nick

Holiday Gift Guide 2016

As we race towards the holiday season, we’ve put together our first annual holiday gift shopping guide for the baker in your life. This curated list of baking related gift ideas are sure to hit a home run with the baker in your life. The best part is that you may reap the benefits of these baking gifts in the form of edible treats throughout the year!

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Hedley & Bennet apron, $75

Because every baker needs a nice apron, this one is 100% cotton and has ample pockets for tools and gadgets. It is washable, durable, and stands up to the messiest chefs!

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Kitchent Aid Tilt-Head Stand Mixer, $280

An essential arsenal in every baker’s tool kit is the mighty stand mixer. This tilt-head mixer from KitchenAid is powerfull enough to knead tough doughs and gentle enough to whip the fluffiest of meringues. With a 5-Qt. stainless steel bowl , it offers enough capacity to mix dough for 9 dozen cookies or 4 loaves of bread in a single batch.

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Emile Henry Bread Kit – Cloche, Banneton, and Lame, $160

As you’ve read here on this site, I’m a huge fan of the Emile Henry bread cloche. In our opinion, it is the best bread cloche you can buy. It’s ceramic properties provide even heating for your entire loaf and the fact that it is lightweight make it easy to load in to and, most importantly, out of your oven. This kit is awesome because it comes with a 8 inch round proofing basket and a lame, just about everything you need to make bakery quality, artisan bread at home.

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Uuni 2s Portable Pizza Oven, $230

The Uuni has been a favorite pizza oven here for about a year. It heats up to over 700˚F and bakes Neapolitan style pizzas in your backyard in about 2 minutes. We’ve had a lot of success using this portable pizza oven and think that your pizza loving friend will rock out some amazing pies too!

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EXO Super Peel, $60

Loading and unloading fragile items in to a hot oven can often times be stressful (even dangerous)! The Super Peel from EXO eliminates a lot of the hassle by providing a mechanism where the food just delicately slides off the peel and on to your cooking surface. No stress, no burns, and serious yums!

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Our Favorite Bread Baking Books

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Tartine Bread Book, Chad Robertson, $25

A must have book for anyone aspiring to become a better baker by learning how to start, grow, maintain, and evolve their own sourdough culture. Robertson shares his baking background and teaches you how to make amazing breads at home using a dutch over or Cloche.

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Flour Water Salt Yeast (FWSY), Ken Forkish, $20

This book is aimed at folks who are just taking off in their baking life. With this book you can make the bread on the cover on your first go and the results will look and taste just as good!

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Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes, Jeffrey Hamelman, $30

Hamelman’s book is a more advanced book for bakers. Hamelman is the head baker at King Arthur flour and to me, this gives him serious street cred. This is one of my favorite books and I refer to it often as it offers a fairly technical background on how bread baking works and it also provides easy to follow formulas for the home baker to try.

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Thank you all so much for making this year great, and here’s to a better 2017!

5.12.16 By nick Leave a Comment

Faux Sourdough

We love hosting dinner parties. Having friends over to cap a busy week, letting the kids run wild, and enjoying these relaxing times are sometimes the highlights of our busy weeks. One of the things that help the evening to stand out is the amazing food that’s brought to the table, especially the bread.

My friends know that I love to bake and enjoy coming over to nibble on fresh homemade bread, and I’ve recently been working on perfecting a super easy yeasted sourdough like bread that I call “faux sourdough”. With just a few hours and six simple ingredients, this bread is a crowd pleaser from start to finish. It comes out of the oven with a golden crispy crust, has a slightly sweet aroma, and a flavor that you can make as sour as you please.

[Read more…] about Faux Sourdough

2.12.16 By nick Leave a Comment

No Knead Bread

Check out this short video for a brief overview on making no-knead bread.

As you can see, it’s really easy! Mix the ingredients and let them hang out overnight. Whenever you’re ready, pre-heat the dutch oven or cloche, load the bread, and bake away.

No-Knead Artisan Bread at Home

No-knead bread is a good way to make bread. It gives you a nice crust, decent flavor, and a good looking end product! This will get you on your way to artisan breads at home with minimal fuss.

16.11.16 By nick Leave a Comment

Bread Cloche: Why you should get one NOW.

I’ve been hacking around my kitchen for quite some time trying to figure out how to make my loaves look as good as they do at a bakery. At one point, I broke one of our tea kettles on purpose and tried to inject steam in to the oven via high temperature plastic tube in to the oven during the baking process. You can imagine how that went. I also tried using an electric steamer to inject vapor in the oven and the bread. I’ve tried lava rocks in pans, covered bricks, pizza stones, baking steels, baking on the grill, dumping water in the oven throughout baking, and several other hair brained attempts all with very little success. Then one day I tried a bread cloche and was blown away. “Why didn’t I try this before?!” I thought to myself. That was the golden ticket. An “oven inside an oven” where the bread’s own moisture would be used to create the perfect environment for a golden, crispy, crunch, bubbly loaf.

After baking with a cloche almost exclusively for a couple of years, I found the Emile Henry cloche while browsing through Amazon. I decided to reach out to them and they sent me a demo unit that I used for this post.

I’ve used other cloches in the past but this one is a little lighter and much more attractive than my old clay setup. The Emile Henry cloche is made in France and seems to be very well made. It’s “fire engine red” coating is nice to look at and the whole thing is much lighter than I expected. When I first received the box I thought they hadn’t sent me the right thing since it was so light, but it punches way above its weight in the oven.

This would be the perfect gift for bakers!

I used my trusty 30% whole wheat sourdough loaf to put this cloche through its paces and made two loaves.

The recipe is as follows. You need 200g of starter so prepare it the night before. If you don’t want to use a starter but would rather use commercial yeast, add 100mL to the water you add and 100g to the AP flour weight.

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The night before you bake, feed your starter so it’s mature and ready to go on bake day.
Mix your flours and gently stir to combine them, and add the starter to it.
Start incorporating your water and save about 150mL for now.
Mix the flour and water until you have a dry mass, and add just enough water so that everything comes together. Cover for about 15 minutes and let things relax a bit then add the remainder of your water.
Knead until things start to come together and then cover again for about half hour to 45 minutes.
Knead again for just a minute and cover again for half hour.
Knead again for just a bit and cover again, this time let it remain undisturbed for about 3 hours.
When it has visibly grown in size and bubbles start to form, dump it out to a lightly floured surface and divide in two.
Gently pre-shape the dough and let it relax for 10 minutes.
Shape your dough to its final shape and place in covered proofing baskets for another 1-2 hours.
In the meantime, place your cloche in the oven and pre-heat to 475˚F for 30-45 minutes.
Gently turn one loaf on to a parchment paper lined peel and score the loaf.
Carefully load it in to the cloche and cover for 15-20 minutes and bake the remaining 10-15 minutes without a lid.
Again, carefully remove your loaf from the oven and load up loaf number 2. Repeat the baking process.
Let the loaves cool before cracking in and devouring!

Thanks to the Emile Henry Cloche, this loaf came out crusty and hitting all the right notes. The cloche took approximately half an hour to heat up before I slid the bread in to it.

I’ve made several breads on this cloche and have not yet been disappointed. It traps the steam in the cooking chamber and helps your bread stay moist during the first half of the bake, which aids in oven spring and crust development.

While they sent me this demo unit to review, I’ll be keeping in my regular lineup from here on out!

7.10.16 By nick Leave a Comment

Infused Yeast Water Bread

Fall is here and one of my favorite end-of-summer/start-of-fall fruits is the prune plum. I was always a plum fan but what really makes me love them is the fun memories they bring back. One day while visiting family in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood I noticed how there were plum trees everywhere! My daughter was 3 at the time and we went out for an evening stroll when all of the sudden, a plum fell right on her head! Oh how we laughed at that! She ate that plum and we picked a few more along our route to be sure. We bonded over plums and I guess I’ve always loved them even more since that day.

Now that season is here again and I bought a huge quantity at our local fruit farm. Try as we might to eat them all, we weren’t able to. We even gave a third to our neighbors and still had some left over after 2 weeks! So, instead of baking a pie (which I really wanted to do!) I decided to make some yeasted water with the plums to try to make bread. I also harvested several seeds and will try to plant plum trees in our yard. If anyone has any insight on planting plum trees from seeds, connect with me via Facebook!

If you’ve never heard of yeasted water, it’s kind of magical. You get a mason jar, fill it with about 2/3 water, and add your fruit of choice to the water. I just pitted about 3 plums and lightly smooshed them in the jar. I then put the lid on tightly and put the jar in a cool darkish place for a week.

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Checking on it every few days I could see the magic start to happen. Bubbles were forming and I took the sniff test each time to make note of the sweet smell and to hear the bubbles fizz. After a week’s time the plums had all floated to the surface and the water had gone from clear to “plum” color – a beautiful dark rose/light purple hue. It also smelled very sweet. I almost took a swig to taste it but decided to save every drop for a double batch of bread.

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So, “how do you use yeast water to make bread?” you may ask. It’s really quite simple. Instead of adding any yeast, you just use the water. Does it work? You betcha! I got my inspiration from this post about a year ago and tried it, and have used this method a few times since. The tricky part is figuring out how much water to use in order to replace your yeast. Since I didn’t want it to fail I used all of the water and cheated by spiking the bread with just 1 gram of yeast. Turns out I really didn’t need this extra yeast as the dough was super active after a few hours on the bench.

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Process

Weigh the flour and add to a large mixing bowl
Add the other dry ingredients to the mix
Add the water to the mix, removing the fruit while doing so. You could probably leave it in but I didn’t want chunks in these breads.
Mix by hand or mixer until the dough mass just comes together. Cover with a lid and let sit for 30 minutes.
Mix by hand for another 5 minutes, and cover again for about 30 minutes.
Do 4 stretch and folds at 30 minute intervals. At the end of this cycle I saw bubbles indicating that the yeast was thriving and helping the bread to rise. My dough was really wonderful to work with at this point.
Let it sit and rest for about another 90 minutes.
After the dough has risen nicely, dump it out on a floured surface and divide in two. Pre-shape in to balls and let them rest for 5-10 minutes.
Shape your dough as desired and place in to proofing baskets.
Final proof for about an hour.
Put your bread cloche in the oven and pre-heat it to 425˚F.
Cut off a piece of parchment paper and put it on your baking peel. With oven gloves, carefully slide the bread in to the cloche and cover with the lid.
Bake with the lid for 15 minutes and remove it.
Bake the bread for another 15-20 minutes and remove once the bread is done.
Let it cool and enjoy!