Bread bread and more bread

The weather has finally started to cool off and with that I get a major bug to start baking. I was recently introduced to the book The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. I am loving the concept of slow fermenting breads. I've played a bit with this concept in the past but never to this extent. I've made several of the breads and they have been quite fun. The hardest part is that we aren't eating the bread as fast as I can make it and most of the recipes come in two loaf variations. This is a delightful large book filled with fabulous recipes. Reinhart talks of bread as though he is wooing it. It is near poetic erotica how he speaks of bread and describes it. Just reading his description of crumb and crust will make you salivate and yearn to get your hands into flour. I highly recommend this book for any true bread lover. Oh and just a word of caution. If you make poolish and put it in a 1 quart jar because it fits and then you forget to put it in the fridge after a few hours you will come home to find poolish all over the counter, down into the draw that houses your bags and wraps, inside the door of the baking pans and in a puddle on the floor. The next day when you go to use said poolish you will only have enough for one large loaf of bread. I don't think you need to ask me how I know this.

The biggest problem that I am having with some of the wetter breads like the ciabatta is that I'm not getting the nice big open holes that these breads are known for. Mine tend to have a really nice crumb and great taste, but I'm missing the holey experience. I'm thinking that I am handling them too much between letting them rise on the cloths and putting them on the pants. The next time I make one of these I am going to let it do a final rising after they are on the pans and see if I am just degassing them too much when I move them to the pans. My friends are enjoying my efforts (though I think that their waistlines are not).

My last bread I made was a lovely egg enriched challah which had just the most wonderfully tender insides. It made you just want to use it for a pillow and it was quite delicious. I have several loaves to make for this upcoming weekend and I am going to make sure that this is one of them.

Bread

I love bread. There is something about a loaf of homemade bread baking in your oven and filling your home with the aroma of warm yeasty wheat. I learned to bake bread when I was a child. My grandmother was a whizz with flour and could make the best biscuits, dumplings, pie crusts, cookies and bread. She taught me to be patient and not try to hurry the bread. "Breads that had forced risings had poor crusts," she would tell me. "But then you don't want to overwork it either." There was a fine line between giving bread enough and too much attention.

In the nineteen nineties, there was the arrival of the in-home bread machine. A marvelous contraption that allowed anyone to have home baked bread without doing any work. Just dump everything into a bucket and push a button. Three or so hours later you ended up with a, well, bucket of bread. If you actually were able to extract your bread from the bucket you had a square loaf with a thick crust and a hole in the bottom. There were hundreds of cookbooks available for the bread machines.

I was a new mother at that time and just knew that this nifty little gizmo would allow me to have fresh baked bread in the house while chasing after a very active two-year old. I baked exactly six loaves of bread in the machine before I gave up on it. After being spoiled most of my life with beautiful rounded loaves of tender crusted bread, I found the bread from a bread machine to be quite lacking. It didn't fit in my toaster (or any toaster that I know of) and the first third of the loaf had a large hole in the middle, so it didn't make for very good sandwiches either. But mostly, I missed kneading and shaping the bread.

I love the feel of bread dough. It has a certain texture that tells you when it is ready for the final rising. Knowing that you put your arms in motion to bring the loaf of bread into being is gratifying when you pull the loaf, piping hot, out of the oven and resist the temptation to just tear into it before it has a chance to cool a bit. You made that bread. You used your hands to shape the top and to make it into the perfect loaf. Not some machine.

People often ask me for the recipes for my bread and I just stare at them blankly. I just don't use recipes. I go strictly on touch. I know that I begin with about a cup of liquid. Sometimes milk, sometimes water, sometimes evaporated milk, sometimes a mixture, sometimes with an egg as part of my liquid. Into that I put about 3 cups of flour, sometimes more, sometimes less. It really depends on the humidity and when the dough feels right. I use anywhere from one teaspoon to three tablespoons of sugar or honey (and sometimes none at all). I usually use a tablespoon or so of butter, but even then it might be olive oil or vegetable oil or even no oil. (I once made twenty loaves of bread without any oil at all because I forgot about it and no one noticed.) The flour can vary depending on what is at hand and what I am in the mood for. It could be just plain white flour or maybe whole wheat or a blend or some rye or oatmeal. And then there is the all-important yeast. Some days I put in a lot (two teaspoons per loaf) and others less (one half teaspoon). In the end, it is still a loaf of bread.

Whatever happened to that bread machine? I still have it. In fact I still use it, but only to mix my ingredients. If I am in a hurry I will simply toss a bunch of stuff in the machine and select the dough setting. It will mix it and let it rise once. Then I take it out and do the final kneading, shaping and rising before popping it in the oven. I still have a need to touch my bread. I still have to put part of myself into it. Bread needs that and no machine can ever give it that individual attention.