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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