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.

I have to admit, I was going to skip this month’s challenge. I have so many excuses, “I’ve done them so many times”, “I don’t have all the ingredients”, “I don’t have the time”, “I don’t want to”, etc…After seeing that several of my macaron posts were referenced in the most recent challenge, I felt like a goat for not at least trying this one out. It’s three days after the challenge was supposed to be posted, but here goes…

I just so happened to have the makings of macarons already in my pantry, albeit with my not-so-favorite, unblanched, skin-on, almond meal from Trader Joes. This stuff works fine but the specks both me; it’s all I had on hand so please excuse the mess. The other ingredients, the sugars and the eggs, are things that I always seem to have on hand; it looks as if one of my excuses was a lie.

The recipe, as it so happens, isn’t all that different from past efforts: (Forgive me as I hack it up here)

Ingredients
Confectioners’ (Icing) sugar: 2 ¼ cups (225 g, 8 oz.)
Almond flour: 2 cups (190 g, 6.7 oz.)
Granulated sugar: 2 tablespoons (25 g , .88 oz.)
Egg whites: 5 (Have at room temperature)

I took the liberty of halving this recipe, just in case things went south with the method, the recipe, or my lack of practice. The big difference in this recipe is the lower amount of granulated sugar in the the meringue. I’m sure this will affect the sweetness as well as the difficulty of incorporating the egg white mixture with the dry goods. A stiffer, more sugary meringue will be a bit more forgiving, but alas, I gave it a go.

The general method of combining wet and dry ingredients is pretty much the same: incorporate the dry into the wet in three separate additions, make sure the ingredients are fully incorporated yet don’t completely destroy the meringue in the process. There’s also a hairy little secret most people don’t divulge: if you don’t mix enough, you get meringue cookies instead of macarons. Most of us have the opposite problem of overmixing the batter and getting wonderful, cracked, exploding macarons that break your will, yet we go back into the kitchen for another beating

The cooking of these macarons is where things get a bit interesting. Instead of allowing the macarons to dry at room temperature on the counter, the recipe has them cooked at a low temperature to dry them out first, then they are completed at a much higher temperature.

Preheat the oven to 200°F (93°C).

Bake the macaroon for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and raise the temperature to 375°F (190°C). Once the oven is up to temperature, put the pans back in the oven and bake for an additional 7 to 8 minutes, or lightly colored.

I’m a bit weary of this step but it could prove useful in speeding up production. Even when I made them in a restaurant kitchen with a fancy-shmancy convection oven, we always let them dry for hours before we baked them off. This high cooking temperature runs the risk of browning the macarons if they aren’t watched carefully.

Even with my doubts, I got the feet. They weren’t as pronounced as previous efforts, but they did come out. As expected, though, the macarons browned a little bit while waiting for them to be fully cooked. Even with about five extra minutes of cooking, I don’t feel like these baked as well as they do at a much lower temperature. The skin on the top of the macarons is so unbelievably thin that, even carefully taking them off the silpat, they cracked.

Yet another macaron recipe that works but not quite good enough, for me, to switch from my most recent efforts. I was happy to see them come together and form, and that, for most of us, is good enough.

On one of my last weeks in Massachusetts I had dinner at a French Bistro on Newburry Street with my good friend, and apprentice, Marcelo. The Bistro had all of the normal French classics that you would expect but this French pizza, or pissaladière, caught my eye. Normally when you think pizza the first thing that comes to mind is Italy, or at least red sauce and mozzarella cheese. This Pissaladière did not have either.

The French pie was thin and crisp, topped with thinly sliced beef, a stinky blue cheese, and dressed baby arugula. It was nothing like the pizza you would expect from Boston’s North End, this pizza was light and crisp and packed with flavor. With the geeks changing coasts again I knew that I would have to come up with something of my own to taste this again.

I set out to recreate the thin, crispy, cracker-like crust using a basic pizza dough recipe. The proportions of several ingredients were changed and I added rice flour to try to cut back the gluten count; pastry flour could have been used instead, but there was none in the house. The dough was rolled as thin as I could get it and cooked in a very hot oven. The crust was very light, crisp, yet not overly chewy. The dough could take a bit more cooking, but overall it was almost a match.

For my pizza, I decided to change the toppings up a bit: apples, caramelized onions, spinach, and brie. Everything almost worked out perfectly except for the part where I put the spinach on BEFORE cooking the pizza; it pretty much wilted into nothing. Hindsight tells me I should have waited until the cooking was completed, and, taking a play from the bistro, place the dressed spinach on the pie prior to serving. When I make one of these again, this knowledge will come in handy.

Please don’t be too afraid to make this dough yourself. The dough comes together fairly quickly and isn’t all that hard to put together. I used my kitchenaid to mix the dough but you could very well do it by hand if you so desired.

Pissaladière

1 cup water, room temperature
3/4 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup rice flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon olive oil

Combine water, sugar, and yeast in a the bowl of a mixer and stir to dissolve.

Mix the two flours and salt together in a separate bowl.

Turn the mixer on low and slowly add the flour until a dough forms. Continue to mix until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl. Add more flour if the dough feels a little sticky. Stop mixing when the dough is slightly tacky and soft-to-firm.

Remove the dough from a mixer and place in a lightly oiled bowl covered with a towel. Let the dough rise for about an hour.

Preheat oven to highest temperature (mine is 550F).

Roll out dough into oval shape, top with your favorite toppings, and cook until golden brown.