Summer Reading, year 3 - "Artisan Breads Every Day"

The fifth and final goal on my Summer Reading list was to read a How-To Book and then apply what I learned. To read the entire summer series, click the links below:
The Sword in the Stone and Far From the Madding Crowd
Out of the Silent Planet
Everyman
and a bonus, my review of Go Set a Watchman 

The skill I chose to learn more about is bread-making, which is why this post is much later than I anticipated. Bread-making is a process! When I was growing up my mom baked bread once a week (and sometimes more than once a week - life with 9 kids, yo), so I am familiar with the process and the time/effort involved. But I don't bake for us on a regular basis, and lately I've been wanting to experiment more with different types of bread: rustic varieties, sourdoughs, etc.So I purchased the book Artisan Breads Every Day by James Beard-award-winner Peter Reinhart. I was not familiar with Reinhart before purchasing the book, but he has written several titles and won multiple awards. It looked like one of the best options: lots of instructions, illustrations, and scrumptious recipes.

The first recipe I tried was a french rustic bread, which turned out very well. Pretty round loafs, crispy crust, soft and fluffy interior. We ate it hot from the oven with big bowls of homemade chili, then I toasted and buttered it for breakfast, then finished it off with olives and feta cheese later in the week.

The second recipe I tried was a milk dough bread, which is a    dough that incorporates milk and sweetener (sugar or honey) along with the basic dough ingredients (flour, water, yeast, salt). This one did not turn out so well, and I'm not really sure why. I'm going to have to experiment with it more. The dough was extremely heavy and dense - kneading it was almost impossible. It rose admirably in the fridge, but when I pulled it out and let it proof it barely rose at all, even after 3+ hours. I went ahead and baked it, but the loaves turned out short, dense, and a little bit under-cooked in the center. I plan to try again, since it's Reinhart's most basic recipe for sandwich bread and dinner rolls.

The third and final project was creating a sourdough starter ("final" only for the purpose of this blog!). The starter is a bubbling, "living" dough (the same way that normal yeast is alive) that, once completed, is "fed" once per week and kept in the fridge indefinitely. Every time you want sourdough bread you take a little of the starter to use in the recipe and then re-build the starter through the feeding/replenishing process. To create this living, yeast-like concoction, I combined unsweetened pineapple juice and flour, let it sit for two days, added water and more flour, let it sit for two days, added more...etc. This fermented mix creates the slightly tangy, springy bread that is great for sandwiches and soups.

Once the starter was ready, I went ahead and baked a batch of Reinhart's San Francisco sourdough bread. It turned out SO WELL. The dough was smooth and perfect, the loaves rose like champs and the finished loaf was crusty on the outside, soft on the inside, and delicious. Yum.

That concludes my summer reading for 2015. I hope you have enjoyed reading my thoughts and personal musings, because I have enjoyed sharing them. Here's to a lot more great reads this fall!