Bread Machine (73 page)
One of the pioneers in providing organic whole grain flours and information about how to use them was Frank Ford. Before organic was a household word, Frank grew his hard red winter wheat in Deaf Smith County, Texas, with none of the usual chemical grain fertilizers. In 1960 he set up a small stone mill and an office in an abandoned railroad car. He distributed his flours out of the back of his pickup truck.
Today, Deaf Smith wheat is a standard for excellence. As a purveyor of organic flour, Arrowhead Mills, provides fresh flours to home and commercial bakers in the United States and around the world. Arrow head Mills flour is now on supermarket shelves across the country.
Despite much press, organic grains are still a minority in the agricultural marketplace; organic farming is labor intensive, crops give lower yields, and prices to the consumer are a bit higher because of a limited supply. But I believe the flours truly are superior. If they are available to you, I urge you to give them a try.
TRADITIONAL LOAVES
Country Breads and Sourdough Breads
COUNTRY BREADS MADE WITH OUT STARTERS
Peasant Bread
Chuck Williams’s Country French
Semolina Country Bread
Pain Ordinaire au Beurre
Classic Baguettes
French Whole Wheat Bread
Pane Italiano
Panino Bruschetta
Grissini
COUNTRY BREADS MADE WITH STARTERS
Pain de Maison Sur Poolish
Pain de Paris
Pain à l’Ancienne
Pain au Seigle
Pain au Levain
Pane Toscana
Olive Oil Bread
Italian Whole Wheat Bread
Pane Francese
Little Italian Bread Rolls
Ciabatta
Two-Week Biga
Pagnotta
Pane Bigio
Italian Semolina Bread
Pane di Cereale
Pane All’Uva
Saffron and Olive Oil Challah
SOURDOUGH STARTERS
Next-Day White Sourdough Starter
Next-Day Rye Sourdough Starter
Suzanne’s Sourdough Starter
German Beer Starter
French Buttermilk Starter
Grapeyeast Natural Starter
SOURDOUGH LOAVES
White Sourdough Bread
Classic Sourdough Rye
Sourdough Cornmeal Bread
Sourdough French Bread
Sourdough Whole Wheat Bread
Levain Loaf
Sourdough Buckwheat Bread
Sourdough Sunflower Seed Honey Bread
Sourdough Raisin Bread
Sourdough Banana Nut Bread
Sourdough Bread with Fresh Pears and Walnuts
Orange Sourdough Bread with Cranberries, Pecans, and Golden Raisins
Sourdough Pumpkin Spice Bread
Sourdough Carrot Poppy Seed Bread
Sourdough Cottage Cheese Bread with Fresh Herbs
Sourdough Tomato Bread with Feta
Sourdough Pesto Bread
Sourdough English Muffins
C
ountry-style breads, also called European-style artisan or peasant breads, represent the pinnacle of C breads to bakers. Made in the bread machine, they are a bit of an anomaly. The entire premise of European-style country breads baked today is that they embody the artisan creed, and this tells the customer a lot about the quality of the bread and the style in which it has been made. Artisan bread baking employs old methods, so it is usually created entirely by hand and baked in a wood-fired oven to give it a very special character.
Pain cuit au feu de bois
, or bread baked in a wood-fired oven, has a passionate following. It is the primary baking technique that says natural, authentic, and traditional.
Many old world-style bakers stubbornly hold on to old methods, regarding the bread machine as a savage, interrupting the natural flow of the universal laws of baking by removing the process from the warmth of their hands. But others have modified their opinions to a more positive stance. Obviously the closed electric oven chamber of a bread machine will never produce a loaf with the crust or familiar long or round shape of a traditionally baked loaf, but baking country bread in the machine does have its attributes. Even when baking with a machine, you can still use a baker’s care and feel, choosing fresh ingredients and using classic recipes. And there is the entire spectrum of aromas and sensations associated with bread-making that remain constant no matter what means you use. Any machine can make good country breads; the newer ones with their state-of-the-art technology—developed, in part, with just these breads in mind—produce especially good results.
Country breads, no matter the origin of any given recipe, are all known for the same simplicity of raw ingredients that allows the flavor of the flour to really dominate. When first-rate ingredients—organic flours, natural leaven and yeasted starters, pure spring water, and unrefined sea salt—are used in making them, the quality of these loaves really becomes apparent. These are, on the whole, simple breads, whose characters can be changed by a slight variation in the proportion of flour or how long a starter sits. Sugar and fat are virtually nonexistent in these breads, making them favorites with people who are concerned about cholesterol and calories.
Many country breads use starters, or pre-ferments, for leavening. The recipes that follow begin with breads that do not use starters. Later in this section, when you come to the recipes that use starters, you will be using your machine to make the starters as well as the doughs. The starters are made on the Dough cycle, then left to sit in the machine for a specified number of hours. The new Welbilt machines have a special setting just for starters, keeping the pre-ferments gently warm at an even 85°F for up to twenty-four hours; I think more manufacturers will be adding this feature in the future. The closed environment of any bread machine offers a nice place for a starter to develop. The amount of time a starter sits will vary from recipe to recipe. The consistencies of the starters will vary, too, ranging from very soupy, to thick and creamy, to springy, almost like a small amount of bread dough. When the starter is ready, the dough ingredients are added right into the bread pan with it, a new cycle is chosen, and the machine does its work.
Baking off a loaf is the culmination of the baker’s art. Many of the breads I’ve included are baked right in the machine, and for these the baking temperature is, of course, already decided. This automation is perfect for beginning bakers. No fancy equipment, no jostling in the oven, no need to pay attention to timing. Set the crust control on medium or dark for country breads (remember that the real difference here is the amount of time that it bakes; a darker crust will usually bake about seven minutes longer than a medium one). The closed bread machine environment naturally has a lot of steam in it, another very desirable element. The evaporation of the water from the dough creates almost a miniature steam-injected oven, an environment that has always been a challenge for the home baker to recreate. This moisture around the loaf contributes to the texture and appearance of the final loaf. It is important for the caramelizing of the sugars in the flour, which gives the crust its brown color. While the thick crusts produced in oven baking are great, a thinner crust produced by the machine allows the dough to come up to its full shape and helps prevent a dense, heavy loaf.
All of these breads can be baked in the oven after the initial mixing in the machine. Many bakers like to combine the ease of preparing the starter and dough in the machine with the use of traditional techniques—such as rising the dough in a banettone or baking the bread on a baking stone—in preparing a loaf.
Some of the recipes in this collection are based on classic recipes whose character can’t be approximated without the denser crust the oven provides. These doughs need to be taken out of the machine, shaped, and baked in the oven. This allows you to take advantage of the beautiful hands-on shaping techniques that make loaves unique. Loaves prepared this way end up close cousins to, and sometimes even better than, ones made by more common home mechanical mixing techniques, such as the heavy-duty electric stand mixer or the food processor. It was a great surprise and delight to me that these loaves were some of the best I have ever made in the entire thirty years I have been baking.
For doughs prepared in the machine and baked off in the oven, the machine’s Dough cycle has some great advantages built into it. The chart in your manufacturer’s manual that details the different parts of the cycles will show you that the Dough cycle has two kneading periods with a short rest in between. I view this little rest as the
autolyse
in artisan baking. A tremendously important rest period, it allows the enzymes in the dough that create the acids that contribute to the final flavor to be released. Some recipes deliberately manipulate the dough to include these all-important rest periods. Also, as in artisan baking there is not one, but two or three rising times; this contributes to the bread’s texture. If you are using the Basic or the French Bread cycle, you can reset it for another rise, or reset the cycle to begin the whole thing over again, allowing the dough to get the advantages of being kneaded and risen a second time.
As when preparing other breads, it is important to lift the lid of the machine and check the consistency of the dough at various points, adding flour or water as needed. While the technique of adding a bit of water or flour in increments to adjust a dough may seem novel to the budding bread machine baker, it has been done for centuries by artisan bakers. French bakers use the terms
bassinage
to describe adding some water during the kneading cycle and
contre-frasage
to describe adding flour. But pay close attention to each recipe; often the properties of these doughs will vary from one recipe to the next. Sometimes the doughsare meant to be moist to the point of slackness, yet still elastic, a very desirable consistency that makes a loaf with lots of uneven holes in it. Every type of flour will produce a different dough, even different white flours, whether bread flour, all-purpose, or clear flour.
Fermentation of the dough begins at the completion of the kneading and ends when the dough is deflated for shaping. The closed environment of the bread machine is a mockup of the proofing boxes that are so important to professional bakers. The controlled temperature and humidity inside your bread machine are very important to your resting dough, and the bread machine provides this environment naturally, without any effort on your part. You won’t have any sudden changes in temperature to stress your dough and damage its quality. I do not recommend the use of One Hour, Quick Yeast Bread, or Rapid cycles for country breads; you want to use all the rising time needed to develop your dough.
