Digital Thinkbox

More BBA madness. I’m somewhat behind on my postings, so playing catch-up today.

Next up, Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Swirl Bread. This bread is awesome. My new favorite.

What can I say. Cinnamon + Raisins + Walnuts = win. This bread is actually pretty easy to make. The only extra step is the rolling of the dough to get the cinnamon swirl. Other than that this is a pretty standard bread formula. I opted for a more cinnamon-sugar mixture as a topping. This added a really nice sweet burst of flavor to each slice.

Biggest problem with this bread is all the stuff in the dough. Kneading took longer, and I still think it was under kneaded by the end. Also the oven spring was a little weak, although this is a really heavy bread with all the nuts and fruit so it will make a smaller, denser loaf.

Awesome bread toasted with a touch of butter. Highly recommended.

Another Bread Baker’s Apprentice formula down. This time Ciabatta. A pretty neat little bread that is characterized by crisp crust and distinct big, holes in the crumb.

My bread got the distinct bubbles, but didn’t have the oven spring I had hoped for. Additionally the taste was rather bland. I attribute this to over active yeast. It was fairly hot the day I baked this and its possible they little yeasties just overworked themselves during the bulk fermentation. The dough probably could have been wetter too. Ciabatta is a pretty wet dough; wetter than I’m used to working with.

Tragedy strikes!
Do NOT put your expensive stoneware baking dish in the oven without having some liquid in it first. The idea was to add water to create steam in the oven. Unfortunatly the rapid temperature change caused by pouring hot water into a even hotter pan, lacking a thermal buffer, caused disastrous results.

The other day my friend Zap asked me if I wanted to do a The Bread Baker’s Apprentice
“challenge” with him. I had just purchased the book myself so I figured this would be excellent motivation to try it out. This challenge has us baking one bread per week (or so), until we’ve baked EVERY SINGLE recipe in the book. Whew. I picked challah bread this week to start things off.

I won’t repeat the recipe since it is in the book, but it is pretty basic. Flour, sugar, yeast, oil, water, eggs. Four eggs to be exact. Well two eggs and two egg yokes. Oh and save the whites for later when you brush the bread down.

The dough after mixing waiting for the first rise:

After the first rise. The dough really took off. Very puffy.

After braiding. This thing is HUGE. I could have made two 3 braid loaves from this.

I cut the final proof time short because of how active the yeast was. Only about 30 minutes instead of the 60-75 minutes recommended.

Out of the oven and on the rack!

Nice color, although you can see the over spring was excessive. The whiter parts are where the egg mixture didn’t get because the loaf wasn’t this big before baking.

Nice bubbles. Crumb could be a little deeper.

This bread came out big, as I expected. The yeast was over active for some reason. Maybe I used too much? Not sure. However the bread smelled and looked great. It was REALLY light and fluffy. Almost too light as it was hard to cut after it cooked. The texture was super fluffy too. Unfortunatly the flavor was a little lacking. It was, quite honestly…boring. I had just purchased some local Food Co-Op challah bread the day before, and other than the texture, it is much tastier. It wasn’t that this bread was bad, far from it. Its just that it was serious lacking in any flavor.

It is possible the over active yeast had something to do with that, I’m sure it contributed to the texture being light and fluffy. I’ve never had a dough puff up like this. All but one of the rise steps were for the full time. Only the final proof step I cut short. This is a new type of yeast that I’ve not used much of before so maybe that was it. It also baked up quickly.

Still this was a fun project. I’ve never braided bread before and it was a nice learning experience to figure out how to bread the bread. I may try this again some day and see if I can get a bread that is a full flavored as the bread I get at the Food Co-Op.