I've joined an online group. It's a baking blog group. I read the blog
http://doriegreenspan.com/ and there is a group called Tuesdays with Dorie (TWD)
http://tuesdayswithdorie.wordpress.com/ that was just starting to go through the cookbook
Baking with Julia.
Nathaniel had asked the week before if I could make homemade bread again. I haven't made it since we moved into this house, partly because there is a Great Harvest Bakery right next to the grocery store and I've been buying bread there. But, Nathaniel is having a hard time adjusting to his new braces-hardware (his lips and cheeks are tattered and swollen) and there aren't many things that he feels like eating. So, I found a recipe I wanted to try on America's Test Kitchen's website
http://www.americastestkitchen.com/recipes/detail.php?docid=27410&incode=M**ASCA00
Check it out soon because they only have their current season available for free.
I love America's Test Kitchen (ATK) because they go about testing recipes in a scientific way, trying to figure out what is the most desirable trait in the dish, what are the major pitfalls, and what is the most efficient way to meet their objective. Martha Stewart always drove me crazy because she tried to make things more difficult than they needed to be just to prove she is fancier than anyone else. ("Don't use orange-flavored jello in a recipe when you could make your own by boiling down some horse hooves and adding sugar cane extract and blood oranges").
Honestly, when it comes down to it, I didn't like Julia Child for the same reason. When she was demonstrating french recipes, I'm sure her purpose was to show traditional french techniques. But it always reminded me of the old story where the daughter asks her mother why it was necessary to cut the ends off the potroast before placing it in the pan... "I don't know," says mother, "that's the way my mother always did it." When asked, grandmother replied that she never had a pan big enough for a whole roast and had to trim it down to make it fit. So, I prefer recipes made to use modern ingredients and techniques that get the desired results in the most efficient way. That being said, I like to make things from scratch and avoid cake mixes, jello, condensed soup, and the too liberal use of cream cheese. I have dropped blogs from my watch-list for depending too much on these ingredients. Too many ingredients that are unrecognizable as food go into the first three of those ingredients, and cream cheese is used so liberally in everything from desserts to pasta sauces that the purpose is just to mask a mediocre recipe.
Enough of my rant. I was ready to put ATK head to head with Julia (actually with Julia's guest baker). Right when I was about to start, Chris' neice Amanda posted my sister-in-law's (Andie's) bread recipe, so I decided to start with it.
http://minasmith.blogspot.com/2012/01/andies-bread.html
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| Kneading in the mixer. |
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| Rising in warm oven. They deflated when I moved them from the warm oven to the hot one to bake. A delicate rise. |
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| Awww... The bake time in the recipe wasn't long enough. I should have tested the internal temperature. |
Amanda/Andie's recipe came out doughy and undercooked. I really should have tested it before taking it out because the thump-on-the-loaf-to-see-if-it-sounds-hollow method let me down on this one. Onto
Baking with Julia (BWJ) You can find the recipe here (unless you buy the book or check it out of the library)
http://someonekitchen.blogspot.com/2012/02/twd-bwj-white-loaves.html
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| Photo from book. This is how it is supposed to turn out when sliced and toasted. |
The directions are a little crazy. The dough is kneaded first, and then softened butter (a lot of butter) is added to the dough. The dough becomes a greasy mess, but after awhile the butter is worked in and the result is a springy, silky dough. Wow. I wonder if having the fat in the dough during kneading slows gluten formation. Why is the butter left out until after the kneading? Is this a cut-the-end-off-the-potroast kind of thing? The book provides no clues. (I love ATK because it explains why certain steps are taken.)
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| Lovely dough, I used 1 cup of flour less than the highest range in the recipe |
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| Beautiful and eaten within a day with the creamed honey Chris bought. |
BWJ white loaves turned out great, just as the recipe was written. But I had saved ATK for last. I was sure it would be the best one. You have to start the night before by making a "soaker" with the whole wheat flour (King Arthur's white wheat), wheat germ and milk. That is kneaded and left in the fridge over night to soften up the tough wheaty-bits. A biga (bread flour and yeast) is left on the counter overnight to bubble and develop deep yeasty flavors. Great. Then they are mixed together with the remaining ingredients.
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| It took a long time to get the cold-from-the-fridge dense "soaker" to mix in with the warm, soft "biga", even when the soaker was pinched off into 1 inch pieces. |
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| "Soaker" after spending the night in the fridge. |
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| The dough finally came together and was very soft. Recipe did not recommend adding more flour than went into the biga and soaker - so I decided to stick to the recipe. |
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| Dough was so cold that I did the first and second rises in a warm oven in a warm bowl of water. |
How did ATK stand up to BWJ? It really didn't. To be fair, I wasn't comparing white loaves with wheat loaves per se. I was comparing the success of following the recipe word for word. BWJ gives a range of flour needed. That means I could add just enough until the dough looked right. ATK did not provide any sort of instruction for variation. The dough was so soft that I wanted to add more flour, but I was sure their scientific method would have accounted for that and maybe soaking the wheat flour would make it a much softer dough. The loaves turned out more like batter-bread: the crumb was coarse, very little elasticity. It crumbles when sliced. But the flavor is good and it's not as heavy as you might expect with the amount of wheat:white flour in it.
Conclusion? BWJ recipes (at least this one) are written well for the home cook. The white loaves are a terrific texture - light and springy, but a little dry when toasted. I'm going to try ATK again, but allow the soaker to warm up before adding to the biga, and then I'll add bread flour to get a little stiffer dough. I'll try Andie's again too and bake it longer this time (or maybe I'll divide the flour and make a biga and soaker the night before, combining Andie's and ATK's recipes). What I really need though, is homemade jam (but that's another project for another blog.)
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Result? Squashed loaves.
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