Category Archives: BBA Challenge

I bought the Bread Baker’s Apprentice for its cover (and because my sister wisely recommended it to me), but I fell in love with it for it’s l’Ancienne recipe.

Pain à l’ancienne was the first BBA bread I made from the book — long before the BBA Challenge was a twinkle in Nicole’s eye. In fact, it was the only recipe in the book I had made before the BBA Challenge began. This was one of the biggest reasons why I joined the Challenge. I’ve long been guilty of buying and reading a cookbook (yes, I actually read them), but only making a handful of recipes from it before moving on to the next. We have a bookcase full of great cookbooks, and yet I keep going back to the tried and true recipes, the favorites. I don’t know why.

I saw the BBA Challenge as a way to force myself to really explore a cookbook, just one for now, in depth. I assumed I’d learn a few new things about baking bread, and maybe find a few new favorites, and, by being part of a group, get to know a few fellow bakers. Boy, I had no idea how much I’d learn, how many people I’d come to know, how many new favorites I’d have, how far this would take me from a decent bread baker to someone so comfortable with dough that I would confidently put together a couple breads in a single evening, while tending a sourdough starter, and mixing up a pre-ferment for tomorrow’s bread.

And it all started with pain à l’ancienne.

For the Challenge, rather than make the regular baguettes as written (which I have made many, many times), I decided to try two variations. The first was the pizza variation. This is made by simply taking the fermented l’ancienne dough, dividing it into 6-8 pieces. flouring them well, and then stretching them into pizza doughs. From there, it’s just a matter of putting on the toppings and baking. It made a fine pizza, but I don’t think it was the best way to use this dough. The depth of flavor was lost in the resulting pizza, and the dough is difficult enough to handle that it didn’t seem worthwhile making it into pizza. I far prefer a very simple, thin-crust pizza dough that my friend Jo gave me, which takes all of about 15 minutes to whip up in the food processor.

The second variation I tried was a variation in cooking method only. Instead of using the BBA hearth baking method in the oven, I tried baking the loaves in our Big Green Egg grill. This was the first time I’d tried baking on the Egg and I decided to try l’Ancienne this way because I knew the bread so well and would be able to compare it well to what I was used to.

In a word, it was spectacular. The wood fired baking gave the bread a slightly smoky flavor, a crackly crust, and a huge spring resulting in lovely, large, uneven holes in the crumb. It was just the way you’d want a wood-fired baguette to taste. And we made it ourselves, on the back porch.

I won’t go through the step-by-step recipe here (you can see the pizza pictures here and the baguette-on-Egg pictures here.). Instead, I encourage you to buy the book, or borrow it from your local library or your bread-crazed friend, and try it. It’s not the easiest recipe. It asks you to deal with a very wet dough, and trust yourself not to overhandle it, but even if your first loaves come out lopsided and oddly shaped, I guarantee the flavor and the crust will amaze you. And maybe it will lead you to making bread every week, even if it’s the same loaf every time.

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The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is a group of home bakers, scattered across the planet, focused on one goal: completing every recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, in order, and writing about our experience. Want to join us? Buy or borrow a copy of the book, open a big bag of flour, and plunge in!

When I make my list of top 10 favorite BBA Challenge breads (and I will), I won’t forget to mention this loaf.

I grew up in a family of white bread eaters. So things called “multi grain” always sounded foreign, and overly hearty, possibly difficult to chew. I steered clear.

Over the years, as I learned to cook, I grew to appreciate whole grains more and more, but I still stayed in the white zone when baking bread. Not because I didn’t like whole grain breads (I’d had more than a few, usually in restaurants, that were stunningly rich and delicious and light), but because I didn’t know where to start in making my own. Any bread books I owned that talked about whole grains had recipes for heavy, dense loaves that were lauded for their excellent keeping qualities (which I took to mean that you couldn’t tell the difference between a fresh version of one of these loaves and one that had sat around for two weeks).

So, even though fellow BBA Challenge bakers who had forged ahead of me were full of praise for the Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire, I was somewhat suspicious. The name made me a bit suspicious, too. I mean, why call something “extraordinaire” unless you’re trying to convince someone that it’s not so bad? Really.

This is a two-day bread, but instead of starting with a pre-ferment, it starts with a soaker. The soaker, which is a mixture of the multi grains in question, and water, sits at room temperature overnight. This soaking process provides two benefits to the resulting bread. First, it softens the coarse grains, which affects the texture of the baked bread. Second, it allows the enzymes in the grains time to extract sugars from the grains, giving the bread a sweeter, less bitter taste.

Mixing the soaker is a quick process. For my grains, I made a mixture of coarse cornmeal, rolled oats, some bran sifted from whole wheat flour, and water, and let the mixture sit overnight at room temperature. After I left that to soak, I made some brown rice for dinner and set aside a few tablespoons for the next day.

The next morning, I made the dough by mixing together unbleached bread flour, brown sugar, salt, yeast, the reserved brown rice, honey, buttermilk, and water. Then I kneaded the dough for about 10 minutes until I had a soft, tacky dough that passed the windowpane test with flying colors. I rounded up the dough and put it in an oiled bowl to ferment for about 90 minutes, until the dough doubled.

After that, all I had to do was shape the dough into a sandwich loaf, put it in an oiled loaf pan, sprinkle with poppy seeds, and let it proof for another 90 minutes. I baked it for about an hour total.

See step-by-step pictures of this bread here.

It smelled incredibly delicious and it was hard to wait the 1-2 hours for it to cool. I slathered my first warm slice with butter. I made amazing toast with that bread all week long.

For my daughter’s school’s annual fund raising auction last fall, Michael and I contributed “six months of bread.” Once a month for six months, we’re making a loaf (or two) of fresh bread for the winning bidder. We’re on the 3rd month next week and Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire is on the menu.

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The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is a group of home bakers, scattered across the planet, focused on one goal: completing every recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, in order, and writing about our experience. Want to join us? Buy or borrow a copy of the book, open a big bag of flour, and plunge in!

I’m embarrassed to admit this in my household, but I loathe rye bread. Everyone else I know loves it, but I just can’t see the attraction. Everything I love about bread seems absent in any loaf of rye I’ve eaten. It’s heavy. It’s bitter. Its crumb is dense. It doesn’t satisfy any part of what I crave when I think about bread.

So you can imagine how I felt as I approached the rye bread section of the Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I almost longed for the celebration breads again. I think this is one reason why it’s called a “challenge”.

So, to make a long story short, I made this bread, which is actually two colors of a basic rye bread, one light and one dark, rolled together to give the bulls eye pattern.

The one thing I found interesting about the recipe is how the dark rye gets its color. I’d always assumed that it was due to the bran content or color of the rye flour itself, but, since this recipe uses a light rye flour, which has most of its dark color milled out of it, the color must be added back in separately, either via caramel coloring, cocoa, carob, or powdered coffee.

The recipe itself is a very simple one-day affair, though you are making two doughs in succession. The shaping is the fun part, rolling the two different colors of dough into a spiral or bulls eye.

See step-by-step pictures of this bread here.

It yielded a pleasant loaf, but since I’m no fan of rye, I didn’t especially love it, and the rye lovers in the family found it not rye-y enough. I think the recipe is fine; it’s just not our style of bread. On to the next.

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The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is a group of home bakers, scattered across the planet, focused on one goal: completing every recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, in order, and writing about our experience. Want to join us? Buy or borrow a copy of the book, open a big bag of flour, and plunge in!

The Light Whole Wheat loaf is another one-day bread in the BBA challenge, which makes it one of those breads you can decide to make mid-morning and have it ready to serve with dinner that evening.

What makes this bread “light” is that the whole wheat flour is only a part of the total flour component (the rest is white bread flour or high-gluten flour). Since I live with a picky eater and was hoping to come up with a whole wheat bread that she might enjoy, I went one step further and used King Arthur Flour’s White Whole Wheat flour, which, as the name reveals, is made from milled white wheat (versus the standard red wheat that most whole wheat flour is made from).

This bread is also made lighter by the addition of powdered milk, sugar or honey, and shortening or butter, making it a member of the enriched bread family.

To make the bread, mix the flours, salt, powdered milk, yeast, butter, honey, and water. Knead for about 10 minutes until you achieve a supple dough. Ferment in an oiled bowl for about two hours. After fermenting, shape the dough into a sandwich loaf and place in an oiled loaf pan. Proof for about an hour-and-a-half, and then bake for thirty minutes.

See step-by-step pictures of this bread here.

What you’ll get is by no means a real whole wheat bread, but for those looking to add more whole grain breads to their diet while still making a sandwich bread that makes a respectable jelly sandwich, this one works.

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The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is a group of home bakers, scattered across the planet, focused on one goal: completing every recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, in order, and writing about our experience. Want to join us? Buy or borrow a copy of the book, open a big bag of flour, and plunge in!

These crackers are so easy and quick to make, and so satisfying, the only explanation I have for not making them a second time is that I’ve been sort of been preoccupied by making a whole lot of other bread recipes in the past few months. It’s hard to fit in repeats. In fact, the only reason I’m looking forward to the end of the BBA Challenge is so that I can spend more time retrying my favorites.

This is one of them.

Once of the best things about these crackers is their versatility because they take on the character of whatever toppings you select. Want a basic cracker? Sprinkle with coarse salt, sesame seeds, or poppy seeds. Want Indian flavors? Top with toasted cumin seeds or dust with garam masala. Use whatever herbs or spices you have on hand and each batch of crackers will be different.

To make the crackers, I mixed together a quick dough with flour, salt, yeast, honey, vegetable oil, and water. Then I kneaded the dough for about 10 minutes. The dough was smooth, firm, elastic, and extremely satisfying to knead. Then I let the dough ferment in an oiled bowl for 90 minutes, and then transferred the doubled dough to the counter. I used my trusty rolling pin (my husband’s grandmother’s well oiled wooden rolling pin) to roll the dough out as thin as I could. The dough was quite elastic and not as easy to roll thinly as I’d wanted. In retrospect, I should have used the pasta roller to get the thinness I was looking for, but by letting the dough rest for a few minutes between each rolling attempt, I was able to get a fairly thin sheet of dough.

I then transferred the sheet of dough to a parchment lined sheet pan, misted the dough with water, and sprinkled on the seeds. For this batch, I used kosher salt, toasted cumin seeds, and poppy seeds, arranged in stripes along the length of the dough. Then I baked the sheet for 20 minutes. Once cool, I shattered the sheet into crackers by snapping it into pieces with my hands.

See step-by-step pictures of this bread here.

The entire process is simple, requiring no pre-ferment, lengthy fermentation, or unusual ingredients. It’s so easy, you could make them for dinner tonight.

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The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is a group of home bakers, scattered across the planet, focused on one goal: completing every recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, in order, and writing about our experience. Want to join us? Buy or borrow a copy of the book, open a big bag of flour, and plunge in!

Homemade kaiser rolls? Why not?

Kaiser rolls are a childhood favorite of mine. They reside deep in my memory, as the bread of my first sandwich love: the heaping hot pastrami sandwich at the restaurant where my sister, grandmother, and I would meet my grandfather for lunch once or twice a summer.

We’d meet my grandfather at his office. He was always impressively dressed in nice pants, a button-down shirt, and a tie. He’d tour us around the office a bit, and then we’d drive over to a favorite deli restaurant in a nearby strip mall.

I have no idea what else was on the menu, because I always ordered the same thing: a pastrami sandwich on a kaiser roll, with french fries. I was small and the sandwich was huge. The meat portion was large, but it was the kaiser (also known as a bulkie roll) that put the sandwich over the top. I’d open my mouth as wide as I could and still there was no way that sandwich was going to fit into my mouth. I had to use my fork first to pull out a meal’s worth of pastrami, and then proceed to eat half the sandwich. The other half we took home for later.

In all the years since, I’d never thought that normal people could make a kaiser, and now that I live in northern New England where there is no such thing as real pastrami, I’d kind of given up my lust for a good kaiser. In the past year, though, Michael had hunted up a source for artisanal pastrami (okay, I’m kinda laughing at myself as I write that phrase. I mean, really….) and though it tasted great on the local rolls and sandwich breads (and, yes, I know, many people believe that pastrami and rye bread are the only natural combination, but I am emphatically NOT one of those people), something was missing.

Unfortunately, by the time I got this recipe, the good pastrami was once again not available in our neck of the woods, so I had to eat the kaiser rolls with inferior sandwich meats, but I still enjoyed the rolls. And, what’s more, I enjoyed making them, mostly because it’s so much fun to shape them.

The recipe itself is another simple, two-day affair, where the first day is just mixing up a quick pâte fermentée and allowing it to ferment for a few hours before refrigerating. The next day, de-chill the pâte fermentée by allowing it to sit on the counter for an hour, mix the dough (flour, salt, diastatic barley malt powder, yeast, pâte fermentée, vegetable oil, and water), knead for about 10 minutes, and then ferment for two hours.

When the dough has doubled from its original size, divide it into four-ounce pieces for large rolls (what else would you want to make?), shape into rolls, and let them relax for a few minutes.

To make the distinctive kaiser roll shape, you have a couple choices. One is to use a kaiser roll stamp/cutter, which allows you to press the swirl pattern into the top of the round roll. The other is to shape the roll into a rope and knot it. I chose the knot method, mostly because I didn’t own the stamp and didn’t feel like buying a single-use tool. I’m happy with my choice because the knotting method is simple and the results were terrific.

After shaping, proof the rolls for about 45 minutes, seed them if you want (we didn’t) and then bake.

See step-by-step pictures for this bread here.

The resulting rolls were the best kaisers I’d had in a long time. And guess what Michael found at the co-op today? A new brand of pastrami, and it’s pretty darn good. I think I’ll be making kaiser rolls again very soon.

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The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is a group of home bakers, scattered across the planet, focused on one goal: completing every recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, in order, and writing about our experience. Want to join us? Buy or borrow a copy of the book, open a big bag of flour, and plunge in!

I was most excited about making this bread because the recipe says you can use it to make bread sticks, which is one of those things I’d kind of always wanted to know how to make, but had never bothered to look for a recipe for. I have no idea why I didn’t, because now I know just how darn easy it is to make bread sticks. This is one of the wonderful benefits of this whole BBA Challenge process: getting to try things I’d ordinarily not even consider making myself (English Muffins are a prime example).

Like the French Bread, this recipe incorporated a pre-ferment (made at least the day before), which helps develop flavor. In this case,  the pre-ferment is a biga, which is very similar to the pâte fermentée, except that it omits salt. In both cases, the pre-ferment is made one to three days before the bread, and is allowed to develop slowly in the refrigerator.

Before making the dough, remove the biga from the refrigerator, and let it come to room temperature by cutting it into pieces and allow it to sit on a floured counter for an hour. Make the dough by combining flour, salt, sugar, yeast, diastatic barley malt powder (which adds color and boosts the enzyme activity in the dough), olive oil, water, and the biga. Knead for about 10 minutes, round up into a bowl, and ferment for two hours.

Once the dough has doubled in size, remove it from the bowl, and divide it and shape it. Since I wanted to try both the loaf and the bread sticks, I divided the dough into two, shaped a batard out of one piece, and rolled out the other piece and used my pizza wheel to cut it into thin strips. I sprinkled sea salt and poppy seeds on the bread sticks. Let the loaves proof for an hour, and then bake.

You can see the step-by-step pictures for this bread here.

The resulting loaf was tender, soft, easy to like. Like the French Bread, it lacked a deeply developed flavor, but it was far better than any Italian loaf I’d bought at local bakeries and was quite simple to make. The bread sticks were fine, but not the bread sticks of my dreams because they weren’t crunchy enough. Next time, I think I just need to roll them thinner. The loaf, however, made wonderful sandwiches and toast, and was one of the few loaves that everyone in the household was happy to devour.

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The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is a group of home bakers, scattered across the planet, focused on one goal: completing every recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, in order, and writing about our experience. Want to join us? Buy or borrow a copy of the book, open a big bag of flour, and plunge in!

I won’t go on and on about this bread partly because my fingers are still a bit tired from typing about focaccia, but also because I just don’t have that much to say about it.

I think it’s a very workable recipe. It made a nice loaf and the dough was quite easy to work with, but it lacked the depth of flavor of its cousin, Pain a l’Ancienne (which I first tried back in May of 2007). What’s nice about the French Bread recipe is that the dough is easy to work with and firm enough to score (unlike the very wet l’Ancienne dough). And if you happen to have some pre-made pâte fermentée in the fridge (and who doesn’t?), you can make this recipe in a single day. French bread for dinner!

Five or six hours before you want to be eating a baguette, mix the dough (a combination of unbleached all-purpose and bread flours, salt, yeast, pâte fermentée, and water), then knead the dough for about 10 minutes. Ferment the dough for two hours, divide the dough into three pieces, shape into baguettes, and proof for another hour or so. Score, bake, cool, cut. Couldn’t be simpler.

You can see the step-by-step pictures for this bread here.

It’s a perfectly pleasant, easy-to-make bread, and the crust and crumb were both nice, but it lacked that nutty, rich flavor I crave in a baguette. Somehow we managed to polish them off anyway.

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The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is a group of home bakers, scattered across the planet, focused on one goal: completing every recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, in order, and writing about our experience. Want to join us? Buy or borrow a copy of the book, open a big bag of flour, and plunge in!

We learned this afternoon that Oggi of I can do that! is the first BBA Challenge participant to complete the Challenge!

Cool! Congratulations, Oggi! The rest of us will be pulling up behind you shortly.