Recent Bread Baking Exploits

Last year I got in a bit of a rut with my bread baking - I was baking two white bloomers, once a week, and if I'm honest it all got a bit boring. This year, I'm being far more adventurous, helped in part by a baking stone, a shiny new food mixer (with a dough hook) and a couple of excellent books (namely 'The River Cottage Bread Handbook' and Paul Hollywood's 'How to Bake'). Here are a few of my recent experiments:

Ciabatta

A very difficult bread to make without a food mixer - ciabatta requires an incredibly wet dough in order to get the aerated texture. I made this one with some local flour from Gilchesters Organic - a mixture of 'rare breed' strong white bread flour and fine semolina. It's lovely flour that gives a noticeably different flavour to anything else that I've tried. Being home-grown it's not quite as high in gluten as some of the imported strong flours that I'd normally use, so it seems to benefit from a little extra kneading. I was quite pleased with the results - light and crusty, and richly flavoured from the olive oil. It made great panini the next day too!

Pizza Bread

An experiment in using a very wet ciabatta style dough as a pizza base. This was topped with mozzarella, blobs of rich tomato and garlic sauce, and some crispy fried bacon. It was very tasty and the ciabatta base was very light and crisp, but because of the nature of a wet dough the transfer from wooden board to baking stone proved a little tricky - precious buffalo mozzarella fell off onto the baking stone, only to be instantly cremated. A little practice is needed!

Seeded Bloomer

This was a case of using whatever I had in the cupboard - some Shipton Mill malted wholemeal flour, some strong white bread flour, a handful of seeds....

Brioche

Not a bread to bake if you're on a diet - this brioche contains 5 eggs and a whole pack of butter! As you would expect, it is light but rich - it virtually melts in the mouth, and although it's sweet it's still equally nice with cheese as it is with jam or marmalade. It's also remarkably easy to make provided you have a food mixer with a dough hook. Flour, salt, yeast, sugar, eggs and milk are kneaded together, and the butter is beaten in once the dough is formed. It's then chilled overnight in the fridge before shaping into balls and arranging in a deep cake tin. It then proves for 3 hours and bakes for 30 mins or so. I had a little dough leftover, which I topped with sesame seeds and baked in a muffin tray, - it came out looking like a brioche toadstool!