Hot (un)Crossed Buns

I'm not sure I'd ever had a hot crossed bun before.  If I had, it hadn't made a huge impression on me.  I kind of had an idea that they were sweet rolls, although I also may have confused them with Chelsea buns, which I've also never had, although I think they're sweeter.  Anyway, after laboring all day on the garlic french bread on Sunday, I was looking around for something fun and easy.  Ideally, I wanted a cooking project that would taste yummy and satisfy my need to cook more without spiking my frustration level through the roof.  The Joy of Cooking, my old standby, came to the rescue.

I was flipping through the bread section, looking for a fast bread that didn't require lots of milk and eggs - items I am ambivalent about during the best of times and certainly can't afford at the moment (seriously, the only eggs I don't feel completely guilty about eating cost nearly half my weekly shopping allowance!)  As soon as I saw the recipe for hot crossed buns, I knew I had found what I was looking for.  It only required one rising period and 20 minutes in the oven, plus, it called for raisins, one of my favorite foods.  I didn't notice until I was almost finished making the dough that it called for one egg.  I'm not sure how I missed it, since the Joy is very clear in its ingredient lists.  I think I assumed that, as in the other roll recipes in that section, the egg was optional.  At any rate, I didn't have any eggs so I carried on without them.  The rolls turned out just as delicious as I had hoped, but a little dry.  I have two theories for this.  First, I would have let them rise a little bit longer if I hadn't had plans in the afternoon.  Second, I think that I kneaded them too much!  After working with tough dough all morning, I think I might have been a bit too excited to be kneading nice soft dough.  Finally, I have a third theory, that eggs help bread rise and would have added moisture.  The next time I make these I will remember to add the egg. 

Nonetheless, I'm happy with the result.  These buns are slightly sweet, the golden raisins are delicious, and they kind of remind me of Christmas with all the cinnamon and nutmeg.  They're excellent with a little butter and a cup of tea in the morning.  When I realized that the "crossed" in the name referred to actually drawing a little cross on the top of the rolls, I skipped it.  Who wants to do extra work for something that has no effect on the deliciousness of the food?  Which leaves me wondering what to call these yummy un-crossed buns.

I Stand Corrected . . . also, this tastes AMAZING!

I have to admit that, while I was waiting for the dough to rise this morning, I thought a number of not very kind things about Confessions of a French Baker by Peter Mayle.  The book purports to be a guide to baking loaves like a professional, artisanal French baker, aimed at an audience of regular people, like me.  Or maybe not.  Although the first chapters of the book linger over the romance of bakers arriving to work well before dawn to lovingly craft their loaves and the smell and feel of yeasty dough being shaped into perfect baguettes, batards, and boules, it does not give much space to what I consider the much more important aspects of bread-making: ratios of ingredients, kneading technique and length of time, and rising periods.  In fact, the recipes contained in the second half of this book almost universally call for both mixing and kneading the dough in an electric mixer.  I have always been of the opinion that anything that can be made with a mixer can also be made by hand (see Thursday's post), although sometimes it requires more effort, so I simply made these recipes the old fashioned way.  But I have never achieved completely satisfactory results. 

Over the past few months since I checked this book out of the library, I have been experimenting with its recipes, particularly the baguette recipe, and have come to the conclusion that the measurements did not survive the translation from French to English and from European to American measuring systems unscathed.  I find that I consistently need to add more water, and that my dough often doesn't rise nearly as much was one would expect from dough with such an obscene amount of yeast in it. (4.5 teaspoons? Really?)  Today, while I was waiting - and waiting - for my most recent batch of dough to rise, I began to wonder if it really did make a difference whether I mixed and kneaded the dough by hand or in a mixer.  Maybe I'm not strong enough to mix really stiff dough by hand, and that's why I'd been adding extra water.  Maybe, 15 minutes of kneading in a mixer is actually equivalent to more like 25 minutes of kneading by hand, which seems like a lot, but some of these doughs have been really tough.  I even formulated an experiment in which I would go to the home of a friend who has a stand-up mixer and make bread solely by machine for a day. 

All this is really just another way of saying that I was doubting Confessions of a French Baker and thinking that I would never get a really good loaf of bread from its recipes.  Today it proved me wrong. 

I decided to try garlic french bread, a variation on the traditional batard in which you add 6 chopped cloves of garlic to the dough before kneading.  The recipe was indecisive about whether the garlic out to be cooked first - in one section it called for sauteed garlic, while in the instructions it said simply to chop the garlic and add it to the dough.  I love roasted garlic and dislike raw garlic, so I decided to roast mine in the toaster oven before adding it to the dough.  I ended up needing about a 1/2 cup more water than the recipe required, plus a little extra salt, and there was so much yeast that the yeast was actually falling out of the dough as I was kneading it, although it slowly dissolved in.  Even though I had added a little extra water, the dough was very dry and very tough to knead.  I kneaded it for about 15 minutes, until I was completely sick of it, and put it in a bowl in the slightly warm oven to rise. 

Every rising period seemed to take ages longer than expected, and the dough just barely doubled in size.  In short, it had none of the fabulous airiness I've come to expect from dough that has risen multiple times.    Once I had formed the dough into batards, I decided to let it proof for as long as it needed to start to breathe a little.  At that point, I didn't really care if the loaves came out small as long as they weren't unbearably dense.  Really dense bread just isn't fun to eat.  I ended up letting the dough proof for over an hour on top of the preheating oven, and although it didn't double in size it did get noticeably fluffier.  I cut the dough into leaf shapes for fun, then sprayed the loaves and the inside of the oven and popped the loaves in.  About ten minutes in I sprayed the oven again.  After about twenty minutes, I turned the heat down from 450 to 400 degrees, afraid that the loaves were browning too much on top.

What came out of the oven were savory, not-too-dense, crisp-crusted loaves of french bread, with a strong hint of garlic.  They are absolutely delicious with butter slathered on top, and I can't wait to try them with cheese!  I'm not sure how these loaves came out of that not very promising dough, but I can only assume that that dough needs a much longer rising period (and possibly higher room temperatures) than others.  The loaves are still not as airy as I'd like them to be, but not nearly as dense as I'd feared.  I'm also completely sold on roasting the garlic first.  Although the taste is not as strong as it would have been if I had used raw garlic, the softness of roasted garlic allows the flavor to spread throughout the loaf, rather than being captured in pockets of garlic.  In the future, I may try this recipe again with more like 10 cloves of roasted garlic.  I am also going forward with the mixer experiment (if my friend agrees, and who wouldn't want someone baking in their house all day?)  More updates to follow . . .

The Stand-up Mixer Debate

What is it about stand-up mixers and marginally domestic girls in their 20s?  It seems like stand-up mixers used to be something that our grandmas had, and, if we realized how useful they were, we could look forward to inheriting them rather than tossing them out as relics or pieces of junk.  As far as I can remember, neither of my grandmas had a stand-up mixer, at least not during the time when I knew them.  My mom definitely never had a stand-up mixer.  I don't know if it was our consumer culture that placed "now" over "good" or a glitch in our understanding of feminism that made us think that any woman who got near a kitchen was betraying her ideals, but a lot of women my age grew up thinking that cooking was unimportant, boring, or someone else's job.  Or worse, we believed that we were cooking when we poured something frozen into a saute pan.  Regardless, we never learned to value cooking meals from scratch, and so we never learned how, and so we never wanted mixers.   At least, I think that's how the progression ought to go.

But this post isn't really about the cooking and life skills we've lost.  After all, we've seen a huge surge of interest in all things do-it-yourself, back-to-the-land, and crafty in the past ten or so years.  People are taking steps to slow down and connect with their families and with the planet by making more home cooked meals, growing their own fruits and vegetables, even canning fruit and raising chickens.  But, where, in all of this interest in "from scratch" does the resurgence of interest in products like the KitchenAid Mixer come from?  When I was taking my first steps toward a more "from scratch" lifestyle six or so years ago, I was focused on reinventing the wheel.  I thought that, to really be from scratch, my food had to be made by hand.  Luckily for me and my occasional dinner guests, I didn't extend this idea to its logical (if absurd) conclusion and start cooking my meals over a camp fire.  But I did start to think about where my food came from and then later tried to gauge how much energy input went into getting it from where it came from to my table ready to eat.  I figured out that you could make most things that called for mixers by hand (even meringues, though I wouldn't recommend it).  I also figured out that there are some things, like pumpkin, that really do taste better after a few minutes in the food processor.  At that point, it becomes a decision and a trade-off.  Is the improved consistency worth plugging in the food processor for a few minutes?  Can I make this dish in another way?  If it will taste the same, I try to go the non-tech route.  And I now own a couple of sturdy appliances that get me through the tasks that I have decided really are worth plugging in for.

Which brings me back to the mixer.  All of a sudden, this summer, I absolutely had to have a KitchenAid mixer.  I think it was a combination of the lingering euphoria from looking at friends' wedding registries (so much shiny cookware!) and soreness from all the hours I was spending alternately hunched over my computer and laboring in the kitchen.  There might have been whiskey involved, too.  I searched on the internet (purveyor of so much shiny cookware) and found a sturdy-looking refurbished mixer.  It was still woefully out of my price range.  I talked about it for weeks.  I tormented my mother, my best friend, and my roommate, not to mention my Bar study partner.  In the end, I didn't buy it.  A girl with no job who has never been able to afford a washer and dryer or a car shouldn't be purchasing fancy cooking appliances.  That was when I started to wonder what had happened to me, and why I felt so strongly about needing to own a stand-up mixer.

Which came first, our interest in cooking from scratch or our interest in shiny cookware?  The answer to that question is different for everyone, and I don't think it really matters as long as we're doing something that makes us healthier and happier.  If good marketing by sellers of beautiful cooking tools is getting more budding cooks into the kitchen and more home cooked food on people's tables, I think it's a win for everyone.  And yet, it frustrates me to think that our new-found love of cooking and living in a sustainable way has come full circle to once again support the consumer culture that a lot of us have been trying to get away from.  Why did I really want a stand-up mixer?  Was it because my arms were sore, or because everyone else had one?  I think that I was hugely influenced by the well-marketed idea that delicious food comes from a beautiful kitchen, and that people who have the "right tools" are able to accomplish more.  For me, this is a bad thing.  I turn to cooking for all kinds of reasons: to control the food I eat, to "vote with my dollar" at the grocery store, for the comfort that crafting by hand gives me.  I don't like to think that I do it for the shiny consumer goods, even if I can acknowledge that they're pretty.  I'm curious how other people feel about this issue, or whether I'm the only one who stays up at night agonizing over consumerism and its grip on me.

In the end, not getting the mixer was the right choice for me.  No matter how much I tried to use it, it would have been just another thing that took up unnecessary space in my life (and that I would have developed some form of guilt about).  At least for now, I have decided that I already have all the tools I need to be a great cook:  two hands, a bunch of cookbooks, a little ingenuity, and a lot of resilience. 

Brioche-la-la!

Stop the presses!  I just realized that bread was slaved over and enjoyed, and yet the blog was not updated!  Clearly someone was asleep at the wheel.

This little slice of heaven is my first attempt at brioche.  I LOVE brioche, in all its many variations.  This brioche had the right taste, but it was, like so many of my loaves lately, too dense.  The flavor was milky and bland, kind of reminiscent of store-bought challah, and would have been delicious if the bread had just been a little bit softer and moister.  Because the dough seemed moist enough, I'm going to chalk this one up to not enough time rising and a little too much time baking.  I made both the brioche and the fougasse pictured below after work on a Monday night, and multitasking in the kitchen isn't exactly one of my strengths.  I seem to remember running short on time and just wanting to be finished by the time I was prepping the brioche for the oven.  I think that the next time I make this bread I will be sure to let it more than double in size, and maybe allow it multiple rising periods.  I will definitely use this recipe, from the River Cottage Bread Handbook, again.  The flavor is there, now only the texture needs to catch up.

Luckily, my other loaf of the evening rose like a charm.  While my fougasse has been inconsistent in the past, I have recently had great success by applying the River Cottage techniques and by giving the dough more time to rise.  This fougasse with olives and herbs was chewy and soft and delicious.  I ate nearly half the loaf with pesto for dinner, then served the rest as an appetizer to friends the following night.  I consider myself very lucky to have friends who will rave over an "appetizer" that is clearly a half-eaten loaf of bread pulled out of a ziploc bag, by the way.

Back to Basics

It's been a while since I stuck my nose in The River Cottage Bread Handbook and came out with something delicious and satisfying.  Overall, I've had good luck with the recipes in that book, although I'm skeptical of their flour to water ratios.  I first attempted to make their basic loaf back in early July, and I decided to take another crack at it today. 

The recipe calls for 8 cups of flour, 1 tablespoon yeast, 4 teaspoons salt, and 2 1/2 cups of liquid.  That's it.  I first taught myself to make bread using recipes spiced up with herbs, olives, olive oil, and other add-ons that gave the loaves zip.  For a long time, I was so pleased with the flavor added by these additional ingredients that I neglected the flavor of the underlying loaves.  I love that River Cottage's recipes are so simple that they force me to focus on how kneading the dough for longer or letting it rise three times rather than two affects the flavor.  The other great thing about these recipes is that within the simple formula there is room for experimentation.  When the River Cottage Bread Handbook says flour, what it means is that I am free to choose between white, whole wheat, rye, spelt, etc., or any combination of the above.  When it says liquid, I can choose water, milk, beer, buttermilk, or any other liquid I think might taste good.  In addition, it gives helpful guidelines about when and how to add the add-ons that bring that little extra zest to the bread.

Today I mixed 3 cups of white bread flour, 3 cups of all purpose white/whole wheat mixed flour, and one cup of whole wheat flour.  Although this only added up to 7 cups of flour, I knew from past experience that I still might need to add more water, especially since the whole wheat flour seems to absorb more water than the white flour.  I added 1 tablespoon of yeast, 4 teaspoons of salt, two handfuls of rolled oats, and two generous pinches of ground flax seed.  Then I added 2 1/2 cups of warm water with about a tablespoon of honey mixed in it.  The dough was so dry and rough that I ended up adding about another 1/4 to 1/2 cup of water.  Even then, the dough was torture to knead, but I worried that if I added more water the dough wouldn't rise properly.  After I'd kneaded the dough for about seven minutes, it began to take on a more uniform, less gritty texture. 

I let the dough rise twice in the slightly warm oven - I usually set the oven on its lowest setting for about 5 minutes, then shut it off while I knead the dough and clean the bowl.  That way the oven is warm and snug for the dough - rather than cold and drafty like my kitchen, even in August - but not hot enough to cook the outside layer.  Between the two rising periods, I turned the dough out onto my work surface and deflated it by poking it all over with my fingers.  I have been kind of religious about the techniques I learned from River Cottage, and will continue at least until I learn why they work so well.  After the second rising period, I formed the dough into two large, somewhat loose batards, and wrapped them in a damp towel to rise one last time.  I learned the last time I made the basic loaf that baking the dough in small boules made very dense bread unless I had all the time in the world to wait for the tight little boules to double in size.  I think that the two rising periods, combined with the shape of the loaves, helped me create much lighter, more manageable bread this time.

I preheated the paving stone while the batards were rising, then sprayed the batards and the entire oven with water to create steam.  After baking the batards at my oven's highest setting for 10 minutes, I turned the heat down to 325 degrees for the next 35 minutes or so.  Although the crust came out a little browner than I had planned, for the first time I got the contrast between crunchy exterior and soft interior that I have been searching for.  Some factors which I'm sure contributed to the difference: the two rising periods; I didn't crush all of the air out of the dough after rising; batards rather than boules; less whole wheat flour may have made it less dense; I sprayed the interior of the oven twice.  I think that my next experiment will be with three or four rising periods.  I'm theorizing that, if rising is stretching the glutens in the flour and allowing the yeast to develop, then it must have an impact on the flavor as well.  So the more dough is allowed to rise, the lighter, chewier, and more flavorful it will be.  Maybe. 

Regardless, this bread is delicious, has a decent texture, and even is fairly good for me.  I'll consider this a basic loaf win.

The Land of Flour and Butter

For the past two weeks I have been tasting the fruits of others' labors rather than laboring myself.  My mother took me on a trip to France to celebrate my graduation from law school, and we worshiped at the altar of all things bread and wine related.  We ate baguette with all kinds of goat's and sheep's milk cheeses, croissants, pains chocolats, quiches, and those wonderful french pastries with yellow custard and mini chocolate chips in them.  Every single piece of bread I put in my mouth in France (especially in rural France) inspired me to become a better baker.  I want to improve my crust, make lighter, airier baguettes, and make more flavorful bread without loading it with herbs and salt.  I suspect this may entail reassessing my flour options, which I've been meaning to do for a while anyway.

It also inspired me to exercise some small degree of moderation in my baking and bread eating life.  I believe in enjoying the good things in life when they come my way, but even for me the amount of butter consumed in the past two weeks was appalling. Mostly in a good way.

Cooking again!

Dude.  It has been a rough couple of weeks.  During the last crunch up to the bar exam, I lost my will to cook (or really to do anything other than flip flashcards and watch Friends reruns).  Even after the last day of the test on Wednesday, I was too busy drinking, and feeling relieved, and buying myself possibly undeserved (and definitely not affordable) presents, to do much of anything.  But, there is good news.  My will to bake finally came back, and I made some decent baguettes using a recipe out of Confessions of a French Baker by Peter Mayle for a party I threw on Saturday night.  Then, because we ate them all on Saturday, and I was desperately hungry, I made another set on Sunday.  They taste excellent with pesto, or goat cheese, or really anything.

But, they still don't have the earthy flavor I'm hankering for.  I'm going to keep trying different recipes until I find it, because I know it's out there.  For now I"m content to sit on my patio, sipping cheap Pinot Grigio and eating baguette and cheese.  Life could get a heck of a lot worse . . .