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.

Ratio

There is nothing more wonderful for a book person who cooks than a book about cooking (not necessarily a cookbook/recipe book.) I was listening to NPR the other day (Sunday's ATC episode) and they were interviewing Michael Ruhlman about his new book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. It sounded interesting so I went and picked a copy up from my local bookstore. I was captivated by the first sentence that I read (which was not the first sentence in the book, actually.) What caught me was from the section on Pâte à choux. It read: "Pâte à choux is one of the coolest flour-and-water preparations in the kitchen." After hearing the author talk I could hear him actually reading passages to me. (I love when I know the author's voice, it means I don't have to read everything like Alan Rickman playing Col. Brandon. Not that that's a bad thing.)

I am not a recipe cook. I rarely use recipes, especially the second time around. It was the way I was taught to cook by my grandmother. She didn't even use a recipe when she made jelly or pickles. Her forte was her biscuits. She just knew how to cook and how much baking powder to use to how much flour. If more company was coming she'd just made more. (I suck at making biscuits. It's the one food that I truly can't make. My family groans when I say, "I feel like biscuits." They'll beg me to not try it again and just get in the car and go to Cracker Barrel.) So I'm intrigued by this book as it actually has an entire chapter (OK, it's only three pages long) on the ratio of biscuits.

One of the things that gets greatly overlooked in the world of cooking by many home chefs is the food scale. I love my food scales. In fact I own three (although one has been relegated to my knitting so I can weigh yarn and fibers). My latest acquisition is this mighty mite. It's small, but it can weigh up to 6.6 pounds. (All together, OoooooOOOooo.) Ruhlman has all his ratios designed around weights rather than measurements, so it is important to have one (or three, you just never know.)

If you have always had problems with cooking before, especially baking, I highly recommend this book. Now if only he knit.