Pain a l'ancienne

I've been having consistent, if varied, success with my focaccia-making. With the exception of the book by Beth Henspergn, the 2 other bread recipes I have are meant for bread-machines. Deciding to extend my bread-making repertoire, I eagerly scouted Amazon for bread making books that could make use of my KitchenAid -- I always have good reasons to buy cookbooks.

And so it was that I chanced about the book titled "Bread Baker's Apprentice" by Peter Reinhart. It won the James Beard book award and IACP Cookbook Award -- I have no clue what IACP stands for but I figured it must be something good (kekeke). Its gotten fairly good reviews and most importantly, there are recipes for artisan breads, many of which are European-type breads -- or are all artisan breads from Europe anyways?? After reading through it, I was rather proud of my purchase. The reason being that the author aims to provide a good foundation and explanation on the science of bread-making. What I like is that the author has attached a formula for each recipe providing the percentage component of all the ingredients. Meaning to say that if the recipe calls for a 1-pound bread but you would need to make a 3 1/2-pound bread, you could use the formula to calculate how much of each ingredient would you actually need. I found that really neat.

I've also found little nuggets of useful information that is not explained in a lot of cookbooks. For example, it explains that while the use of commercial yeast is helpful in leavening breads (i.e. make it rise), the maxim in good bread baking is to use the minimum amount of yeast because you do not want the bread to acquire a yeasty taste. Another useful info was that you only knead as long as it takes for the bread dough to form, not any less or more. What is more important is to allow the dough to ferment (or to proof) as that constitutes towards developing about 80% of the final taste of the bread (fyi, the remaining 20% are attributable to factors such as quality of ingredients, oven temperature etc).

Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the bread requires at least 2 days to make. The first day is used to make a preferment (known as starter or sponge), before making the bread proper on the 2nd day. Hence, its tough to decide that you want to make any bread spur-of-the-moment, especially if you entertain thoughts of making your own bread for a dinner at home with guests.

Anyways, I decided to make the pain a l'ancienne The author had visited Gosselin in Paris and was given the idea to refrigerate the preferment. The rationale for doing that in gist (since my chemistry was terrible back in school) what that refrigerating the dough retards the action of the yeast, but allow natural sugars to build up within the dough. Hence, when the dough is taken out from the fridge the next day, the return to room temperature will activate the yeast to start digesting the sugar. But becos the dough has produced more sugar after sitting overnight, there's better flavour to the bread.

Now, back to the all important question... how did the bread turn out? Well... it was certainly edible, but far from being good. If you could hear my mom, she kept saying that the crust was sooo haard, blaming it on the flour. Overall, with the exception of the teeth-aching hard crust, the taste of the bread really wasn't too bad. The interior of the bread didn't have that many air-holes, unfortunately.

The lessons learnt were:

1) It was a little tedious having to convert ounce and pounds to the metric system. Thus, when I was making the preferment, I had wrongly read and convert the amount of flour needed. Hence, the flour was rather wet. Took a while of kneading before I reread the quantity and realised my mistake. For ease of reference, am going to paste a conversion chart in the book or pencil in the weight in kilos and grams next to it.

2) Secondly, during the handling of the dough, I might have degassed it a little. Also, while dividing and cutting the dough to form the baguettes, the original dough was a little too long. Hence, transferring the baguettes was difficult as they slipped and slithered. Becos of the size (or length) of a home oven, the baguettes were more like demi-baguettes rather than the store-bought long ones.

3) Slashing the baguettes to form nice splits wasn't as easy as I thought. Some slashes were too deep, while others too shallow that the final output didn't even showed any slashes.

4) The book instructed to put the baguettes into the oven after shaping and transferring to a baking sheet without the need to proof. I felt that this might be a reason why the baguettes didn't spring more in the oven and partly resulted in the lack of airy holes in the interior. The next time, I think I will allow another 10-15 minutes of final proofing in order to allow the dough to relax.

5) Length of time that the baguettes baked in the oven was around 20 minutes. But becos my baguettes were a little skinny, I should have adjusted for that and not left it in the oven for the specified length of time. That was the reason why my bread crust was a little too hard. And when I measure the internal temperature of the bread, it was about 270F instead of the 205F, which was the optimum internal temperature.

6) I was reluctant to sprinkle too much flour on each of the cut baguettes, except for one loaf. However, in the final output, I realised the one loaf that I sprinkled more flour actually turned out more rustic looking. I shall be more liberal with sprinkling flour the next time.

I think I shall have another few more attempts at the pain a l'ancienne. It tastes a little like the baguette au levain that I loved in France, although when I googled the latter, the method was different. While pain a l'ancienne uses commercial yeast, the au levain type of bread relies on wild yeast (i.e. just water and flour, relying on natural air-born yeast to ferment).

Wish me luck!

To the start of artisan bread-making... hopefully

2nd time success at Focaccia bread making

I've been trying my hand at baking recently, specifically bread at that. I used to bake my breads in the bread machine that I found in my MIL's cupboard. But it keeled over one fine day while I was trying to bake a cranberry pecan bread and that ended my bread-making sessions.

Since then, I hadn't made any cos I wasn't too keen on kneading bread by hand -- tried once and my arms ached after. Until most recently. I finally haul out my spiffy KitchenAid that was sitting idle on its side in my kitchen cabinet. I had bought it during my 3rd trimester but hadn't had the chance to use it post-pregnancy.

And so it was, I decided to make sundried tomato focaccia, inspired by the ones that Louis and I have eaten at Pete's Place at Hyatt Hotel. The first time I made it, it was using the recipe from Beth Hensperger's "The Bread Bible". It wasn't too bad for a first time attempt, but the inside of the bread was rather dense, not chewy. I was wondering if it was becos I didn't shift my flour.

Then, I decided to use another recipe from "Baking at home with the Culinary Institute of America". The recipe required an overall longer time for the bread to rise and it also used bread flour as opposed to plain flour in Hensperger's recipe. Lo and behold! The bread turned out to be fantastic with a crispy crust and airy, chewy interior. In fact, it was the best bread that I've ever made!!

Bread-making is definitely very satisfying, seeing how simple ingredients like water, yeast, flour and oil could turn out something so beautiful. Eating a good loaf of bread always brings back memories of our one-year stay in France, where boulangerie abounds and you can get pretty good baguettes wherever you go. In Singapore, the best baguettes so far come from Delifrance, but somehow, they don't keep as well. Whatever that is bought has to be eaten the same day.

Back in France, I used to buy a few loaves of baguette au levin (baguettes that taste a little like sourdour bread) on market days and store them in the freezer, popping them into ovens whenever we wanted some bread. They were good with practically everything, ranging from sandwiches, to pizza, with cheese, as accompaniments to a main meal etc. And they always taste so good. Contrary to popular belief, croissants aren't as popular as baguettes, which were staples to the French like rice is to Asians.

I remembered when we first arrived in France, we were rather amused when we see the French carrying their baguettes everywhere. What shocked us really was that their baguettes are not fully wrapped in neat size packaging like the ones we get in Singapore. Instead, the bakeries would simply wrap a small rectangle or square piece of paper onto the middle of the baguettes, leaving a large part of the 2 ends "naked". And so the French would strolled out of the boulangeries with their baguettes tucked under their arms (hope they don't have smelly armpits), or stuffed into their grocery bags, dumped onto the back seats of their car etc.

After a while, we got used to it and fancied ourselves localised such that we carry our baguettes stuffed into our grocery bags and walk around nonchalantly. Admittedly, we never dared to tuck them under our arms, even though we showered at least twice even in winter.

Thus, for every bread that I successfully bake -- or not -- it never failed to evoke fond memories of Europe and especially, how good the breads were in that part of the world. And we conceded that the French baked the best breads in the world.