No-Knead Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Bread

Remember Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's lovely chocolate currant bread in How to Make Bread? Maybe because of the cold snap that hit most of the country, including our state, and maybe because there are few things more comforting than the aroma and taste of chocolate when the outside world freezes up, I had a sudden craving for that bread when we came back from our Thanksgiving family visits. However I knew there was no way I could make it until I got my levain (starter) going again and since said levain had been quartered in the fridge for a couple of weeks, I also knew it was going to require some tender loving care over the course of a few days before it got back to its usual ebullient and efficient self...
Meanwhile, what could I do? Mix a poolish, let it ferment overnight and use that instead of levain? Sure, and I would have done just that if, on the plane ride home, I hadn't read the Kindle version of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François' appealing new book, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and bookmarked a double chocolate bread which seemed rather similar to Hadjiandreou's (minus the currants) but required neither levain nor poolish. It did require a long cold fermentation though. Impatience and curiosity had a go at each other within my head for a few seconds and curiosity won. I decided to give the Artisan-in-Five recipe a try.
The result is spectacularly tasty, even if a bit less complex than the levain version. The crumb is both soft and ever so slightly crunchy and the dark chocolate flavor is to die for. I attribute the almost imperceptible crunch to the sugar I used: with the drop in temperature, the hummingbirds had been feeding like crazy and most of our regular sugar had gone into making nectar for them. I didn't feel like driving to the store just for sugar, so I settled for evaporated cane juice sugar which we had in stock. It doesn't seem to melt in quite the same way but I actually love the crunch.
Despite the fact that I only used half the amount of sugar indicated in the original recipe, the bread eats like chocolate cake (with less fat) and is so easy to make that even a beginner should have good results.
One thing to keep in mind if you decide to try your hand at it though: do not treat time indications as gospel truths. I am sure that all the recipes in the book have been thoroughly tested and re-tested but they haven't been tested in my kitchen in the winter, using the flour available to me. If I had followed the recipe to a tee, I doubt I would be as satisfied as I am with the result. So instead of going by the book, trust your eyes and hands. To give you an example, the dough sat on the counter for close to twenty-four hours after mixing before it had risen enough to be put in the fridge (instead of the two hours indicated in the recipe) and, on Baking Day, the shaped loaves proofed for two hours (instead of forty minutes) before they were ready to bake. Depending on where you live and a myriad of other factors, you may have a different experience. If you have the patience to jot down flour brand, dates, times and temperatures and if you make the recipe over and over (which you may well do if you get hooked), you will learn more about the interplay of these factors. In the words of Adam Gopnik (in Bread and Women, a piece he wrote recently for The New Yorker and which, sadly, isn't available online in its full-text version), "Bread dough isn't like dinner food, which usually rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over." In my experience, the more a baker knows about the way dough thinks, the easier it becomes for her to humor it and get good results.
Jeff and Zoë kindly gave me permission to blog the recipe providing I used my own words. Please note that I adapted both the ingredients (using less sugar and a different salt) and the method. For the original recipe, I refer you to the book and, for more info regarding the "Artisan in Five" method, to the Breadin5 website and corresponding YouTube videos, including this one.

Ingredients: (for three 300g-loaves)

(The formulas were created using BreadStorm)

By weights

By percentages

Method:

(The dough is made a few days ahead of the actual baking day)

1. On Day 1, I mixed the liquid ingredients in a large bowl (using water at 100°F), then added yeast and sugar 
2. I added in the remaining dry ingredients (flour, salt and cocoa) and mixed well, using a dough whisk.  Even though the whisk helped a lot, at the end I had to use my hands and since my wrist is not strong enough yet to hold the bowl firmly for long, the cocoa powder wasn't perfectly blended in, which really doesn't matter. A case can actually be made for the white swirls, don't you think? Next time, I might just stop blending in the cocoa a bit sooner...
3. I covered the bowl loosely (the dough needs some oxygen at this stage) and let rest at room temperature (which was 65°F on that day). According to the book, the dough will rise and collapse within about two hours but I suppose it depends on the season and how warm your house is. In my case, after two hours it was going nowhere fast. In fact, it took almost 24 hours to rise
4. Once it had more than doubled and looked like it could do no more, I put it in the fridge, tightly covered this time
5. The authors suggest using the dough within a five-day period: accordingly I used two-thirds of  it on Day 3 and will use the rest by Day 5. Following their instructions, I dusted the surface of the dough with flour. Then I scooped out 600 g of dough which I divided in two. I loosely shaped two boules which I let rest at room temperature on a floured countertop, covered with a plastic sheet
6. After thirty minutes I shaped one piece of dough as a bâtard and the other one as a boule and I sent them to rise on a board covered with flour-dusted parchment paper. I placed the board inside a large sealed plastic bag, put a space heater in the little laundry room (which doubles as my bakery) so that the room temp rose to about 73°F and I waited. The loaves took over two hours to proof (rise). (You know they are ready to bake when they jiggle as you gently shake the board.) At a lower room temperature, the process might have been even longer
7. Meanwhile I had preheated the oven (equipped with a baking stone) at 350°F. Before sliding the loaves onto the baking stone, I brushed them with a bit of melted butter and sprinkled them with pearl sugar
8. I baked the loaves for 50 minutes (a good way to know when they are baked through is to take them out, hold them upside down and knock on the bottom with your knuckles. If they give a hollow sound, they are done. If not, bake a while longer)
9. I let them cool overnight on a rack before slicing one of them open.

For those of you who are using BreadStorm (including the free version), please click on this link to import the formula so that you can scale it up or down as desired.

Barley Bread

For as long as I can remember, I have been a barley girl. Of course it helped that in France when I was a kid,  a sucre d'orge (literally candy made with barley sugar) was a treat. Tubular and fashionably skinny, always tightly wrapped, most often in cellophane but occasionally in shiny silver paper which gave no clue to the flavor inside, known for having soothed many of life's minor woes and pains for generations of children, it held a mysterious appeal. By contrast, the plump sucette (lollipop), always clad in revealing colors and coiffed with a bouffant paper twist, seemed resolutely modern. Probably thanks to its down-to-earth chubbiness, it was often a kid's first choice at the boulangerie-confiserie (bakery-candy store) but not mine.
Since I spent a large part of my childhood reading and re-reading the books which had belonged to my dad and my uncle in their youth (they had won them at school for being top students), I kept solid footing in an enchanted other world (of which the black and white illustrations offered tantalizing glimpses) and, in my own, I looked for and cherished surviving signs of a vanishing past. Sucres d'orge (thus called because barley water -soon to be replaced by glucose- was the original sweetener) were therefore my favorites and I spent many a drizzly or blustery Sunday afternoon with my nose in one of the characteristic red books and a sucre d'orge in my pocket (my parents were not liberal with candy but since I never had a sweet tooth,  looking at it afforded me more pleasure than eating it and a single one went a long way).

Many years and a move across the ocean later, I discovered that orge (barley) could actually appear on the table in a soup or a barlotto (a risotto made with barley instead of rice) or simply as a grain and when I did, I fell in love all over again.  So when a Baking With Barley class was offered last year at Kneading Conference West, I knew I wanted to attend.
The class was taught jointly by Leslie Mackie (owner of Macrina Bakery in Seattle) and Andrew Ross, a cereal chemist at Oregon State University (OSU). Leslie has been experimenting with barley from the time she first started Macrina:  she liked using locally grown grain and, at the time, that meant mostly barley. She now puts it in monkey bread (for an added touch of sweetness), in Francese bread and in Pugliese bread (an exceptionally tasty miche for which she was in the process of developing a formula).
As for Andrew - who is not only a scientist but also a passionate baker - he has developed formulas for various barley breads within the framework of the barley project: he brought barley baguettes and barley miches to the class and demonstrated barley pitas and bretzels. I was hooked (especially when I discovered that my local mill made a beautiful whole grain barley flour).
I was hoping to be able to go and observe Andrew at work at OSU in Corvalis and to do a full Meet the Baker post on him afterwards. But it didn't work out according to plan. He was unexpectedly swamped with work when we showed up at the agreed-upon date last month and there was no way he could fit baking into his schedule on that particular day. As for us, we were traveling through Corvalis on our way back home from the coast and we couldn't possibly come back later in the week. He very kindly showed me his beautiful lab/bakery and answered the questions I had prepared but I made it quick as I knew he had to go back to work.  I would still love to see him bake and also to hear more about the relationship between the University and the local farmer though but it will have to wait. Maybe the stars will align better on another visit to Oregon!
Meanwhile Andrew gave me a few useful infos and pointers on baking with barley:

• The preferred barley is a hulless variety, also called naked barley (the hull falls off when the grain is harvested): it has the best nutritional profile
• Barley contains a soluble fiber called beta-glucan which has been shown to slow glucose absorption and is thought to help lower blood cholesterol
• People with celiac disease or high sensitivity to gluten should not eat barley: it contains protases which are very close to gluten
• A 100% barley starter yields a very acidic bread. Not pleasant
• The higher the percentage of barley in relation to wheat, the less extensible the dough
• For a better crumb, it is best to use barley flour in conjunction with high-gluten flour
• Using a stiff starter also helps compensate for the lesser amount of gluten in the dough
• To keep the dough from sticking, use more water or flour than you normally would 
• Increase dough hydration by 5 to 10% if making a 50% barley-50% wheat bread
• If using a high tpercentage of barley, it is best to underproof a little
• A good rule of thumb for flavor, nutrition and extensibility is to use a total of 20 to 30% of barley in the  dough
• Barley flat breads and tortillas are much easier to make than raised breads.

For this barley bread, I used the Whey Sourdough recipe from Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's How to Make Bread, a book I already blogged about here and here. At Emmanuel's suggestion (when we talked on the phone back in April after I found an error in one of the recipes), I substituted half Greek yogurt and half milk for the whey (which I didn't have) and, mindful of Andrew's recommendation, I replaced 20% of the white flour by whole grain barley flour (hulless variety).  The resulting bread was delicate and flavorful with a slightly fermented taste (very different from regular sourdough) which I find utterly seductive. Not a memory-trigger like the old-fashioned sucre d'orge but definitely a keeper and maybe a memory-maker for the kids and grand-kids in our life! What could be sweeter than that?

Ingredients:

• 160 g white sourdough starter
• 150 g milk (I used 2% milkfat)
• 150 g plain Greek yogurt (mine was 0% fat but regular fullfat Greek yogurt would work fine)
• 200 g all-purpose unbleached flour (Hadjiandreou uses bread flour with a higher gluten percentage but I had none on hand. I might have gotten a more open crumb if I had used that)
• 120 g  all-purpose unbleached flour (again he uses bread flour)
• 100 g barley flour
• 10 g salt (Hadjiandreou uses 8 g)

Method: (adapted from the book)

1. In a large mixing bowl, mix starter, yogurt and milk with a wooden spoon until well combined
2. Add 200 g of all-purpose flour and mix well. Cover and let ferment overnight in a cool place (it should show tiny bubbles 12 hours later when ready)
3. In a smaller bowl, mix 120 g of all-purpose flour, the barley flour and the salt
4. Add to fermented mix and mix by hand until it comes together
5. Cover and let stand for 10 minutes
6. After 10 minutes, stretch and fold the dough inside the bowl by going twice around the bowl with four stretches and foldings at each 90° turn (8 stretches/foldings in all)
7. Let rest 10 minutes again, covered. Repeat twice
8. Complete a fourth stretch and fold cycle and let the dough rest one hour, covered
9. Ligthly flour a work surgace and put the dough on it
10. Shape into a smooth, rounded disc
11. Dust a proofing basket with flour and lay the dough inside
12. Let it rise until double the size (which will take between 3 and 6 hours)
13. When ready, transfer dough to a non-preheated Dutch oven (using a large piece of parchment paper as a sling to carry the dough) and replace the lid on the Dutch oven
14. Bake in non-preheated oven set at 475°F/246°C for 35 minutes
15. Remove Dutch oven from oven and bread from Dutch oven (exercising caution as both will be very hot)
16. Replace bread in oven, turn oven temperature down to 435°F/224°C and bake for another 20 minutes or so, until the boule is golden and makes a satisfying hollow sound when thumped on the bottom
17. Enjoy!

The Barley Bread can also be baked the usual way in a hot oven. I just find the unheated Dutch oven/oven method works wonders with boules and it saves having to preheat the oven for an extended length of time.

The Barley Bread is going to Susan for this week's issue of Yeastspotting.

Troubleshooting dough hydration: A trick "à la Gérard"

Update: If you are planning to make the Levain de campagne Bread from How to make bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou (the bread I am talking about below), please note that there is indeed a typo in the recipe and that the amount of water should be more or less 300 g and not 150 g. This was confirmed to me today by the author himself.

Spring break brought us a passel of kids and grandkids and made for an extremely lively ten days in our household. Anyone who has had the good fortune of living in close quarters with five-and-a half-year old twins and their even younger first cousins will probably agree that the experience isn't exactly conducive to meditation, reading and gourmet cooking.
By popular (and youthful) request, macaroni and cheese have been seen in my kitchen this week with unprecedented frequency while greens were the object of much suspicion and arduous negotiation. Asparagus and broccoli prevailed. Spinach was voted down. Frozen peas passed muster. Usually beloved, avocado was categorically rejected. Fruit was regarded with a marked lack of enthusiasm in its original form except for bananas, apples and mangos (save for one kid who expressed total revulsion at the sight of sliced mango in his fruit salad) but was widely appreciated in disguise (notably in the shape of the blackberry frozen yogurt I made from the berries we picked last summer).
A large part of the family went back home today. A second installment (grown-ups only) is expected tomorrow. In-between I found myself in the mood for a baking Sunday.
Since I am still exploring Hadjiandreou's book, I decided to make the miche Emmanuel Hadjiandreou calls his "Levain de campagne" Bread (shown on the cover) for which he won a Great Taste Award. The recipe calls for 150 g of mature white starter (at 100% hydration) and 150 g of water (as indicated above, the water amount is incorrect as printed in the book. It should be 300 g)  as well as for 250 g of all-purpose flour (he actually recommends strong/bread flour but then he bakes in the UK where flours are different from ours), 150 g of whole wheat flour and 50 g of dark rye flour. So far so good. 
Cruising along  after weighing everything, I was feeling quite happy (the fragrance of the levain will do that to you!)  when I hit a snag. Hadjiandreou says to "mix until [the dough] comes together. The mixture will be a bit soft, but don't despair and don't be tempted to add more flour". I certainly wasn't! Far from being alarmingly soft, my dough was as stiff as could be. I wet my hands, I added a few spoonfuls of water, then a few more. It still didn't look good. I set the dough to rest for ten minutes prior to the first stretch and fold, hoping that it would have relaxed, but no such luck. I tried adding more water but it made matters worse: the dough showed signs of breaking apart.
That's when I remembered a trick Gérard Rubaud showed me last fall. He said it is never too late to add water to a dough and he proved his point by hydrating a dough that had just finished fermenting and successfully making a whole batch of baguettes with it. 

This above video was done for demonstration purposes only: the dough was already fine as it was. But Gérard does use this trick to troubleshoot production situations:  he says that each time he gets a new delivery of all-purpose flour, he has to recalculate the percentage of water and sometimes he's off in his calculations for the first batch and doesn't know it until after the autolyse is over. If he has used too much water, it is simple enough to add more flour but if he hasn't used enough, it is much trickier. In his experience, it is way easier to add water (up to 2% of the flour weight) at the end of the first fermentation than at the end of the autolyse.
The dough that was slowly taking shape in my bowl had none of the silkiness and pillowiness (is there such a word?) of Gérard's. It was still rather stiff and forbidding and didn't look like it would take kindly to a bath "à la Gérard". Still it could clearly use some water, so I gave it a shower instead (using a spray bottle) and that's clearly what it was waiting for.
After each stretch and fold episode (and there were a total of six at ten minute-intervals), I sprayed it thoroughly with warm water and covered it again with an inverted bowl. It absorbed the water while resting and became progressively more flexible. It was still a very different dough from Gérard's but then Gérard's contained mostly white flour while this one contained close to 80% whole grains.
I am sure the crumb won't sport big holes (Hadjiandreou's doesn't) but will it be dense or not? In other words, should I have sprayed more? Or less? That's what I am hoping to learn from the experience... Don't you love the everlasting challenges of breadbaking?
I wrote to Emmanuel Hadjiandreou to make sure the recipe is correct. The dough seemed way too dry, even accounting for the differences in flour, climate, etc., for the prescribed amounts of flour and water to yield the soft dough pictured (and described) in the book. I will let you know what I hear back, if anything.

Chocolate and Currant Levain

The recipe comes from an excellent book on bread-baking I recently discovered, How to Make Bread by South-African born and UK-based baker Emmanuel Hadjiandreou. Here are a few of the things I love about this book:

• It stresses that "accuracy is crucial in bread baking" and encourages the baker to use a precision electronic scale
• It lists all quantities in metric weights first, followed by American cups and/or ounces, tablespoons, etc. 
• All recipes are illustrated with clear explanations and gorgeous pictures (some of the pages can be seen online on this blog)
• All recipes are mixed by hand (stretch-and-fold method) but they are wrist-friendly because the quantities are always on the small side (the downside is that the yield is smaller than what I am used to and I am tempted to just double the amount of ingredients but then the wrist-friendly aspect becomes less obvious. A professional baker would also tell you that because the amounts are small, there is no mass-effect which makes it harder to coax all possible flavors out of the grain. Life is all about compromise, isn't it?)
• The book explains the basics of bread making, then offers recipes for yeasted breads, sourdoughs, flatbreads, soda breads and pastries (among which pains au chocolat for which the reader is shown how to make his or her own chocolate batons). There is even a gluten-free bread recipe with two variations (I love the fact that it doesn't use any xantham gum or other barbarious sounding binder). Hadjiandreou writes that he learned his trade as a baker in a German-style bakery and he includes a recipe for dark rye bread which he says is one of his all-time favorites. There are also wheat-free breads, including a prune and pepper rye bread that looks marvelous and is definitely on my to-bake list! He also includes an award-winning recipe for a marzipan stollen
• I find How to Make Bread a great resource for both new and experienced bakers and if I ever teach bread-baking, I would be tempted to use it as a workbook since it covers a lot of ground in a friendly manner and makes home baking look deliciously rewarding (which it is, I can testify to that!). 

Although I have already baked quite a few recipes from the book (including a pretty pink-dotted beetroot sourdough for the Easter dinner bread basket), I am showcasing the chocolate bread since I recently made and froze a new batch in anticipation of our grandkids' arrival on spring break at the end of the week. It is a kid-friendly bread that even adults not blessed (or cursed, depending on the point of view) with a sweet tooth can enjoy, all levain-based and chokeful of good-for-you currants. I used bittersweet chocolate chips as that's all I had on-hand (Hadjiandreou suggests using milk or semisweet which we would probably have found too sweet anyway). This blog entry comes with a warning though: once you have made this bread, you'll likely find yourself compulsorily making it again and again. 

Ingredients: (for two small-loaves)

• 200 g Zante currants
• 80 g semisweet chocolate chips
• 330 g unbleached all-purpose flour (Hadjiandreou says to use "strong or bread flour" which contains a high amount of protein (up to 17%) to trap the carbon dioxide during fermentation and give the bread a good texture. That would be considered too high here in the US but then our flours are quite different. To be on the safe side, if you do live in the UK, your best bet is to follow Hadjiandreou's advice)
• 8 g salt
• 20 g cocoa powder
• 170 g white levain (sourdough starter) at 100% hydration*
• 250 g warm water

* The starter I used is one that my friend Teresa from Northwest Sourdough kindly sent me when I came back from my trip to France (saving me the tedious task of reactivating my dehydrated levain). Appropriately called Northwest Starter because it was originally cultured near Willapa Bay, Washington, it is wonderfully fragrant and so active that I was able to bake with it after just one feeding. No wonder it was once featured in a TV show (in 2006 during the "What's Cooking?" segment on KNOE TV Channel 8/CBS affiliate). Why, if I had been the one to capture these wild workhorses yeasts, I would probably have tried to get them on Animal Planet! Well done, Teresa, and thank you!

Method (slightly adapted):

1. Mix the currants and chocolate and set aside
2. In one small mixing bowl, mix the flour, salt and cocoa powder together. This is the dry mixture
3. In a larger mixing bowl, mix the sourdough starter and water together until well combined. This is the wet mixture
4. Add the dry and chocolate-currant mixtures to the wet mixture and mix until incorporated
5. Cover and let stand for 10 minutes
6. After 10 minutes, stretch and fold the dough inside the bowl by going twice around the bowl with four stretches and foldings at each 90° turn (8 stretches/foldings in all)
7. Let rest 10 minutes again. Repeat twice
8. Complete a fourth stretch and fold cycle and let the dough rest one hour (I actually let it rest closer to three hours before it was fermented enough, probably because my house was colder than the lab where the recipe has been tested)
9. When the dough has doubled in volume, punch it down to release the air (I didn't really punch it as I am always weary of completely deflating it), lightly flour a clean work surface and transfer the boule of dough to it
10. Divide the dough into two equal portions and roll each one into a ball
11. Dust two small proofing baskets with flour (Hadjiandreou uses a long oblong one into which he fits the two balls snugly together but I don't own one like that) and set the boules in them, seam-side up
12. Let the dough rise until doubled in size (it can take between 3 and 6 hours)
13. About 20 minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 475°F/240°C with a baking stone on the middle shelf and an empty roasting pan at the bottom. Fill a cup with water and set it aside
14. When the boules have doubled in volume, tip them out seam-side down on a parchment-lined semolina-dusted rimless half-sheet pan and slide them onto the baking stone. Pour the reserved water into the empty roasting pan and lower the oven temperature to 425°F/220°C
15. Bake about 30 minutes. To check if the bread is ready, tip it out upside down and tap the bottom. It should sound hollow
16. Let cool on a wire rack
17. Enjoy!

The chocolate and currant sourdough bread is going to Susan for Yeastspotting.