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

I see you live in Syracuse. I have a son that lives in Constantia. Small world eh? I live two hours north of there.
I love baking bread. I just joined a Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge”. They have it on Twitter/Facebook/and through google groups. I think it would be great if you joined up. They are going to start from the very 1st recipe and go through the book in order. It starts on Monday. The first recipe they are letting everyone have 2 weeks because some are waiting for their books.
If you are interested, let me know and I’ll give you the links. I think it would be great to have a few more that have some background with the book like you.
I’ve made a few breads and I’m sure loving yours. Here are my bread photos: http://tinyurl.com/yobgjx
Last I knew there were 50 of us going to join in.
Susie

I just did the Artos. Specifically, the poolish version with the Christopsomos variation. I actually wrote about it here (http://www.parcher.us/blog/?p=13) and had found this 43things list while doing some research. Cool!

Hey guys! It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here; I’ve been busy, and I got out of the habit of posting while I didn’t have internet at home. Anyhoo – I’m back, and I brought bread!

Geez, has it really been eight months since I added to this goal?! Whoa.

This recipe took a long time to make (3 days!), but not much effort over that timespan. First there was the preferment, which proofed overnight in the fridge…then the dough (which rose for two hours and also proofed overnight in the fridge). Finally, I baked the bread this morning. It was the first high-heat bread I made in my new oven. Not bad!

A few other special details about this bread: a) the shape – fun to make! Like playing with Play-Doh. b) the flour was about 1/3 semolina, which is a sandy-textured high-gluten flour usually used for pasta (and for keeping baked goods and pizzas from sticking). I didn’t notice an appreciable difference in the texture of the bread, but the flavor is nice and the color is more golden than usual.

All in all, quite an easy recipe as Reinhart recipes go – it just required patience and a little planning. I should note that the bread was ready in about 2/3 the time that the recipe called for. I don’t know if both ovens I’ve used are off, or if Reinhart is nuts or what. Every high-heat bread I’ve made from this book has taken way less time than he calls for.

Finally: please note the new toaster in the above photo! One of my coworkers brought it in to work to give away – it wasn’t hers, she had gotten it from another person who was giving it away. I am glad that I spoke up and said that I wanted it…’cause right away I could tell it was awesome. It’s heavy-duty, chrome is involved, a heavy lever lifts the toast instead of a spring…I figured it was old-school, which excited me. The reason I didn’t have a toaster until now is because every new toaster I’ve tried has been unsatisfying. They are just not powerful enough, and tend to dry out the bread rather than toasting it.

ANYWAY. I brought it home, and today I toasted up some of the bread I just made. As I suspected, it performs beautifully. So beautifully, I had the notion to look it up and see if it was indeed retro or just retro-looking.

Well. It’s a contemporary Dualit toaster. And it retails for $300!!!!!! I’ve read some reviews on the web, and these things last for years and years and years. I was shocked. And I’m stoked. I foresee a LOT more toast in my future.

Hmmm. First a free working KitchenAid mixer (albeit missing some replaceable parts) and now this. Hey. Maybe if I wait long enough, someone will give me a stainless steel SubZero fridge for free, too. :D

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.