My nightmare

I recently met a guy who is living my nightmare…he has celiac sprue. This is a disease where the person becomes allergic to wheat!!! If there is one thing that I love it is baking bread. If I had celiac sprue I would probably lose some of this weight I’ve gained the last 2 years but I would be miserable...miserable. But I digress; this is really a post about bread, not about being allergic to bread. We have two bread cookbooks, one pastry cookbook, two pie cookbooks, and one cake cookbook. Our first bread book was The Bread Bible by Ruth Levy Beranbaum and with some reservations we really love her book. It has many fantastic breads in it and it is a great book to start with for someone wanting to make their own bread. However, she is first and foremost a dessert expert (her cake book is amazing, as is her pie & pastry book. Nothing we’ve tried has turned out anything less than amazing) and the difference between her book and our recent purchase The Bread Baker’s Assistant is evident. Peter Reinhart is a bread instructor at Johnson & Wales University and he knows bread. This book doesn’t have quite as many recipes (or formulas as he calls them) and the ones that he does have are mostly hearth breads (also called rustic breads, or artisan breads) and taste absolutely amazing. Hearth breads are breads made from flour, water, yeast, and salt and that’s essentially it, but can be manipulated to produce a wide variety of different textures, shapes, and tastes. In case you’ve never had these breads, or more likely have never made these, I would highly recommend it. They are simple to make and absolutely delicious.

7-grain torpedo

One of the great dilemmas with bread baking is the cost benefit ratio.
Here are some of the "pros" for baking bread. It tastes amazing, seriously, nothing tastes quite like bread fresh from the oven. It makes the whole house smell great; who needs scented candles or potpourri anyway. It's usually cheaper than buying bread from the store. It's also satisfying to make a loaf.
Now for the "cons". It takes a lot of time to make a good loaf (see bottom for some of the tricks for making great bread), not much active time, but a decent amount of passive time. It doesn't last nearly as long as store-bought bread which means you would have to make it every other day or third day to have some on hand. And perhaps the greatest con (which is also a pro) is that when you have a fresh loaf of bread you want to eat the whole thing.
Overall we have concluded that if we were to make bread to save money it just doesn't add up. We could (and have) eaten a whole loaf of bread right out of the oven before, so it doesn't stay around for long. That doesn't mean that we don't make bread anymore, because it's hard to resist its siren song, but we just don't kid ourselves into thinking we're being economical by doing so. Here are some pictures of a 7-grain torpedo loaf that we made, whole grain and incredibly tasty. WooHoo.

P.S. There are a couple of ways of making yeast breads. In the Bread cookbooks we own or have perused they recommend using a dough "starter" to increase the flavor of the bread. A starter takes all the wet ingredients with half of the dry ingredients, whiskes them together and lets them sit at room temperature to ferment. This give the natural bacteria in all flours the opportunity to out-compete the yeasts for a little bit. Bacteria and their by-products are what give breads their distinct flavors while yeast provides lift and airyness. Many bread recipes in non-Bread Baking cookbooks advocate using much more yeast and leave out the starter to save on time. This starter takes a little more thought ahead of time, but the better taste is worth the effort.

The French Baguette Dilemma

There is something incredibly satisfying about having a loaf of bread turn out well. Along the way you have a sense that it’s going well to turn out well based on how it rises and looks and feels, but you don’t really know until you pull it out of the oven and taste it. Our first bread book has been The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, and for the most part we’ve been really impressed by it. In many ways she is a purist when it comes to bread; the bread should be as close to the original as you can make in your home kitchen. This has produced some really fun breads for us that are impressive to look at and taste fantastic (see pictures - first one is Challah bread, second one is Walnut Fogasse). On the other hand there are recipes for certain breads that don’t turn out as well. The case in point is a French baguette. In case anyone was interested in how long it takes to make this, the answer would be about 24 hours from start to finish. Most of that is just waiting around time, but still, that’s a really long time. Our first two attempts turned out looking and tasting very much like authentic French bread with the obvious exception that they only raised a little bit and were only about 1 ½ -2 inches thick. You can imagine our frustration at spending all that time for a flat loaf. Our next attempt was using Baking Illustrated’s version of it and boy-howdy did it raise so much better and tasted pretty good, but more like an Italian loaf than a French baguette. So the real question of the day is would I rather keep trying a French baguette that looks and tastes more authentic to get it to raise, or a softer fluffier loaf that doesn’t seem very authentic. Life is full of tough choices. Ultimately I think that I’d prefer to keep on trying the authentic loaf, otherwise it just seems like I should just make white bread and shape it differently to call it different loaves.