Casatiello

And I'm back.  January is a sort of intermezzo for me, because it's a long period between semesters when I don't have any real, formal structure to my time.  This year, January simply re-enforced a lesson I've learned about myself before, though I need periodic reminding: I have a hard time getting motivated when I have long periods without a deadline.  I get bored without a specific structure to my time, and in my boredom, I tend to putter around without doing anything productive.

That is to say, it's been a long time since I last posted.  I'm hoping that the renewed structure to my weeks, now that the spring semester has begun, will help me keep on schedule.

This week's bread is casatiello.  It's an enriched dough similar to brioche, though it doesn't pack in quite as much butter as the brioche from my previous post.  Casatiello is a stuffed dough, which Peter Reinhart likens to a savory panettone.  The conventional stuffings include both cheese and smoked, dried meat.  Typically, it includes provolone cheese and salami, though the recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice lists several possible substitutions for both the meat and the cheese.

Crumb of vegetarian casatiello, highlighting the chunks of mushroom

I'm a vegetarian, so any of the traditional smoked, Italian meat products like salami or prosciutto weren't going to work for me.  Instead, I used browned mushrooms to provide the umami in my preparation.  I first came across this idea about 6 months ago in a recipe from Bon Appétit magazine for a mushroom bolognese sauce.  Since then, I've been hooked, and browned mushrooms have become a regular part of my diet.  In this instance, I used a combination of cremini and shitaki mushrooms with the stems removed.

I love dairy too much to go full vegan, so I opted to use my cheese selection to bring in some of the smokiness that browned mushrooms, despite their glorious umami deliciousness, cannot provide.  Thus, I replaced the provolone cheese in the recipe with smoked gouda.

Tuscan countryside in October, as seen from Florence

Peter Reinhart writes in The Bread Baker's Apprentice that when eaten cold, this bread is very much like a sandwich in and of itself.  Having tasted this bread, I can definitely understand what he meant.  When Jess and I visited a small town called Greve in the Tuscan countryside, we stopped at a famous sausage shop that will cut you slices from huge sides of smoked meat to create your sandwiches.  While this bread wasn't quite as magical as a sandwich of freshly sliced meat under the afternoon sunshine of a Tuscan autumn, it definitely reminded me of the experience.

Obviously, I plan to make this bread again!

Contrary to what one might expect for such a delightful bread, this recipe was relatively simple compared to many of those in The Bread Baker's Apprentice.  The entire process from starting the sponge to slicing and eating took about seven hours.  There was no cold, overnight fermentation that many of the recipes in the book require.  The starter was a simple sponge that came together without much fuss, and the lower butter content in the dough made the kneading and shaping process much easier than for the extraordinarily rich brioche I previously prepared.

The finished loaf, fresh out of the oven

The traditional preparation for this bread calls for placing the dough in tall, thin paper bags and letting it rise inside the bags.  I don't have paper bread bags, so instead I opted for the much easier cake pan option recommended in the recipe.  Regrettably, the experience of trying to get brioche to rise led me to dramatically over-estimate the rise time on my casatiello.  Some combination of less butter and possibly a warmer kitchen led the dough to over-prove dramatically before I was ready to get it into the oven.  The result is what you see at left.  Instead of a nice, round loaf, I ended up with a mushroom.  It's still a cool shape, and of course it tasted great, but it was less visually striking than I was hoping for.  That's definitely a lesson I'll need to remember next time I make this recipe.

While I love the bread, and the quick, simple recipe is quite convenient, I'm not entirely convinced that those two things are beneficial when found in combination.  This bread was so delicious that I finished the entire loaf—mostly by myself, because Jess was on a trip—in about two days.  It made a wonderful meal replacement and a tempting snack.  Once I finish my journey through The Bread Baker's Apprentice, I think I'm going to have to be very careful about how often I make this recipe.  If not, I'll get very fat.

This bake was a resounding success, and I definitely understand Peter Reinhart's claim that he receives more compliments from readers regarding this recipe than for any of his other formulas.  Next week is yet another enriched dough.  This time, it's going to be challah.  I've never tried a braided loaf before, so this will be another fun, new challenge.  Wish me luck.

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Let Them Eat Brioche

This week's offering is a famously rich, delicate, buttery bread called brioche.  Legend has it that Marie Antoinette's famous last words, "Let them eat cake," should actually be translated "Let them each brioche."  After trying this decadent bread, I can definitely understand why that notion would have been so out of touch.  The first time I cut myself a slice, I discovered that the bread is so packed with butter that left an oily residue on my fingers.  I had to wash my hands after every slice, lest I leave greasy fingerprints all over my apartment!

The finished brioche

In fact, brioche is so rich in butter that it approaches a pastry dough.  Pastry chefs will sometimes use brioche dough in place of a more traditional short-crust pastry as the shell for a fruit tart.  This gives an unexpected texture to the tart, and the more flavorful bread can make for a delightful variation on a fruity, summer dessert.

The Bread Baker's Apprentice contains three different brioche recipes with varying proportions of butter to flour.  The traditional brioche contains about 0.8 parts butter to one part flour.  I opted for the slightly less rich (but still decadent!) option that Peter Reinhardt called "Middle Class Brioche."  My loaf has a butter-to-flour ratio of 0.5:1, which was still enough to leave my fingers buttery after each slice I ate.  The book also includes a "Poor Man's Brioche", which is yet farther down on the butter-to-flour scale.

Like the bagels from last week, most of the work on the dough happened on the first day of a two-day bake. The dough is built from a simple sponge.  The sponge carries a larger than usual amount of yeast, because the heavy dose of butter and eggs in the dough retards the rising process, so the dough needs extra lift to compensate.  In the "Middle Class Brioche" that I made, the sponge also needed a fairly long proofing time to get the yeasts active and reproducing before assembling the dough.

The mixing process for the brioche is fairly simple, and the slack, butter-rich nature of the mix means that kneading would an exercise in frustration.  As a result, the finished dough goes straight into the refrigerator for an overnight chill.  This hardens the butter again and makes the dough easier to shape.

The shaped dough, prior to the final prove

The next day, the cold dough is shaped and baked.  The Bread Baker's Apprentice recommended several different shaping options, including rolls and classic brioche à tête.  The latter are formed in specialized molds that I don't own, so I opted for a non-traditional shape: the cottage loaf.  I formed the dough into balls with a mass ratio of 2:1 and assembled them as you see at left.  It quickly became apparent to me that brioche dough is too soft and buttery to sustain that shape.  Even before the prove really got started, the balls began to flatten out, and that process continued during the rising process.  If I ever try brioche again, I'll probably opt for simple rolls, but a more photogenic shaping choice will definitely need much smaller top sections.

The proved loaves, prior to baking

The high butter content of the dough meant that the final prove took about twice as long as a plain, white-flour dough.  As I foreboded once I'd finished shaping the dough, the risen loaves (at right) turned out relatively flat.  It doesn't make for a particularly pretty presentation, and the look was also marred by my haste to get the risen loaves into the oven.  Brioche dough is supposed to receive an egg wash prior to going into the oven.  This helps produce the distinctive shine that marks enriched doughs.  Regrettably, I forgot the egg wash entirely, so finished loaves (top) have a beautiful, golden-brown color, but they have quite a flat finish compared to a properly prepared brioche.

Next time, I'll be preparing an Italian variation on brioche called casatiello.  It's an enriched dough that also includes cheese and chunks of cured meat.  I'm a vegetarian, so I'm going to be trying a meatless alternative.  Let's hope it's as tasty as the original sounds!

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Bagels!

This week's post is pretty late, not because I've necessarily been too busy.  I'm just feeling lazy after the holidays.  I baked my bagels last weekend, but I couldn't be bothered to actually blog about them until now.  In fact, I've procrastinated so much that today is the day to start my next recipe.  I'll try to be better in the future.

A cutaway of a finished bagel, showing the crumb

Before I begin, I should note that producing a good bagel is notoriously difficult, so I was a bit trepidatious from the start.  The recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice is for a traditional water bagel.  Some places (even some places in New York) will steam their bagels these days, because steaming is way more efficient at scale.   You can simply do all the bagels at once rather than having to boil them in batches.  That said, the steamed bagels are often not as good.  Boiling provides a massive hydration boost to the bagel's exterior.  The hydration helps open up the starch molecules in the flour, aiding in the formation of a nice, chewy exterior to the bagel.

The mere act of boiling the bagel doesn't guarantee a good result, though.  New York is known for particularly good bagels, but bakers argue incessantly about just why that is.  The common myth—that New York water has just the right mineral content to make the perfect bagel—is just that: a myth.  As a result, I knew going in that getting a good bagel was going to need good, old-fashioned precision.  It's probably going to require a bit of practice, too.

My new kitchen scale

In the precision department, at least, I was aided by a new kitchen accessory.  Jessica bought me a kitchen scale for Yule, and this is my first time trying to use it.  It seems to have worked fairly well.  I'll probably need more trials to figure out if it really makes that big of a difference.  I'll also need to work out the proper weights for my sourdough recipe so I can see what affect it has on a dough I'm more familiar with.  Nevertheless, I was really excited to take my first foray into high-precision baking.

Fortunately for me, The Bread Baker's Apprentice includes both volumetric and by-weight measurements in all of its recipes.  I used the by-weight formulas for the first time to prepare the bagel recipe.  The first stage in the process was to put together the sponge.  The sponge combines a small amount of commercial yeast with flour and water.  The yeasts wake up and start multiplying—and the flour can fully hydrate—before forming the final dough.

The sponge, after the yeasts have fully activated

Once the yeasts in the sponge are fully active, bagel dough needs a massive injection of high-gluten flour, which is distinct from bread flour.  This week's bake led me to learn something new about baking:  There is a difference between bread flour and high-gluten flour.  I've been buying and using high-gluten flour from my local grocery store for years now, because I can get it in an off-brand that's about 30% cheaper than bread flour from the nationally-known flour brands.  I'd always assumed that "high-gluten" was just a strange synonym for "bread flour" from this unknown brand.  Not so!  Bread flour is typically about 12% gluten by weight, but high-gluten flour is typically about 14% gluten.  Bagel dough needs to be extremely stiff to stand up to boiling, so it needs lots of gluten to provide structure.  That's why bagel recipes call for high-gluten flour.

All of this means that I'd been inadvertently helping out my whole wheat sourdough for years now by using flour with just a bit of extra gluten.  As a result, I can use a higher proportion of whole grain flour and still get a good structure in my loaves.  Cool!

In addition to the high-gluten flour, bagel dough also needs another unusual ingredient.  The recipe I used calls for barley malt.  It's sprouted barley that has been baked and milled to create a flour that contains both an unusually high proportion of simple sugars and some of the by-products of caramelization.  I couldn't find this on short notice, so I used the recommended substitute and replaced it with brown sugar.  I'm not sure exactly what effect this had on the dough, but the final product was tasty enough.

The shaped bagels, prior to the overnight fermentation

After mixing and kneading the dough, it's immediately shaped into the traditional rings and left to ferment overnight in the fridge.  Peter Reinhart insists that this step is essential, so I dutifully cleared out some space in my fridge for two baking sheets with half a dozen bagels each and covered them.

After the overnight fermentation, the cooking stages on the morning of day two went pretty quickly.  The entire process of boiling, topping and baking only needed about half an hour.  Unlike a more traditional bread, which requires lots of kneading and resting and shaping and rising before a long bake, most of the time-consuming stages in bagel-making take place on day one.  Despite the quickness of the process, however, this is where I hit my first big snag.  I neglected to oil the baking sheets prior to the stay in the fridge, so the risen bagels stuck to the sheets.  

I managed to get all of the bagels to let go of the baking sheet, but in the process, I deflated them a bit.  Some of the bagels also became a bit misshapen before going into the water, as you can see in the photograph, below.

Finished bagels, after coming out of the oven.

 For a first effort, I'm fairly pleased with the results.  Because I baked them myself, I had the chance to try these bagels fresh out of the oven and still warm.  I now understand why everyone says that a truly fresh bagel doesn't need to be toasted.  If it's still warm inside, a fresh, untoasted bagel is amazing.  However, I still abide by my personal preference that, if it's had time to cool, your bagel should be toasted.  Toasting comes close to getting the bagel back to that initial, pillowy interior that it has fresh out of the oven.

I will definitely be making bagels again.  They're fun to shape, and if you have the time the night before, they make a great, quick breakfast treat.  I'd also like to experiment with different topping and doughs.  As you can see, I made a basic sesame bagel this time, but I'd like to try putting together an "everything" topping.  I'd also love to try whole wheat, rye, and maybe even a sourdough bagel.

Bagel making seems like it will probably require more practice to get right than many bread recipes, but it also seems like it would definitely be worth the effort.

Next time (i.e. starting today), I'll be working on brioche.  I love the rich, delicate texture of a real, quality brioche bread, and I can't wait to see if I can manage on myself.  I hope you'll tune in later this week to see how it went.

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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.