Breadies Unite For BBA Challenge

Bubbling Sponge

Damp Dough

Too Sticky, Not-yet Tacky

Shaped, Ready to Rise

Rising Beautifully

I’ve been keeping a lot from you.  This past year, I’ve been seriously baking a lot of bread.  Not just bagels.  It started with No-Knead Bread.  It got worse when I purchased Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.  And, don’t get me wrong, the bread I made was fine.  Just fine.  But I live in one of the great bread areas of the world.  And, yes, you can definitely make acceptable bread in five minutes a day.  It’s just that there’s really no point in making acceptable bread, when I can run down to the store – 2 minutes from my house – and buy Acme bread.  I love that the authors of that book found a way to bring the joy of bread-making to busy people. I applaud them.  It just wasn’t superb bread.  I craved more depth of flavor.

So Smitten Kitchen has had a couple of Peter Reinhart recipes on her site.  And I’ve made them: the bagels I shared with you, and some light wheat bread.  I knocked the bagels out of the park.  But the light wheat bread was lacking.  Okay, but not stellar.  I knew I needed to learn more.  And here’s the ugly thing, hard to admit, but true:  I’ve had a bad attitude about Peter Reinhart.

I lived in Sonoma County, previous home of Peter Reinhart, for over 20 years.  I rarely made bread when I lived there, in fact, because there were so many great bakeries producing world-class bread.  Peter Reinhart was one of the co-founders of Brother Juniper’s Bakery there.  The mere mention of his name makes breadies swoon.  In spite of the fact that I sometimes purchased his bread, that bakery brought one thing to my mind: hippies.

You need to believe me.  I have nothing against hippies.  One reason I lived in Sonoma County for so long is because I loved living with hippie-types.  But I myself am not a hippie.  Never was.  Occasionally leaning toward earth-mother perhaps, but not hippie.  No self-respecting hippie would even want me to be confused with one, either.  Because I am way too uptight to ever be a hippie.  I weigh ingredients.  I measure pie crusts with a measuring tape when I roll them out.  Simply not relaxed enough to be a hippie.

In my ignorant state of mind, I thought Peter was a hippie, playing with whole grains and smoking god-knows-what and turning out some rather dense loaves of bread.  Except that more recently, I realized that my favorite pizza-dough recipe is his.  And those darned bagels were totally amazing.  And that light whole-wheat thing, well, I knew it was my shortcomings that made it less than great, not his recipe.  I started thinking it was time to buy one of his books, but I never quite did.  Until now.  And now I have committed (and probably should be committed, for doing so) to spend almost a whole year of my life baking his bread recipes.  That’s cosmic justice, I’m sure.

The first week was Anadama Bread, a bread I’ve never made or eaten before.  Again, attitude adjustment was clearly needed.  I don’t love, love, love cornmeal, so why would I ever make a bread, other than pure cornbread, that had a lot of cornmeal in it?  Because it’s freakin’ amazing-tasting, with a wonderful crunch, that’s why!  (Obviously, my path to spiritual enlightenment has already begun.  Relaxation can’t be far behind.)

It’s a rather damp dough.  You have to soak polenta-grind (coarse) cornmeal in water overnight.  Then you make a sponge with that and let it sit a while.  When you’re ready to make the bread, you get to struggle with the terms “sticky” and “tacky,” because you want to add flour until it is tacky but not sticky.  Yeah, seriously.  I even ditched my Kitchen-Aid for this one and kneaded it by hand, because I desperately wanted to find the difference, and touch was the only sure way.  My dough never reached the prescribed temperature during kneading, even though I kneaded much longer than suggested, but I knew when it was ready.  I had added quite a lot of flour, but managed to find a balance in there somewhere.

As you can see, the loaves turned out great.  It’s flecked with the crunchy bits of yellow cornmeal.  Toasting brings out the light sweetness of the golden molasses.  (I didn’t even know there was such a thing!)  We finished both loaves within a few days – bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, peanut butter and jam, toast – we came up with any excuse to have another slice.  It was that good.  My family is already asking when I’ll make more.  And I never would have picked this bread to make if I hadn’t joined the challenge.  I’m a much better bread-baker already.  I have 199 teachers/co-learners posting comments at the speed of light, sharing their knowledge freely.  Peter packs so much instruction into the first third of his book, that I already have taken a quantum leap toward bread-brilliance.  And by the way, he’s an instructor now.  At the world’s largest culinary academy, no less.  So establishment, huh?

P.S.  I really need volunteers to eat some of this bread I making all the time now, because we still need to fit into our clothes this time next year!

P.P.S.  I don’t think Peter was ever a hippie, but I could be wrong.  However, I may be the first person ever to mistake an Eastern Orthodox Christian for a hippie.

(A note:  There will be no recipes posted for the breads I make from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  I mean, how would you feel if you spent forever and a day on the process of writing and publishing a book, and then 200 crazy people posted every single recipe in their blogs?  Exactly.)

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Tagged as: Anadama Bread, BBAC, breadies, Peter Reinhart, Sonoma County