I’ve been having a huge bread jones these days. After lurking on www.thefreshloaf.com for several hours looking at all the recipes, tutorials, and message boards, I decided on making a plain white French bread. This French loaf uses only the simplest of ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt; yet, made properly, has a flavor that you would not expect from such a miserly array of ingredients.

I didn’t have to do all that much to get a recipe together that I liked. I took my inspiration from the blog’s creator, Floyd. Floyd’s daily bread is a very wet dough that produced a real nice loaf with a very good open crust. I wasn’t happy with the huge mess it made so I modified his daily bread recipe somewhat. I made some adjustments in the flour and water measurements he used, converted it to a more friendly and scalable format, IE grams/weight, and tested it out. The overall result was just what I wanted: open crumb, good flavor, and a great crust.

In modifying this recipe, I also got to learn a new way to prepare the dough. This dough is not kneaded in the usual sense. After the poolish has risen, all the ingredients are mixed together into a rather ragged dough and left to sit. This process is called autolyzation. While sitting, the gluten forms in the dough on its own without any outside assistance. After the prescribed amount of time, the dough is turned onto a flour surface and folded, much like puff pastry, and let to rest. The process is then repeated two more times and then the dough is shaped, proofed, and baked.

This new method of making bread helps create the open crumb structure that is much desired in an artisan bread. It’s also a good technique to keep in your bag of tricks if you want to make some bread and don’t have a mixer or the desire to knead for 10-15 minutes.

French Inspired White Bread
Recipe adapted from Floyd’s Daily Bread, http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/mydailybread

Poolish:
110 g flour
230 g water
1/8 teaspoon yeast

Dough:
520 g flour
300 g water
1 teaspoon instant yeast
2 teaspoon salt
All of the poolish

To Make the Poolish:

Combine all the ingredients together and mix with a spoon until all the flour is incorporated. Leave overnight (8-16 hours) in a bowl covered with plastic wrap.

Making the Bread:

Combine all ingredients together is a large bowl and mix with a wooden spoon until all the ingredients are mostly incorporated. Cover the bowl with a towel and set aside 30-60 minutes (autolyse). The mixture will not look like a dough at this point, don’t worry, it will soon.

Flour your work surface generously and gently remove the dough from the bowl. Flour your hands and the top of the dough and gently stretch out to a rectangle. This will be a little messy, but work quickly and gingerly and you won’t get too messy. Fold the dough into thirds by folding the left side of the dough into the middle and the right side over the left. Fold into thirds from the top to the bottom in the same fashion.

Place in a bowl and cover with a towel and set aside 30-60 minutes.

Repeat the process two more times, flouring and folding the dough each time. Place the dough back in the bowl each time and let rest for 30-60 minutes.

Remove dough from bowl and preshape the dough. Allow the dough to rest for 5-10 minutes and then complete the final shaping. Allow the dough to rise until 1.5 times bigger. Slash bread and bake in 425F oven for 30-50 minutes.

This month the Daring Bakers tackle pizza making. This isn’t anything new to me, one of my first posts was pizza making (I even threw the dough!). The rules are a little slack this month: use the recipe provided, get a picture of yourself throwing the dough, and top it with anything you want. Here’s my throwing proof!

No crazy ingredients involved, techniques aren’t anything new, and I can use my mixer! This was too good to pass up; besides, I love pizza.

The dough was easy to put together but nothing to write home about. It wasn’t my favorite, but how can you dislike pizza? At least I had fun throwing the pizza around.

The recipe made six medium-sized pizzas, and like a champ, I made them all. My six pizzas were:

1. Cheese – a classic
2. Egg topped cheese pizza – sounds weird, tastes good
3. Hearts of Palm – the apprentice claims it’s a Brazilian staple
4. Potato with goat cheese bechamel – my take on a white pizza
5. Mebrillo and Manchego – dessert? appetizer? Either way, it was good
6. Hearts of Palm – a mishap with the dough sticking to my ‘peel’ turned this one into a mess

If you’re interested in the dough recipe, it can be found here or in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

Strudel is a magical dough. Some flour, a little bit of water, a touch of butter kneaded together into an unassuming dough. You would never know that this little lump of dough would be able to amount to so much, and then you stretch it. You pull the dough to, what you believe, is the limit only to realize this magic dough needs wants to be stretched even further.

The dough starts off just like any dough, a dense ball. Slowly the ball is rolled and stretched and stretched some more until it starts to get really thin. At this point you might think you can’t stretch it anymore, but you can and will. The dough is continuously stretched and pulled until you can see through it. When the dough starts to slightly tear a little bit, you’re almost there.

This dough was stretched to about four feet by six feet and was paper thin. When it was the size of my table, I trimmed the edges, filled it was a wonderful apple filling, and baked it off like anything else. While the end dessert was good, pulling the dough was definitely the highlight of this dessert.