I'm quite happy to have some Scottish ancestry. It's led me to the dry and delicious world of scones, the simplicity of shortbread, the warm and satisfying bite of Scotch, and the utter tastiness of haggis. Now, it's led me to warm and tasty baps.
Scottish baps are simply bread rolls made with yeast. They must be kneaded and allowed to rise a few times before being flattened, left to raise again, and then pinched to keep them from rounding out while baking. They only need to be baked for 20-30 minutes, and they're the perfect sort of bread for beginner bakers. The recipe is incredibly easy, it familiarizes you with kneading and rising, and it is hard to mess up. The flavor of a bap is simple, yet rewarding. It tastes much like a freshly made biscuit while having the texture of a well-worked piece of bread. The outside is wonderfully crisp while the inside is soft, airy, and just waiting for a slab of butter.
There's really no limit to the foods that can be slid inside a bap, and Wise Geek notes that regional favorites include bacon batties (bacon, butter, and a brown sauce), baps served alongside Lincolnshire sausages, and fritter rolls that pile potato fritters inside.
There's one food preference that I could not understand -- dedication to all things crustless. It just never made sense to me -- how could anyone give up the flavorful crust, whether it be crunchy with fresh bread, or brown and thin on that ol' soft white bread?
While other kids requested crustless sandwiches, I would insist that they stay on -- not only that, but I'd prefer my sandwiches be made with the crusty ends, or with baguettes that would give me a whole sandwich of brown crunch. Perhaps this is because my family had a thing for bread beyond that preservative-laden soft stuff. Perhaps it's due my father's love of all things crisp and crunchy. Whatever the case, to this day, I'll grab the end piece off every loaf of bread I buy, to enjoy it at its freshest. It's that good.
And it's not just breads. No matter how many times I see it, I can't believe it when people indulge in pizzas and leave the crust. The thought of one of those center pieces of crustless, square pizza ... it's such a waste and just not the same. But what say you? Weigh in below!
Writing in Slate, Jewish food maven Joan Nathan ponders the bagel, that thick steering wheel of boiled dough that's such a cultural touchstone for American Jews. Now, a new book, The Bagel: A Cultural History delves into the subject, sussing out the bagel's ancient roots and exposing amusing details of the bagel's role in 20th century life.
Apparently, breads with holes have been around for centuries. Italians had hard crackers called taralli, Romans had something called buccellatum and the Chinese something called girde. Egyptians, Nathan adds, had their own - you can see the doughnut-shaped rolls in hieroglyphic displays at the Louvre. Polish Jews may have invented the modern bagel, when the Polish king first allowed Jews to begin commercial baking (they had previously been banned) and a baker made a round bread in his honor. Bagels found their way to the Lower East Side by the 19th century, and they burst into the non-Jewish American consciousness in the 1950s, when Lender's frozen bagels were invented. Today you can get them in Dunkin' Donuts stores from Albuquerque to Bangor.
Because Thanksgiving dinner often features so many heavy foods, too many households pass up the opportunity to serve up a delicious and festive bread with the meal. Check out these autumn-inspired breads that will fill your Thanksgiving kitchen with a yummy aroma and please guests of all ages and tastes.
1. Cranberry Walnut Braid from Epicurious. I made this yesterday, and was thrilled by how beautiful it looked and wonderfully seasonal it tasted.
The above is one of the most insane things I've ever seen, and not because of the hugely enthusiastic Japanese voiceover. This is a clip showing you how to make bread with a rice cooker. Why would you want to use a rice cooker? Ease? Speed? If you guessed either, you'd be wrong.
I guess that these guys never heard of no-knead bread, and find bread machines to be too easy. To make this bread, you have to do all the required kneading yourself, along with the waiting and punching. But unlike regular loaves, which get thrown in the oven and simply baked after all those steps, you have to turn this bread a number of times while it cooks in the rice cooker. So basically, it's bread with extra hassle.
I guess, at the very least, it'd come in handy for someone who has a rice cooker, but not a oven, toaster oven, or bread machine.
Still, I think I'll stick with the tasty, and easier, no-knead varieties.
The magic of wheat flour is its ability to produce leavened bread. Wheat is the only grain that can do that because it is the only grain that can make gluten, the three-dimensional protein structure that can stretch and expand and hold air, then set when baked into glorious bread.
That stretchiness and ability to expand both have a name. Elasticity, the stretchiness, is the tendency for the dough to want to shrink back into its previous shape. It's like a rubber band: after you stretch it out the band snaps back into place. The ability to expand is called extensibility. The dough becomes more extensible, it will expand, as the gluten structure is allowed to relax.
The give and take between elasticity and extensibility is what makes yeast raised bread what it is. It is able to be worked into desirable shapes and to expand with the gas inside of it. Because of the elastic element, bread dough has to be rested several times during the process to allow it to be more extensible, but you don't want to get rid of either aspect. Without elasticity, the dough would simply be a slack mess, unable to hold it's shape. The two elements work together to form the bread that we've depended on for a good chunk of human history.
Have you ever taken note of the bread you're served at restaurants in the pre-meal bread basket? I suspect that unless you're a bread snob, the answer is no. As a self proclaimed breadie, I actually have had conversations about the bread at restaurants with other bread lovers. Some of my bread friends refuse to eat bread out, just like I had friends in art school who would cover the bad art in hotel rooms so as not to be exposed to the negative vibes.
However, I haven't met anyone who would bring their own bread to nibble on. According to the Guardian, that's exactly what bread scholar Steven Laurence Kaplan does. He even brings his own bread to very high end places in France, the bread capital of the world, because he says that even in France bread is an afterthought in restaurants.
I have had good bread in one restaurant, but that place is directly across the street from the best bakery in town. I agree that bread is usually an afterthought in dining establishments, but would you, or should you, bring your own? Take the poll below to throw in your own two cents.
Attention all people-who-would-really-love-to-make-bread-but-just-can't-find-the-time: The New York Time's Mark Bittman, AKA "The Minimalist" has figured out how to make no-knead bread even easier. Just add more yeast.
Bittman, who made no-knead bread inventor Jim Lahey a foodie household name when he first published his recipes two years ago, knows that Lahey himself wouldn't approve. Lahey thinks bread is best fermented slowly with just a small amount of yeast. But while Bittman's may not taste quite as good (which he freely admits), it only takes four and a half hours to rise. So basically you could mix the dough in the afternoon before a dinner party and have fresh hot bread to pass around the table with your beef tenderloin and roasted new potatoes.
All you need is a standard loaf pan. Check out the recipe here.
The Georgian Feast is now officially my favorite cookbook. I've been meaning to get around to making the spice bread, Nazuki, for a while now and I'm glad I finally did. This one made the house smell so fabulously delicious that I'd make a killing if I could bottle the scent. Next time I sell my house, I'm making Nazuki every day (in case you didn't get the "Good Eats" reference, Alton did an episode where the premise was to make sticky buns for a nice homey aroma in the house so it would sell more quickly).
As with most of the recipes I've tried from my Georgian cookbook, this one was pretty simple. The author calls for active dry yeast, but that needs to be bloomed prior to use and adds an extra step. I just substitute instant yeast, aka bread machine or rapid rise, which can be mixed in with everything else. That way, all you have to do is throw everything in a bowl and mix it all up in one step (called the straight dough method).
My sister could not wait for the Nazuki to come out of the oven, and she cut into it as soon as it was cool. Sadly, my Georgian friend has been pretty busy this week, so he didn't get to try it and tell me if I got it right. Either way, it's delicious, and it will definitely be one of my holiday breads this year. Check out the gallery, and the recipe is after the jump.
This weekend I got it into my head that I really wanted to try some bread from my Georgian cookbook. Up til now I've pretty much stuck to vegetables and sweets, but it was high time that I made one of the delicious looking bread options. I chose the Lobiani, which is a simple bread with a kidney bean filling, because I had most of the ingredients. I only had to get sour cream.
The Lobiani was very simple to make, you'll just need plenty of space to roll the dough out (which can be a problem in my tiny kitchen). I have an extra large cutting board that I use for rolling out bread doughs. The dough is made from sour cream, eggs, butter and flour, and it's leavened by working baking soda into the dough after it's mixed. The filling is made with lots of onions and kidney beans, plus seasoning and coriander.
Let me just tell you, I will make Lobiani again! It is so good, with the mild kidney beans mixing quite nicely with the sweet onion flavor and coriander. I took a loaf over to share with my Georgian friend and he told me more than once how delicious the Lobiani was.
I did change a few things. First off, the recipe said not to leave the dough out for more than 8 hours or it'll turn sour. Of course I did (just FYI, don't fall asleep on the couch at about the time you're supposed to be starting a baking project), but I just threw the dough in the fridge overnight and let it warm up the next morning and everything was fine. I actually liked the sour taste. Also, I used canned white kidney beans because I had them. Other than that, I did everything the recipe told me to do, and everything was great. The recipe after the jump.
Fougasse is a bread traditionally associated with the Provence region of France, and it's a cousin to the Italian focaccia. Both breads are descended from a Roman bread that was baked directly on the hearth, which in Latin is called 'focus.' The Roman bread was called panis focacius, so it's easy to see the relationships, etymologically speaking. Apparently, fougasse was traditionally used to gauge the hearth temperature, which was determined based on how long it took to bake. Leave it to the French to make a very tasty bread out of a tester loaf.
This is definitely a bread that benefits from a baking or pizza stone in your oven. It needs that immediate heat from the hearth/stone to get proper oven spring. It's also a pretty wet dough, so you can expect it to be very sticky and it'll require a fold halfway through the fermentation. The only thing I changed from the original recipe was that I used kalamata olives rather than the niçoise olives, which would be the more Provencal of the two. You could also add some herbes de Provence or some anchovies, as well as goat cheese and dried fruit.
If you really want to impress your friends and family, make some fougasse. I made this last week and the first loaf was gone within ten minutes of it being cool enough to eat. Check out the gallery below, and the recipe is after the jump.
I love going through my baking books and looking at all the recipes that I'd like to try. I work a lot and have a pretty busy life right now so I'm not baking at home very much, but I can still fantasy bake. Recently, I have been salivating over the recipe for Anadama bread in Peter Reinhart's "The Bread Bakers Apprentice". Next time I actually get time to do some baking, I'm going to make this.
Anadama is a New England tradition. Most people agree that it's name comes from some poor farmer or fisherman who was cursing his wife, Anna. Either his wife left him or only fed him corn gruel and molasses; either way, he mixed the corn gruel and molasses with yeast and flour to make bread while muttering "Anna, damn her" the whole time. According to legend, the name of the bread comes from a gentler version of the curse on Anna.
Have any of you tried Anadama bread? I'm a sucker for anything with molasses in it, but I'd love to hear any of your stories. For those of you who would like to try it, you can find a recipe here.
Contrary to popular belief, when you're baking at home, you don't need a baking stone or a steamy environment in the oven. Those things are very nice to have, but they just aren't necessary to create a good product.
While I don't bake at home often, on those occasions that I do want to get steam in the oven, I have a method that works very well. Start off by putting a sheet pan or baking pan (something with walls) on the bottom-most shelf of the oven. Place on that something that is heavy and retains heat. Some people use lava rocks that you can get at garden centers, but I use nuts and bolts. A colleague told me about that once, and I found that worked well and they were far easier to come by than a lava rock.
Bring your oven up to temperature with the nuts/bolts/pan set up in place. Whatever medium you use, make sure to give it plenty of time to hot. When the oven has been heated to the recipe-prescribed temperature, put your bread on the rack, pour some water (about a cup) over your steam-creating rig and close the oven door as quickly as possible. The hardware will evaporate the water, creating plenty of steam for that artisan loaf. Make sure to let everything cool down thoroughly when you're done baking before removing it from the oven.
I recently tried this bread recipe from Young Mo Kim I found while perusing a magazine called Pastry and Baking North America. Bread and red wine just go so well together that I had to see what a bread made with red wine would taste like. It was good if I do say so myself.
The recipe is called red wine walnut bread, but I had some dried currants which I thought would be so much better with the red wine. There's no specific red wine mentioned, and I just used a Cabernet Sauvignon. I made two more deviations from the recipe. Since I didn't have any rye meal, I used the same amount of wheat bran instead. Also, I forgot the softened butter, so I'm not sure how the bread would have turned out with it.
Even with all of the changes I ended up making, the red wine bread was very good. It was a little dry, which I'm sure would have been taken care of had I not forgotten the butter (or added a little more hydration), but the red wine taste really came through. The taste of the red wine was strongest when I first took a bite, and mellowed after that to a sweet, wheat-y taste. The dried currants were also really nice in this bread, and they added to the sweetness. For more of a crunch and less fruity-ness, go with the walnuts. Recipe after the jump.
We can change the way we make eggs -- scrambled, poached, fried -- but what about changing the eggs themselves? Mix up your scrambling routine with quail eggs.
Writing in Slate, Jewish food maven 
Contrary to popular belief, when you're baking at home, you don't need a baking stone or a steamy environment in the oven. Those things are very nice to have, but they just aren't necessary to create a good product.
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