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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