Now that Food Photo 101 is started, I still don’t want to stop cooking and talking about cooking. With that, I realized I still haven’t posted about the bread I made for the wine party we had a couple of weeks ago.

The foie gras I made gave me the opportunity to try a new kind of bread, brioche. What is brioche? For those that don’t know that it’s a little slice of buttery heaven, here’s a formal definition:

bri·oche /ˈbrioʊʃ, -ɒʃ; Fr. briˈɔʃ/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[bree-ohsh, -osh; Fr. bree-awsh

n. A soft, light-textured bread made from eggs, butter, flour, and yeast and formed into a roll or a bun.

Really, that lists things in the wrong order; butter should be the first thing, because this bread is loaded with it! There’s almost as much butter as there is flour in this recipe.

I made the Rich Man’s Brioche, though there were 2 other versions, each with different levels of butter, adding other dairy to compensate (and be less costly when butter was harder to procure).

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It’s here!!!

Autumn officially started today!  After this summer, I’m ready for lower temps and cooler evenings.  Bread baking filling up the kitchen with yeasty smells and apple pies cooling before being ready to eat are anticipated.

Nicole at Pinch My Salt recently posted on both comfort foods and biscuits.  I tried her biscuit recipe, which can be found here.  I have to say that this was not only an easy recipe but really makes some great biscuits!  The effort wasn’t much more than popping open one of those cannisters from the grocery, but the taste and texture were much better!

Biscuits and gravy can be found not only at Pinch My Salt in her latest Comfort Foods post, but also at The Pioneer Woman Cooks.  Ree at the Pioneer Woman Cooks does a fantastic job of showing photos of every step of any process during her cooking. 

With my wont to add smoke to whatever I’m cooking, I do my gravy a bit differently…

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I was hoping to do some cooking last weekend, but the weather didn’t cooperate.  I’m almost embarrassed to admit that, but the one type of weather I don’t like to cook during is rain, especially freezing rain!  We got about 5" of snow yesterday, with rain following.  As it turned out, I probably could have gotten away with it, but I just baked instead.

I wanted to try my new sourdough starter, and my wife wanted pumpernickel bread, so I decided to do a sourdough pumpernickel.  The recipe was from King Arthur Flour; I wanted to do one from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, but I didn’t realize that just about all the recipes there require time the night before.  Even with sourdoughs, I think the recipes call for some work, letting the starter/poolish rest for a few hours, then refrigerating it.  I didn’t start until after 9:00 PM, so that was out.

The recipe was different than I expected; instead of just flour, yeast and water, it also called for a touch of vegetable oil and a cup of coffee, along with a quarter cup of molasses.

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Day 7 of my sourdough started brought a lot of bubbles!  I think it’s on its way now.  I can detect a slight acidic/sour smell, but not a bad smell at all.  When I mixed in more water and flour, the starter was kind of pillowy, definitely not just a bowl of flour and water.

In my opinion, it’s a real starter now!!!

Now the question is…  When will it be ready to use?

Hopefully, I’m not boring you all with my sourdough starter attempt.  It’s a simple way to try to make a starter, and, after having read more about starters in books like The Baker’s Apprentice, I probably would do it differently if I hadn’t already begun.

However, you should be able to see the bubbles starting to form in the starter.  There were a couple on day 4, more on day 5 and even more on day 6!  I think it’s working, though it may be a while before it’s a stable starter.  I’m going to keep going until I think it’s either failed or is ready to try out.

What makes a starter like this different than adding yeast is the type of yeast.  At some point I will get into the differences in the yeasts and the addition of beneficial bacteria.  I’ll get into more detail once this works, but my goal is to not use yeast anymore, but to substitute my own sourdough instead.  This should impart my own unique flavor to each loaf I make.  I just hope that’s a good flavor!

On a side note, I wanted to thank Joe at Joebob Graphics for letting me use one of his fonts; he has some of the best handwritten fonts available; Joe Hand 2 is the font currently being used on the photos.

I’m keeping up with my starter, but not doing as well keeping up with my posting, so I’ll try to catch up tonight with days 5 and 6.  Here is a photo of day 4’s starter.  It’s getting there, keeping a better texture and starting to seem to have a bit of a sour smell, in a good way.

There’s more progress as of the last couple of days, so it’s getting there.

T
his past weekend, as I mentioned in my beef stew post, I made some European hearth bread.  The recipe was a bit different from what I’ve used for baguettes; it used less yeast and allowed more time to rise.  The poolish used only 1/8 teaspoon of yeast, in fact.

I was busy last weekend, so I not only had a slow rise on the bread, I refrigerated it to retard the rise even more.  And it does make it take a lot longer!  I want to try more breads with slow rise, as I think the flavor reflected that.

I used King Arthur Flour’s European artisan style flour, and that probably added to the flavor, too.  The baking hotline at King Arthur Flour was helpful, as the dough was too dry, so I called them about how to add more water without over doing it, and they gave me good answers that allowed me to keep going.

This bread is baked at a higher temp; it calls for 425, and I baked at 415 convection/bake.  I slashed the bread diagonally, and I wish I’d slashed it even deeper, as the slashes created great crust!  The higher temps resulted in the crunchiest crust I’ve done so far.  I sprayed the oven and the loaves with water before baking, and I had a pan of water under the baking stone.  Next time, not only will I slash more, but I’ll do full convection at 415.  As it was, it only took 25 minutes to reach an internal temp of 200, instead of the 30-35 the recipe called for at the bake setting.

This is the best bread I’ve baked.  My wife and I had a whole loaf before we knew it.  One thing I learned from reading my new book, the Bread Baker’s Apprentice, is that the crust gets its flavor from the Maillard reaction, the same thing that creates all the flavor on a seared steak…  I’m finding that bread and grilling are closer than I realized!  I’m assuming that toasting bread makes it taste so good from the same reaction.

I’m learning to play with the dough a bit, getting to know the feel of the dough a little bit better, though I have a LONG way to go still.  It’s going to be fun learning more, too!

I got lazy yesterday and didn’t make time to post my photos from day 2 of making my sourdough starter.  This one will be a quick and easy entry.

To be honest, when I looked at the starter from day 1, I thought it was ruined.  It looked dried up and greenish brown.  I added another 2 tablespoons of both whole wheat flour and water, though, and it mixed pretty easily.

After day 2, the starter is looking better.  It’s wetter and ddn’t take much to get it mixed up with more flour and water.  I’m guessing that it will take a few more days before I see much change.

When adding the flour and water for day 3, I wanted to see what type of odor was being produced, as it will be a bit sour when it’s where it should be.  It smelled pretty much like flour and water to me, though, at this point.

Now that I’ve been trying my hand at bread baking for a few months, I’ve been reading more and more on sourdough.  Everyone knows about the famous San Francisco sourdough bread, and many think, because of that, sourdough means sour tasting (pleasantly) bread.

Actually, sourdough is a way to bake bread without using commercial yeast.  The starter is made from very basic ingredients (flour and water).  The combination  is allowed to attract wild yeasts and bacteria (good bacteria) from the air until the starter starts to bubble and becomes stable.  Once the sourdough is stable, it can be fed and maintained fairly easily.

There are plenty of sourdough recipes, but sourdough can also be substituted in recipes that call for yeast by using 1 cup of starter for 1 ounce of yeast cake or about 2/3 ounce of dry yeast.  Using less is just fine, as one of the things I want to try is to allow my bread to rise much longer than I have.
I’ve been doing 2 hour rises, but less yeast may take up to a day to rise as the yeast has to have time to do its thing.

So why make my own starter?  Sourdough attracts the local wild yeasts.  I could buy a San Francisco sourdough starter, and the first few loaves would taste like it, but, eventually, the wild yeasts in my starter would be the ones in my kitchen, and I’d no longer get the original flavor.  This isn’t a bad thing; it means that every loaf of bread will have the taste of my kitchen in it and nowhere else!

So, on top of anything else I talk about over the next few days, I’m going to be posting the progress of my sourdough starter!

I’ve been trying the bread baking thing since about September, when I started trying to make baguettes.  Part of what was nice about it was I was in the house with my dog where I could spend time with him.  My first attempt was actually the weekend before he was gone.  So now I have this tie in my memory between my dog and bread, so it will likely be something I do for quite a while to come.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be trying some new breads and trying to make healthy stuff that I also like to eat.  Coincidentally, Dave at the Fumbling Foodie and Adam at Men In Aprons both have gotten the bread bug, so we’re going to all be posting periodically on breads we’re doing.  Dave tried the recipe my mom gave me for my grandma’s bread, and met with success.

So here is my version of my grandma’s bread.  It’s good enough that my
wife asks me to bake some so we have bread every week.  My mom even
said it turned out good, and she’d be the first to tell me if it wasn’t
right (that’s a good thing).

It goes great with my wife’s apple butter (her secret is that she
smooths it with an immersion blender when it’s about done).  It’s dense
enough for sandwiches, and makes great toast!  Yeah, toast!

Be sure to check back now and then for more bread baking!