Spicy Parmesan and Herb Grissini

These super skinny and crispy pieces of straw colored goodness are completely addicting. The ingredient list includes parmesan, black pepper, white pepper, garlic, chives, rosemary, thyme, sage, and oregano. My biggest issue with them is that I can't leave them alone. They are crazy good.

Pane di Como | Como Bread

Isn't this bread pretty? It's a white bread with a lovely thin crisp crust. The starter contains both malt syrup and milk. The interior, while not super airy, is somewhat soft and has both large and small holes. It's great for sandwiches and morning toast.

Check out the other side.

Hi there. The recipe did not mention that I should have slashed the bread. Or maybe not. When researching the bread, I came across this post in Serious Eats than used the same formula, and the loaves do not appear to be slashed in the photo. It also looks like those loaves may have a bit of "bursting action" going on too.

As the name implies, the bread formula is from the Como region of Italy, and is sometimes referred to as Italian French bread. This recipe is adapted from The Italian Baker, Revised: The Classic Tastes of the Italian Countrysideby Carol Field. The book gives you three options for mixing the dough, either by hand, mixer, or food processor. I used a mixer.

The dough requires a starter that is made the night before and left to bubble up.

Pane di Como

Ingredients

Starter

1 tsp active dry yeast

1 scant tsp barley malt syrup

1/3 C warm water

2/3 C room temperature milk

135 grams unbleached all purpose flour

Dough

2 C room temperature water

860 grams unbleached all purpose flour

1 T salt

cornmeal for the baking stone

Instructions

To make the starter:

• In a large bowl, mix the water, yeast, and malt syrup and let it sit for about 5 minutes. 
• Add the milk and flour and stir with a spatula or dough whisk until combined.
• Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit until it is very bubbly, at least four hours, but overnight is better. It will get very large.

To make the dough:

• In the bowl of a stand mixer, mix the starter and water with a dough whisk or the paddle attachment. 
• Add the flour and salt, mix first by hand until all ingredients are blended, and then switch to the dough hook and mix on medium for about 4 minutes. The dough should be slightly sticky and elastic. 
• Remove the dough from the mixing bowl onto a lightly floured surface and knead by hand for about a minute. 
• Move the dough to an oiled dough rising bucket or large bowl, and cover with plastic wrap. 
• Allow the dough to rise until doubled in size, about 90 minutes. 
• Divide the dough in half and shape into boules (round loaves) and place them, seam side up, into oiled and floured bannetons or brotforms. If you don't have a banneton, you can line a bowl with a well-floured tea towel and place the dough in there. Cover with plastic wrap. 
• Allow the dough to rise until doubled, about an hour. 
• Prepare the oven with a baking stone and preheat it to 400 degrees F. 
• When the loaves are ready, sprinkle the stone with corn meal and turn the loaves out onto the stone. 
• Spray the oven with water to create steam, and close the door. About 30 seconds later, spray the oven again and shut the door. 
• Bake the loaves until golden brown and the interior reaches about 200 to 210 degrees F. The bottom, of the loaves, when tapped, should sound hollow. The book says about an hour, but mine took about 50 minutes. 
• Allow the loaves to cool completely on a wire rack. 
• Slice and enjoy!

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Cinnamon Sugar Pull-Apart Bread

Today is Friday. It's been a long week for some reason. Same for you? Would you like some comfort food?

Stir-Fried Chili Scallops with Baby Bok Choy | Wok Wednesdays

This is a meal that you can prepare when you get home from work and are too tired to cook. The ingredients don't require a lot of prep, and you can have this on the table within minutes.

Croissants | Tuesdays with Dorie | Baking with Julia

Pain au Chocolate

I've made croissants before. Successfully. How hard could this be? The last time I made croissants I had hunks of butter popping out everywhere and they still turned out. I can do this.

Dough & butter 

I cannot tell you how "done" I was with this process. Making these croissants has been a three day adventure (ordeal). I'm sure it was fun for the other member of my household to watch me standing on a chair just to get leverage with my rolling pin. The palms of my hands are sore from rolling out this laminated dough over and over and over.

Laminated dough before final roll out

And this dough did not easily roll out for me as it did for Esther McManus in a video of her demonstrating it with Julia Child (no longer available).  Every time I turned a 20 by 24 inch piece of dough, it shrunk back up to to about a 10 by 12 inches (slight exaggeration).

Even though I had a lot of time and labor invested in this project, when the time came for the final roll out and shaping of the croissants, I was DONE. Three hour rise? Forget it. One hour will have to be enough. I need to go to bed. I don't really have to do this. It's a flipping hobby, not my JOB. I can skip this.

End of rant.

Jumbo pain au chocolate

I haphazardly rolled up half of the dough into 12 semi-crescent shapes and the other half of the dough into four huge pain au chocolate shapes (when it's supposed to be ten to twelve), let them rise for an hour, threw them in the oven, set the timer, and used one of my least favorite expressions.. "whatever."

When the croissants were done baking, I decided to try the teeniest one. Oh. My. Goodness. Alrighty then. It was all I could do not to stuff the rest of the croissants into my mouth right then. Right there.

Croissants

These croissants are about as flaky as anything I will, could, should ever create. Ever.

This recipe is from Baking with Julia: Savor the Joys of Baking with America's Best Bakers edited by Dorie Greenspan (of Tuesdays with Dorie fame).  Awesome book. To see the recipe and step-by-step photos, visit the Tuesdays with Dorie host Amanda's blog, Girl + Food = Love (no longer available). To see how each baker did with this recipe, visit the Tuesdays with Dorie website and click on everyone's links.

What did I do differently from the original recipe?

• I let my croissants rise for just one hour at room temperature (about 65 degrees F) instead of the three hours in the warm environment that the book called for. Oven spring took over from there. 
• To save time, I baked some of the croissants in the toaster oven (it worked!).
• I shaped the second half of the dough into four large pain au chocolate instead of 10-12 rolls. 
• I started the four large pain au chocolate at 450 degrees F to give them a boost and immediately lowered the temperature of the oven to 350 degrees F.
• I used instant yeast instead of the fresh yeast called for in the recipe at a 40 percent ratio by weight. 

These can be wrapped individually and frozen. Thaw, wrapped, at room temperature. Unwrap and re-crisp in a 350 degree F oven for about 5 to 10 minutes. 

Enjoy!

No-Knead Chocolate-Cherry Pecan Bread | ABC

This month, the Avid Bakers Challenge (ABC) is King Arthur Flour's No-Knead Chocolate-Cherry Pecan Bread.

No Knead bread is a wonderful thing. Mix up some flour, salt, a teeny bit of yeast, water, and maybe some add ins, let it sit at room temperature for at least 12 hours, and you have this amazing dough that makes an airy flavorful bread with a thin crispy crust that literally sings when you take it out of the oven.

 Second rise, seam side up. The dough eventually filled the bowl. 

I usually make it in a cast iron Dutch oven Combo Cooker but the KAF blog by PJ Hamel (love, love, love her... I'm a big fan) warned against doing this because the bottom would burn, so I rigged up my baking stone and an upside down metal bowl. The reason for baking the bread in an enclosed environment is to create steam and simulate a brick oven.

A self-portrait of me and a panoramic view of our kitchen. 

The bottom of the bread still charred, maybe because of all of the chocolate and cherries? Next time around, I will start the bread on the pizza stone to get that great blast of heat and oven spring, but once I uncover the loaf after 20 minutes, I'll add an oven rack and place the loaf on a baking sheet to finish baking.

Here's the deal. The dough is quite slack and wants to spread out like a pancake. The hot stone and cover seem to help the dough push upwards and become a taller loaf. I could try using a hot baking sheet with the bowl and compare results. Bread experiments. Just thinking out loud.

Verdict? I love this bread, charred bottom and all (I just have to give it a little "shave"). This bread does require some attention. I had a hard time keeping all of the add-ins inside the dough and half way through baking, I had to pick off burned cherries that had wormed their way out of the bread and were sticking out like the popping out eyes of one of those squeeze toys. One of the ABC Bakers describes it as whack-a-mole. I think that is appropriate.

See the spots where I had to pick off burnt cherries?

No Knead Chocolate Cherry Pecan Bread

Ingredients

6.75 ounces bread flour 

6 ounces unbleached all purpose flour

2 ounces rye flour, any type 

2 ounces whole wheat flour

2 1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp instant yeast

14 ounces water

3 1/4 ounces dried cherries

3 ounces chocolate chips (I used chocolate chunks because they were just beginning to bloom, and I didn't want to have to throw them away)

6 ounces of diced pecans, toasted (toast for about 6 to 8 minutes in a 350 degree F oven)

Instructions

•  Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Spray the top of the dough with spray oil and cover with plastic wrap. Let the dough sit at room temperature overnight (I did a stretch and fold before I went to bed). The dough should have grown quite a bit by morning and be very bubbly. Mine quadrupled. 
• Lightly flour a work surface and scrape the dough out onto it. Using a wet dough scraper and wet hands (have a bowl of water nearby for dipping), stretch and pat the dough out into a large square.
• Spread the pecans, cherries, and chocolate chunks over the dough, and stretch and fold the dough over the add-ins. Make sure they are fully incorporated. 
• Spray a banneton or proofing basket with spray oil and sprinkle with flour (I used brown rice flour). 
• Form the dough into a ball and place it, seam side up, into the banneton. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to proof for 90 minutes to 5 hours, until puffy. Mine took 90 minutes in a my makeshift warm environment. 
• Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F with a pizza stone on the lower third of the oven and an inverted large metal bowl on top of the stone. (You could also use just a sheet pan or a cake pan on top of a sheet pan with a bowl over the dough.) 
• When the dough is ready, spray a sheet of parchment with spray oil, place it over the dough. place a pizza peel over the parchment, and flip the whole contraption over.
• Move the dough and parchment onto the pizza stone, spray the dough with water, and cover it with the heated bowl immediately.
• Bake, covered, for 20 minutes. 
• Removed the bowl and move the loaf to a sheet pan. Add an oven rack just above the pizza stone and place the sheet with the loaf on that rack.
• Bake for another 20 minutes, until the loaf reaches an internal temperature of about 205 degrees F. 
• Place the loaf on a rack and cool completely. Seriously. Leave it alone! You don't want gummy bread. 
• Enjoy!

To see other ABC versions of this recipe, visit the Avid Bakers Challenge page.

Note: Most of the flour I used for this bread is King Arthur Flour. It's a personal choice and King Arthur Flour has not asked me to promote their products. I'm just a big fan.

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Kontinentbrot | Continent Bread

My friend David of Hearth Baked Tunes contributed this recipe to the Artisan Bread Bakers Facebook page for the February Bread of the Month. David is currently on a quest to bake the perfect German breads (brots). His favorites include a rye starter, lots of rye flour, and lots of seeds. Hearty breads. It's been fun to see what comes out of his oven. Did I mention that he is a Dead Head?

I've had my challenges with breads with a high percentage of rye flour. Rye flour can get very sticky when kneaded.  Fortunately, Cathy of Bread Experience attempted this recipe first, so I was able to benefit from her recommendations.

One other thing.... this recipe calls for pumpkin seeds, which I love. A lot. But I couldn't find my pepitas. While rummaging through the bottom of my baking freezer (did I just admit I have a freezer for baking ingredients?), I came across some pine nuts and decided to substitute them. They worked out well, although next time I might toast them first and add a bit more salt to the dough to compensate.

Verdict: This is a very dense bread that lends itself to salty toppings and cheeses. It goes well with salty/savory toppings such as feta, Boursin, or tapenade. After the second day, I recommend slicing it thinly and then freezing the slices for toasting and topping.

Here is my version of this bread. To see David's version, click here. To see Cathy's version, click here. I don't know if mine turned out correctly, but it's pretty tasty.

Kontinentbrot

Ingredients

Sourdough Build

110 g whole rye flour

11 g sourdough starter

85 g water

Quellstuck (soaker)

77 g whole rye flour

22 g rolled oats

35 g pumpin seeds (or pine nuts)

20 g sunflower seeds

13 g flax seeds

15 g toasted sunflower seeds

127 g water

Final Dough

73 g whole rye flour

106 g bread flour

10 g salt (I would recommend a bit more)

All of the sourdough build

All of the Quellstuck

4 g yeast

138 g water

Instructions

Make the sourdough build

Mix all of the ingredients in a bowl, cover and let it rest for about 14 to 16 hours.

Make the Quellstuck

Mix all of the ingredients, cover, and let it soak overnight at the same time that the sourdough build is fermenting.

Make the dough

• Mix all of the ingredients (including the sourdough build and quellstuck) in the bowl of a stand mixer until mixed. Don't overmix.
• Cover and let the dough rest for about 30 minutes. 
• Form the dough into a ball and place it into a banneton/proofing basket, spray with spray oil, and cover with plastic wrap. Proof for for about an hour in a warm environment. I let it rise in a warmed microwave. (Don't microwave the dough, heat water in the microwave to warm the oven and then add the dough). 
• Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F with a cast iron Dutch oven in it. When it is time to bake the bread, remove the Dutch oven, turn out the dough into it (no need to slash the dough), cover, place the contraption into the oven, and bake for 15 minutes.
• Remove the cover from the Dutch oven, reduce the oven temperature to 425 degrees and bake for about 20 to 30 minutes more. The internal temperature of the bread should be 205 to 210 degrees F. 
• Allow the loaf to cool completely on a wire rack. 
• Wrap the bread with a towel and allow it to sit for about 24 hours before slicing. 
• Enjoy!

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