Artisan Bread Weeks 7

Artisan Breads Week 7

Week 7 Day 1 projects: Light whole wheat bread, Portuguese Sweet Bread, and Pita pocket bread; the poolisch and Old Dough for Day 2 breads

Since these breads are from Bread Baker's Apprentice instead of the school textbook, Chef typed the recipes and emailed it to us. We came in with the printed copy and started making the breads. I started on the pita bread while my other teammates worked on the Portuguese Sweet bread and the Light Whole Wheat. I mixed up the ingredients, but noticed something odd about the recipe--it called for 0.5 oz of instant yeast (roughly 5 teaspoons) but only 6.75 oz (little less than 2 cups) of bread flour and 4 fl.oz. of water.

Whoa...that's a lot of yeast! I thought. But that's what the recipe said, so I kept going. But halfway through the kneading, I noticed that the dough had an awfully yeasty smell. Worried, I had others smell it. They both agreed that the dough smelled way too yeasty, and that 0.5 oz. of yeast is too much for the amount of flour and water it contained. Then something clicked in my head---

"What if it was a typo?"

Now very worried, we double checked with the Bread Baker's Apprentice book that Chef had on her table....

It was a typo. A major typo.

The amount of yeast is supposed to be 0.055 oz. Definitley not 0.5. I immediately informed everyone in the class (some of who had already kneaded the dough and was fermenting it) and then informed Chef. She was quite shocked at her mistake and apologized repeatedly. I threw out the dough and started over. Fortunately it was a very easy recipe with six ingredients, so it didn't take us too long to get the dough (with the correct amount of yeast) together.

Clockwise from top: Light Whole Wheat, Portuguese Sweet breads, and Pita bread. We tried different toppings on our Portuguese Sweet Breads. I put a mixture of coconut and almonds on mine, and others put sanding sugars. They were sweet and delicious. Another incident happened with the Whole Wheat Bread also--again, there was a typo on the amount of butter in the recipe. Instead of "1 oz." Chef had typed "10z." which confused everybody into thinking that this bread contained 10 oz. of butter. Ours were the only ones that turned out great--since we were the only ones who double checked with the actual book. Other group's had turned into a greasy, oily bread; they had the flavor of whole wheat brioche, with a muffin-like texture and crumb.

We cut open our pita to see if it had formed a pocket....

ROOOOOOARRRRRRRR!!! ...yep, it did.

Week 7 Day 2

So, with the mishaps from Day 1, Chef decided to write out the recipes on board for us to copy into our notebook. This is fine, since there's less chance of a typo, but it takes up the first 40~60 minutes of our class time, which leaves us only 4 hours to make several different kinds of breads.

Today's projects: Pane Siciliano, Pain de Campagne, Poolisch baguette, and Multigrain Extraordinaire. We used the Old dough and the poolisch that we had prepared yesterday on Day 1.

Pane Siciliano is an Italian bread that is traditionally shaped into an S-shape loaf and sprinkled with seeds. We tried poppy and sesame seeds.

The bottom ones are the Multigrain Extraordinaire, with different toppings. A tasty and healthy bread with lots of whole grains incorporated into it.

Pain de Campagne is a type of rustic French bread. There are many recipe variations out there, but this one uses Old dough. The Old dough lends a deeper, complex flavor and a somewhat more dense texture. It can be formed into many different shapes, such as tordu, tabatier, epi, etc. I shaped mine into a simplified couronne Bordelaise, a crown-shaped loaf of bread.

Turned out very pretty! Although it looks more like a Japanese cherry blossom than a crown... The bread itself tasted quite delicious, its flavor hard to describe. It was like French bread, but it had that underlying sweet flavor that developed while chewing.

We only have two more weeks left...