Ciabatta with Stiff Biga

Saturday, July 12, 2009

This ciabatta turned out to have one of the most successful crusts I've ever made. It actually shattered when I cut into it. And it was delicious too. It's from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread, from which, after making 4 or 5 different breads, I still can't decide whether I like or not. It's filled with information, but it's written in a way that's hard for me to decipher.
Jim looked at the cookbook and asked me if I was making ciabatta with poolish. "No," I said, "I'm making the one with the biga." "What's the difference between biga and poolish?" he asked. "Ummm," I said, "well, you know." "No, I don't," he said. I didn't want to admit I really didn't know the difference myself. I searched my memory. "Well, you ferment them ahead of time and add them to the dough. And poolish means Polish. I think." I finally looked it up, and there's not a huge difference, except that a biga is a more generic term for a pre-ferment and can be soft or stiff in texture, and can be refrigerated up to three days, whereas a poolish is never refrigerated. Got that?

This is the biga after it's been fermenting for about 14 hours.

It's stiff, and very, very sticky. You add it to the dough while it's mixing, and the biga definitely resists leaving your fingers.

It's an extremely wet and sticky dough. As with all of Hamelman's recipes, he gives two different quantities: one for professionals (that one uses 20 pounds of flour and makes 31 loaves) and one for home use (two pounds of flour, makes three small loaves). I decided to make only one large loaf, and so I divided the "home recipe" in half, using a total of one pound of bread flour.
Here's where I had trouble with the recipe. It tells you to fold the dough twice during the three-hour period of its first rising. It says, "Spread a considerable amount of flour on the work surface for the folds, and fold quickly and assertively. Be sure no extra flour is incorporated into the dough as it is folded." I must have read this 20 times. First, I couldn't picture in my mind what constituted "assertive" folding. I finally did a self-affirmation: "I am quick! I am assertive!" and hoped the bread would understand. Second, I couldn't figure out how I was going to do the folding without getting some of the flour on the counter mixed in with the bread dough.

As it turned out, it worked pretty well, and I managed to brush off most of the flour that wanted to incorporate itself, but I'm still not satisfied with those instructions. I think my hands look quite assertive.

You can see how much more the gluten has developed by the second folding, an hour later.

The bread takes very little shaping. If I had made the three loaves, they'd be narrower than this. But I wanted to use my bread steamer, and I can't make two, much less three, loaves at a time using the steamer.

I don't have a picture of the steamer process because it takes four hands to slide the bread on the hot stone, put the steamer lid on top, and actually steam with the hot steamer contraption. The word "hot" is in there twice, because we've rarely managed to use the steamer without getting at least a little burned. This time it went very smoothly, and we gave each other a congratulatory little fist bump. But not so fast.
The steamer lid stuck to one end of the bread, and the poor loaf got malformed.

But when I sliced the bread, I cut into that end first, so then it looked just about perfect. The crust is a rich mahogany brown--I probably would have taken it out of the oven a little earlier, but Hamelman warns that doing so would "greatly impair eating quality."

The eating quality of this bread was not impaired at all. It came out of the oven around 4:00, and we had it for a simple supper, with Italian dry salami, Morbier cheese, sweet cherries, and a crisp Chilean sauvignon blanc. If I had made the small loaves, we would probably have polished off one of them.
This morning, it was still fresh enough to be the star of a yogurt, fruit, and bread breakfast.
It's an exceptionally delicious bread, but I can't imagine what I would have done with this recipe if it had been the first bread I'd ever tried.
I'm going to give the recipe as it is in the book, but feel free to cut it in half, as I did.

Ciabatta with Stiff Biga
--From Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman

BIGA
6.4 oz. (1 1/2 cups) bread flour
3.8 oz. (1/2 cup) water
1/8 tsp. instant dry yeast

DOUGH
1 lb. 9.6 oz. (5 3/4 cups) bread flour
1 lb, 3.6 oz. (2 1/2 cups) water
.6 oz. (1 T.) salt
.13 oz. (1 1/4 tsp)instant dry yeast

1. BIGA. Mix the yeast, flour and water until just smooth. The biga will be stiff and dense, and may need a few more drops of water to mix entirely. Cover the bowl and plastic and leave for 12 to 16 hours at room temperature.

2. MIXING. Add all the ingredients to the mixing bowl except the biga. In a stand mixer using a dough hook, mix on low speed for 3 minutes. As the dough comes together, add the biga in chunks. The dough will be quite sticky and slack. Finish mixing on medium for 3 1/2 to4 minutes. The dough will still be sticky.

3. FERMENTATION AND FOLDING. Put the dough in a mixing bowl sprayed with baker's spray. Fold the dough twice, after one hour and again after two hours. This is where you fold quickly and assertively, adding no extra flour.

4. DIVIDING AND SHAPING. Flour the work surface copiously. Invert the dough onto the work surface and pat out the larger air bubbles. Lightly flour the top surface of the dough. Cut the dough into 3 rectangles, weighing about 18 ounces each. Gently shape into rectangles. Place the dough piece onto floured bread boards (I used floured parchment paper). Cover the shaped dough with baker's linen and then plastic.

5. FINAL FERMENTATION. About 1 1/2 hours.

6. BAKING: Preheat oven to 460 degrees.
To transfer the proofed dough to a baker's peel, spread the fingers of both your hands. With a quick, deft stroke, invert the dough piece so that the side that was touching the bread board is now on top. Place one hyand at each end of the dough piece, bring your fingers underneath, and pick it up. Here you will slightly punch the dough for easier transport; there should be wrinkles in the center of the loaf as the transfer it to the peel. [I just picked up the parchment paper and put it on top of a pre-heated baking stone--I'm using his instructions here just to show why I think they're hard to understand.) Fill the oven with steam, load the ciabattas, steam again, and bake for 34-38 minutes. (I used the steam machine; otherwise you can use either an ice cube or boiling water method to get steam. Hamelmans thinks you should use all three: ice cubes on a heated skillet before the bread goes in, boiling water on a heated pan when the bread goes in, and spritzing with water too). Lower the oven temperature by 10 or 20 degrees if bread is taking on too much color, but be sure not to underbake.
Remove the bread from the oven and let cool on a baking rack.

Dakota Bread

Sunday, July 5, 2009

How I love baking bread. It's so satisfying to feel the rightness of the dough with your hands, and to get into the rhythm of mixing/resting/shaping. The cakes have been a real adventure, and have pushed me beyond my comfort level. It's good to be pushed, but it's also good to return to what feels comfortable and right.
My blog (and now in-person) friend Jini has been telling me about this bread for months, and finally she sent me the recipe. When she did, I realized it came from a cookbook I already own: Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland, by Beth Dooley and Lucia Watson, the owner and chef of fabulous local restaurant, Lucia's.

When I bought this cookbook, well over ten years ago, I didn't pay attention to its chapter on breads, because I didn't bake bread at the time. It's a very down-home cookbook, heavily influenced by the immigrant German, Scandinavian, and eastern Europeans who populated Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas. The bread chapter contains, for example, recipes for Saint Lucia buns, kolachke, Norwegian toast, and Finnish cardamom coffee bread. This first recipe, Dakota bread, has made me want to return and try more.
The Dakota bread is from a St. Paul institution, Cafe Latte, a cafeteria/bakery/coffee shop/wine bar, that's especially well-known for its breads and cakes. This bread is a customer favorite, and for good reason: it's soft and light, but every bite has a different combination of crunch and taste because it's got four different seeds: sunflower, poppy, pumpkin, and sesame, as well as cracked wheat.

Even with all the nuts, the dough is very easy to work with. I usually prefer breads with small amounts of yeast and long fermenting times, but this one has two tablespoons of yeast and requires an initial rise of only one hour, then a rest.

After the dough is shaped into two loaves, it takes just a half-hour or so to rise again. It's nice to have a bread in your repertoire that comes together this quickly and easily and can be ready in time for lunch.
I made one loaf in a banetton

and one free-form boule.

They looked stunning coming out of the oven because of the shininess of the egg wash and the seeds scattered on top. I followed the recipe exactly, and I liked this combination of seeds, but you could vary them depending on what you have and what you like. Flaxseed would also be good.

It has a nice, even crumb. We ate it plain, with a little butter, this afternoon, but it looks like it will also be good for toast and an excellent sandwich bread. Jini also uses this recipe to make rolls, and I think they'd make perfect hamburger buns as well.


DAKOTA BREAD
--from Savoring the Seasons of the Northern
Heartland, by Beth Dooley & Lucia Watson.

2 cups warm water
2 scant tablespoons yeast (instant or active dry)
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup cracked wheat
1 tablespoon salt
1 cup whole wheat flour
5 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (or more for kneading)
1/2 cup roasted unsalted sunflower seeds
1/3 cup hulled raw pumpkin seeds
1 tablespoon poppy seeds
1 tablespoon raw sesame seeds

1 beaten egg

In a large bowl, combine the water, yeast, honey, oil, and cracked
wheat and allow to proof about 5 to 10 minutes, or until the yeast is
light and bubbly. Add the salt, whole wheat and white flours, and
stir to combine.

Knead by hand, or, using a dough hook, knead in a stand mixer for five to ten minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic.
Mix the seeds together and sprinkle them over the dough, reserving a
few tablespoons to sprinkle over the loaves before baking. Then knead
the seeds into the dough. (If you use the stand mixer, finish kneading by hand for a minute).
Turn the dough into a greased bowl, cover with a towel, and allow the dough to rise
until double in bulk, about 1 hour. Press the dough into a rectangle and give it a business-letter turn. Let it rest for 5 minutes.
Place baking stone on rack in lower third of oven, and preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit
Divide the dough and shape it into two round loaves on lightly floured parchment paper. Let rise 25 to 30 minutes. Brush the loaves with a beaten egg and
sprinkle on any remaining seeds. Slash the tops of the loaves with a razor blade or sharp knife.
Carefully place the loaves, still on parchment, on the baking stone. Add steam by spritzing water in the oven, putting ice cubes on a preheated pan, or adding about a half-cup boiling water in a preheated pan.
Bake for about 30 to 40 minutes, or until the loaves are
nicely browned and sound hollow when tapped.
Remove the loaves from the oven and cool on wire racks.

Sullivan Street Potato Pizza

Sunday, June 28, 2009

I've been itching to bake this pizza for a few weeks. The color photograph in the book looks wonderful. But it's pizza dough, lots of potatoes, onion, rosemary, and olive oil. No cheese, no tomatoes. Just potatoes and bread. The kind of thing that would make your mother say, disapprovingly, "You don't need two starches." Or maybe you'd say that to yourself, especially if you just got off a low-carb diet. But the picture looks so good. I figured it would either be spectacularly good or dull. It was actually both.
The bites at the edge of the pizza, where the crust was golden brown, and the potatoes were soft yet crisp, and there were little bits of onion and salt--those bites were fabulous. The middle of the pizza, which stuck to the pan, and where the potatoes were neither soft nor crisp, were mediocre.
When I looked at the picture in Artisan Baking again, I saw that the pizza was on a pizza stone. Well, no wonder. My problems with pizza in the past have always been because I was too cowardly to bake the pizza dough directly on a hot stone. After getting encouraging comments from readers, I finally dared to do it, and it did make an amazing difference. If only I had remembered this learning experience, I might have used it.
I made only half the recipe, and it was more than enough for two people. If you make the full recipe, you'll have a lot of pizza.
The dough is one of those miracle doughs, like the focaccia recipe in The Bread Bible. It's very, very wet, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to do anything. Then, after a good 20 minutes, it starts to come together, and suddenly it's a real dough.

This is a great pizza to make on a weekend because you can mix it up in the late morning, and have the afternoon free before you have to come back and start working on it again.
After the dough has risen and rested, it's pretty easy to stretch out onto a pizza pan (although I've just told you that I shouldn't have used the pan). It does need to rest for about 10 minutes (or longer) or it will pretend that it's moving toward the edge of the pan and then it will just slither back into place.

I squeezed the potatoes, and put them in a colander, and dried them with towels. They still didn't get as dry as I would have liked, but the dough was ready and I was hungry, so I just plunked them on top of the dough, and brushed them with more olive oil. (I didn't use all the potatoes, by the way, and I don't think you need 4 pounds--I would use only about half the recommended amount. I'd also use more than the recommended amount of rosemary).

The pizza bakes for nearly 40 minutes, which is really quite pleasant because it smells amazingly good when it's cooking. When I took it out of the oven, I thought that I had achieved pizza nirvana. It was the best looking crust I've ever achieved.

The picture in the cookbook is of a large rectangular pizza baked in a half-sheet pan. Because I cut the recipe in half, I used a round pizza pan.
I think the deck is stacked against a pizza maker using a home kitchen. You just can't get a hot enough oven. If I were to do this again, I think what I'd do is oil a big piece of parchment paper and shape the pizza on parchment. Then I'd transfer the parchment to a pizza peel and slide it right onto a preheated baking stone. I think then you'd get all the delicious flavor and crunchiness without the sticking-to-the-pan problem.
If anyone has made this pizza, I'd love to hear how it went for you.

Sullivan Street Potato Pizza
--from Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer

For two 13 x 9-inch pans, or one half-sheet pan

3/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons (130 grams) unbleached bread flour
3/4 cup plus 2 T. (130 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1 1/4 cups (285 grams) lukewarm water
1/2 tsp. granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
Extra-virgin olive oil.

Mix the flours and yeast in a mixing bowl. Using the paddle attachment, add water on low speed until the batter comes together. Increase the speed to medium and beat for 20-25 minutes until it cleans the bowl and comes together. (If it hasn't started to come together in 20 minutes, add a few pinches more flour). The dough should still be quite weg. Add sugar and salt and mix for another 2-3 minutes.

Cover the dough with plastic wrap and let it rise about 4 hours.

Coat the baking pan or pans with olive oil. Pour the dough directly into the pan. With hands coated with olive oil, press the dough into a thin layer. Let it rest for 10-15 minutes, and then finish pressing it into the whole pan. It will be quite thin. Cover and let rise for another hour.

Meanwhile, slice 7 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled (about 4 pounds) into thin slices. Toss them with salt and let them exude moisture for about 15 minutes. Squeeze them dry in a colander to release more of their liquid. Toss them with a thinly sliced onion and about 2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary.

About 30 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 425 degrees F (220 C) and put one rack on the oven's top shelf. If using two pans, put another rack on the lower third.

After the dough is proofed, spread on the potato topping. Brush with olive oil and sprinkle with more salt. Bake until the potatoes are brown at the edges and easily pierced with the tip of a knife, about 40 minutes.

Pane al Latte (Italian Milk Bread)

Saturday, June 13, 2009

From Carol Field's The Italian Baker, this is a delicious, slightly sweet, slightly eggy, slightly rummy bread. It's too sweet for sandwiches, except maybe for peanut butter and jelly, for which it would be fantastic. If I had to fit it into a bread niche, I'd say it was made for some good fruit preserves and a cup of strong tea. Don't skimp--it should also have a layer of butter before you slather on the jam. If you wanted it with coffee instead of tea, that would not be amiss.
Butter, eggs, milk ... and rum. Just a smidgen, only a tablespoon; you can't taste it if you eat the bread in the recommended way (with butter and jam), but there's a faint hint if you try the bread plain. If you doubled the amount of rum, it would probably be too much. This is just enough to give it character, although rum is not really known for adding to character, is it?

Like other doughs made with butter and eggs, this is a joy to touch. It's so soft, silky, and kneadable, it's really a pleasure to work with. And quite easy. It goes through one fast rise, and then it's ready to be divided into 15 pieces to make 3 small loaves. Each 50-gram piece is rolled out into a cigar-shaped form, fat in the middle and tapered on the ends.

You line up the five cigars so they're touching each other, and pull them together, making the outer ones slightly longer so that you can pinch them firmly together.

After it's shaped, it rises again. Just before putting it in the oven, you brush it liberally with an egg glaze, which makes it beautifully shiny and adds to the egginess of the bread.

After I made two small loaves of bread with 50-gram "cigars," I looked at the dough that was left. Instead of having 250 grams like I was supposed to, I had well over 400, so something went wrong somewhere, but I don't care because it didn't matter. The small loaves were fine and so was the larger one.

Luckily, because the loaves were tiny, I didn't have to wait a full hour before slicing into it.

It was a delight to get back to baking bread. I've been having a great time with the cakes, but there is nothing more satisfying than a slice of freshly baked bread. I also have not imposed the "one piece" rule on myself with bread as I have with cake, so I had three (well, maybe four, but who's counting) pieces of bread.

Pane al Latte (Milk Bread)
From The Italian Baker by Carol Field

SPONGE
1 3/4 tsp. dry yeast
1 T. sugar
1/4 cup warm milk
1 cup less 1 T unbleached all-purpose flour (130 grams)

Stir the yeast and sugar into the milk in the mixer bowl; let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes. Add the flour and and whisk vigorously to make a thick batter. (You may have to add a little milk to make a stirrable batter). Cover and let stand until doubled, less than one hour.

DOUGH
1 egg
1 T. rum
1 cup milk, at room temperature
1/2 stick (55 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 3/4 cups (375 grams) unbleached A-P flour
1 tsp. (5 grams) salt
Add the egg, the rum, milk, and butter to the sponge, and mix with paddle attachment for about a minute. Add flour and salt, and mix on low speed. Change to dough hook, and knead until soft and elastic, 3 to 4 minutes. Finish kneading briefly by hand.

Place the dough in a tightly covered, oiled bowl, and let rise until doubled, 1 to 2 hours.
After the first rising, cut the dough into 15 pieces of dough (if you decide to weigh the pieces, weigh the batter first and divide by 15 to see how much each ball should weigh). For each loaf, roll five of the balls into 6-inch-long cigars, plumper in the center and tapered at the ends. Place the five cigars next to each other on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover with a towel and let rise until doubled, about 45 minutes.

About 20 minutes before baking, preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Brush with an egg wash made with one beaten egg, making sure it gets into the cracks between the "cigars." Bake 25 minutes, or until shiny golden-brown. Cool on racks.

Note: You can also make this bread by hand or in a food processor. If you use the food processor, the milk and butter should be cold, not room temp.

Heavenly Cake Place

Dear readers,
If you've been wondering where I've been lately, check out my second blog at www.heavenlycakeplace.blogspot.com.
I'm going to try to bake all the cakes in Rose Levy Beranbaum's soon-to-be-released cookbook called Heavenly Cakes.
I definitely haven't given up on bread, and I hope to keep trying out new ones. But if you don't see a new bread, there may be a new cake.

Rosemary Slabs from Acme Bakery

Saturday, May 9, 2006

This bread was as flavorful and satisfying as last week's was dull and disappointing. It's from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking, which is one of the three bread books that I find both consistently good and very readable. (The other two are Carol Field's The Italian Baker and, of course The Bread Bible). The recipe is adapted from The Acme Bread Company in Berkeley. (When Elizabeth was visiting colleges, we went to Berkeley--how I wish I'd known about this bakery then! Someday I hope to take a cross-country trip, visiting all the iconic bakeries in the country). But back to the bread.
It's a very easy bread, but it does take time. You must start it on Friday night to have it ready for Saturday dinner because, although no step is difficult, there is only a very modest amount of yeast in the bread, so its risings are slow. The poolish is made with only 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast, which is mixed in a cup of water. Only 1/4 cup of this yeast water is used, so the poolish really has only about 1/16 teaspoon of yeast. After 12 hours, however, it is bubbling satisfactorily.

In the morning, or 12 hours later, the poolish is mixed with a little more yeast, flour, chopped rosemary, water, and olive oil. It's a very soft, sticky dough, which is folded three times in the first hour.

After its third folding, the dough is a little more tractable. It can then be left alone for another five hours. Yes, seriously--five hours. While it's sitting in its big bowl, you can go out in your garden and start planting flowers, eat lunch, finish the Saturday crossword, and do some laundry. Eventually the dough doubles in size. Then you cut it in half and let it rest for a while (because it's been working so hard the last six hours). After that, you shape them into rectangles and put them into a couche (or a makeshift couche) for another hour and a half.

And you are still not done because they need to be shaped into a 12 x 6-inch rectangle, dimpled all over, and let them proof for yet another two hours.

If you are a fussy, obsessive person, you will get out your tape measure and make sure they are really 12 inches by six inches. Otherwise, you'll guess.

The only thing I had a problem with was flipping them over after five minutes of baking. They're on the next-to-the-top shelf of the oven, which is quite high in my oven, and the oven is very hot. The flipping process did not go smoothly and one of the loaves ended up scarred. But such scars can be hidden, and when the bread is sliced, no one will notice.

The texture is attractive and the flavor is quite toothsome.

That's a little piece of rosemary you see in the picture, by the way, not mold.
Much as I enjoyed this bread, I thought it came up a bit short if compared to Rose's rosemary focaccia, which has the added flavor elements of olive oil and sea salt on top. But if you don't compare it to an old favorite, it's quite enjoyable.

ACME'S HERB SLABS
--from Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer

Poolish
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1 c. water, 110 to 115 degrees F.
2 cups (300 grams)unbleached all-purpose flour
1 1/3 cups (295 grams) water

Whisk the yeast into the cup of water and let stand for 5 minutes. Add 1/4 cup of the yeasted water to the flour, then beat in the lukewarm water. Cover with plastic wrap and let it ferment overnight for about 12 hours.

Dough
3 cups (450 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp. (16 grams) salt
4 teaspoons fresh rosemary
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
3/4 cups (170 grams) lulkewarm water
1 Tbsp. (30 grams) olive oil.

By stand mixer: Combine the flour, salt, rosemary, and yeast in the mixing bowl. Add the water and oil to the poolish, and pour into the flour mixture. Mix with dough hook on low speed until rough dough forms. Cover the bowl and let rest for 10 minutes. Mix the dough another five minutes, until very smooth.

Place the dough in large oiled container and cover with plastic wrap. Let dough ferment until doubled in bulk, about six hours. Turn the dough 3 times during the first hour of proofing.

Cut the dough in half. Round the pieces and let rest for 20 minutes. Press dough into rectangle. Fold into thirds like a business letter, place seam side down in couche and cover with a flap of the couche. Repeat with other piece of dough. Let them proof for about 1 1/2 hours.

Cover a large baking sheet with parchment paper. Press each piece into a 12 x 6-inch rectangle. Press your fingertips into the dough to dimple all over. Move the dougoh onto the parchment paper and reshape. Cover with plastic wrap and let proof another two hours.

Place race on oven's second to top shelf and place a baking stone on it. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Poke the dough all over with a skewer. Slip the breads, still on the parchment, onto the hot stone and bake for five minutes. Flip the breads over onto the stone and remove the paper. Continue baking until they are well browned, about 20 minutes more, rotating them after 10 minutes. Let the breads cool on a rack.

Nick Malgieri's Italian Bread Ring

Saturday, May 3, 2009
When I said I was making this bread, my friend Karen said, "Why is it Italian?" I said, "I don't know." Jim said, "Why is it a circle?" I said, "I don't know." I know nothing! (as Sgt. Schultz would say).
I know nothing, but I had high hopes for this bread, and it was great fun to make, what with the hyperactive dough and making the giant hole in the bread. Sad to say, it did not live up to its promise. It was okay, but definitely a disappointment.

I'm usually very fond of breads that begin with a sponge and sit around over night, because they generally develop a lot of flavor. This is an unusual sponge because it makes up about 90% of the final dough: the sponge contains all of the yeast, all of the water, and most of the flour. After being kneaded in the KitchenAid for about five minutes, it's elastic to the point of being almost gummy.

The sponge is supposed to rise until doubled--about an hour. We were watching Doubt on video (overrated in my opinion, although Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams give praiseworthy performances) while the sponge was rising, and it was in its bowl for more than an hour.

Yikes! The bread sponge that ate Minneapolis! I moved it to a bigger bowl and quickly stuck it in the refrigerator to calm its raging hormones. I was a little afraid to open the refrigerator in the morning because I envisioned a scene in a horror movie, with me as the hapless victim, being attacked by a woman-eating bread dough.

But no; it had cooled down, although it had developed gluten like crazy, and had a mutant blob-like consistency.
But the dough was actually quite easy to work with, as I shaped it into a disk, rounded it, and then began to make the hole in the middle.

The hole was supposed to be 6 inches in diameter. That's actually a pretty big hole.


The directions in the recipe are confusing. Well, they're just wrong. In one place, he tells you to shape the bread on a prepared pan. Then he tells you to move the already-shaped bread to the prepared pan. I mentally went through both methods, and decided it made more sense to shape the bread and then move it, which worked pretty well.

The directions were to slash the bread in five places--which five it didn't say, and I couldn't really visualize what it was supposed to look like, so I just hoped. I don't think this is what it's supposed to look like.

If I had just showed you a closeup, however, it would look better.

It tasted pretty good Saturday afternoon, although the texture was not what I was expecting--I was hoping for more of a baguette-like result.

Instead, it was softer and more even--almost like a sandwich bread, although the crust was nice and crusty. Sunday morning I planned to have a slice or two for breakfast, but it was already stale. No problem, I though, I'll just toast it. These wedge-shaped pieces of bread don't do well in the toaster, however--the thin side burns and the fat side doesn't want to go into the toaster slot. So even as toast, this bread was second-rate. (Unlike the Portuguese sweet bread, by the way, which made delicious toast).
Because of my lukewarm review of this bread, I'm not including the recipe, although I'll be happy to send it to anyone who wants to make the bread. One variation included adding rosemary, which certainly would have given it some oomph, but still not worth making. I'll try another bread or two from Malgieri's How to Bake before I'm ready to give up on the bread chapter, but I'm not impressed so far.