Today’s post is going to be the culmination of two separate efforts to bake bread. First, from February 19th and then from March 5th.
I planned to try my hand at bread baking when I first started the project of learning to bake and blogging about it, but it became more poignant when my family lost our beloved uncle Mike Ruvolo. I’ve mentioned the Ruvolo family once before in my blog, during my first post about my grandmother’s crumb cake, because my cousin Patti Ruvolo put together our family cookbook a number of years ago. The Ruvolos are relatives of mine on my Mom’s side and they are a family of bakers. Uncle Mike owned a bakery for many years and employed many of our family and friends in various capacities; even my Mom used bag up rolls on Sundays when she was a teenager. Needless to say, I got a lot of baking advice from everyone when we gathered for Uncle Mike’s wake.
If there were two things that were very important to Uncle Mike: family and good food. In honor of that, I want to dedicate my bread baking efforts to him. I tried to make bread a few years ago and was really enjoying it until I realized that it was near bedtime and I was only done with the first rising. Sadly, I never got to the actual baking, the dough went to waste and I was so frustrated that I vowed I’d never make bread again because it just took too much time to do. Good thing I’ve matured a little when it comes to things in the kitchen.
Saturday February 19th:
To find my bread recipe, I remembered reading recently in Mark Bittman’s farewell column for The Minimalist in the NY Times that one of his all-time favorite columns he’d done in the series was his no-knead bread. I thought this would be perfect for me: a bit of a shortcut, a little easier to manage, and assured first-time bread-baking success. Not so fast, friend. The recipe seemed easy enough until I got to Step 4 where it called for a 6- to 8-quart oven-safe pot, preferably ceramic. I have one big pot, it’s aluminum and has a non-oven-safe glass top, and I love it. It’s perfect for making soup to last me a week or all the pasta one needs to make a tray of ziti. But it’s not a fancy Le Creuset pot like Mr. Bittman wanted me to have to make the no-knead bread.
Knowing that there had to be other easy bread recipes, I turned to another Bittman resource, his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian book that I’m a huge fan of and make something from just about every week. I found a really simple-looking recipe for bread that has one drawback – it calls for another piece of kitchen equipment I don’t have – a large food processor. I have a small food processor, one that’s the perfect size for my purposes and my kitchen. Thankfully, Mr. Bittman’s book also gives instructions on how to mix the dough for those without food processors, so I was ready to go.
Mr. Bittman’s recipe for Fast Whole-Grain French Bread calls for 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, 1 cup of whole wheat flour, salt and active-dry yeast – all ingredients that I had on hand, which made me very happy. Now, to do this dough by hand, he recommends putting half of the flour in with all of the salt and the yeast and stirring in about a cup of warm water. His instructions for adding the remaining half of the flour say that as soon as it becomes to difficult to stir with a wooden spoon to turn the dough out onto a flat surface and begin to knead the dough. This sounded easy enough. To start, I put in 1 1/4 cups of regular flour and a 1/2 cup of whole wheat. I added the yeast, the salt and the water and began to stir and watched the dough begin to come together. I added the other 1/2 cup of whole wheat and the dough got pretty difficult to stir. I added a 1/2 cup of the regular flour and had a ball of dough. This was fine, except that I was still missing 3/4 cup of regular flour and my regular-to-whole wheat flour ratio was off, something that Mr. Bittman warns against doing.
I started to knead the dough and was finding that the dough was just really dense and I wasn’t thrilled with its texture. Not wanting to waste my effort, I resolved to just let it rise and make a second batch of dough.
For my second loaf, I decided I’d only use 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour and the process went a little better, but I was still coming up about 1/2 cup short of flour being added in before I had a ball of dough that was no longer able to be stirred by a spoon. I kneaded the dough and set it in its bowl to rise.
I turned the dough out onto my work surface and shaped each ball into a boule shape – a big round loaf – and then let them rest again so they could rise. As I mentioned, Mr. Bittman’s book is pretty long on technique, so during these hours of waiting for the dough balls to rise, I was reading and rereading his pages on kneading, shaping and rising as I cleaned up the kitchen and picked up the rest of my apartment. After the dough rose for the second time, I turned it out onto baking sheets. Mr. Bittman recommends using a pizza stone, something that I have, but unfortunately it’s in storage upstate in my parents’ attic, since there’s no place to keep it in my kitchen. One of the dough balls had a harder time coming out of the bowl after its second rising and it fell a little bit. I put my slashes in anyhow and let it bake – big mistake. The bread came out looking kind of withered, but we’ll get to the debacle that was the result of this first attempt at the bread in a minute.
Mr. Bittman’s instructions for the actual baking of the bread call for the oven to be heated to 400° and then dropped to 375° when the bread goes into the oven. Okay, sounds a little weird, but who am I to question? Also, his recipe doesn’t give a baking time, it indicates baking by look (“bake until the crust is golden brown”) or by internal temperature (“at least 210°”). Here’s where I complain about one of my culinary heroes in a semi-rude way. Why is it that there’s a recipe in a vegetarian cookbook that requires you to have a meat thermometer? And, okay, semantics-lovers, even if you call it a “kitchen thermometer,” when else does the average person use it except to test doneness when roasting chicken, turkey, pork or beef? This mostly-non-meat-eater doesn’t have one, and was really starting to regret using this recipe.
I can’t say for sure how long I baked the bread. I started checking it for golden-brown-ness at 15 minutes but the bread never got to golden brown. At close to – I’m guessing – 30 to 40 minutes, I finally decided to pull my barely brown bread from the oven to test how hard the crust was. My best description of the feel of the crust was somewhere between butcher block cutting board and granite countertop. Disaster! Boo on you, Mr. Bittman. As punishment, you must cease writing your new opinion column in the NY Times and go back to writing recipes for the Dining section, starting with a revamp of this recipe redone for someone with a normal NYC-sized kitchen that doesn’t have room for a pizza stone, a big food processor or anything by the lovely folks at Le Creuset.
When the bread was finally cooled, I attempted to cut into it. When my serrated knife jumped out of the crust and nearly sliced open the back of my hand, I reached for the cleaver in my knife collection. Sadly, it was the best tool for the job. And while the crust was an absolute horror, inside wasn’t so terrible; at least it tasted great. There was an air pocket in one loaf, but it wasn’t a great tragedy. I enjoyed the bread, but it hurt my mouth (and my soul, a little) to eat it.
While my cousin, Ginny Degennaro told me at Uncle Mike’s wake that she really enjoyed that I don’t shy away from showing my failures in this blog, I’ve struggled over the posting of my big bread failure because I felt like my post honoring Uncle Mike should be a big success, something he would have been proud of. Enter this week.
Saturday March 5th:
Originally, my project for this week was to be a King Cake, the traditional Mardi Gras treat, to share with the members of my church at this month’s Sunday Potluck. A King Cake is made using a sweet yeasted dough, and the more I looked into making it, the less comfortable I felt in being successful doing it, hence my second go-round with baking bread this weekend.
Instead of beating my head against the wall trying to use the same recipe, I went in search of one that seemed less complicated. In my collection of recipe books, I have two that I consider my old classics: my 1961 version of The New York Times Cookbook and my 2001 version of The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, both of which I stole from my Mom at some point, with her blessing (I think). I typically only pull out the New York Times Cookbook around the holidays because it has recipes for dishes like crown roast of lamb or trout muniere that I stare at wistfully and wish Mom would let us prepare for Christmas dinner. It seems a little dated when it uses words like “Oriental,” but I’ve held onto it because I figure that classic recipes just don’t change. I like The Good Housekeeping Cookbook for the same reason, except that the recipe selection is updated for the 21st century, meaning it includes Mexican and Thai selections and doesn’t consider Italian food to be “ethnic.”
The NY Times recipe for French Bread calls for a tablespoon of shortening, so I gently shut the book with a derisive snort and placed it back onto the shelf to await November. In The Good Housekeeping Cookbook, I found a baguette recipe which looked pretty simple to do. In the first step, the recipe says to “beat” the ingredients, which made a little light bulb go off in my head. Most of the stand mixers that are out there come with paddles for making dough, so I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, there was something I could get for my hand mixer to do the same thing. When I checked the manual, I learned that I already had everything I needed for this because the weird spiral-looking attachments that came with my mixer were intended for just that purpose. Bonus! I was so ready to try making bread again.
The recipe calls for two cups of warm water, a packet of dry yeast, a tablespoon each of sugar and salt, and about five cups of all-purpose flour. The yeast, water and sugar did their thing for a few minutes and then I was supposed to add the salt and three cups of flour to the mix. The flour mixed in so much easier with the dough paddles on my electric mixer. I added the remaining 1 1/2 cups gradually, mixing as I went along. According to the recipe, the final 1/2 cup of flour is added during the kneading process. In theory.
When I finished adding all the flour that I was supposed to per the recipe instructions, I didn’t have a ball of dough, but it looked pretty much ready to be kneaded. I was so wrong in thinking this. It wasn’t ready to be kneaded at all, but it was ready to stick to both my hand and my flour-dusted work surface.
I was so ready to pack it in and just quit for the week, but thought to myself, “No, you can save this.” And just kept adding flour, 1/4 cup at a time, until I actually had a ball of dough that was ready to be kneaded. It was a frustrating and very messy process, and I hated almost every second of it, but I was glad I pushed through. I kneaded the dough for about 7 minutes and then put it into a bowl brushed with some olive oil to keep the bread from sticking, and let it rise for a couple hours. When I came back to the dough, it had grown enormously and was almost to the top of the bowl – I took this as a good sign.
I divided the dough in half and rolled each piece out with my rolling pin (which I got for Christmas and this was my first time using it, yay!) into a rectangle. I then rolled the dough up tightly into baguette shapes and rolled around the ends of each baguette so they’d taper nicely. It was at this point that I realized I couldn’t be nice to the dough and I had to rough it up a little bit to get it to cooperate. This was an extension of the realization that sometimes I’m just a little too tentative when trying out new things in the kitchen and that the ends of the baguettes weren’t going to make themselves taper just because I politely wished they would. So I man-handled the dough a little bit and got three of my four baguette-ends into a nice taper; one of the ends was something of a lost cause.
At this point, we’re going to take a quick commercial break to point out some new stuff I got for my kitchen: new baking sheets! My Aunt Carol and Uncle Ross have been following my exploits and offered to get me something new for the kitchen. They are very pretty and I got to use them this week to bake my baguettes! Thanks, Ross and Carol – very generous of you! Back to our regular programming…
I oiled up my new baking sheet, placed one baguette on each and allowed them an hour to rise. Once they did so, I added my slashes, which again required a little force (I’m sitting at my computer flexing my biceps involuntarily just thinking about how strong I am) and I prepared an egg-white wash. This required the white of one egg and 1/4 teaspoon of salt, beat together and then brushed on top of each baguette. I was a little surprised at this, because I thought that all egg washes utilized the yolk, but I learned something new – thanks, Good Housekeeping! I then placed the baguettes into a 400° oven. Thankfully, the lovely folks at Good Housekeeping gave me a timeframe for baking these: 30-35 minutes with a rotation of trays on the top and bottom racks halfway through.
At the halfway point, I was a little concerned that the bread might have been baking a little too quickly, but I stayed with the recipe’s suggestion for cooking time. When I pulled them out at the 30-minute mark, they were gorgeous and the perfect golden brown color for the crust. I was so happy, I almost started jumping for joy. Instead, I chose to do the next-least-manliest thing I could have and called my Mom to share my excitement.
Once the bread was cool, I put the baguettes in a paper bag that I covered loosely with a plastic bag so they’d stay nice and fresh for the morning. When I was ready to leave for church this morning, I packed a big cutting board with the baguettes and a bread knife in case my pastors didn’t have those things readily available at the start of the potluck. I’ve found that when bringing food to someone else’s party, it’s better to bring supplies to serve my dish. I’d prefer not to stress out the hosts of the party – who are already generous enough to offer up their home and are being attentive to other guests – by asking them to go digging into drawers and cabinets to find something I could have easily carried along with me.
I put the baguettes onto the cutting board and cut a few pieces off to make a nice presentation of it and the bread sliced easily, a good first sign. Inside, the bread looked and felt fantastic. I couldn’t wait to try some, but most of the other dishes hadn’t arrived, so I socialized a bit before grabbing some food. When I finally got a chance to make my own plate about twenty minutes later, almost half of the bread was already gone. Sweet! It seemed like it was a big hit. I cut myself a piece from each baguette and they were both awesome. Outside, the bread had a real rustic, homemade look to it, and to me it tasted like it was from a professional bakery, so I was thrilled and honestly, quite shocked. After the previous debacle with bread baking, and this dough being such a nightmare at first, I was ready for the bread to be kind of a letdown. Luck was with me this week, and I was somehow able to pull it off, I’m not quite sure how. I think I’m going to pass it off as a little bit of luck, a little bit of practice, a little bit of baking bread being a family tradition, and a little bit of Uncle Mike pulling for me to be successful. I got a lot of compliments about the bread from my fellow congregants and was personally really thrilled with how it turned out. I can’t wait to try doing this again, now that I have a bit more of a hang of what I’m doing.
Before I sign out for the week, I wanted to spread around some more thank-yous. First, to all my cousins at Uncle Mike’s wake who have been reading the blog and offered their support and compliments, I really appreciate it – special shout-outs to my cousins Tracy, Patti and Ginny for the baking tips and recipe suggestions. Second, to my Aunt Carol and Uncle Ross for the new baking sheets and storage containers, thanks again. And lastly, for all my fellow congregants at the Greenpoint Reformed Church, thanks for being my taste-testers and not being disappointed that I had regular bread instead of King Cake this week. Next time, I’ll make something sweet, I promise!
Thanks for reading!
- Jon
