Easy Olive Baguette

It's been a couple of years now, that we almost don't buy bread at home - I prefer to make it myself. This gives me the freedom to experiment with various types of flour, recipes, forms and additives. Today's recipe is one of the variations of my usual bread recipe, but with a twist - literal and figurative :)

Ingredients:

• 300 g all purpose flour
• 200 g lukewarm water
• 7 g fresh yeast or 3 g dry yeast
• salt, sugar or honey, oregano
• two tbsp olive oil
• pitted olives

Preparation:

Activate the yeast with some of the water and the honey. I add a small teaspoon of honey in the water and stir, until the honey and the yeast have dissolved. In a bowl measure the flour, add salt and oregano, mix. Add the yeast and the rest of the water, mix everything well and thorough, until the entire flour is absorbed. At this stage I do not add the olive oil. 

Leave the dough covered to rest and rise for 30-45 min in a warm place (I put my bowl in the oven with the light on). When the dough has doubled, add the olive oil and fold the dough a dozen times, then leave again to rise for at least an hour.

When the dough has doubled again, spread it on a floured surface, cover it with the olives, cut into small pieces, then cut the dough into four and form four baguettes. I made mine by rolling the ends toward the center and enclosing the olives inside, then I twisted the roll a few times.

Cover the baguettes and leave them for the last time to rise. This recipe has no kneading, you need only time and patience. Once the baguettes have doubled again after an hour, brush them generously with olive oil and put the tray in a preheated oven at 250C for 15 min. I put a metal container with water at the bottom of the oven to get a crispy crust. After the 15 min are over, turn the oven temperature to 200C and bake for another 10 min.

These baguettes are so delicious, that you can snack with them directly like buns, or enjoy them with feta cheese, vegetable spreads or any other way you enjoy your bread.

Bagels

The weather in Sofia this week has been nasty, foggy and cold, for days the city was under a cover of clouds and smog and we couldn't see the sun. Nothing however cures January blues like warm kitchen and the smell of baking and cooking and I've been busy making all kinds of dishes and breads.

My latest baking experiment - bagels. I didn't research much, just took the first recipe I came upon and tried it for half a dozen of warm, aromatic round buns.

Ingredients:

• 380 g flour
• 7 g dry yeast
• 220 g warm milk
• 25 g butter
• 30 g sugar
• 5 g salt
• 1 egg white
  

 For the egg wash - 1 egg yoke, just a little water; sesame seeds

Preparation:

Mix the ingredients and make the dough. Leave it to rise in a warm oven (30C) for an hour. Cut it into 6 balls and leave them rise again for 30 min. Using your finger, make the balls into rings. Bring about a liter of water with a teaspoon of sugar to boil and drop each of the rings in it for about 30 sec.

Place the rings on a baking dish, glaze with egg wash and sprinkle with seeds. Put in a pre-heated oven at 200 C and bake for about 25 min.

As this is in fact a variation of pains au lait, you can serve them with cream cheese, butter, jam, anything you have in your fridge.

We tried them as deserts with home-made blueberry and quince jam, as h'ordeuvres with smoked cheese and butter,

but I liked them most warm with celery, carrots and potato cream soup.

Sourdough Bread

I've been baking bread for a few years now and I feel pretty comfortable with dough, the varying hydration levels and the different types of bread, though I have a favourite recipe at 60% hydration.

However, sourdough bread is a completely different animal. Instead of fabric grown yeast, for sourdough bread you need sourdough starter. You can make one yourself at home or borrow from a fellow baker. Unlike store-bought yeast, which is one species of yeast, industrially grown, the sourdough starter usually contains various species of wild yeast and other sour microbes, like lactobacillus and other sour bacteria, that have been caught in the process of fermentation. And this makes sourdough bread really much richer in taste, but also so much more work and unpredictability of results.

I had watched quite a few YouTube videos (is there any other way to learn a new trick nowadays :) ), but dragged my legs when it came to starting my own starter. And then one morning over coffee a friend of mine mentioned that her daughter was into bread baking and had started her sourdough. I jumped at the opportunity and soon had my own little jar with a sourdough starter. 

I fed it for a few days, to let it accommodate and then, about two month ago, I baked my first sourdough bread. 
Since then I've tried half a dozen recipes and the one I have stuck to recently was suggested by the Chainbaker on his YouTube channel - No-Knead Sourdough Bread. 

I usually start my leaven in the evening and mix the bread in the morning. After two or three folds, I leave the dough to ferment for 4 hours, then fold the bread, leave it for two more hours and bake it in the evening. Yes, I know, it takes a lot of time and I am not going to argue whether it is worth it or not, but the resulting bread is really very different from the standard, much easier to make bread with dry yeast.

Leaven: 

• 10 g starter 
• 50 g water 
• 50 g strong flour

Dough: 

• 100 g leaven
• 240 g strong white flour
• 50 g rye flour
• 190 g water
  

I still haven't bought any special equipment - a fancy proofing basket or a cast iron skillet, so I proof and bake my sourdough bread in a Jenna glass casserole. It is not ideal, but works well for now.

My bread is still far from perfection and my crust is not as airy as I would like it to be, but I'm getting there. And there is so much to learn and experiment along the way :)

Brötchen

After my exploits ;) in French cuisine in January, this month I'm diving into German cooking. The most worthy of my efforts so far have been these small bread rolls, which I've already made three times, always with great success.

I took the recipe from Thomas kocht and of all brötchen recipes out there this is probably the easiest and simplest to follow.

Ingredients:

• 500 g flour
• 300 g cold water
• 20 g olive oil
• 10 g salt
• 2 g dry yeast (he suggests 0.5 g, but I usually put more)
  

The whole trick with this recipe is that you let time do the work for you. Just mix the ingredients the night before and let the dough stay at room temperature for at least 12 hours. It will rise and be ready for baking the next morning.

The other important trick for achieving the soft inside and crispy outside of the rolls is the combination of water vapour and high temperature. Once you've made the rolls and let them proof again, you preheat the oven at 250C and right before you put the rolls to be baked in the oven, you sprinkle them with water and add hot water to a metal bowl inside the oven, so that the oven fills in with vapour. The resulting brötchen are really amazing and super delicious.

Sandwich Pockets

And another baked goody I made from a Turkish video, using google translate.
The video was in my friends' feed on Facebook and I liked the idea so much that I had to try it.

Here's the recipe source and the products I used  - I reduced it a little to get eight sandwich pockets, just enough for one baking tin:

• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup water
• 3 1/2 cups flour
• 7 g instant yeast
• 1 egg white
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt

I filled my pockets with tomatoes, Chinese lettuce and feta cheese.

 A very delicious sandwich bread, that I'll be making again for my children's school lunches.

And a glimpse at my current project - socks for my husband. The yarn is 100% wool, which I dyed last year and have been racking my brains what to knit with it, as it is only 100 g. So when husband said that he would like warm wooly socks the problem was solved.

I'm so enjoying the process, I really love the slight variations of burnt orange, red and brown of the stitches and the pattern - Simple Skyp Socks is excellent:

Challah Bread

A post about my today's experiments in baking. Last Black Friday I bought a new standing mixer - a sturdy (semi-)professional one, that can really mix dough. My previous mixer had the gadgets and pretenses of a dough mixer, but it could only beat eggs and mix runnier dough like cake batter. The new one is much more powerful and has proven (to me) that the secret of nice well baked bread is not in the triple sifting of the flour and hand kneading of the dough, but in having a good mixer or bread baking machine. Nowadays I simply and even arrogantly empty the ingredients into the bowl (without  sifting the flour, what a blasphemy!), turn on the mixer 'et voilà - in 6-8 minutes I have the dough ready for rising. Then I take the bowl and just put it in the oven at 30C for an hour - an hour and a half to rise - almost no physical work and engagement on my part apart from opening packets and measuring ingredients. And the results are so much better. So - yey for labour saving appliances :)

So - today I made Challah. I followed this recipe and instructions - an excellent step-by-step challah tutorial that could be followed even by a beginner in baking.

I especially enjoyed the mantra for the braiding - over two, under one, over two. Thus worded, it makes the 6-stranded braid so easy to execute and easy to remember for next time when I'm making  braided bread.

Challah is very similar to Bulgarian Easter bread - kozunak. The dough is enriched with eggs and sugar (I also replaced some of the water with 1/2 cup of milk). However, it is not as sweet as kozunak and can be eaten with cheese or meat too. The new thing for me, apart from the braiding, was the egg wash - it is done with the egg white and not with the yolk, as I usually do. Surprisingly, this egg wash gives the baked bread darker and richer caramel color. i sprinkled mine with sesame seeds too.

I didn't "plump" my bread quite evenly and it has a somewhat irregular shape,

but look at those threads - this challah came out so airy and light textured!

Leopard Bread

And another really interesting recipe, translated from German (with the help of daughter and short and very clear video on how to make).

Ingredients:

• 250 ml milk + 2 tbsp
• 1 vanilla
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 25 g corn starch
• 50 g butter
• 375 g flour
• 70 g sugar
• 20 g cacao
• 3.5 g dry yeast

The method of preparation is very different from what I've experienced so far and the resulting dough is very easy to work with. I added about 5 g of cacao to the light brown dough, but my cacao was very strong and there is almost no difference between the lighter and the darker brown dough. Next time I would add cacao only at the tip of the spoon.

Also, this bread is supposed to be sweet, but the quantity of sugar is not enough and it tastes more like neutral rather than sweet. I would at least double the sugar next time and also cover it with granulated sugar before baking.

Because the rolls are arranged irregularly, when cut the bread produces different patterns and each person can be served a different looking leopard slice.