Brioche and Pain au Levain

Today was a successful day on the bread front. In between clients, I kneaded and turned and gently set my doughs in bowls to rise. I peeked in on them, deflated them when they needed and finally tonight baked them, separately, each waiting their turn, in a hot oven until they were both golden and puffed. They are possibly the two most different types of bread, so let me start with the brioche, which I promised I would tell you about today.

I used Rose Levy Beranbaum's Basic Brioche recipe. It required lots of steps and seemed a bit daunting, like many of her recipes I must admit. But when I broke it down and actually looked at the steps, I realized it wasn't that difficult.

The soft, golden yellow dough that I had set in the fridge last night puffed until the plastic wrap around it was really tight. When I looked at it this morning it reminded me of a chubby woman squeezed into a mini skirt. All I had to do today was fold it and leave it to rise. I decided to make it in a big loaf pan with white sugar crystals on top, my favourite topping for brioche. Then it baked for about an hour and voila! A real brioche made in my own kitchen. I tried to be patient, but patience is not a great quality of mine, so I sliced it carefully while still a bit warm and spread it with apricot jam from last summer. It was lovely, mildly sweet, golden from the free range eggs, rich from the butter and with a softness that I was surprised and delighted by. All in all, the brioche was a winner.

Now for my pain au levain. I was skeptical about the life of my starter. I again used Rose's recipe for starter and I realized after about a week or two that I had been stirring it with a metal spoon. Apparently that is a big no no, but in all my reading about starters, I couldn't figure out why. Some people claim that metal is warm and will kill the bacteria, others say that metal contaminates starter. I wasn't sure. So I kept dumping out a little each day and feeding it with flour and pure water. It was smelling like a starter, acidic, maybe even a little cheesy. It was bubbling a little bit, like a good starter should. It was a nice even colour, with no streaks. I decided to name it (as both Rose and Clotilde did) and came up with Yuki. So I set out to try Clotilde's recipe for Pain au Levain using my very own Yuki. Basically I used 600g flour (red fife, whole wheat and white), 400 g water, 200 g yuki, 1 tbsp wheat gluten and 2 tsp sea salt. This got mixed, rested, kneaded and rose all day. The baked in my beloved red cocotte. It didn't give away how lovely it was going to taste with much of a smell wafting from the oven the way the golden brioche did. I tried to wait patiently by distracting myself with the end of a captivating book, but I was dying to see what was going on inside the lidded cocotte. Finally an hour passed and I opened it up, only to find it a little bit pale and not as high as I hoped. So I took the lid off and popped it back in to get a bit more colour and hoped for the best. I still wasn't sure that the starter had done it's job very well. So with a bit more patience I waited for the miche to cool and then, finally, cut into it. Well, let me tell you, I needn't have worried. If I dare say this, it was almost as delicious as my favourite bread, Pain Poilane! It had a lovely, chewy, compact interior, a hard, carmelized crust and that nice, mildly acidic tang that a starter lends to bread. I can't believe that I was able to create such a nice bread in my own kitchen!

Pain Quotidien

For Christmas, JS always knows that cookbooks are my favourite gift! This year he got me two that I had on my list. One of them is Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Bread Bible. I decided that as one of my New Year's resolutions, I would start baking bread. Not the same old bread that never has a great crust and is just kind of bland, but real, crusty, artisanal breads with a more complex sourdough taste and a chewy crumb.

Bread baking seems like such a basic and old fashioned skill that few people today really have. The process of creating something so wholesome and belly filling with 4 ingredients, flour, salt, yeast and water, is pure alchemy. People today are so worried about eating too many carbs, but I feel strongly that bread is the pillar of any meal. We should all be eating bread, not the horrible, white, spongy loaves that sit on the shelf for weeks, but real, homemade loaves that fill the house with an unbelievable smell. So onwards with my new years resolution, and my mission to fill my house with the aroma of yeast and flour baking in my oven.

I started with the recipe for Hearth Bread. I was a little sceptical because she always uses instant yeast (I buy my yeast in the bakery of my supermarket in a large brick. It's the moist, pressed kind of yeast and it's what they use in France so I assumed it was the good stuff). This bread started with making a sponge, which I had never made before. It's basically a dough made with flour, water and a tiny smidgen of yeast and left to sit for the day. Then you mix the sponge into the dough when you're making the bread. I followed her recipe step by step (a feat for me, who likes to improvise and adjust) and the bread came out beautifully! It had a crisp crust and a moist, chewy crumb. The only step I ignored was at the end when Rose advises to leave the bread to cool on the rack before eating. I think we ate about 3/4 of the loaf before it was even warm!

Next I made a ciabatta bread, which started with a biga, similar to the sponge I made for the hearth bread. It also turned out lovely. It had a nice crust and a chewy interior with lots of little air pockets.

Yesterday I made her Flax loaf, which is a straight dough bread, no starter, sponge or biga required. It may have been the biggest success yet! It had a nice, wholesome flax flavour and a soft and chewy crumb. Best of all it was the fastest bread I've made so far in terms of rising time, which means I can think about it at 3 pm and still have fresh bread for dinner! We enjoyed some last night with cultured butter sprinkled with Maldon salt alongside sweet potato and vegetable soup. Yum!

I also tried her pizza dough which was a success. It doesn't require much kneading, which produces a softer crust and was very much enjoyed by the crowd at JS's birthday dinner on Sunday night.

My other project is the sourdough starter that I started from scratch. It has taken longer then indicated and required a lot of love and persistence, but it looks almost ready to bake with. I can't wait to see how my first loaf turns out! I have been advised to name my starter, maybe because it is a living organism that requires daily care (it eats flour and bottled water for dinner every night), but I've had a hard time coming up with one seeing as it doesn't really look like your typical pet. It's a jar full of bubbling, acidic smelling goo. Gooey, Bloop, Yuki? Any suggestions? I'm kind of liking the sound of Yuki....

As you can see, so far so good on the bread baking front. I have been successful with each loaf, although there is always room for improvement. I would like to get a pizza stone to bake the bread directly on, as Rose recommends in many of her recipes. I also want to try my hand at baguettes, but maybe after I feel a bit more confident as I think they are one of the more difficult breads to master. In the meantime I will tend to Yuki, maybe try a loaf using some of her this weekend and enjoy the delicious smells wafting about my house during the cold, dark days of this new year.