixture with the flour.

Add seeds, walnuts and salt.  Mix thoroughly until the dough forms a ball and pulls away from the side of the bowl (approximately 2 minutes).

Cover the entire bowl with food-safe plastic bag and refrigerate for at least 3 hours, preferably overnight.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and allow to come to room temperature (approximately 1 hour).

Mix in 1/2 c. whole wheat flour and turn the dough onto a lightly floured work surface.

Knead until the dough feels smooth and elastic (approximately 15 minutes).  The finished dough should pass the windowpane test.

Set the dough ball aside and allow it to rest for approximately 10 minutes.

Cover a large baking sheet with parchment paper.  Lightly oil a piece of plastic wrap that is about as long as your baking sheet.

Cut the dough ball into equally-sized halves.  Form each half into a ball, and place them approximately 5 inches from each end of your baking sheet.  Cover the loaves with the prepared plastic wrap.

Allow the dough to rise at room temperature until the balls nearly triple in volume (approximately 3 hours).

Approximately 1 hour before the dough is ready for baking, place your pizza stone on a middle rack in your oven.  Place a heavy, oven-safe metal pan on the bottom of your oven.  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F and let your pizza stone heat for at least 30 minutes before baking.

Immediately before baking, bring 1 cup of water to a boil.

Place your baking sheet on your pizza stone.  Pour the boiling water into your metal pan and immediately close the door.

Spritz the oven walls with cold water every 30 seconds for 2 minutes, closing the oven door again immediately after each round. 

Bake for 20 minutes, then rotate your sheet pan.  Bake for another 10-20 minutes.

To check for doneness, tap the bottom of the loaves.  They should sound hollow.

Turn off your oven and remove the pizza stone.  Return the loaves to the oven, and prop the oven door open with an oven mitt or a wooden spoon.  Allow the loaves to cool to room temperature in the oven.

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This recipe takes a long time to prepare.  I usually plan for about 36 hours from the time I feed my starter to the time the finished loaves are ready to eat.  Nevertheless, if you plan ahead, you can get a delicious, heart-healthy batch of bread in exchange for your patience.

Whole-wheat sourdough starter, approximately 24 hours after first feed.

This sourdough recipe is based on three separate bread recipes in The Joy of Cooking: "Slow-Rising White Bread", "Whole Wheat Bread" and "Rye Bread with a Sponge Starter".  I started by using 50% rye and 50% whole wheat flour in my dough, along with a rye starter.  It didn't work very well, I've been experimenting ever since trying to figure out how to get a good crumb with much more whole wheat grain than the 33% whole wheat flour recommended in Joy.

Using a pure sourdough process without any commercial yeast seems to be key to a good loaf with lots of whole grains.  During the overnight fermentation, the lactobacillus bacteria that create the distinctive sourdough flavor go to work on the fiber in the whole wheat flour and start to break it down.  The long fermentation process also allows the gluten in the flour to fully hydrate before kneading.  Whole grain flour contains less gluten than bread flour, so this allows the baker to take better advantage of the gluten that is there.

After fermentation but before kneading

As I've added the seeds into my dough, I also find that the fermentation process starts to break down the raw seeds, too.  Fermentation is just one form of "cooking" after all, so it should be a big surprise that the seeds change state during the 24 hours they spend in the fridge.  Between that long, slow fermentation and the high cooking temperature in the oven, the raw seeds that go into the dough come out tasting rich and nutty.

You may have noticed that my recipe calls for a long kneading process.  The low gluten content of the whole grain flours that I use—especially the rye flour—means that we need to work the dough quite a bit before it's ready for its final rise.  The extra work will pay off, however.  The dough will be sturdy enough to sustain a good rise, and it creates a delicious chew when it comes out of the oven.

The natural yeasts that developed in my starter (born in Brooklyn, circa 2017) also work more slowly than commercial yeast.  That means that you need a very long final rise, but it also means that you get a big rise out of your yeast without the danger of over-proving and having your loaf fall in the oven.  (I over-proved several batches back when I was still using lots of rye flour, and it was pretty depressing when it came time to pull the loaves out of the oven.)

Even with such a long rise time, the loaves that result have quite a dense crumb (see picture, below).  This isn't uncommon with whole grain breads, but as I've improved the flour proportions, I've definitely noticed a better rise and more oven spring.  I suspect some of this high density also comes because I don't own any bannetons, so the loaves rise out more than up.

Finished loaves, formed into boules

I've found a pizza stone to be very helpful in getting a nice loaf of bread out of my home oven.  In fact, I don't just use one pizza stone; I use two.  I'm planning a series of bonus posts on the more technical aspects of bread baking.  They'll include a discussion of sourdough starters, my oven set-up, and how to get a good crust in a home oven, so stay tuned.  

Next week, I'll launch into my project to bake my way through The Bread Baker's Apprentice.  I'll begin with anadama, a traditional New England loaf that includes cornmeal and molasses.

Until then, I remain your,

Dauntless Baker

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All content is licensed under the Creative Commons 4.0 By-NC license.  You are free to use content on this page for non-commercial applications, provided that you correctly attribute its source to this blog.