Pugliese Bread

For those of you following my progress through the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, you already know my dread of “wet” dough.  Pugliese dough is another one of the wet dough recipes, so you can imagine how much I was not looking forward to making it.  But the whole point of a challenge is to challenge one’s self, is it not?  So on I pressed.  And I’m sure glad I did!  Not because I made incredible bread with it.  The bread was, well, meh, at best, largely because I still can’t seem to gently dump the dough out of the bowl after its second rise.  I deflate a whole lot of the trapped air bubbles every single time!  And it sticks to the darned flour-dusted cloth, every single time!  No, the reason I am glad I made this dough is because it made the best non-thin, non-thick pizza crust in the world, yessirrrreeee!

The dough was very wet, as you can see, and uses fancy durum flour, which I didn’t have, and didn’t want to buy.  (The twenty different flours I currently store in my tiny house are quite enough, thank-you-very-much!)  I instead used the suggested option of a bread flour and semolina flour mix.  I also chose the additional option of throwing in a small amount of mashed potatoes, because we had some in the fridge.  As I literally poured the dough from the mixer bowl onto the flour-covered counter, I was pretty concerned about handling the dough.  Peter Reinhart’s exact words are, “Don’t be alarmed if the dough seems very sticky.  The wetter it is, the better the final bread will be.”  So, I figured, okay, from the looks of my dough, I was heading for a real winner!

And, sure enough, after following the instructions to dust flour on top of the dough and pat the wet mess into a neat rectangle, I had something on my counter that looked a lot better.

I was able to do the stretch-and-fold method with no problem.  (You basically take each end, one at a time, and pull outward, then fold the dough over in thirds, letter-style)

Each time I did the stretch-and-fold method, the dough became stronger and less sticky, as promised.

With the help of my dough scraper, I managed to get the still-pretty-wet dough into an oiled bowl, where it rested for two hours, rose beautifully, and got filled with lovely gas bubbles.  Which broke my heart.  Because I knew that in the next steps, I was going to man-handle all those bubbles right out of the dough with my inexperience.  And that’s when I decided to make pizza with half the dough.  (Another one of Peter’s great options/suggestions.)

What a stupendous pizza it was!  Now my family could eat pizza (any kind of crust) every night for a week and never complain.  I, on the other hand, really only like super-thin crust pizza.  And not very often.  This pizza dough cured me.  Not thick-crust, not thin-crust, it was an amazingly chewy, tender, air-filled, moist, salty, complex crust.  Seriously.  Covered in olive oil, caramelized onions, arugula, mushrooms, and goat cheese, it was heaven on a slice of bread, really.  And I didn’t have to worry about getting it from the final proofing bowl onto the baking surface without it sticking to the cloth.  What could be better?

Not the loaf of bread I made with the other half, certainly.  That got eaten as toast, mostly.  It did stick to the cloth a little in the last transfer before baking.  And I did manage to degas the dough more than I wanted to.  But it was edible.  I had no complaints.  I’d eaten manna from heaven, made with the same dough, and that was enough for me.

As usual, we’re not allowed to post the recipes for the challenge.  However, Google has it here.  Scroll to page 224.  I really do suggest you buy the book.  The first third of the book is filled with instruction and is well worth having on the shelf to read multiple times.  Then you, too, could stay up long into the night wondering exactly how one transfers soft, wet dough around without degassing it!

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Tagged as: BBA Challenge, Peter Reinhart, pizza dough, pugliese bread, semolina bread