Ashley: San Francisco-Style Sourdough Bread
Well somebody is being an extreme slow poke when it comes to baking breads! I baked this bread awhile ago but Adam has yet to make his. And he’s the sourdough lover! We are however having a family burger and bun competition tonight where we’ve both prepared hamburger buns (and other people did the burgers), so we’ll see if his rusty bread making skills can beat my well practiced ones. 
While I really love bread, I’ve never liked (in fact I’ve strongly disliked) sourdough bread. So for many years I’ve avoided it. But I was both happy and wary to give it another chance. And as it turns out, I actually really liked this bread. But it doesn’t have a very strong sour taste as I remember sourdough having, so maybe that’s why. And I’m assuming that’s because my sourdough starter was only left for 24 hours (as instructed in the book) – whereas other sourdough starters are probably much older when they’re used, so they’ve had more time to develop flavour. When it first came out of the oven, the crust was wonderfully crisp (my favourite part) but overnight it’s softened. The inside is soft, light and airy – which is what I expected from the French bread/baguette but didn’t get. Overall a really great bread for sandwiches, french toast, snacking, anything.
Ashley: Cheese Bread
Unfortunately my cheese bread story is not nearly as exciting as my brother’s, but I guess that’s okay because I’d rather not have a fire in my kitchen! I made it a while ago and should’ve (is should’ve not a word?) written the post up back then but I didn’t. So I will keep this brief.
I decided to do a cheese swirl loaf, because swirls make life and bread more exciting. I also kneaded some cheese into the dough, though I’m not sure what difference it made because I didn’t add that much. I used aged white cheddar, which is one of my favourite cheeses, but I think an old regular cheddar would’ve been better (in both looks and taste).
The dough itself was really soft and easy to work with (and I am completely smitten with how bread dough looks prior to baking). And I would definitely make this cheese bread again, and have already thought of all the different things I can do with it. Like making savoury rolls (cinnamon roll style) and baking them in muffin tins. I’d fill them with cheese (smoked gouda?) and pesto instead of sugar and cinnamon mmm.
As you can see I’m an amateur swirler. I hate how there’s a giant hole between the top 2 layers! Hopefully it turns out better next time when I try rolling it tighter.
Adam: Cheese bread
So this was an adventure! I’m late posting this due to catastrophe and it goes a little something like this:
Those are scorch marks! I haven’t checked yet, but I do believe this tin is now ruined. How did it get this way you ask? Well let me tell you! I had made my dough mixture, had it rise a couple of times, added everything I needed. My daughter had a friend over for lunch and I made them some fabulous grilled cheese sandwich’s using my new panini press. So the dough was just about done.. and just needed a final rise. The girls wanted to go outside and play so I headed outside with them – but before doing so I threw the final on top of the stove with a floured cloth over it – for the final rise before baking. I must’ve knocked – somehow – the element that was below the tin (it’s a flat top/glass type stove top) – and didn’t notice. So there I go outside.. talking to the other neighbourhood Dad.. and then I hear fire alarms. Man, I wish someone would stop that loud noise.. it’s really loud! Don’t people watch what they are cooking? Sheesh…. oh wait – is that my house? Is that my wife yelling? I run inside and there’s a fireball on top of my stove!!! Quick action took care of it – but not without being banned from the kitchen (I’m still banned so I hope she doesn’t see this ! ) and a very burnt bread tin. I should’ve taken more pictures but alas no.
So round two was this weekend. I was very excited about making this bread as my daughter declares, daily that she LOVES cheese – was pretty sure this would be a hit even if I goofed it a bit. Some notes: I kneeded the dough more this time (not that I would really know the difference as the last dough was all charred and … semi-cooked. Maybe I should’ve tried to save it!) – probably about 10 minutes actually. I love this new Rogers white bread flour – it seems to have a really nice texture once you start really working at it. I also thought I’d try something fancier this time with the way I folded the dough to fit in the pan. Previously I sort of ignored the folding, but this time I watched a video of this dude on youtube and thought I’d try folding it over like him (though his was much more wet than mine). I can’t find it now as I seem to be using different search terms. Rest assured our faithful Jewish Baker’s book has 0 pictures of this activity and the folding terminology gets quite complicated.
The tl;dr; (too long didn’t read) version of the folding is: I basically folded it in 1/3′d inwards.. and then the other 1/3′d inwards .. first making it a rectangle. This made the right shape. But when the bread was baked .. it’s stayed together, but it does separate rather easily where the folds were made.
The bread is DELICIOUS. It’s SO very good. Toasted with a bit of butter it’s even better. ”Adam, this bread is really really great” said the wife last night. Yay!
Adam: Baguette
So first off: I was really nervous about making this bread. I freakin’ LOVE baguettes – and am entirely guilty of sitting with a small dish of butter and an entire baguette and having them both just disappear somehow. I love the crunchy crust and the soft interior – and the smell.. oh the smell. So I really wanted this to turn out right – ESPECIALLY after last weeks debacle; and for a spoiler: It turns out! Sorta.
I ran out and got some proper white bread flour (we have a lot of whole wheat stuff in the house but not much in the way of white bread flour, so .. well, corrected now!) and decided that this was going to the loaf of loaf’s! I spoke with Ashley previously and she mentioned it become quite large and to make two (which the recipe calls for ) would be fairly difficult with a standard sized baking sheet, so I split the recipe. After the sponge was done I took it out and it was the most amazing dough I’ve ever played with.
It just felt … svelt? I’m not even sure if that’s the right word for it but it was an amazing experience. Our beloved bread book, now very specifically says: ”Knead until you feel you are done”. Really? That doesn’t seem like very good instruction to me. EXCEPT THAT IT WAS. This dough was no like no other and I knew it was ready, or did I? It then said: “When you think you are done, knead for another 15-20 minutes and whap it on the table every once in a while”. Most excellent.
Once done it was set to rise, and then rise again. And oh yes, then again.. wait no, I don’t have to split the dough and let it rise again – or do I? How much does this all really matter? Wait what? My dough didn’t rise at all – ok maybe 10-15% but that was it. I couldn’t figure out why dough that was so amazing to knead wasn’t doing everything right to insure it found itself transformed into the most amazing baguette ever. Turns out when I 1/2′d the recipe I failed to 1/2 the salt. Salt eats yeast right? I think this is the problem. But I continued (I clued into this about the time I put it on the baking pan). I rolled it out after a few failed risings and twisted it just slightly while putting it on the sheet. It looked like it was going to be awesome : a few slits down the top for steam and they said if I angled my cuts it’d open flower like, sure did.
Our oldest and most trusted baking sheet is up for the task.
40 minutes later and some magic came out of the oven. I really enjoyed the way it looked. Ashley had actually gone out for the day with my wife and when she returned it had just come out of the oven. I asked if she wanted to see it of course and I felt like I was standing next to my offspring, very proud. Of course, I think that at this point I still forgot that I doubled the salt. Turns out it was sorta salty – but otherwise really nice and soft inside and a wonderful rustic crust on the outside.
I forgot to take bread interior shots. I’ll do that in the future. It was nice and airy – not too dense. It took butter like a champ. If only it didn’t have so much salt!. ARGH. I will remake this and likely update this post. I didn’t do much in the way of storage for it as we didn’t each much of it being salty and all – but I think bread box + brown paper bag is the way to go. And of course, you must consume most of it as quickly as possible!
Also, one of the dog – because I took the bread outside on this cutting board to take some better lit pictures and she patiently waited for me to finish up. She likes short walks, cheese and belly rubs.
Ashley: French Bread (Baguettes)
This was my first time making baguettes. The baguette fresh out of the oven was amazing, with a super crunchy/flakey/crumbly crust. Sadly the next day the crust had greatly softened, so if you’re going to make baguettes I would recommend making them on the day you want to eat them. As for the texture of the inside, it’s chewy – which I like. But I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be more airy?
I had some issue with the shaping of the baguette. I opted to do the method where you roll the dough into a long rectangle, then roll up the long side slowly, sealing the dough after every roll – if that makes sense. This was fine for the most part but you could see the coil of the roll in the finished bread at the ends, and on the outside seam it split a bit. This didn’t really bother me but in the future I’d try a different shaping method. Also, the full recipe was supposed to make 2 baguettes, and I halved it and got 2 baguettes that were the length of my cookie sheet, which is almost the width of my oven (I need a bigger oven!) But I don’t think you could make a full length baguette as they describe it to you in a regular size oven anyway.
The best way to eat bread… fresh out of the oven, with butter.
Adam: Broa – Portuguese corn bread
I’m reasonably certain I’ve followed all the directions correctly. I even read through the entire recipe prior to anything to be sure I wouldn’t miss a thing.
The bread itself looks really great. The crust is very hard as described in the cookbook. The bread itself is fairly dense and is reasonably soft. The taste… is really not very good at all. I did do a couple of things when making this fairly popularbread: I forgot to put in any salt until the last few minutes of kneading prior to the last step of baking and I also left the sponge out longer than 45 minutes – was more like 2.5-3 hours.
As I did end up rolling in the salt, and the sponge seemed fine anyways I find it hard to believe either of these items was the issue. Whisking up the corn starch was a bit weird as well as the cookbook suggests you let it cool before adding it to your sponge. Well, when you let it cool it turns into a real gelatin type substance as doesn’t transfer well into a sponge? Again – not convinced this was the issue either.
We’ll see where we go next. All in all a disappointment the evening I finished this up as the wife and I were excited to try it with a bit of a butter – especially after I received an email from Ashley saying “MY BREAD IS SOOOOOO GOOOOD” or something to that effect. She was quite the oppositie.
Ashley: Portuguese Corn Bread (Broa)
This recipe calls for corn flour and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I have masa flour which is for making tortillas and what not, but I know that the corn has been treated with lime so I was really scared what it might do to the bread. I ended up using it, but also spent time researching corn flour and there is corn flour out there without lime. So one day I will try that out, but for now the masa worked just fine.
One of the steps in making this bread is to make a cornstarch mixture that’s heated, which when cooled is a very thick clear gel. (You can see in the above photo the gel, which I dumped on top of the flour before mixing in.) Wasn’t sure how this was going to work out but it seemed to blend into the dough just fine. The recipe says that this dough is softer than other doughs but I found mine to be somewhere between normal to maybe even a bit stiff. The dough also seemed to kind of “break” when I was kneading it so I worried that the gluten wasn’t being properly formed during kneading.
Shaped and dusted with flour, waiting to proof.
Proofed. You can see the fine lines that have developed in the flour (well some of them aren’t so fine!) I love how this looks. I think these lines are one of the important factors in how broa is supposed to look.
Once the bread was baked and had cooled a bit, I couldn’t wait any longer so I started to slice off a small piece and was scared that it was in fact a big rock because it was really hard to saw through but NO! It was not a rock. In fact the bread has the most gloriously thick and crunchy crust (loooooooove crusts like this) and the inside – oh the inside! It’s like the poundcake of breads. Dense and so so soft. As for the taste? A mix between white bread and corn tortillas. I can’t wait to make this one again. Sadly this bread didn’t turn out so well for Adam.
Adam: Carrot Bread
And off we go! Ashley beat me to making this and teased me with photos of raw dough sitting in a bowl. Unfortunately due to weekend business I ended up sampling Ashley’s bread and then baking mine 2 full days later on a nice lazy Easter Monday. I cheated a bit though as I had a professional carrot peeler.
Ashley mentioned she 1/2′d the recipe and I’d thought of doing the same but totally forgot by the time I’d started the sponge. I forged on! I used more yeast than I’d ever used any previous bread making experiences (though not a lot by any means) and I attribute my end result, which ended with a beautifully shaped interior and was not nearly as dense as previous breads directly to it. I just used your typical pre-packaged dry yeast.
So after I left the sponge for an hour or so on the cold easter morning I came back and it had doubled nicely anyways and I continued to follow the directions from our Jewish baking book. The next steps asked for mostly white flower but I substituted whole wheat as I have a lot more of it and generally enjoy whole grain flavoring more. After mixing everything in and doing 8 minutes of kneading or so (including the master-crafted carrot pieces) it was left to sit covered on top of the stove until risen again and aprox. 90 minutes later I cut it in two (2/3’s and 1/3 as I don’t have two identical baking pans just yet) and then after reshaping into a proper folded over loaf I threw them in the two olive oil (lightly) smeared tins and let them rise up again. I hadn’t ever let bread rise up once in the tin and this was interesting. Directions called for it to expand over the tin by an inch (2cm or so). Mine rose at different speeds but once they were nearly there I scored them sorta diagonally 3 times.. probably not quite as deep as I should have but I’ll experiment with this.
Then into the oven and away we go. The book mentions adding a bit of steam to the process and proceed’s to tell you different ways of doing this with one of them being taking a small pan (I used a pie pan) and throwing some ice cubes in it and setting it below your bread. The steam is supposed to improve the crust. So I did this and am not sure of the difference. Too bad I dont’ have two ovens to test the difference! They did also mention knocking them out of the tins at the end and baking them on their own for the last 5 minutes which I should have done in retrospect but didn’t as I quite honestly skimped in pre-reading the recipe’s tail end: assuming wrongly that one would just bake it the whole time in the tin.
In any case, they turned out really lovely. Possibly the best bread to date! ha! The crust was much heartier than any previous breads I’ve made and the overall taste was extremely lovely. I particularly like how the large-ish carrot strips detail the outside crust.
Ashley: Carrot Bread
This is our first bread out of the book!! Most exciting. I wish I’d taken photos with a real camera instead of just my iPhone…
Even though I messed up some stuff when making this bread (didn’t dissolve the yeast in the milk, forgot to add the sugar) and I accidentally added more whole wheat flour than I meant to, this bread still turned out really well. A lot of the recipes in this book use skim milk powder and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I opted not to use it in this recipe. The bread wasn’t anything special but it was something a bit different with the carrot, though I couldn’t taste carrot at all.
One thing though is that I’m really starting to love hand kneading bread. I’ve made bread before but rarely hand kneaded because of this one traumatic experience where I kneaded some potato bread dough for about 20 minutes and had sore forearms the next day. But I now realize that obviously I was doing something wrong. Anyway the way I knead bread usually is with the dough hook of my Kitchenaid. The problem with this method is that you have no idea if your dough needs more flour because you (well this is how I do it) just turn on the mixer for x minutes and then stop it and it’s done. I often ended up with dough that I thought was too sticky but at that point there isn’t a ton I could (or maybe wanted to?) do about it. Of course this problem doesn’t exist (or maybe that’s a naive statement a bread newbie like myself would make) when you hand knead because you know when to add more flour. Plus it just feels better knowing that you kneaded the dough yourself. So I’m really looking forward to hand kneading all of the breads we make from this book.
Hello everyone, welcome!
Hi everyone! We’re excited to announce a new project that will hopefully run for some time. It’s one that involves two siblings that want to see more about baking breads (and maybe more!) and have decided to cook their way through some books and blog about it in the process. Ashley, who’s already been blogging for ages and runs eatmedelicious.com and Adam who’s never blogged more than one post in his life and isn’t remotely a baker having to look up every item and detail of how to prepare items.
We’ll start with a few basic breads from Secrets of a Jewish Baker, which is a random book Ashley recommended on a list of books we had to choose from. This book appears to have a large variety and has a lot of interesting tips for the new baker which comforted Adam greatly. It appears to be a bit vague in some places as well but luckily we’ve both baked a few loaves before and are somewhat familiar with the process.