I’m pleased and honored that my post “A Good Crust” has been syndicated on BlogHer. Please check it out there, where you’ll also find more terrific posts about food, family, politics, work, entertainment, and everything else!
Stromboli
The thing I love about the Bread Baking Babes, aside from the fact that they are true bread sorceresses as well as babes in every sense of the word, is that I always learn something new with each assignment. This month I learned that Stromboli is not only Pinnocchio’s evil puppet master, but a rolled Italian bread filled with all manner of deliciousness. Kind of like a spiral calzone.
Elle (Feeding My Enthusiasms) chose this one for us, based on Heather’s (girlichef) tempting example. As Elle noted, the dough is fairly basic, so the focus can be on the filling. I made a few ingredient changes, substituting smoked mozzarella for the smoked Swiss, soppressata for the pepperoni, and adding a 12-ounce jar of roasted red peppers. Very tasty, but not meant for people on a low-sodium diet!
Behold the prosciutto, cheese, soppressata, peppers, basil, and garlic, ready to roll:
A Good Crust
Teff Poolish Bread with a good crust
Call me shallow, but I do judge books by their covers, and breads by their crusts. For most of the hearth loaves I bake, I’m looking for a gorgeously brown, thin, crisp crust that “sings” when it comes out of the oven and shatters under the knife on the cutting board. I don’t always get it, but here are some things that help:
- Steam the oven, but not too much. Steam promotes a rich, lustrous crust color and good volume, but too much makes the crust chewy rather than crisp, and makes your loaves look like they’ve been dipped in shellac. Some ovens hold steam better than others, so experiment with steaming methods, how much water you need to use, and when to open the oven door to vent the steam, to determine what’s best for you.
- Don’t underbake. The baking times in recipes are guidelines. If your crust is too pale after the recommended baking time, bake it longer, to the darkness you like. It’s hard to overbake bread.
Shaping a Pinwheel
The three B’s (baguettes, batards, and boules) are classic, but maybe you want to mix up your loaf shapes now and then. Pinwheel loaves are an easy and fun change of pace. They are also good for people with fear of scoring, as no blade is required. They are not good for keeping birds away from your vegetable garden, however.
The loaves here are Norwich Sourdough, but you can use this technique with any medium-hydration dough. The shape is essentially two fendu loaves twisted in their centers and placed at right angles to each other.
Green Market Baking Book Review, Recipe, and Giveaway
The Green Market Baking Book : 100 Delicious Recipes for Naturally Sweet & Savory Treats by Laura C. Martin is premised on the idea that baking with fresh, seasonal ingredients, and without refined sugar, is better for both our bodies and our planet. If you like that idea, you’ll like this book.
The majority of the recipes are treats of the sweet variety (cakes, pies, cookies, puddings, muffins, etc.). All are made with one or more “natural sweeteners” such as honey, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, and barley malt syrup. The book includes a section on substituting these ingredients for refined sugar in your own recipes. Whether or not you believe (and I’m not sure I do) Martin’s assertion that these sweeteners are more healthful than sugar, you may still wish to “support the small producers of alternative sweeteners — the honeybee keepers, the maple syrup farmers, and so on.”
The recipes — some Martin’s own, but many contributed by bakers and chefs around the country — are grouped by season, and most, though not all, feature fresh produce. Some are designated as low-fat, gluten-free, or dairy-free, and many contain a good proportion of whole grain flours and/or heart-healthier fats such as olive oil.
For me, though, what any baking book that focuses primarily on desserts comes down to is not whether the recipes are healthful, because I’m not going to go looking to dessert to fill my nutritional dance card. What it comes down to is do the recipes work, and do they taste good? The answer here, as far as I can tell, is yes they do (mostly).
Peppercorn-Potato Sourdough Bagels
Here on the West Coast we have a chain of bagel restaurants whose namesake is an ark-builder that rhymes with a feathered neckpiece worn by Mae West (you got that?). While I have always found their bagels a little too puffy and bready for my taste, there is one that makes my heart skip a beat.
I admit it, I’m a sucker for that ark-builder’s peppercorn-potato bagels. But, while I will not be so immodest as to say my sourdough version is better, it is chewier, and makes a damn good tuna sandwich. If you like a bagel that bites back when you bite into it, this could be your creature. Try them one by one or two by two, and decide for yourself.
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