Babes Bake Apple Bread

I missed making the Bread Baking Babes bread last month, but this month I finished the loaf yesterday, just in time to post today. Not only that, but it's also World Bread Day so there is likely to be lots of great bread around the blogosphere today.

Our Kitchen of the Month Kelly of A Messy Kitchen gave us a wonderful recipe for October; Apple Bread. You start with a poolish and the next day make the dough, let it rise, work the sauteed apples into the dough and shape it and then bake it at a pretty high temperature to begin with, then at a lower temperature to finish. The result is an absolutely delicious bread, flavored with apple, faintly sweet and perfect for eating plain, toasted, or as a sandwich bread.

In making this, I followed the poolish part exactly, altered the dough part by using Irish whole meal wheat flour instead of the rye flour. I also worked the sauteed and cooled diced apples into the dough before the first rise because I needed to go to bed, then let it all rise slowly in the cool night air in the sunspace overnight, then shaped it, let it rise and baked it today. Sweetie was quite taken with this bread so I know I'll make it again. I used Gravenstein apples from our trees for the apple part and brandy instead of Calvados. See the little apple pieces in the bread?

Do give this one a try...you'll be glad you did. To be a Buddy, bake the bread, take a photo and email Kelly with a brief description of your bake and be sure to include the photo and she will send you a Buddy badge and include you in the roundup.

Check out the apple breads that the other Babes have made, too. Sure to be inventive!

I used this recipe which makes 1 good sized loaf.

Apple Bread with Cider and Calvados
makes 1 loaf
This is from  Artisan Breads: Practical Recipes and Detailed Instructions for Baking the World's Finest Loaves, by Jan Hedh.

Poolish:
150 g strong white flour (bread flour), preferably stoneground (I used all purpose)
0.7 g (¼ tsp) instant yeast
150 g dry cider (I used apple juice)

Add the flour and yeast to a bowl and mix thoroughly.  Whisk the cider into the flour/yeast mixture.  Cover with plastic wrap and leave at cool room temperature overnight, 12-16 hours.  Poolish will be bubbly and should have risen and fallen slightly in the center when ready.

Final dough:

300 g strong white flour (bread flour), preferably stoneground
50 g whole meal (dark) rye flour, preferably stoneground (I used 50g Irish wholemeal wheat flour)
0.9 g (¼+ tsp) instant yeast
150 g water (I added an additional 10g water because it seemed dry)
9 g (1½ tsp) sea salt

Mix the yeast and flours thoroughly in the bowl of a stand-mixer fitted with a dough hook.  Heat the water to lukewarm (approximately 35°C/95°F).  Add the water and poolish to the flour/yeast mixture and knead on low for 13 minutes.  Add the sea salt and knead for 7 more minutes at med/low speed.

Cover with plastic wrap or a shower cap and leave in a warm place (ideally at 24ºC, 75ºF) for about 90 minutes, until doubled in size. Meanwhile, prepare the apple mixture to give the apples time to cool before you need to use them.

Filling and baking:

Apple Mixture:
5 g (1 tsp) unsalted butter
150 g cored, peeled and diced eating apple
5 g (1 tsp) soft dark brown sugar
25 g calvados (I used brandy)
Heat up the butter in a pan, add the diced apple and then sprinkle over the sugar.  Saute until golden brown, stirring occasionally.  Pour over the calvados and continue cooking until the pan is dry.  Set aside to cool.

Tip the dough on to a lightly floured surface, and knead lightly. Add the cooled diced apple and fold it into the dough.  Do this in stages to ensure that the apple is mixed in as evenly as possible.  Shape the dough into an oblong loaf round and place it in a lightly floured lined proving basket or floured cloth.  Cover with a cloth and leave in a warm place for 75-90 minutes until doubled in size.

Add a baking stone to an oven and preheat to 250ºC (475ºF) for at least 30 minutes.  Cut up a thin apple slice for the top of the bread.  Gently turn the loaf onto a parchment lined baking sheet or peel and gently press the apple slice in the middle.  Slide the loaf onto the baking stone.  Heavily spritz your oven with a water spray or cover the loaf with an inverted roasting pan sprayed with water. (I skipped the spritz and the covering, although I did bake on a baking stone.) Bake for 15 minutes, turning down the temperature to 200ºC (400ºF) after 5 minutes.  Remove roasting pan and continue to bake for another 25-30 minutes until the bread is golden and hollow sounding when thumped on the bottom and has reached an internal temperature of about 205ºF.  Remove to a wire rack to cool completely before slicing.

Leaf Bread for Fall

The bodacious Bread Baking Babes are celebrating autumn this month by baking Fougasse, a delightful leaf-shaped bread, at the invitation of Elizabeth of blog from OUR kitchen, our Kitchen of the month.


Our regular posting day, the 16th of the month, coincides this month with World Bread Day, the annual event that encourages us to bake bread. We are asked also to honor the fact that we have enough food, a situation that isn't true for too many people in the world.

So today we celebrate both World Bread Day and baking with the Babes by baking fougasse, a shaped flatbread.

Fougasse is perfect for fall since it is traditionally shaped like a leaf, with the dough cut and stretched in such a way that, once baked, there is a lot of crustiness. That's a lovely thing in a flatbread like this, especially if you are serving it as an appetizer as I did, or with a nice cooler weather soup or stew.

Elizabeth gave us a couple of choices for the bread dough but indicated that we could also use our own recipe. I'd posted a foccacia recipe during the winter of 2008 and it used sourdough starter, so that's what I used. It made enough dough for me to make two loaves each of two variations. I was inspired by a fougasse that fellow Babe Susan of Wild Yeast had made which used gorgonzola cheese and figs to add flavor and texture to a fougasse which included rye flour.

I only used unbleached bread flour... no rye or other fancy flours this time... and paired the gorgonzola cheese with chopped walnuts. The result was awesome! There was no need for any additional butter or oil, although we did find that some slices of Golden Delicious apple went really well with that version of fougasse.

As Elizabeth days, "Because fougasse is baked on a stone instead of on an oiled pan, there are more crispy bits. Not too crispy though... it's juuuuust right! Of course, it can be cut with a knife but we think that fougasse tastes better torn apart."

The other half of the dough was flavored with freshly chopped herbs...Italian parsley, basil, and rosemary. I'm grateful to have not only enough for myself and Sweetie, but enough to share. I gave one of the herbed loaves to our renter because she loves bread and is on a fixed income so it helps her stretch her food budget a bit, too. Seems appropriate as we honor World Bread Day.

Try baking this easy and delicious Fougasse yourself...you'll be glad you did. There is only one rising, only a few ingredients, and trying out the shaping is fun and gives you another skill in the kitchen. You can choose your own additions or bake it plain and slather on the butter or dip the torn pieces of fougasse bread in a mixture of good olive oil and balsamic vinegar for an Italian touch. If you do bake it this month (by October 29th) be sure and send an e-mail with a link to your post (or a description of the bread and if you liked making it added to the e-mail if you don't blog) and a photo of the finished bread to Elizabeth to become a Bread Baking Buddy. She'll send you a badge and include you in the roundup.

Elizabeth was daring and baked her fougasse on a grill. I baked mine in the oven. Since I was using a baking stone (actually a pizza stone)

I shaped each leaf on a piece of baking parchment which I had laid on a wooden tray. Each was covered with oiled plastic wrap to rise. No corn meal was used on the parchment paper since I slid the bread and parchment paper on to the baking stone, then removed the loaf directly to the stone half way through baking (throwing the used parchment away).

Each loaf was shaped to fit the stone and they were baked one at a time. One day I'll have to spring for a larger stone so that I can bake two at a time. I also added moisture at the start of baking to help with crust development. I put ice cubes into a pie plate below the baking stone, plus sprayed the walls of the oven with water when I put the loaves in. The latter part of the baking time was done without the steam.

Now that you've heard how I did it, do visit the blogs of the other Bread Baking Babes (see links to the right). I'm also sending this over to Susan at Wild Yeast for the weekly Yeastspotting event. This week is sure to be a good one with entries from lots of World Bread Day posts, so check it out.

Sourdough Focaccia (with instructions for making Gorgonzola-Walnut Fougasse and Fresh Herb Fougasse)

2 cups 100% hydration sourdough starter
4 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 cup water, divided
1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
4 - 5.5 cups unbleached bread flour
2 teaspoons salt
additions like cheese, nuts, herbs, citrus peels, olives, etc.

In the bowl of a stand mixer place the sourdough starter. Add 3 tablespoons of the olive oil and mix briefly with the paddle attachment just until the oil is mixed in.

Make sure the water is lukewarm. Take 1/4 cup of it and add the dry yeast. Let sit 5 minutes until foamy.

Add the yeast, the rest of the warm water, and about half the flour. Mix with the paddle.

Switch to the dough hook. On slow speed add the flour, a half cup or so at a time, adding only a few tablespoons at a time toward the end. The dough will be soft. Add the salt and then knead with the dough hook on low to medium low speed for about 6 minutes, until the dough cleans the sides of the bowl and is smooth. Turn out on a lightly floured board or counter and knead in most of the rosemary, leaving about a teaspoon for the top.

Form the dough into a ball. Oil a large bowl (not metal) and turn the dough ball in the oil to coat. Cover with plastic wrap and place in a warm place and let rise until doubled in bulk. It took mine four hours, but even my 'warm' place wasn't as warm as it should have been.

Punch dough down, turn out of the bowl onto a lightly floured surface, knead a few time to get rid of the extra trapped gas.

At this point check out the directions below to make fougasse. To make focaccia, follow this link.

These were the instructions we were given. Notes on my variations are in italics below:

1. Mix, knead and allow your favourite bread dough to rise to double (I used the focaccia recipe above). If you are adding anything like olives, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, caramelized garlic cloves and/or walnuts, mix them into the dough near the end of kneading it or on the first turn of the dough (I added mine once the dough had risen and was ready to shape...just kneading the cheese and nuts into half the dough, then cutting that dough ball in half and shaping each into a leaf shape...then doing the same for the other half of the dough by adding the herbs for the second two loaves which were each shaped into a leaf shape:

for the nut/cheese versions:
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup crumbled gorgonzola cheese

for the herbed:
1 tablespoon EACH chopped Italian parsley, basil and rosemary).

2. If you are wanting herbs/spices on top, please add them just before baking.

3. Shaping: About an hour before baking the fougasse, turn the dough out onto a lightly floured board and press it out into an oval (or a rectangle; or a circle). Using a floured rolling pin, roll the dough out until it is about 1 cm (1/2 in.) thick. (I shaped it into a tall triangle.)

4. Sprinkle corn meal (to act as ball-bearings) on the peel - or an upside-down cookie sheet. Lay the shaped dough on the peel. Using a pizza wheel and "swift, decisive strokes" cut a design of a leaf or ladder into the dough. Take care not to cut through the outer edges. From the edges, pull the dough outwards to make sure the cuts are spaced. (I used parchment paper instead, but the dough with a stiff plastic scraper, then gently spread out the dough to open up the cuts to create the leaf shapes...sort of triangular)

Cover with a clean tea towel followed by a plastic grocery bag and allow to rise. (Robertson allows the shaped bread to rise first and does the slashes at the last minute. Naturally, because of my stellar reading skills, I didn't notice that until I had already made fougasse several times by slashing it directly after shaping it.) (I did notice that I had to open up {gently} some of the gaps that had closed up during the rising time. Since my loaves were on parchment and covered with oiled plastic wrap, it was easy to uncover them and gently move the dough to open up the shape again.)

5. Just Before Baking: Drizzle with olive oil and scatter coarsely ground sea salt over top. (You can also do this step just after the bread is baked; that is what Robertson suggests. Or you can forget to add the olive oil at all, as I did the last time.) (I skipped the olive oil and salt part since the additions were flavorful enough.)

6. Baking in the Oven: Put a pizza stone on the middle or top shelf of the oven and turn it to 400F (200C) (I used 450 degrees and added steam with ice cubes and water spray for extra crunch in the crust). Transfer the fougasse onto the hot stone and bake for about 15 minutes, turning it around at least once to account for uneven oven heat. (You may need 20 minutes or more of baking time if you want a darker crust.)

7. When the fougasse done, remove it from the heat and allow to cool on a well-ventilated rack. To serve, break it apart and dip it into good quality olive oil with herbs if you want.

Thank you Elizabeth for a wonderful, delicious, will-make-this-again challenge. My only other attempt at making fougasse was a dud so it was a lot of fun to do it again and discover that it is a great bread. The ultimate test is how quickly it is gone. All four loaves were finished in less than two days (with Straight Shooter having almost a whole one for breakfast yesterday!) so it truly was a success.

Babes Broa for Bread Baking Day 2010

Soft and Savory Broa

The October bread for the Bread Baking Babes is a yeasted corn bread. Kitchen of the Month Blogging from OUR Kitchen hostess Elizabeth piqued my interest by describing the Portuguese Broa that she remembered having when she first moved to her new neighborhood years ago. In hopes of making it as authentic I tried to hunt down white corn flour and meal. Unfortunately all I could find was yellow corn flour and we had some polenta style corn meal in the pantry, so I went with that.

Right from the start it seemed like I was baking a different bread than Elizabeth had, not even including the white vs yellow corn component. Polenta is usually cooked in three times the water as the volume of the corn meal. The recipe called for equal amounts so I ended up using my hands to combine the cooled polenta with the whole wheat and yellow corn flours, plus the amount of white flour we were to start with. When I started mixing that with the ½ cup of water that I’d used to reactivate the dry yeast it was clear that this was a very stiff, not slack, dough…the exact opposite of what Elizabeth had described.

What to do? Well I decided to go for broke and added and additional ½ cup of water, kneading everything together on the board using my hands and the bench scraper. I was having so much fun that I neglected to find out when to add the salt, so I ended up with no slat in the dough so I glazed the finished loaf and sprinkled it with sea salt so that there was some salt on the bread if not in it. I followed along with the recipe until the part where you allow it to rise for 1 – 4 hours. By then (I started the bread after work) I was ready to go to bed. The dough, plate on top, was retarded in the fridge overnight.

After that, except for the egg glaze and sea salt, I followed the recipe and ended up with a moist loaf with a nice salty, crunchy crust, and plenty of corn flavor. The crumb included some texture from the polenta and it was fairly loose without any major air holes, and the loaf was a bit on the flat side but we liked that. Sweetie and Straightshooter really seemed to enjoy it and half the loaf was gone pretty quickly even though we had sliced it thinly. I served it with chili and a salad when it was barely warm. The next day thin slices went into the toaster and came out even crunchier and more delicious, if that is possible.

Thank you Elizabeth, for choosing a bread I might never have tried to make. Very glad that this was our Babes October challenge! Now, about World Bread Day...see below.

If you would like to be a Buddy, bake this flavorful moist bread and post about it by October 29th and let Elizabeth know so that she can send you her badge. Head on around to the other Babes’ sites and you will probably see this bread as it is supposed to be made, not my poor attempt. The links are on the sidebar toward the top.

Last, but not least, next month we will be asking for suggestions for the third Anniversary celebration bread. Somehow between Thanksgiving, Harvest, Christmas and New Years the Babes will figure out the bread for February and we are counting on our friends and Buddies and lurkers to challenge us with great bread ideas. Check back around the middle of November for specifics on how to get those ideas to the Babes. I know, dear reader, that you will surprise and delight us!

This bread goes over to Susan at Wild Yeast for the weekly Yeastspotting event, plus it is my bread for World Bread Day…which, by happy coincidence, is TODAY!..., hosted by Zorra at 1x umruhrem bitte. Last year there was a great deal of participation in World Bread Day so it is likely that this year it will be even more popular as people around the globe reconnect with the older rhythms and rituals that connect us, like baking bread, that are now being recognized as an essential part of our humanity. HAPPY BREAD BAKING DAY!

Head over HERE for Yeastspotting and HERE for World Bread Day and HERE for the Broa recipe.