Jacqueline's Egg Bread

Related posts:

• Meet the Bakers: Dado and Jacqueline Colussi
• BreadStorm

Easter was in the air the week I visited with Dado and Jacqueline Colussi in Chicago and Jacqueline baked these two gorgeous breads with the holiday in mind. She used beets to color the eggs. The formula is one of the sample ones included with the BreadStorm software.

Jacqueline's notes

• I find scaling the yield to 650 g is a nice size for a 3- or 4-strand braided loaf. 
• Syrup: In a saucepan, combine the butter, milk, water, sugar, and salt. Cook over low heat until the butter is melted, and the sugar and salt are dissolved. Set aside to cool.
• Egg Mixture: Whisk together the eggs and sour cream. Set aside.
• Dry Ingredients: Sift together the flour and the yeast. 
• Mixing: Once the syrup has cooled to room temperature, whisk it into the egg mixture. Add this mixture to the dry ingredients. Mix well, then knead vigorously by hand for 5 minutes, or until gluten develops.
• Bulk Fermentation: Cover the dough with a cloth. Ferment for 1 hour. Punch down. Ferment for a second hour. 
• Shaping: The dough is ideal for braiding, and works well as a 2-strand twist, or a 3-, 4-, or 5-strand braid. 
• Proofing: Proof the loaf under a cloth for 30 minutes to 3 hours, depending on the ambient room temperature.
• Pre-heating: Pre-heat the oven to 425˚F (220˚C). 
• Egg Wash: With a fork, whisk together the egg yolk, a pinch of salt, and a few drops of water. Just before baking the loaf, brush it with egg wash up to 3 times. This will give the loaf a shiny, mahogany crust. (Leftover egg wash can be stored in the refrigerator for up to a week.)
• Baking: Just before placing the loaf in the oven, reduce the oven temperature to 380˚F (195˚C). Bake for 25-35 minutes, depending on the size of the loaf. Cool completely before slicing.

My notes

• Jacqueline's egg bread is based on a taste memory (her grandma used to make it). She wanted consistency of a challah without the kosher constraints. So there are eggs and butter in it.
• Jacqueline likes to experiment with different sugars. In this version of the egg bread, she used muscovado sugar (which explains the pale brown color of the dough). She normally uses 16% turbinado sugar. She seems to remember that she reduced the sugar amount to 10% in this version because the muscovado is much more flavorful than the turbinado but it could have been 12%.
• The eggs were dyed with beet dripping (from peeling cooked beets). Jacqueline hard-boiled them in that liquid with a splash of vinegar.
• Jacqueline found the dough stickier than usual. Maybe because muscovado sugar absorbs water differently?
• She used the Craig Ponsford technique of egg-washing the proofed loaves dough three times, letting them dry in between. The method locks the steam in and yields a gorgeous gloss.

Jacqueline's Walnut Flax Seed Boule

Walnut Flax Seed Boule baked by Jacqueline during my stay

Related posts:

• Meet the Bakers: Dado and Jacqueline Colussi
• BreadStorm

Jacqueline's notes

* I find scaling the yield to 650 g is a nice size for a medium-size boule.
* I usually don't score this loaf, as it doesn't seem to require help expanding in the oven. Perhaps the milk, honey, and walnut oil tenderize the dough, allowing it to expand evenly in the oven without ripping.

1. Boil the water. Combine the water and oats. Cover and set aside for 30 minutes. The oats will absorb water and soften, so the crumb will be soft and tender.
2. Chop the walnuts. In a frying pan, toast the walnuts over low heat until they become fragrant. For best flavor, remove the walnuts immediately from the hot pan. Set them aside to cool. 
3. Check that the soaker has cooled.  (If it's too hot, it may harm or kill the yeast. To test whether it's cool enough, you should be able to comfortably leave a finger in the soaker for 10 seconds.) 
4. In a large bowl, combine the soaker and all other ingredients. Knead by hand until you can feel the gluten coming together.
5. Add the walnuts and flax seeds to the dough. Mix gently and thoroughly.
6. Cover the dough. Ferment it overnight in the refrigerator.
7. In the morning, shape the dough into a boule and proof it for 2-3 hours at room temperature. Pre-heat the oven to 460˚F (240˚C).
8. Bake the loaf for 20 minutes at 460˚F (240˚C), then for another 25 minutes at 430˚F (220˚C).

My notes

• This formula is part of the sample formulas included with the BreadStorm software.
• Jacqueline made the bread on that particular day with fine whole wheat form Fairhaven Organic Flour Mill in Washington State which I had given her. As she was mixing it, she reflected that the dough was much drier than it is with the organic whole wheat from Bob's Red Mill which she normally uses. She had to up the hydration to 82.5%. Different flours absorb water differently, so she was expecting having to adjust the hydration. She started by adding 1% water and increased the amount incrementally to 2.5% (8 g) until she got the consistency she was looking for.
• A lovely bread with a nutty flavor. The taste of the grain shines through as well.

Wishing you a year of good bread...

...and other wonders! May your life rise to new heights, leavened by the love of family and friends!
This beautiful holiday bread was made by my friend Diane Andiel whom you may already know from this Meet the baker article and from that post. She used a 14% butter brioche dough but says any cinnamon bun dough recipe would work. It is a favorite in her house and among her customers. Though she sometimes uses her grandmother's grinder to grind the poppy seeds, she also often buys cans of ready-made poppy seed filling either from a European specialty store or online. She definitely doesn't recommend using a food processor although a coffee grinder might work. The shaping is just a roll that is split in two and twisted together before going in the bread pan. Yum! Thank you, Diane!

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.

Learning Loaf (with old dough)

So many of you have written to say you wanted to try your hand at bread but didn't know where to start that I thought I should post a fairly simple (but still tasty) recipe. There are faster recipes galore, both in books and online, but frankly I am not crazy about them. In my experience (and that of many other bakers) and except in the case of breads that rely on baking soda or powder for leavening, the faster the bread the blander the taste and the shorter the shelf life.
Most simple breads (those who don't rely for flavor on a bunch of ingredients beyond flour, water, salt, and yeast) turn out tastier, rise better and have a better crumb if they are made over two days instead of being mixed and baked in the space of a few short hours in one single day.
These breads call for a two-step process: a mix of flour, water and yeast (and sometimes salt, as in this recipe) is left to ferment overnight acquiring both depth of flavor and increased leavening power. The day after, this first dough (or preferment) is incorporated into the final dough to which it imparts a distinctive taste and structure depending on its hydration (percentage of water relative to flour), the temperature at which it was kept, the length of its fermentation, the amount of yeast involved, etc.
There are several types of preferments. In this recipe, we will be using what's commonly called "old dough". Some bakers prefer to call it by its French name, pâte fermentée (fermented dough) but "old dough" does the trick for me. It is easier to explain to kids and it reminds me of the hours our grandchildren have spent at our kitchen table playing with salt dough. They cut and folded and shaped and had all manners of fun. I used to put a bit of vegetable oil in their salt dough, so that it remained pliable and whatever was left over could be kept in the fridge from one weekend to the next. If I were teaching them to bake bread now, I would explain the difference between salt dough (which is dead) and bread dough which is alive because it contains yeast and therefore requires a bit more tender loving care.
To get your hands on a piece of old dough, either you use some dough left over from another baking session (which almost never happens in my house as I nearly always forget to set dough aside for the next batch), or if you have baked no bread in the past 48 hours (old dough tends to become more acidic and to lose its leavening power if it sits for too long), you simply mix flour, water, salt and a pinch of yeast until the dough starts to develop, put it in a bowl, cover it, let it ferment slowly overnight at cool room temperature and voilà, you have your old dough!
This loaf is the perfect weekend baking project: you mix the old dough on Friday night, mix and bake the final dough on Saturday and enjoy fresh bread from Saturday night on (which is why the amounts are generous enough to yield two loaves). You may not succeed right away: we ate our share of doorstops over the years but learning is always a process, isn't it? So don't despair if it doesn't turn out exactly the way you want the first time.  Plus unless your bread is hopelessly burnt or you forgot the yeast and it baked into a flat stone or you forgot the flour (which happened to me once when I was a child and made a French almond cake for my family. It tasted awfully of canned mushroom - I still can't figure out why - and my doting father is the only one who got a second helping and said it was really good in an interesting way - although decades later he still laughed like a hyena when he told the story) and there was no dough to bake, it will always be appreciably better than supermarket bread...

To make this recipe,

You will need

• A large bowl and two medium-size bowls as well as lids or plastic film to keep them covered
• A spatula to scrape the bowls
• A scale (preferably electronic, so that you can switch easily from ounces to grams)
• A dough cutter (or a knife with a wide blade) to divide the dough prior to shaping it
• A clear plastic bag large enough to house the proofing shaped loaf without touching it
• A razor blade or a serrated knife (to slash the loaf before baking)
• An oven
• A pelle or rimless baking sheet to slide the loaves into the oven and get them out when they are baked
• Parchment paper

You might find it convenient to have as well

(Please note that the links are meant to give you an idea of what the equipment looks like and that I am recommending no specific brand or seller)

• A instant-read thermometer
• A plastic proofing container with a lid
• A round proofing basket (or else a round colander lined with a flour sack or other non-stick towel)
• A board and a linen (or other non-stick fabric) towel to proof your shaped loaves (the ones which don't proof in a basket)
• A baking stone (before I had one, I used a rimless metal sheet pan which always stayed in the oven and got preheated when I turned the oven on)
• Some kind of steaming device (I use an old metal dripping pan filled with smooth lava stones which I always leave on the oven bottom shelf)

My oven setup

Bread Tips

• Time can also do a big share of the work for you. My hands and wrists are giving me all kinds of trouble but even though I own two different types of mixers and unless I am baking for a big crowd, I still prefer to mix my doughs by hand. My favorite method is to just incorporate the ingredients (making sure all the flour is hydrated) and then leave the (still very shaggy) dough to rest, covered, for 10 minutes. When I come back, lo and behold, the gluten has developed appreciably. I give the dough a few gentle stretches and folds inside the bowl (the in-bowl mixing method is helpfully illustrated here  by Khalid on The Fresh Loaf ), cover it again, and come back again 10 minutes later to do the same. After four or five times, the dough is usually ready for bulk fermentation.
• Temperature matters. Most bakeries are much warmer inside than the average home, at least at our latitudes during the cold months of the year. Depending on the season, the same exact dough may give you different results. The taste may vary (the bacteria which develop in cooler temperature are not identical to those which develop at warmer temperature) and so may the bread structure (in my experience, it is often easier to get a more open crumb with a yeast-leavened dough that has fermented in a warmer environment).
  There are ways to keep your dough snug (setting it to rise in the oven with a light or the pilot light on or near a source of heat such as a fireplace or using a makeshift proofer made of a seedling mat and an inverted plastic box, etc.). I have a folding bread proofer but I haven't used it for this recipe as I wanted to reproduce as closely as possible the conditions which might exist in your home if, like me, you have to reckon with the tail end of winter in the Northern United States.
  Everything being otherwise equal, I find that an indoor temperature of about 76°/24° is about ideal. But good luck on getting that temperature consistently throughout the year! The little laundry room where I do my mixing and baking is hot in the summer (85-90°F/29°-32°C) and cool in the winter (59-62°F/15-16°C). On very warm days, I set the dough to ferment -well covered- on the floor of the garage and on very cold ones, on the countertop next to the washer on the side opposite to the window, where temperature is a couple of degrees warmer. I have learned to enjoy the slow fermentations of winter (which give me a lot of time to do other things) as well as the bouncy eagerness of summer doughs (which sometimes require to be tempered in the fridge as a quickly risen dough seldom yields satisfactory results).
  Of course when a dough needs to be slowly fermented over a long period of time (as is often the case for doughs leavened with a natural starter instead of commercial yeast), it can only be kept at cozy room temperature if the process is strictly controlled and watched over (as it is for instance by Gérard Rubaud in his Vermont bakery). For the home baker who enjoys sleeping through the night, the only solution is often to find a really cool place (sometimes the fridge) to let the dough rise slowly overnight.
  It is considered optimal for a dough to have an internal temperature of about 76-78°/24°-26°C at the end of the mixing. One way to achieve this is to modulate the temperature of the water you add to the flour at the time of the mixing, using warmer water when the room and the ingredients are cold and colder water when they are warm. For this loaf, I used warmish water from the tap. I didn't measure the temperature but made sure it was one step above lukewarm. Never use hot water as it would kill the yeast. For a very helpful and detailed description of the way to obtain a specific desired dough temperature (DDT), please refer to this page of Susan's Wild Yeast blog (a blog I most fervently recommend to anyone who is interested in becoming a serious home baker);
• The amount of water you use makes a big difference in the type of bread you end up with and it is nearly impossible for any recipe to give you an exact indication of the hydration rate. There are too many variables, the first of which is the flour you are using which is most probably not from the same brand and the same batch as the ones used to make the featured recipe. Even if you are used to working with one specific brand and one type of flour, you will find that you may need to increase or decrease water with each new batch. Which means that you need to develop a feel for the dough consistency that gives you the best results. That may be the toughest part of learning to be a baker but it is also the most rewarding because one day you'll just know and you will never forget (a bit like riding a bike).
  A good rule of thumb is to reserve at the start about 10% to 15% of the total water amount indicated in the recipe in order to add it later on in the mixing process as/if needed. You may end up not using it or you may have to add even more. It will be for you to determine but once you know, it is useful to make a note of it for the following time. I often find I have to use more water than indicated in a recipe;
• Which brings me to this: keep a log book. If you intend to start baking regularly, for each bread you make, write down which recipe you used, what was the room temperature, how much water you ended up using, how long you preheated the oven, how long you baked the loaf and at what temperature(s), how open or dense the crumb was, whether or not you liked the bread, how was the flavor, what you would like to change if anything, etc. Take pictures of the bread and of its crumb and save them. Your log book will quickly become a reference tool which will save you time and effort down the road.

Ingredients (for one boule and one curlicue)

Old dough

• 210 g all-purpose flour, unbleached
• 137 g water
• 4 g salt
• A scant pinch of instant yeast

OR:

• A 350 g piece of dough saved from a previous mix

Final dough

• 631 g all-purpose flour, unbleached
• 70 g wholegrain rye flour (also called dark rye flour) (I use rye because I like the flavor and the slightly darker color it imparts to the bread. I also like the tiny specks of rye bran in the crumb)
• 484 g water
• 14 g salt
• A pinch of instant yeast
• All of the old dough (about 350 g)

Method

Old dough (to be made the evening before)

1. Whisk all the dry ingredients together in the medium size bowl, add water and mix by hand until the flour is well hydrated and incorporated
2. Let rest 10 minutes, covered
3. Leaving the dough in the bowl, pull it on one side and fold it towards the center, turn the bowl slightly and repeat, repeat until you are back where you started. Cover the bowl again and let the dough rest
4. Repeat four or five times
5. Let ferment, tightly covered (I use plastic film) until morning at room temperature (if room temperature is cool). If room temperature is warm, let it ferment about four hours, then put it in the fridge overnight. In the morning, take it out of the fridge and leave it at room temperature for one or two hours before mixing

Old dough in the evening

Old dough the following morning

Final dough (to be mixed on the day of the bake)

1. The old dough should have inflated a bit and smell slightly fermented
2. Divide it in several little chunks for easier incorporation with the other ingredients
3. Pour most of the water (set aside 10 to 15%) into the large bowl
4. Whisk together the flours, yeast and salt in a medium-sized bowl and add them to the large bowl
5. Add the chunks of old dough

6. Mix until incorporated. You shouldn't see any dry flour. If you do, add some of the reserved water. If you still do afterwards, add more water from the tap by very small increments (matching the temperature of the water you previously used)
7. The dough will be shaggy but pliable. Cover it and let it rest 10 minutes 

8. Leaving the dough in the bowl, pull it on one side until it is stretched and fold it towards the center, turn the bowl slightly and repeat, repeat until you are back where you started. Cover the bowl again and let rest

9. Repeat four or five times at 10 minutes interval. Each time you come back to the dough, it should have changed, become smoother, shinier and easier to handle

10. Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled proofing container and cover tightly
11. After 20 minutes, fold the dough inside the bowl (see this useful video by Amy at 0:26 to 0:46 min. Amy from Amy's Bread is a wonderful New York City baker whom I had the pleasure to meet last year at WheatStalk. Her Italian dough is much wetter and softer than our Learning Loaf dough but the folding method is still the same )
12. Repeat twice at 20 minute-intervals
13. Let rise as long as needed for the dough to show a dent that doesn't bounce back right away when you palpate it with your fingertips
14. Transfer the dough to a floured tabletop and pat it gently into a rectangle
15. Using the dough cutter or a knife with a wide blade, cut the dough in two pieces, roughly two-thirds, one third (you could weigh each piece of dough and make it scientific but you don't really need to). (Alternatively if you'd like to make two identical boules, cut the dough in half instead)



16. Loosely pre-shape the big chunk of dough into a boule and let it rest, covered, on the floured counter
17. Do the same with the smaller piece, except that you flatten it a bit, then roll it loosely into a sausage. Let it rest next to the boule
18. After 10 minutes or so, the dough will probably have relaxed enough for you to proceed with the shaping: please refer to Amy's video at 2:45 min to learn how to shape a boule, at 3:28 min to learn how to shape a batard (elongated bread) you can curve into a curlicue if desired or leave as is
19. Place the shaped boule inside a floured proofing basket such as this one or a round colander lined with a flour sack towel (I suppose a towel-lined bowl might do in a pinch but from what I read it is better for the dough to be able to breathe on all sides as it rises) or just set it on a flour-dusted parchment paper-lined board (if not contained the loaf might expand a bit laterally and don't give you as much of a rise: it will still taste fine though)






20. Place the shaped curlicue on the same board (about 4 or 5 inches away from the free-rising boule if not using the basket) and slip the whole thing inside a large clear plastic bag
21. Tie the bag closed making sure to trap enough air in it for the plastic not to touch the dough
22. Let the boule and the curlicue proof until doubled in size (at cool room temperature it may take 45 minutes to one hour)
23. Meanwhile pre-heat the oven to 475°F/246°C with both the baking stone (or rimless metal half-sheet pan) and the metal pan inside, the stone or sheet pan on the middle shelf and the dripping pan (for steaming) on the bottom one
24. When the loaves have doubled in size, take them out of the plastic bag, gently invert the boule on a parchment paper-lined rimless sheet pan, dust it with flour (I use a fine mesh shaker) and holding the razor blade or the serrated knife at a slight angle, slash it a few times on top (for this boule, I slashed the dough four times in a fan pattern)
25. (If you have room enough for the curlicue to bake in the oven at the same time as the boule, transfer it to the sheet pan, dust it with flour as well and slash it a few times. If your oven isn't large enough (mine isn't), tie the bag closed again with the curlicue inside and set it to wait in a cool place
26. Quickly transfer the boule into the oven by sliding it off the sheet pan and onto the preheated stone (it stays on the parchment paper) 
27. Pour one cupful of warm water onto the lava stones (watch out as a lot of steam will suddenly shoot up) and close the oven door quickly
28. After five minutes, turn the oven down to 450°F/232°C and let the bread bake for about 35 more minutes
29. When ready it will sound hollow when tapped on the bottom
30. Repeat with the curlicue (except that it will bake a bit quicker, maybe 30 to 35 minutes total)
31. I find it useful to turn the oven light on and check on the breads as they bake. If I see they are turning a bit dark, I tent them with aluminum foil (taking care that the foil doesn't touch the bread). You may also need at this point to slightly lower the temperature of your oven. Ovens are like flours: they are all different. My 450° may be you 430° or vice-versa.
32. Once the bread is baked, set it to cool on a wire rack and wait for it to have cooled completely to slice it open
33. Enjoy!

The Learning Loaf is going to Susan's for the next issue of Yeastspotting.

Swedish Thin Bread

I have had a (huge) soft spot in my heart for Scandinavia ever since my beloved late mother-in-law Sigrid -who hailed from Charlottenlund near Copenhagen- introduced me years and years ago to the magic both of white summer nights and of Nordic Christmases. Juleaften (Christmas Eve) was her favorite holiday. She didn't bake or cook but she filled our house with lights and love and I will cherish these memories for as long as there'll be Christmas. So when Eva and Valter, our Swedish friends, invited us to a pre-Christmas bake party, my imagination (never idle) brought me back to these winters of long ago when I used to dream of snowy lakes and red cottages with glimmering windows and my heart immediately skipped a beat.

The thin breads are not part of the Danish tradition (at least not as I know it through Sigrid) but the elves (julenissen) very much are and the minute I stepped inside the Swedish bake house and saw these little creatures on the wall, I knew I was in the right place. Turns out, the elves were not only on the wall. They were rolling out dough, talking, laughing, snacking, tending the oven, counting seconds (it takes exactly 11 seconds to bake a thin bread in a wood-fire oven) and sipping glögg (mulled wine).

We joined right in and a few hours later, with floury aprons and much good cheer, we all emerged from the baking house with armfuls of flatbreads. These will be enjoyed with smoked salmon, lox or crab paste, cheese, jams or just plain butter all through the holiday weekend and even later since the habit is nowadays to freeze whatever isn't eaten immediately.

In the old days, families and friends met a few times a year to bake this bread, not only at Christmas time. So when the owner's family moved from northern Sweden to the Northwest, they had a brick oven built in a little house in the backyward and it became a tradition for the neighborhood Swedish immigrants (there were quite a few in the old days) to meet there and bake. The tradition has survived the generations and today the bake house is still very much in use.

The thin breads can only be made one at a time in a woodfire oven. They are never flipped, just rotated to ensure an even bake. The dough is typically mixed at home and brought to the bake house at the appointed time (families book oven time long in advance).

It is then scaled, rolled out (with lots of extra flour as it is pretty sticky), flattened into round pancake-shaped loaves, thinned out with specially grooved rolling pins, brushed to remove any flour which might still be clinging to the dough and then deftly lobbed onto the oven sole in front of the flaming wood. They are folded immediately while they are still hot. (I hung a few on my pasta drying rack to dry out completely when we got home as condensation had accumulated in the Ziploc bags. As soon as they were perfectly dry, I packaged them again).

What follows is Eva's recipe. Thank you ever so much, Eva! I used a blend of light rye and white whole wheat flour but I'd be tempted to add oat, barley or buckwheat flour next time or maybe use dark (whole) rye, just to vary the taste as the Swedes apparently like to do.

Ingredients (for 30 large thin breads):

• 2.5 liters of milk
• 19 g instant dry yeast (28 g active dry)
• 5 g baking powder
• 56 g butter
• 130 g sugar (I might skip the sugar next time and that may sound like heresy to a Swede! I'll have to ask Eva)
• 210 g syrup (I used maple but you can use any pancake syrup or a mix of molasses and syrup)
• 13.5 g salt (I will use 2% of the flour weight next time as we like our breads a tad more salty)
• 1815 g unbleached all-purpose flour
• 913 g light rye flour (or a mix of rye and whole wheat flours)
• 11 g ground fennel seeds (Eva leaves some fennel seeds whole or barely crushed)
• 11 g anise seeds

Method:

1. Mix all dry ingredients with hand or a wooden spoon
2. Warm milk, butter and syrup to 120-130°F/49-54°C
3. Mix everything together in a large shallow bowl
4. Let it rise, covered, until needed (I gave it one fold as it looked really batter-ish)
5. Divide into 30 pieces and proceed with the shaping and baking as per video above.

Printable recipe

Happy Holidays!

The Swedish Thin Bread is going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

A Convenient Dough (no-knead, 100% whole wheat)

When Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois came out last fall, it didn't even make a bleep on my radar screen. I didn't read any review or go to a bookstore to browse through it or check it out of the library. Everyone was coming out with a no-knead bread book and I just didn't have the energy to deal with one more.

Then Joanne from Eats Well With Others mentioned in one of her posts a lovely whole-wheat black-pepper dried cherries foccacia from the book and when I asked her about the recipe, she was kind enough to send it to me.

It so happens that almost at the same time, I received the book as a present. We were about to leave for our little camp by the river and I took it with me.

As I had local maple syrup at hand, the first recipe I tried making from the book was a 100% whole grain maple oatmeal bread. Neither of us liked it (a very rare occurrence when bread is concerned) and I felt even less motivated to read on. Then we had friends from France visiting for a week and I decided I would make the black-pepper cherry foccacia for "apéritif" (happy hour) during their stay.

So I mixed the dough (with a minimum amount of yeast) and let it ferment in the fridge for about 5 days. It looked supremely soupy and I had serious doubts about anything good coming out of it.

However the foccacia (which calls for soaking dried cherries, black pepper and shallots in red wine for 30 minutes) turned out to be particularly delicious. The topping is to die for and the dough was surprisingly light with a beautiful cherry wood color. Maybe because I was under the spell of the margaritas our friend had just mixed and poured, I totally forgot to take pictures but trust me! it was one stunning whole wheat foccacia.

I can't tell you about other recipes in the book as I haven't really tried any yet (although several look interesting). I was so surprised by the way the 100% whole wheat dough came out, by the fact that my family, including picky grandkids, was gobbling up the resulting pizzas and foccacias as if they were freshly baked baguettes and by how convenient it was to have them on the table in minutes that I have kept a batch of fermenting 100% whole wheat dough in the refrigerator ever since (it can be kept for as long as 7 days).Variations are endless, depending on what you have available. I thus made:

A fresh fennel-Vidalia onion foccacia with black olives and fennel seeds

A prune-hazelnut foccacia (the pitless prunes I had were a tad too dry so I soaked them in red wine for 24 hours. I toasted and peeled the hazelnuts. A few were caramelized and ground).

A potato-roasted red pepper pizza with onion, black olives, Italian sausage, basil and za'atar

A dry berries-crystallized ginger foccacia topped with poppy and pumpkin seeds (which I didn't remember to photograph after baking)

And just yesterday for the kids' breakfast a dark chocolate-marshmallow pizza that even the little ones loved

Here is the recipe for the dough.

100% Whole Wheat Dough with Olive Oil from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day

(makes enough dough for at least four 450g-foccacias or pizzas)

Ingredients:

910 g whole wheat flour (I used flour from Moulin de la Rémy)

5 g instant yeast

15 g sel

35 g vital wheat gluten

788 g lukewarm water

105 g olive oil

Method: (my version)

1. Whisk together the flour, yeast, salt and gluten in a 5-quart bowl
2. Add the liquid ingredients and mix without kneading using a spoon. You might need to use wet hands to get the last bit of flour to incorporate
3. Cover (not airtight) and allow the dough to rest at room temperature until it rises and collapses (or flattens on top), approximately 2 hours
4. Refrigerate it in a lidded container and use it over the next 7 days
5. On baking day, dust the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour and scoop out a 450g (grapefruit size) piece (despite the olive oil, these foccacias do not have a long shelf-life, so it's best to make them just the size you need) . Dust the piece with more flour and quickly shape it into a ball
6. Elongate the ball into a narrow oval (for a foccacia) or flatten it into a circle (for a pizza) and allow it to rest for 30 minutes on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and dusted with semolina flour (I don't cover the dough at this stage as it is extremely wet)
7. Preheat the oven to 400 F/204 C
8. Add the desired toppings to the dough and bake for 30 minutes or so (checking after 15 minutes and turning the bread around if necessary) (because the dough is so wet, I use no steam but the authors do, so maybe their dough is a bit drier)
9. Allow to cool on a rack

Now for the healthy claim. Honestly I don't know. This dough calls for added gluten, so it is obviously not for people suffering from celiac disease or other forms of gluten intolerance. I wouldn't want to try it without this gluten boost however as it would probably turn out like shoe leather.

But beyond that, how nutritious are whole grains when fermented with commercial yeast? From what I understand from a long exchange on the Bread Bakers' Guild of America's forum and other sources, notably Hubert Chiron's Les pains français (a major reference for French master bakers) or Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters, a long levain fermentation generates phytase, an enzyme which prevents the phytic acid naturally present in whole grains to block the absorption of calcium, magnesium and other nutrients by our bodies. Fermentation of whole grains with commercial yeast doesn't generate phytase and could conceivably lead to nutritional deficiencies if our bodies do not absorb these nutrients from other foods.

But is it the long duration of the levain process which enables the production of phytase or is it the nature of the micro-organisms involved? In other words, does a long fermentation with a minimal amount of commercial yeast (a condition the above dough undoubtedly satisfies) present the same benefit as a long fermentation with wild yeast?

Since I am neither a scientist nor a nutritionist, I don't know. So I decided not to take a chance, especially since I am feeding a flock of grandchildren who need all the calcium they can get. I mean, what's the point of feeding them yogurt, cheese, beans and greens if the bread they eat interferes with nutrient absorption? So, with them in mind, I developed this no-knead 100% whole grain pizza dough recipe which uses levain and no commercial yeast.

These flatbreads are going to Susan's Wild Yeast blog for Yeastpotting.