loaves & rolls

High-Extraction Miche

A few days ago I brought one of these miches to dinner at the home of people I’d never met before. In retrospect, this was one of those “what was I thinking?” ideas, because it could have been awkward if they had turned out to be bread wimps. Luckily, they weren’t, or they were very gracious about hiding it. Huge and chewy and sour, with a crust so dark it might be mistaken for burned by the uninformed, this miche is some serious bread.

I’ve had trouble pinning down the exact definition of “miche” (French slang for “butt-cheek,” according to Daniel Leader’s Local Breads). I believe that nominally it is a large, round, somewhat flattened loaf, but beyond that it seems that most breads that call themselves miches involve sourdough and a substantial proportion of whole-grain or high-extraction flour.

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Rustic Flax Seed-Currant Bread

If I’m being honest, I must say that neither flax seeds nor currants make my list of favorite taste sensations. So no one is more surprised than me that this rustic bread freckled with these prosaic little ingredients is nothing short of magnificent.

Nutty and light with an occasional hit of sweetness provided by the fruit, flax seed-currant bread is equally at home for breakfast with a drizzle of honey, sliced horizontally for hearty ham sandwich , or after dinner with fruit and cheese.

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Sourdough English Muffins

Wish I was an English muffin
‘Bout to make the most out of a toaster
— Simon and Garfunkel, “Punky’s Dilemma”

If you want to make the most out of your toaster, lose the Thomas’ and grace it with these instead.

Inspired by several talented bakers at The Fresh Loaf who have produced various takes on the English muffin in recent months, I finally could stand it no longer, and had to try them for myself. I see why they have been so popular. The bang for the buck is tremendous; they could not be easier, yet the result is outstanding.

The recipe uses just the amount of starter I’m “discarding” from my evening feeding, so I don’t even have to have planned ahead to make them (always a bonus in my world). Ferment the sponge overnight, and it’s a simple affair in the morning to mix and cook them.

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One Bread, Two Ways (98.4% Whole Grain Seeded Sourdough)

Did you look at the title of this post and think you were going to get something along the lines of one of those glossy magazine articles on how to live fashionably on a budget by taking a single outfit from the office to the evening with the simple addition of a few well-chosen accessories? (You know, the ones where you start with one ridiculously-priced suit, replace the businesslike button-down blouse with a silk décolleté cami, add the diamond necklace, Fendi bag, and Blahnik stiletto slides, and you’re good to go? Bargain city.)

Sorry to disappoint, but this isn’t exactly that. It is the decidedly less glamorous story of how I made two breads with EXACTLY the same ingredients (no baker’s diamonds here), the first only so-so and the next a bit better, by paying closer attention and changing just a couple of things in my method.

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Overnight Ciabatta

I often refrigerate my loaves after shaping, letting them finish up their final proof in the fridge overnight, for example, so that they’re ready to bake first thing in the morning, or whenever. This has proven to be a wonderful technique for controlling my baking schedule so I can fit a few other activities in (you know, little things like work and sleep).

If I have more than a couple of loaves, though, that can take up rather a lot of space in the refrigerator. When someone on The Fresh Loaf recently brought up the subject of retarding (refrigerating) the dough during its initial fermentation to save on fridge space, I realized that was a pretty good idea, which I had not considered before, especially for breads that proof in a space-greedy couche (thanks, beenjamming!). Then in my recent class at SFBI, retarding was covered in some depth and it was confirmed that, yes, bulk retarding is a very fine strategy. One of the breads we made to illustrate this was a ciabatta, which recipe I have adapted here by substituting a little whole wheat flour and increasing the water to satisfy that thirsty flour.
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Rye and Whole Wheat Sourdough for BreadBakingDay #3

Ulrike of Küchenlatein set the task for BBD #3: bread leavened exclusively with sourdough, preferably rye. The sourdough part did not make me nervous, but the rye part did. Rye bread and I do not exactly have a long history together.

For one thing, I only recently acquired a taste for it. For another, to be honest, it scares me a little. Other than the wheat family, rye is the only grain that contains gluten, but its gluten is much more fragile than wheat’s. It can, therefore, tolerate less mixing and fermentation. The prospect of a twitchy dough made for a twitchy me. Time to be brave.

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