bake my way through Peter Reinhart's "The Bread Baker's Apprentice"

I’ve been wanting to make these for awhile.

The process: again, easy for the most part. I don’t know anymore whether the dough is easy to work with, or if I’m just getting more and more comfortable with yeasted doughs. The one part that was difficult for me was rolling out the risen dough. I’m not that good with a rolling pin, so I was a bit nervous that I’d overworked the dough (turned out not to be the case).

The results: fairly tasty. The roll in the center of the pan did not bake completely for some reason, which is a bit frustrating. The rolls were golden brown on top, so I don’t know what the problem is.

They’re not quite the rolls that I’ve ‘imprinted’ on, of course – those come from an Amish bakery in Ohio. Next time I visit my folks, I’ll do some intensive study to see if those can be replicated.

The base recipe is good, but sadly I have not yet found my ultimate cinn. roll. Includes lemon zest in the dough, a touch I’ve never encountered before. It’s a nice change, but I think I might actually be a purist and prefer the plainer dough. The dough itself could stand to have the sugar dialed back a bit (in my opinion, it should be only slightly sweet). Also the plain white fondant is not the type I want; I think I prefer the maple or coffee flavored…Plain powdered sugar fondant is just too damn sweet.

Complaints: the recipe made way too much fondant and WAY too much cinnamon sugar. Also, the underbaking thing, but that might just be my oven.

No pictures because they’re not that pretty (I am hopeless when it comes to icing).

Verdict: This is not a bad recipe; it works fine. But cinnamon rolls are apparently really important to me, and I have definite opinions on how they should taste!

EDITED TO ADD (2/23): I didn’t feel like baking the whole batch when I made these, so I froze some. Thawed them out for rising in the oven overnight, and baked them this morning. This time I lowered the oven temp a bit and baked them for longer. Much better! I also made some maple frosting, which, though not QUITE what I wanted, was way better than the plain fondant.

This bread is chock-full of great stuff: mashed potatoes, fresh rosemary, black pepper, roasted garlic, and olive oil. Yet it’s not overdone at all – a good recipe.

The bread came together quite easily. The baking time suggested by the recipe seemed WAY off though – my batch was brown and looked done after the first 20 minutes (Reinhart said it would take almost twice that!). I even got out my thermometer to check the internal temperature, and yep, it was basically done. Weird. I’m pretty sure the oven runs a bit hot, but not THAT hot. After letting it cool and cutting into it, I think it may in fact be a little underdone, but not by much.

It’s very tasty – just a bit soft/tender for my taste. I do prefer bread with a bit more “chew” to it, but in this case the softness is caused by adding the potatoes, and really is the whole point of the bread. Nitpicking really – half the first loaf is gone already!

There are quite a few variations of this bread in The BBA, and I was a little concerned about this before making my first ciabatta. What if it’s not that good, and I have to try all these variations?

Well, I shouldn’t have worried, because this bread is wonderful. You can see it looks a bit dusty from all the flour I had to use to keep it from sticking (I did brush off some more after I took this photo). It did take some finesse and a lot of flour to move the dough around in the shaping/proofing stages, but this was not as hard as I feared. The only slightly onerous thing about this bread is that the dough is so soft and sticky that the “kneading” stage is done in a bowl with a spoon instead of by hand. This takes a lot more effort than the regular fold and turn kneading on a board, especially toward the end when the gluten is activated.

Still, a lovely bread! Got to use the steam pan/spray bottle again, so the crust is lovely and chewy – and it makes the most phenomenal toast due to the large holes, nooks, and crannies. The flavor is great thanks to the preferment.

I’m looking forward to making the other versions (wild mushroom ciabatta…droolllll).

This is the first truly Italian-style bread I’ve made from this book. Turns out it was not quite what I was craving (I forgot that focaccia is pretty soft, as breads go, and I like crunchier/chewier usually), but it is delicious nonetheless. I adore the flavor of olive oil and this bread is full of it.

This time I topped it with herb oil only (would have been better with fresh rather than dried herbs, but dried is what I had); if I made it again, I would add more exciting toppings.

I’m still not used to working with very soft doughs so I’m not sure whether it was exactly right (I think I may have added too much flour AGAIN), but then again the crumb looks very like the pictures in the book. So – I’m happy! It’s great to be back in my own kitchen baking bread.

I don’t really care for white bread much, but I’ve vowed to make every bread in the book, and this one could be made with the ingredients I had on hand. It was quite easy to work with, and surprisingly delicious! Not my favorite so far, but many steps above Wonderbread.

It turned out very well – except for that minor dent in the crust where my thumb went in de-panning, and…for the fact that I added 1 1/2 times as much fat as the recipe called for! I always get a bit confused when measuring sticks of butter. Oh well. That’s probably why this was so delicious.

I actually liked it much more than I expected, but think this dough would work better for hot dog or hamburger buns as Reinhart suggests. That’s what I’ll do with variations 1 and 3.

My Thanksgiving Break Baking Binge started at midnight last night w/ English muffins (I didn’t actually start them at midnight, but at 9 p.m., which meant the actual baking did begin at midnight – ah, vacation with no one else in the apartment! How I love thee.)

Having never had a “proper” homemade version of this bread (my only experience is with the ubiquitous Thomas’s brand), I don’t really know how well these turned out. I had one with butter and a poached egg this morning – it was good, but not exactly what I was expecting. In some ways they are much better than the purchased kind – more substantial, and the outside is just delightful. In some ways, I don’t like them as much as the Thomas’s muffins I’ve imprinted on. Fewer “crannies”, and without that sharp taste that I associate with English muffins.

There is no way to tell for certain, though, whether this is a flaw in the recipe or my execution. I do have the feeling that I added a bit too much flour in kneading, which may have made the texture less bubbly than it otherwise would be. And perhaps homemade English muffins are meant to be a different animal from the purchased ones and neither should be judged by the way it does or does not conform to the other…

Recipe a titch fiddly, but nothing that couldn’t be simplified…and quite easy to work with also. I will return to this again to see if it can be perfected.

At last, a bread worthy of a picture!

This bread started out ridiculously easy and ended up nerve-wracking. It looks impressive, but the braid is actually quite simple to do (especially if you know how to braid hair). Dough extremely easy to work with.

However, when I got to the end, there was less dough than I expected. The recipe directs that the pieces of the braid be measured by weight, and I was well under weight – probably because I measured by volume and not weight.

Then, when I went to bake, it baked quickly and got dark – very, very fast. I didn’t want it to burn, so I pulled it out of the oven crazy-early. I had no way to tell if it was underbaked or not, but I figured better underbaked than burnt.

Well, it may be a LITTLE underbaked, but it’s delicious. I think I may try making it again this week to take to a Thanksgiving dinner.

I definitely did NOT have my bread mojo workin’ today. Kind of odd, because this type of loaf is very familiar to me – it’s a lot like the first bread I really learned how to make (although with a greater variety of grains). I did not have my head in the game, though, and made a series of really dumb mistakes. If I were a real apprentice, I’d now be demoted to sweeping the bakery floor and chopping wood for a few weeks.

1) I forgot to put together the “soaker” (basically a small amount of several grains and water which sits overnight – easy, right?) until 12:30 a.m. last night when I was getting ready to go to bed. No harm done, but my roommate was probably confused about why I was rummaging around in the freezer and cupboards at that hour.

2) The recipe calls for 3 T. cooked brown rice. I somehow read this as one CUP cooked brown rice (don’t ask me how) and didn’t realize my mistake until it was too late. Again, not a huge deal – the merits of the recipe can no longer be judged by the results, but most breads like this can take quite a few additions and tweaks before they really suffer. As long as the flour/moisture balance is right, everything is usually ok.

3) I almost killed the yeast and baked the dough prematurely by leaving the oven ON with rising dough in it (I mean to just leave in on a minute or two, to give it a warm place to grow, and then turn it off). But I got distracted, walked away, and next thing I knew, it was almost baking!!!! Quickly stuck the metal bowl in a tub of water to cool it, which seemed to work. Yeast not dead after all – the dough did a fine and quick second rise, so all is well.

4) Forgot to mist the top of the loaf before I covered it for second rise – as a result the plastic wrap stuck like crazy and spoiled the nice smooth top crust when I pulled it off.

All in all, not a great day for bread.

It’s probably a credit to Reinhart’s formula that the loaf actually looks pretty good and smells good (and also it tasted good unbaked). At this point if it’s edible, I’m happy. Will post picture of this debacle when it’s done cooling.

ETA: no pic, but here’s how it tastes…remarkably delicious for all the mishaps that befell it. And now that I know that this formula is so forgiving, I’m gonna try playing with lots of other grain combinations and amounts. Can’t wait to see how millet and/or quinoa might work.

Poolish is a French term for a Polish-style preferment. According to Reinhart, this is not the traditional way to bake baguettes – usually they’re done using a different style of preferment, I guess. He claims this recipe is based on the 2nd-best baguette he ever tasted.

Kind of a fiddly recipe. It requires a type of flour that is not sold in the US (somewhere between whole wheat and the usual white bread flour), so Reinhart improvises by sifting/straining the bran out of whole wheat flour. I sifted 1 3/4 c. of wheat flour using my mesh spice ball (the only strainer-type item I had with mesh fine enough to sift out the bran) before I noticed that he had includes some less-fiddly instructions for getting the same result. Oh well.

For some reason I was annoyed while making this recipe. Part of it was sifting the flour. Also, the dough just didn’t behave very well throughout. For one thing, it’s a lot colder than the last time I baked bread, and our drafty kitchen is not as conducive to rising dough. It took a long, long time, until I finally got impatient and helped it along with a barely warm oven. And I’m sort of out of practice with dough handling, so I just felt awkward the whole time. Even set off the smoke alarm ‘cause I used too much cornmeal to line the pans (in my defense, our smoke alarms are ridiculously sensitive, which is better than the alternative, I guess).

Still, the loaves look OK, and I’m interested to see what a preferment with more bran tastes like.

ETA: Taste info. Really pretty good! The crust is nice – thick and a little chewy and crispy, but not too thick or hard. Crumb is also good. Flavor not as nice as I would like, which I’ll attribute to less-than-great yeast performance and/or impatience (in other words, I probably could have let it ferment longer). Not as transcendent as some of the other breads I’ve made so far, but a nice change from all-white loaves.

Must have been good, or else I was just starved for homemade bread, because I ate a whole baguette by myself for dinner. ;) Granted, they were smallish baguettes so this is not as bad as it sounds. Still, a bit excessive. So much for eating intuitively today.

Not being from New England, I’d never heard of this bread before reading the Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It’s got a funny story attached to it. I like cornmeal and molasses, so I thought I’d give it a go.

Results are very tasty, although the molasses flavor is a bit strong (I looked for golden molasses as the recipe suggested, but couldn’t find anything but “light”, which is definitely NOT golden). Not sure I let it rise quite enough at the end (so it’s a bit more dense than I would like), but I was getting impatient. This bread was made in loaf pans, as opposed to all the other doughs I’ve made from BBA so far (which have been baked on sheet pans).

ETA: for those of you who are familiar with Boston brown bread, it kind of reminds me of that, but with yeast instead of soda and not baked in a cylinder.