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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.
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.
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.
