Beautiful bread with a biga

The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook has a few recipes that rely on a biga—a starter that you make at least a day before assembling and baking the bread. The biga recipe makes enough for at least half a dozen loaves of bread. It keeps in the fridge for up to 2 weeks, or you can freeze it for up to a month.

Measuring out some biga

I've tried 3 of the book's 6 biga recipes, so far:

• Pane bigio: small, round, crusty bread with a bit of of whole wheat and buckwheat flour
• Pagnotta: a round, crusty, floury country bread that resembles sourdough
• Pane di cereale: shaped like pagnotta, but not crusty, and with a fair amount of whole wheat and cracked grains

They all worked out, more or less, and the pane di cereale has joined Zojirushi's pumpernickel recipe as one of my favorites.

I tried the pane bigio recipe first (on the 2nd day after starting the biga) because it has a crunchy crust and some whole grains (whole wheat and buckwheat). The bread had great texture (hard crust, soft interior) but tasted blah, since I used no salt. I'll try it again with half salt.

For the pagnotta (on the 4th day of biga) I thought I followed the instructions exactly, but I must have overcounted the flour measures: the dough turned out to be much too soft to work with. I almost threw it out, but my husband saved it, mixing a bunch more flour into it and pouring it into a lightly oiled, large bread pan. The result was tasty and had a great texture, but I wouldn't make it for myself; I like some whole grain in my bread. However, my daughter asked me to make "the sourdough" again, so I did.

The second attempt at pagnotta (on the 6th day of biga) turned out much better. I modified it slightly, reducing the salt to 1 teaspoon and the yeast to a scant teaspoon. I ran out of time to cook the bread, so after the second rise in the bread machine, I put the dough into a lightly oiled bowl, covered it with plastic wrap, and refrigerated it. The next morning, I shaped it, let it rise for the final time in the oven on proofing mode, and baked it.

Pagnotta

That is one delicious bread. I probably could have baked it a few minutes longer, but the taste is really really good. It's moist inside, with a chewy crust. Yum. My husband and daughter say it goes great with pâté, and it should be great toasted.

The bread was half-eaten by the time I got to taste it

Finally, I made pane di cereale on the 4th day of biga, right after the first pagnotta. I'd hesitated to make the pane di cereale because it has a soft crust, but on the other hand it also has the most whole grain of all the biga recipes. I modified the recipe slightly, reducing the salt and yeast to 1 teaspoon each. For the cereal I used Bob's Red Mill 10-grain.

Pane di cereale

This bread is delicious, even to salt eaters. We made chicken sandwiches with it, untoasted, and it stood up a little better than store-bought sandwich bread would have. Besides tasting good, this bread also looks good.

Pretty inside and out

We managed to fit it into our bread box. Barely.

Not quite bigger than a breadbox

I still have some biga left, even after a first, failed attempt at pane di cereale where I forgot to add yeast. I'll probably use it to make the pane bigio and pane di cereale again. If I manage to get some semolina flour and farina (Cream of Wheat), I might try the Italian semolina bread recipe. There's also a challah recipe that sounds intriguing, although I'm not usually into egg bread. I'll skip the pane all'uva; I love raisin bread, but savory raisin bread doesn't sound appealing.

A note about proofing: Our DCS range recently broke down, and rather than get the annoying beast repaired at great expense, we bought a Samsung stove. The new stove is much better in almost every way, and it has a proofing mode. My kitchen tends to be cold, so I've used the proofing mode for the final rise whenever the oven wasn't already in use. I'm no expert, but proofing mode has worked well for me, so far.

Good and bad apple breads

Back in November, we picked all the remaining apples off of our Pink Lady apple tree. We planted this tree (along a bunch of other fruit trees) 7 or so years ago, and this is the first year it bore more than a few apples.

Our Pink Lady apple tree

These apples are gorgeous and tasty, with a sweet-tart flavor that appeals even to green-apple lovers. They're great for eating as-is, but they also work well in applesauce and baking.

A Pink Lady apple

We tried two recipes:

• Applesauce bread from The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book
• Apple bread from the No Salt Lowest Sodium Baking Book

The result of the first recipe was delicious, if a bit undercooked. We'll definitely try it again. The second bread we didn't even bother to freeze or save for bread pudding. It just didn't taste good.

The applesauce bread recipe is a variant of a Laurel's Kitchen banana bread recipe. It has lots of applesauce, plus raisins, walnuts, and spices. (We used big golden raisins I'd found at Berkeley Bowl.) The bread uses only whole wheat flour, and it has no eggs.

Good apple: the outside (the dark thing is a raisin that got extra cooked)

Our modifications were few. We added more walnuts than the recipe called for. We used all whole wheat bread flour, and no whole wheat pastry flour. Next time I'll either skip the cloves or use much less.

Good apple: the inside

The second apple bread was kind of an ordinary bread with chunks of apples and carrots added. It was slightly sweet, had perhaps too much gluten, and, like most of the recipes I've tried from that cookbook, just didn't taste great. A little salt might've helped, or more sugar and some spices.

Bad apple: the outside

It was weird to me that, in a book full of recipes that use a bit of applesauce, this bread didn't use any. Also, the book is usually very precise about amounts, but it just said "medium" apples. I'd have liked to have more guidance—weight or volume ranges.

Bad apple: the inside, with electric orange carrot bits

The first two loaves I made from this book (raisin bread and maple-walnut) were tasty, but I've had bad luck ever since. Lately I've been making breads from the Hensberger book, and even when I reduce the salt, those work out much better.

Pull-apart dinner roll bread

For Thanksgiving, I wanted to have freshly baked pull-apart bread from the bread machine. Finding recipes for this was hard enough that I worried that it wasn't a good idea. It ended up working pretty well, but could still use some tweaking.

I've already blogged about the first time I tried making pull-apart in the machine, using the honey whole-wheat recipe from Hensberger's Bread Machine Cookbook and techniques from the Zojirushi cookbook's weird recipe for "party bread". I also found a recipe for buttery herb-garlic pull-apart bread, which uses a bread machine and gave me the idea of dipping the top of each ball into butter or oil.

I decided to try the same honey whole-wheat recipe, and I planned to dip the bread balls into a mixture of melted butter and olive oil. This time I expected the bread dough to be sticky, and I knew (no thanks to the Zojirushi recipe) to use oiled surfaces when working with it.

I used the program from before, which is a modification of the Zojirushi recommendation:

• no resting time before starting (instead I warmed the milk and water a bit in the microwave)
• 20 minutes kneading (though I should probably do 22 minutes, like the whole-wheat cycle does, since the dough is somewhat sticky)
• shape (up to 1 hour)
• rise 1: skip
• rise 2: skip 
• rise 3: 45 minutes
• bake: 40 minutes

During the shaping time, here's what I did:

1. Take the dough out, put it in a ball, then put it into large oiled mixing bowl. (I used olive oil.)
2. Cover with a damp cloth, and let the dough rise for 20 minutes (probably more like 25 minutes).
3. While the dough is rising, remove the blades from the bread machine, and wipe out the pan.
4. Push down the dough, and then shape it into 15 mini-balls, putting them into an oiled casserole dish.
5. Cover with the damp cloth, and let the dough rise for 10 minutes (probably more like 15 minutes).
6. Put the mini-balls into the pan of the bread machine. (I squeezed them to get rid of air. That's sort of like kneading.)
7. Press Start, making the bread machine continue with rise 3.

Good lord, that was nerve wracking. The dough didn't seem to be rising much, and the mini-balls didn't fit as well into the pan as I remembered. I decided not to dip the mini-balls into oil/butter, since they were pretty oil covered already. The recipe does say "This one is a slow riser, so don't despair," so I was guardedly optimistic.

The outcome was pretty good, but interestingly, the dough wasn't as easy to pull apart as the time before. I guess the oil didn't separate the mini-balls like I thought it would.

Thanksgiving day, I tried lengthening the second rise and shortening the third one. (This happened to work out well, since the bastard turkey cooked faster than expected.)

All told, the time to make the bread was just short of 3 hours. Add an hour of bread machine warming (and the uncertainty of turkey cooking), and I could have started the rolls 4 hours before dinner. As it turns out, we had enough fridge space that I was able to do the first rise in the fridge, so I started the bread even earlier.

Using less oil helped the dough be a little easier to pull apart, but it still wasn't as easy as the first time. Perhaps a coating of flour or something else might make the dough-balls easier to pull apart. Ideas, anyone?

Goodbye old Zojirushi, hello new Zojirushi

I have a new bread machine! The old one was great the few times that it worked, but its single paddle soon stopped stirring at all. As I blogged before, the result was layered flour bricks like these:

  

If I stirred everything ahead of time, I could still use the machine to bake, which came in handy when my oven broke and I wanted to cook cornbread.

Thanks to the few times the old machine did work, I decided to buy myself a brand new Zojirushi.

Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso (BB-PAC20)

I considered getting a machine that had an automatic dispensing tray for raisins or nuts, but that tray wasn't very big, and the machine just didn't sound as good.

The new machine has a few improvements over the old one, such one:

• 2 mixing paddles instead of 1
• Bigger capacity
• Horizontal loaf rather than vertical

Here's what the new bread machine is producing:

Whole-wheat walnut bread

Whole-wheat and white, cooked with a timer

Pumpernickel, cooked with a timer

By the way, the pumpernickel is delicious. (Who knew that the dark color comes from coffee and cocoa? Crazy!) I used the Zojirushi recipe but reduced the salt to a pinch and the yeast to just over a teaspoon. I made similar adjustments to the other Zojirushi recipes.

The latest bread I tried was a pull-apart honey whole-wheat, using a recipe from Hensberger's Bread Machine Cookbook and techniques from the Zojirushi cookbook's weird, "home made variations" recipe for "party bread". This was a trial run for Thanksgiving dinner rolls. I want to cook them in the bread machine, if possible, so they'll be ultra-fresh and we won't have to use the oven for anything but turkey. Plus, you know, it'll be cool.

The remains of the honey whole-wheat

First, let me say that the bread was tasty. I don't know how well it'll keep, but since it's mostly gone, who cares. I made the 1-1/2 pound loaf recipe, reducing the salt to 1/2 teaspoon and yeast to 2 teaspoons.

Second, although the Zojirushi recipe is very unclear and incomplete, it worked better than I expected. The loaf, created from 15 mini-balls of dough, was fairly easy to pull apart, despite having no flour or cornmeal or oil/butter to keep the mini-balls from sticking to each other. I guess the mini-balls' little private rising time helped.

Third, although the Zo recipe calls for embedding sausage, chocolate, or cream cheese in each piece, I had nothing savory to put in them. I did, however, put a TJ's speculoos chocolate cup in one, just to see what would happen.  It was a bit messy, melting into a spreading puddle that my husband and I gleefully chased down. Perhaps chocolate chips might work better, since they supposedly don't melt as well. However, for dinner rolls I'd stick with savory fillings, if any.

By the way, the Hensberger book is one of several that my friend Shams recently gave to me. Thanks, Shams!

Coconut-coffee-almond "ice cream" and raspberry sherbet

A few months back (near someone's birthday, probably mine), I made two not-quite-ice-creams in a row. Here's a picture of them with some birthday cake.

 

The first was a coconut cream based ice cream, flavored with coffee and with toasted chopped almonds mixed in. It was inspired by an internet recipe, although I don't recall which one. The base had 2 cans of Trader Joe's coconut cream, 3 packets of Starbucks Via instant coffee, less than a cup of sugar, and some vanilla.

The ingredients for the coconut-coffee base

The second dessert was a simple raspberry sherbet (raspberries, milk, sugar, a bit of lemon juice). I believe the recipe was from The Perfect Scoop.

Raspberry sherbet

Both were great, but I loved the sherbet best. It was fresh and clean tasting, and raspberries have such a pretty, intense color.

The coconut-coffee-almond seemed bitter at first (something I've noticed with other coconut-coffee combos) but after a couple of bites I really liked it.

Coming soon: goodbye to a broken bread machine, and hello to a beautiful new one.

Breadventures: A total loss and a partial save

Full of confidence after the success of my first loaf of bread, I tried setting up the machine to cook a loaf overnight. The result: complete failure.

Baked flour with yeast on top. Mmm mmm.

Toward the bottom was something vaguely resembling bread.

It's possible that the machine was to blame, but I suspect it was just that the recipe was too big. Next time I want to cook a loaf overnight, I'll try to make sure that it's a recipe that I've successfully used before.

Not to be put off, I tried another recipe: maple walnut bread. However, I still hadn't learned my lesson about the recipes being too large. I'd thought that maybe because this was a machine-kneaded, oven-cooked recipe, that the machine could deal with it. Silly me. This recipe had twice as much dough as a regular recipe of bread, so of course the machine couldn't deal with it.

After resetting the machine 2 or 3 times and poking the mix with a spatula, I finally got a mostly mixed dough. In a flash of smarts, I took out the dough and threw out half of it. I returned it to the machine for one last mix and its first rise, adding walnuts midway through the mixing.

The recipe had called for adding a cup of walnuts and perhaps a half cup of raisins. Since we'd already chopped the walnuts, I added all of them and left out the raisins. At this point, the dough had been kneaded so much, it was impossible to incorporate the walnuts, so they mostly ended up on the outside.

So there I was, with a weird, nut-covered dough. I punched it down and put it in a pan to rise again. And then I baked it.

The result? Delicious! It looked terrible (sadly, I took no pictures), but it had a wonderful, crunchy crust and excellent flavor.

I've since gone through the book and written, in pencil, the half-amounts for every ingredient of every recipe that I'd like to try.

Cinnamon raisin bread

Cinnamon raisin bread ice cream?

Nope! I'm branching out and reviewing recipes that aren't ice cream. It turns out you can't make tons of ice cream without you and your family gaining weight, so I'm taking a little break from weekly ice cream making. Bread is perhaps not a weight loss food, but it can't be as bad as ice cream.

Also, my parents gave me their old bread machine. I love bread but haven't been able to eat much of it since I started a low-sodium diet (which helps with an inner ear problem). Salt-free bread tastes bad to me, and it's hard—not impossible, but hard—to find regular bread that isn't high in sodium.

My bread adventures (let's call them breadventures) will start out featuring a Zojirushi BBCC-S15 bread maker and recipes from The No-Salt, Lowest-Sodium Baking Book by Donald Gazzaniga.

An oldie but a goodie

The book is a godsend but has a couple of problems. First, its recipes are for a 2-pound loaf, and my bread machine only makes up to 1.5-pound loaves. (I didn't realize this and ended up with bread baked onto the viewing window.) Second, I couldn't find any recipes that I could set up to cook overnight, given the basic ingredients I have. Many of the recipes require adding fruits or nuts partway through, or they use the bread machine only for kneading, not for baking.

Despite these problems, the cinnamon raisin bread was a success! The loaf had a great texture and crust—even though it languished in the machine for a few hours after baking—and it was tasty. When fresh it was good even untoasted. It was also great as a base for cinnamon toast, and should be perfect for bread pudding.

I'll make it again but try halving the recipe. I also might try using proportionately more raisins and perhaps cinnamon.

I'm not sure how much yeast to use when halving the recipe. The author says that salt inhibits yeast action (so I can't rely on regular bread recipes) and that smaller loaves rise more effectively, but then he gives an example of halving where the yeast is 2/3 of the full amount. Also, I found a site that says that cinnamon can inhibit yeast action, so if I add more cinnamon, I might have to use more yeast. Whatever. I think I'll just halve the cinnamon and yeast, and then adjust the recipe next time (if necessary).

This was not a low gluten recipe, by the way. It called for bread flour (high in protein/gluten) and additional "vital wheat gluten", which was probably what made the crust and texture so great. Obviously I don't mind eating dairy and sugar and gluten. Cutting out sodium is more than enough deprivation for me, thank you very much.

Stay tuned for more breadventures...