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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