Sticky Fingers Yield Another Great Recipe: the Strawberry Shortcake Cupcake

On Friday I spent three hours at the car dealership waiting to have my car serviced, and I was delighted to see a single issue of Food & Wine in the waiting room. Usually they just have the Washington Post. As I flipped through the dogeared copy of the magazine, I came upon a test kitchen article entitled, "perfecting the cupcake." The article offered recipes for two different batters, three different frostings, and a long list of suggested toppings to make interesting creations like caramel-pretzel cupcakes, fluffernutter cupcakes, and rocky road cupcakes. I'm sure it was kismet. I'm supplying baked goods for an event my cousin is hosting next weekend, and a couple of weeks ago, she had specifically asked me if I had a strawberry shortcake cupcake recipe that I might be able to use. I didn't, and I wasn't able to find one. But on Friday morning, literally right there in my lap, was a recipe and a beautiful photo of a strawberry shortcake cupcake. I felt the circumstances warranted tearing out a few pages of the magazine to take with me. (Coincidentally enough, I obtained another one of my favorite cupcake recipes from a page I tore out of Food & Wine while waiting for a hair appointment a few years ago.)

The cupcake batter was slightly unusual in that it contained cornstarch, and I think the cornstarch might be responsible for a very odd quality I noticed in the batter. I made a double batch of batter, which ended up yielding 29 cupcakes that I baked one 12-cupcake pan at a time. When I scooped out the batter for the first dozen, immediately after I finished mixing the batter, the batter was extremely thin. Twenty minutes later, when I was scooping out the batter for the next dozen, the batter was considerably thicker. Twenty minutes after that, when I baked the final five cupcakes, the batter was even thicker. Accordingly, the first batch of cupcakes hardly rose at all, the second batch had nice rounded tops, and the final five had pronounced pointy peaks. Weird. If you make these cupcakes, I would advise perhaps letting the batter sit for 20 minutes or so before you bake to allow the batter to thicken a bit.

To make the frosting, I ran a 10 oz. jar of strawberry spreadable fruit through the food processor and incorporated it into a double batch of the buttercream frosting recipe. Even with all that strawberry spreadable fruit, the color was just barely pink and the strawberry flavor was not that strong. I used scalloped green flower cupcake liners thinking that they would create the illusion of a strawberry stem. It didn't exactly work out that way, but I'm still happy with the way the cupcakes turned out. The cupcake itself was nice and moist, and while the frosting was a little on the sweet side, the overall combination of the vanilla cupcake and strawberry frosting was nice. I think that adding some freeze-dried strawberries to the batter would give a nice boost of flavor to these cupcakes and might elevate them to spectacular.

Recipe: "Strawberry Shortcake Cupcakes" from Food & Wine, May 2008.

Healthy and Sweet: Oat-Whole Wheat Honey-Raisin Bread

Tom and I have quickly become addicted to cheesy bread (I've baked a few other cheesy bread loaves that haven't made it to the blog -- but in our defense, they were all shared with friends!), and I knew I really needed to start baking some healthier bread options. I found a tasty looking recipe in Nancy Baggett's Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads, for "Everyday Oatmeal Honey-Raisin Bread." Chock full of rolled oats and raisins and sweetened with honey, this bread seemed like it would be hearty and relatively nutritious. Baggett also offers a whole wheat variation of the recipe that is approximately two-thirds white flour and one-third whole wheat flour. Even healthier!

I used King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour, which is whole grain, but lighter, finer, and milder than ordinary whole wheat flour. The final ingredient list included white flour, wheat flour, rolled oats, cinnamon, salt, yeast, honey, vegetable oil, ice water, and raisins. Everything except the raisins is stirred together in a bowl to make the dough. After the first rise, you stir in the raisins, and put the dough in a well-greased 9- by 5-inch loaf pan for the second rise. Right before you put the loaf in the oven, you sprinkle it with a mixture of cinnamon and granulated sugar.

The top of the loaf ended up quite dark and slightly burnt at the corners, but it was nicely rounded and otherwise fairly attractive. Baggett advises that the loaf must be completely cool before slicing, which took a few hours. Cutting the loaf was a very messy proposition -- there was cinnamon and sugar falling off from the top of the loaf and scattering everywhere. The cut slices had the tan color of whole grain, with lots of raisins. The oats were undetectable. The texture was dense, but not unpleasantly so. And the taste? Lightly sweet, hearty, flavorful, delicious! I think this would be great toasted with a little butter. Baggett also suggests that the bread makes an unusual peanut butter sandwich. Hopefully this loaf will keep us occupied and off the cheesy bread for a while!

Recipe: "Everyday Oatmeal Honey-Raisin Bread (Oat-Whole Wheat Honey-Raisin Bread variation)" from Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads by Nancy Baggett.

The Best Topping Isn't Always on Top: Buttermilk-Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake

While Tom was watching the NFC championship game on Sunday night and screaming at the TV (having grown up in Wisconsin as a Packers fan, Tom has a strong sentimental attachment to Brett Favre), I was flipping through cookbooks looking for a new recipe using buttermilk. I had an open quart in the fridge after making a red velvet cake and some corn-cherry scones last week. I settled on "Buttermilk-Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake" from Lisa Yockelson's Chocolate Chocolate.

This recipe is a tender buttermilk cake (all-purpose flour, cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, miniature chocolate chips, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and buttermilk) that is sprinkled with a butter crumb topping (flour, sugar, brown sugar, salt, cold butter, and vanilla) before baking. Yockelson describes the topping as "a mixture of butter-bound flour and sugar, with a little vanilla extract added as a fragrant seasoning." The recipe makes a lot of topping, enough to generously cover the entire surface of the cake. The final steps in the recipe are to sprinkle the hot cake with more miniature chocolate chips right after it comes out of the oven, and then dust the cake with powdered sugar after it's fully cooled.

I was very surprised by the way this cake turned out. The surprise was that a significant portion of the topping sank into the cake and migrated randomly throughout it. I'm not sure if this was supposed to happen, because Yockelson doesn't mention this phenomenon anywhere in the recipe, and in the picture of the cake in the cookbook, it appears that all of the topping stayed right on top. But in the pictures of my cake above (these are actually the front and side view of the same piece of cake), you can see the tan topping running throughout the entire cake. Intended or not, this was the best feature of the cake! Every bite of cake was permeated with the sweet topping's delightfully crunchy texture.

A minor annoyance with this cake is that the chocolate chips sprinkled on after the cake is done baking don't really adhere and there were quite a few loose chips rolling around as I was trying the cut the cake. I wonder what would happen if you sprinkled on the chips before baking -- if they would also get sucked down into the cake. I might give it a try the next time I make this cake, because I'd love to make this tasty treat again!

Recipe: "Buttermilk-Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake," from Chocolate Chocolate by Lisa Yockelson.

Mother Nature's Sweetest Gift of Winter: Grapefruit Cake

I have some fairly predictable shopping habits whenever I visit my parents in Los Angeles. My routine stops include Surfas restaurant supply, the Westfield Topanga mall, Gelson's supermarket, the Old Town Calabasas Farmer's Market, and Mitsuwa Japanese grocery. If I happen to be visiting between the months of December and March, I also make a point of getting a hold of as many Oroblanco grapefruits as I can possibly cram into my suitcase.

The Oroblanco (the name means "white gold" in Spanish) is an amazing gem of a white-fleshed fruit that is almost inconceivably sweet, with none of the tartness typical of grapefruit. I can't stand to eat other varieties of grapefruit without a liberal coating of sugar, but I can happily pop plain Oroblanco segments like candy. The thick-skinned cross between a white grapefruit and a pummelo was developed at the University of California 50 years ago and patented in 1981. Besides being sweet and juicy, the Oroblanco has the delighful quality of being very easy to segment.

Unfortunately, while Oroblancos are plentiful in Los Angeles, they are fairly difficult to find here in D.C. Domestically, they are cultivated only on the west coast and have a short window of availability in the winter. On occasion I've resorted to having my mother mail grapefruits to me, but this quickly becomes a prohibitively expensive proposition. In past years I have been able to purchase Oroblancos at Harris Teeter for $2.99 each, but I can no longer find them there. The only place I've been able to find Oroblancos lately in the D.C. area is Asian grocery stores, and even that is fairly hit and miss. Last weekend I went to Kam Sam grocery in Rockville, and when I saw they had a plentiful supply of Oroblancos, I purchased 23 pounds of them. That's actually a completely reasonable quantity for me to have on hand. I eat one or two daily and the grapefruits keep well in the refrigerator for weeks.

Having an ample supply of Oroblancos gave me the perfect excuse to try a recipe I've been holding onto for a while, Brown Derby Grapefruit Cake. The Brown Derby is a now-defunct Hollywood restaurant, and the Los Angeles Times printed the recipe for the Derby's well-known grapefruit cake in its Culinary SOS Column. The recipe is included in Dear S.O.S.: Dessert Recipe Requests to the Los Angeles Times and is also available online here (on pages 4 and 5 of the article). The recipe is not written for Oroblancos, but I figured that anything that is good with regular grapefruits has got to be positively spectacular with Oroblancos.

The cake is flavored with lemon zest and grapefruit juice. It contains no butter, includes only 1/4 cup of oil, and is leavened with baking powder and whipped egg whites. The cream cheese frosting is flavored with lemon zest, lemon juice, and grapefruit juice. There is segmented grapefruit both between the cake layers and on top of the cake. I ended up using three entire grapefruits -- one between the layers and two to garnish the top.

The cake itself had a nice light lemon flavor, but I felt it was a bit dry. The grapefruit segments and the frosting helped add needed moisture to the cake, but there was one huge problem with this recipe. It didn't make anywhere near enough frosting. The frosting recipe only calls for 6 oz. of cream cheese, 3/4 cup powdered sugar, citrus juice, and lemon zest. In contrast, when I frost a two-layer red velvet cake of the same size, I mix up a frosting recipe of 12 oz. cream cheese, 2 cups powdered sugar and 2/3 cup butter, which yields the perfect amount to fill and frost a 9-inch cake. You can see in the pictures above that the frosting layer was so thin that you could see right through it, and you can barely see any frosting in between the layers. In the future, I would make a double or triple recipe of the frosting to make sure I could adequately cover and fill the cake.

Oh, and and if you try this recipe, I strongly recommend you use a piece of parchment paper on the bottom of your pan. The recipe specifies use of an ungreased cake pan, but the cake sticks! I understand that not greasing the sides of the pan probably helps the cake rise a little higher, but I don't see any reason why you shouldn't grease and/or use parchment on the bottom.

All in all, this was pretty tasty, but it wasn't quite as good as I had hoped. I think my expectations were sky high, considering how much I love Oroblancos. But to be honest, a plain Oroblanco grapefruit makes for an equally good dessert all on its own!

Recipe: "Brown Derby Grapefruit Cake" from Dear S.O.S.: Dessert Recipe Requests to the Los Angeles Times; also available in the Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1989.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Restaurant Eve Birthday Cake

This year, my friend Dorothy again requested a Restaurant Eve Birthday Cake for her birthday. When I was trying to decide what color to make the frosting, I definitely wanted to avoid repeating last year's pink frosting overload. I decided a little burst of sunshine yellow would be a nice for a gloomy winter's day. I also tried out an orange border on the top but didn't like the way it looked. Instead of scraping it off, I left it and just piped green frosting around it. I knew Dorothy wouldn't care and it added a little bit of visual interest (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!)


Recipe: Restaurant Eve's Cake from the Washington Post, April 23, 2006.

Previous Posts:

• "Alexander's Birthday Party, " September 21, 2008.
• "Inaugural Bakextravaganza Part III: Cute Little Cakes," January 24, 2009.
  

Get'em While They're Hot: Corn-Cherry Scones

Lately I've been spending a lot of time online browsing the Los Angeles Times food section; there are just so many wonderful recipes to be found in the archives and I never get tired of the site. I recently came across a Culinary SOS column from 2004 that I somehow missed when it was first published. A reader requested the recipe for the corn-cherry scones from the Cheeseboard Collective in Berkeley. Never mind that I've never been to the Cheeseboard Collective or tasted these scones before. They sounded delicious and I knew I had to give the recipe a try.

Unlike most of the scone recipes that I make regularly, these scones do not include any heavy cream. The ingredients are flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, sugar, cornmeal, cold butter, dried cherries, and buttermilk. Normally I like to shape my scones into wedges, but this batter was quite loose and I could see that I was going to have some difficulty trying to shape these. Instead, I used a #16 ice cream scoop to portion out the dough, and I ended up with 19 round scones.

Tom and I tried a scone shortly after it came out of the oven, while it was still warm. It was really, really delicious. It was tender and light, with a very interesting crunchy texture from the stone ground cornmeal that I used. The corn flavor was quite pronounced and a nice change of pace from the fruity and chocolate scones that I usually make.

The next morning, I took the remaining scones to work. When I tasted one, I was disappointed to discover that the texture was no longer tender, which reduced the tastiness quotient of the scone considerably. Apparently the twelve hours the scones spent on the kitchen counter overnight was long enough for them to become stale. The toughened texture probably could have been remedied if I had rewarmed my scone in a toaster oven or microwave before eating it. Still, in the future, I will be sure to only make these scones when I can serve them freshly made.

Recipe: "Corn-Cherry Scones," from the Los Angeles Times Culinary SOS Column, January 21, 2004. Also available in The Cheese Board Collective Works: Bread, Pastry, Cheese, Pizza.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes, Take II

More than a week ago, I mixed up my first batch of the master boule dough recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: the Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. I thought the results were a little disappointing. While I certainly admit fault for the loaf being way too salty, the crust and crumb left a lot of room for improvement.

I baked that first suboptimal loaf a mere 24 hours after making the dough. I was hopeful that the dough would improve with time, so last night I baked another loaf from the very same batch of dough. This time, ten days had passed since I made the dough. I also decided to bake the bread in a dutch oven (instead of on a baking stone as I did with the previous loaf, as is recommended by the authors), since I wanted the bread to bake in a steamier environment to hopefully create a better crust.

I took the dough from the fridge, shaped it, let it rise for about 90 minutes, and then put it in a preheated Le Creuset dutch oven. I baked the loaf for 30 minutes with the lid on, and another 10 minutes with the lid off to give the bread some color. The end result was very different from that first loaf I baked last week. This time, the bread had the very thick chewy crust that one expects with an artisan loaf. In addition, the crumb was significantly improved. Last night's loaf had larger air bubbles of varying size, as opposed to the one from last week, which looked fairly uniform, more like sandwich bread. I'm not sure how much of the improvement in this loaf can be credited to the extra week the dough spent in the fridge, and how much is due to baking the bread in the dutch oven. Regardless, I'm definitely going to stick with the dutch oven from now on. It's just easier.

This loaf was, of course, still too salty. I still can't tell what the flavor of the loaf would be like without the salt -- it might be flavorless, or it might be really tasty. I mixed up a new batch of dough (with less salt!), and put it in the same plastic container with the leftover dough from the last batch. Mixing in the old dough should help accelerate the flavor development in the new dough. I'm going to wait a few days before baking another loaf, and hopefully this time I'll get both the texture and the flavor right!

Recipe: "Master Recipe: Boule" from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: the Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.

Previous Post: "Bread in Five Minutes a Day?," January 9, 2010.

Ipso Fatto Photo Essay: Cheesy Bread!

This morning I baked another loaf of cheesy bread to take to a co-worker who is at home recovering from surgery after an accident. I actually have no idea how the loaf tasted, since I took her the whole loaf and didn't taste it beforehand. But I used the opportunity to take some pictures along the way to show you how the bread develops from start to finish.

In the first picture below (click on any of the pictures to see a larger version), the photo on the left side shows the bread dough immediately after I mixed it together. The only ingredients are flour, Asiago cheese, yeast, black pepper, salt, and water. I just stirred the ingredients together with a rubber spatula until the dough came together in a ball. I covered the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and left it on the kitchen counter overnight. Sixteen hours later, the dough had risen into the soft bubbly mass pictured on the right.

After the first rise, I used a dough scraper to get the dough out of the bowl and I shaped the dough into a ball. I put the ball on a piece of oiled parchment paper inside a skillet (this technique is taken from the Cook's Illustrated method for almost no-knead bread; Lahey directs you to put the dough on a dishtowel instead). The dough deflated during this step and the picture on the left below shows what it looked like when I first put it on the parchment paper. As you can see, quite a few cubes of Asiago were stuck on the outside. After two hours of rising at room temperature, the dough had increased quite a bit in size. The picture on the right shows what the dough looked like right before I dropped it into a preheated dutch oven to bake.

So, after half an hour of baking in a covered dutch oven, and another 30 minutes of baking with the lid off, I got the golden brown crusty loaf with bubbled cheese that you see below. It smelled just heavenly while it was baking, and the lovely aroma lingered in our kitchen for hours.

Recipe: "Pane con Formaggio" from My Bread: the Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey.

Previous Post: "We're Crackers for Cheesy Bread! Pane con Formaggio," January 12, 2010.

A Bit of Sunshine from the Los Angeles Times Vault: Double-Lemon Cake

I was positively ecstatic last month when I noticed a great feature in the online version of the Los Angeles Times food section. The Times was "opening the vault" of their recipe archives and publishing lists of the top ten recipes from each of the past 25 years. They started the countdown shortly before Christmas, beginning with recipes from 1985 and working forward. They've finally reached 2009, and you can see the entire 25 years worth of vault recipes here.

I look forward to reading the LA Times food section every Wednesday and I've had great luck with almost every recipe I've tried from the paper. In fact, many of the recipes I've already featured on this blog are included on the vault list, including Milk's Ooey Gooey Cookies (2009), Midnight Chocolate Brownie Bites (2008), Brown Sugar Pound Cake with Caramel Glaze (2007), and Keswick Hall Pistachio Madeleines (1999). So I eagerly looked through all of the vault recipes and amassed a collection of quite a few that I intend to try. To start with, I decided to try the Double-Lemon Cake (scroll down toward the bottom of the page for the recipe) from 2004. Like much of the country, we've been having a long, cold winter here in Washington, D.C. Lemon is such a sunny and bright flavor that I figured a lemon cake would be the perfect pick-me-up for a gray winter day.

This cake was not at all difficult to put together; the bulk of the preparation time for me was in zesting and juicing the lemons. The finished cake was very pretty and had a lovely and intense bright lemon flavor (there is lemon juice and zest in both the cake and the glaze). The crumb was firm and fairly dense, and my favorite part of the cake was the top crust, which had a great texture and the most lemon flavor (most of the glaze that was brushed on ended up concentrated at the top of the cake). This cake was a perfect little ray of sunshine for a cold winter's day. I can't wait to try out more recipes from the vault!

Recipe: "Double Lemon Cake" from the Los Angeles Times Best of 2004.

We're Crackers for Cheesy Bread! Pane con Formaggio

Last week Tom was thoughtful enough to surprise me with a copy of My Bread: the Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey. Lahey, of course, is the baker who supplied Mark Bittman from the New York Times with the no-knead bread recipe he developed at Sullivan Street Bakery in New York. Bittman's article on Lahey's technique and the accompanying recipe published in the Times triggered widespread interest in no-knead breads.

When I flipped through the book and tried to decide which recipe I wanted to try first, I quickly decided on "Pane con Formaggio," or cheese bread. The reason for my selection was simple. I bought quite a bit of Asiago cheese last month with the intention of serving it at our holiday party. But with all of the other food we were serving, the cheese somehow fell through the cracks and it never even left the refrigerator. Lahey suggests using pecorino, Asiago, or aged Fontina for his cheese bread recipe, so it was the perfect excuse for using up some of our extra cheese.

The ingredients for this bread are bread flour, cheese, salt, yeast, black pepper, and water. There is quite a bit of cheese in the recipe: the cheese is cut into half-inch cubes and there is a 1:2 ratio by weight of cheese to flour. Cheese cubes were protruding and clearly visible on the top surface of the bread during the first and second rises. The recipe instructs you to bake the loaf in a dutch oven for 30 minutes with the lid on, and another 15-30 minutes with the lid off, until the bread is a deep chestnut color but not burnt. There is a picture in the book accompanying the recipe showing a loaf that is indeed deep chestnut, or what most of us might call burnt looking. I took mine out after a total of 45 minutes of baking, when it was still (relatively speaking) pretty light-colored. Even though Lahey does not provide a target temperature for the interior of the bread, I spot-checked it with an instant read thermometer. When I saw that it was at 217 degrees, I figured the bread should be done, even though it wasn't nearly as dark as the loaf in the cookbook picture.

At first, I was dismayed at how ugly this loaf was. It did not rise evenly and was fairly lopsided. Even more distracting were the crust's craggy texture and its mottled color scheme due to the cheese bits that had been on the surface during baking. It looked like a hot mess.

Tom and I waited for the loaf to fully cool, and I carefully sliced it open. The first thing I noticed was an amazing crackle to the crust as I sliced through it with a knife. The crumb looked good, and you could see little puddles of melted cheese inside. Tom tried a piece first. After he took a bite, all I heard was chewing, followed by lip-smacking and sounds of gustatory delight. I swear, it actually sounded a little like the "ohm nom nom" sound that Cookie Monster makes. I tried a piece and I understood what the fuss was all about -- this bread was freakin' delicious.

I happen to really love Asiago cheese, so I wasn't all that surprised to like bread with Asiago cheese baked inside. But this bread had just the perfect amount of cheese in every bite, which was wonderfully accented by the black pepper. The most amazing thing about it was definitely the crust. The crackly chewy crust with bits of browned and bubbled cheese was intensely flavorful and had an extraordinary texture. If you've ever had an Asiago cheese bagel with the browned cheese on top, it's somewhat like that, except a whole hell of a lot better.

One of my many silly habits is that whenever I talk about cheese, I often do a little imitation of Wallace from Wallace and Gromit. Wallace is an inventor who loves cheese above all else and who unabashedly declares, "I'm just crackers about cheese!" Well, Tom and I are just crackers about this cheesy bread (even though calling it "cheesy bread" makes it sound like something that should be delivered from Domino's). We ate the entire loaf in a day and could not stop talking about how tasty it was.

Recipe: Pane con Formaggio" from My Bread: the Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey.

Previous Posts:

• "The Best Use I've Ever Found For a Bottle of Beer: the Crusty Seeded Pale Ale Boule," January 10, 2010.
• "Bread in Five Minutes a Day?," January 9, 2010.
• "More Yeasted Breads: Whole Wheat Loaves," January 4, 2010.
• "2010: The Year of Yeasted Breads?," January 3, 2010.
  

The Best Use I've Ever Found For a Bottle of Beer: the Crusty Seeded Pale Ale Pot Boule

Continuing my march through the world of no-knead breads, I tried my first recipe from Nancy Baggett's Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads. I was very excited to get this book, because I have two of Nancy Baggett's other books (The All-American Cookie Book and The All-American Dessert Book), and I like both of them quite a bit.

I don't drink beer and I actually hate the taste of the stuff, but I still wanted to try out the recipe for "Crusty Seeded Pale Ale Pot Boule." Baggett describes this particular loaf as having a "hearty flavor, faint bitterness, and the same light yeasty aroma that always seems to hover in brewpubs." The dough was a snap to make. You combine flour, sugar, salt, and yeast, and then vigorously stir in ice water and an entire 12-oz. bottle of chilled ale. In the Kitchenaid stand mixer, this requires no effort at all. For timing convenience, Baggett's recipes have an optional extended rise step where you can leave your dough in the refrigerator for several hours after it is first made, during which the yeast fermentation process is slowed. I mixed this dough on Saturday morning and kept it in the refrigerator until the early evening. Then I left the dough out at room temperature overnight for the specified 12-18 hour first rise.

On Sunday morning, for the second rise, I transferred the dough to a piece of parchment paper (the recipe doesn't call for parchment, but I really like this technique from the Cook's Illustrated method for almost no-knead bread, which makes it so much easier to transfer the dough into a hot dutch oven without deflating it). When I was ready to bake two hours later, I brushed the top of the dough with water, covered it liberally with sesame seeds, and then picked up the parchment paper to transfer the parchment and dough together into the preheated dutch oven. After 55 minutes of baking with the lid on, I pulled out the dutch oven and lifted the lid to find a beautifully domed, perfectly risen, dark-crusted loaf.

I put the loaf back into the oven uncovered for another 25 minutes, until the interior reached 210 degrees, the temperature specified in the recipe. After the bread cooled and I cut into the loaf, it looked gorgeous. I used a 3.5 quart Le Creuset dutch oven (the size specified in the recipe) and the loaf filled the pot edge to edge, so the loaf had about a 8.5-inch diameter. The sesame seeds were toasted golden brown and the color of the crumb was a very light tan. Best of all, this bread tasted amazing. The loaf had a very hearty and complex flavor that was slightly ale-like without being overpowering. I really enjoyed eating this bread plain.

This is definitely my favorite loaf of bread so far. I was thinking about sharing some of the bread with our neighbors or maybe taking some of the office tomorrow, but it's so tasty that I think we're going to have to keep this bread for ourselves!

Recipe: "Crusty Seeded Pale Ale Pot Boule" from Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads by Nancy Baggett.

Previous Posts:

• "Bread in Five Minutes a Day?," January 9, 2010.
  
• "More Yeasted Breads: Whole Wheat Loaves," January 4, 2010.
• "2010: The Year of Yeasted Breads?," January 3, 2010.
  

Bread in Five Minutes a Day?

I'm really having fun trying out more no-knead yeasted breads. I've picked up a few more books on the subject and I'm looking forward to trying them all out!

The first book I decided to try was Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: the Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking. This book by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois presents an innovative method of baking bread. You mix together the ingredients, let the resulting dough rise at room temperature for a couple of hours, and then move the dough into the fridge, where you can keep it for a couple of weeks. When you want to bake bread, you cut off a portion of dough (each recipe is designed to produce several loaves), shape it, let it rise for another hour or so, and bake it. While there is a lot of waiting time, there is hardly any active time involved.

I tried the basic master recipe, which only has four ingredients: water, yeast, salt, and white flour. It really did take only a couple of minutes to measure out the ingredients, mix them together in my stand mixer, and transfer the dough to a large plastic container to rise. The dough rose considerably (to about four time its original volume) after two hours at room temperature. After a night in the refrigerator, the dough had deflated to about half of its peak size. When I was ready to bake, the dough was extremely sticky and difficult to handle, but with a little extra flour, I was able to shape it into a round loaf and left it to rise at room temperature for about an hour. Most of the recipes in the book are baked on a baking stone (as opposed to in a covered dutch oven, like the Mark Bittman and Cook's Illustrated no-knead recipes), so the recipe instructs you to pour some water onto a preheated broiler pan to create steam. After about 35 minutes, I got a nice looking loaf.

This loaf looked just lovely inside and out, and the crust had a nice chewy texture. However, I was really disappointed with the taste. It was way too salty (my fault -- I used fine-grained salt instead of the coarse salt called for in the recipe and I didn't scale down the amount) and aside from being salty, was essentially flavorless (well, perhaps the salt was just drowning out any other flavors). It still tasted fine with jam and the such, but I wouldn't serve it plain. Apparently the flavor of this bread is supposed to develop over the time the dough spends in the refrigerator. I still have dough left over from this batch in the fridge and I will try baking it in a few days to see if the flavor is any different. I also want to try baking bread from this recipe in a dutch oven, since a broiler pan with water is not a very easy or effective way to create steam in the oven, and the steam is an important component to creating a chewy crust.

If you buy this book, be aware of the fact that the first printing contains quite a few errors. (I bought the book from Amazon.com last week and received a 2007 first printing, even though there have been subsequent printings.) You can find a list of corrections here, from the authors' blog. I also don't like the fact that the recipes in the book use only volume measurements instead of weights, which are both more accurate and easier to deal with (well, if you own a scale). I also wish the recipe would provide an ideal internal temperature for the finished bread, because otherwise it really is just a guessing game to see if the outside crust looks like it's the right color. My loaf probably could have used some more time in the oven, but who knows? Even though I wasn't completely satisfied with the results from this loaf, I'm definitely going to keep trying to improve on it and try other recipes from the book. The method is so easy that I don't have anything to lose!

Recipe: "Master Recipe: Boule" from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: the Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.

Previous Posts:

• "More Yeasted Breads: Whole Wheat Loaves," January 4, 2010.
• "2010: The Year of Yeasted Breads?," January 3, 2010.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photos: Giant Chocolate-Toffee Cookies

Recipe: Giant Chocolate-Toffee Cookies from epicurious.com.
Previous Post: "A Cookie For the Road," June 22, 2008.

More Yeasted Breads: Whole Wheat Loaves

I was so pleased to finally produce a successful loaf of (almost) no-knead bread on new year's day that I decided to make another loaf during the weekend. I picked up a bag of King Arthur whole wheat flour at the grocery store on Saturday and I decided to make the wheat version of the Cook's Illustrated almost no-knead recipe. The wheat recipe is not 100% whole grain, but is one-third whole wheat flour and two-thirds white flour. The recipe also calls for a couple tablespoons of honey. The bread baking gods were smiling on me again, because I was able to produce a beautiful, tasty loaf with an amazing crust. You could definitely tell by the bread's taste and the color of the interior that this loaf included whole wheat flour, and it was particularly delicious with cherry preserves. Yum!

As I was opening up the new bag of whole wheat flour to mix up the almost no-knead dough, I couldn't help noticing a recipe printed on the back of the flour bag: No-Knead 100% Whole Wheat Bread. It was so easy (put all of the ingredients in a bowl, mix at high speed for three minutes, let rise in a loaf pan for 90 minutes, bake) that I simply couldn't resist making a loaf of that as well. The recipe is supposed to be made in a 8 1/2-inch by 4 1/2-inch loaf pan, but my pans are slightly larger. As noted on the King Arthur Bakers' Banter blog entry on this recipe, the bread will not rise as high when baked in a larger pan.

I was a little skeptical when I scraped the messy pile of dough from the mixing bowl into the greased loaf pan to rise, because it just looked like a mess. After 90 minutes in the pan, the dough had risen significantly, but still looked horrible (unlike the pictures on the KA blog, my loaf had not smoothed out after rising). The version of the recipe printed on the flour bag says to bake the loaf for 30-35 minutes, until the bread has an internal temperature of 195 degrees. I checked the bread at 30 minutes and the internal temperature was only 137. I inserted a digital instant read thermometer with an alarm and let the bread bake until it reached 195 -- which took a total of 45 minutes. I wish I had read the online version of the recipe, which clearly (and correctly) states that you need to bake this bread for 40-45 minutes to reach 195.

This loaf looked pretty good, although I have to say that the taste was pretty blah. Tom called it hippie bread -- it tasted healthy and the flavor was completely flat. You can definitely tell that this bread is made from 100% whole grain, because it's dense. I think this bread is fine to use as a delivery system for dips or jam or peanut butter, but by itself, it's pretty bland and boring. I'm guessing that at the texture would be improved if I used King Arthur's white whole wheat flour instead. However, I'm still going to put this one in the win column, because you just can't expect something fluffy and light with 100% whole grain. It was yeasted bread, it looked nice, and I made it. That's good enough for a beginning bread baker like me... At least for now!

Recipes:

• "Almost No-Knead Bread" from the January/February 2008 issue of Cook's Illustrated.
• "No-Knead 100% Whole Grain Bread" from King Arthur Flour.

Previous Posts:

• "2010: The Year of Yeasted Breads?," January 3, 2010.
• "The Third Time's the Charm, Sort Of," August 10, 2010.
  

2010: The Year of Yeasted Breads?

Happy New Year, everyone!

One new year's day, Tom and I offered to make dinner and take it over to some friends. Tom decided to make a lasagna and I told him that I would take responsibility for the rest of the meal. For some reason I decided to make another attempt at no-knead bread. If you follow this blog, you know that I almost never bake yeasted breads, because I suck at making them. But hope springs eternal, so I tried the Cook's Illustrated almost no-knead recipe one more time.

The Cook's Illustrated recipe is a variation on the highly-publicized no-knead recipe developed by Jim Lahey and popularized by Mark Bittman in the New York Times. It attempts to improve on the Lahey-Bittman recipe by: 1) using significantly less water to create dough that is easier to handle, 2) including beer and white vinegar to produce a more complex flavor, 3) kneading the dough for 10-15 seconds after the first rise, and 4) putting the bread on a piece of parchment paper for the second rise so that you can pick up the parchment and drop the parchment and dough together into the preheated dutch oven without having the dough deflate. Kneading the bread for 10-15 seconds is necessary to achieve a desirable texture with this lower-hydration recipe, and this step gives the recipe its "almost no-knead" name.

I tried the recipe exactly as written (using King Arthur bread flour instead of all-purpose flour, since that's what I had on hand), and was absolutely thrilled to achieve a fairly attractive, tasty loaf. Although the crust was almost alarmingly dark (see picture at the beginning of this post), it wasn't burned at all.

The texture was just a little rubbery, but the flavor was nice and bready, the crumb was nice, and the crust was wonderfully chewy. I served the bread as an appetizer along with some homemade muhammara spread, which is my current favorite. There is definitely room for improvement with the bread, but I was completely satisfied with the result, especially in light of my past failures.

For dessert, I made a bread pudding using a recipe a friend raved about from Home Cooking with Charlie Trotter. I purchased an Italian loaf of bread from Whole Foods, cubed it, and let the bread dry for a day before I made the bread pudding. The recipe is incredibly decadent. It calls for 6 cups of cubed bread, 3 cups of heavy cream, and 3 eggs plus 3 egg yolks. Cinnamon, sugar, cranberries, and walnuts round out the ingredient list. The bread pudding is baked in a 9-inch by 9-inch pan, in a waterbath. The pudding is accompanied by a vanilla anglaise sauce made with another cup of heavy cream, two egg yolks, vanilla and sugar.

I liked the bread pudding, but I wasn't thrilled with it. It was rich and custardy, but just not all that different from other bread puddings I've had in the past. I think part of the problem was that I baked it at our house, and then immediately packed it up hot to take over to our friends' house for dinner. There, the bread pudding sat at room temperature while we chatted for a while and enjoyed the other courses of the meal. I re-warmed the bread pudding in the oven for a bit while I made the vanilla anglaise, but I think that the dish really lost something sitting out at room temperature for a few hours. I expect that it would be much better fresh out of the oven.

Although the bread pudding was a little disappointing, I was so pleased with the passability of my yeasted loaf that I decided that I'm going to keep baking yeasted loaves. I'm excited to see what bread goodies this next year brings!

Recipes:

• "Almost No-Knead Bread" from the January/February 2008 issue of Cook's Illustrated.
  
• "Cinnamon-Cranberry Bread Pudding with Vanilla Anglaise" from Home Cooking with Charlie Trotter by Charlie Trotter.

Previous Post: "The Third Time's the Charm, Sort Of," August 10, 2008.