Modern Baker Challenge: Triple Chocolate Scones

Another easy recipe from The Modern Baker, thanks to my handy-dandy food processor. This was really similar to the other scones and biscuits, except for the additions of milk chocolate (I only had semi-sweet), cocoa powder, and chopped bittersweet chocolate (I used 60%). The scones came together easily in the processor and were easy to pat into circles and cut into triangles. And they smelled wonderful.

These were not as sweet as I was expecting; they were very dark. I guess it's not too surprising, especially with my semi-sweet chocolate substitution. Maybe I should have/could have increased the sugar beyond the called-for 1/4 cup or waited until I had milk chocolate on hand.

But when we tried them with a small dollop of vanilla ice cream at my book club . . . oh my goodness, they were to die for! Hubby also said they were absolutely perfect with a cup of coffee this morning.

Another successful recipe for the Modern Baker Challenge. Here's the official post by Renee at Every Pot and Pan.

Modern Baker Challenge: Pecorino & Pepper Biscuits

I started the Modern Baker Challenge feeling unconvinced that I would make many of the quick breads in Nick Malgieri's The Modern Baker, and now I've planned my meals two nights in a row around trying one of his recipes.

Saturday night, I was craving scones, so I decided we'd have breakfast for dinner (we had eggs-in-a-nest).

Last night, I really wanted to try the pecorino and pepper biscuits, which I've been drooling over on Phyl and Andrea's sites, so I decided to make a pot roast.

This was a very easy recipe; once again, my new food processor came in handy. I processed the butter and finely grated cheese (I didn't have pecorino, so used his substitution suggestion of paremesan, which we always have in the house). Then I added in the flour, salt, coarsely ground pepper, and baking powder. Finally, I added in the milk.

When I dumped the mixture onto my counter, it was very crumbly, so I took NM's advice and dribbled on some more milk until I could pat the dough into a rectangle. I finally used my new biscuit cutters, which my husband bought for me over a year ago (!) but which I'd never used. The dough made exactly twelve biscuits.

I baked them for 20 minutes, and then we sat down to dinner.

These were okay. As with the grissini (from the Mellow Bakers Challenge), we weren't hugely fond of the cheese flavor in the bread. And I was actually a little short on cheese, so I'd used a half ounce less than he called for. Soaked in the broth from the meat, however, hubby and I both enjoyed them more. The kiddos were not fans.

I do think I'll try this recipe again, but next time I'll try the old-fashioned baking powder biscuit variation.

Vienna Bread (BBA #39)

I can't believe I'm on the 39th bread in the Bread Baker's Challenge! Only four left: two sandwich breads and two specialty breads that have both gotten rave reviews.

Number 39 brings us to Vienna bread; Peter Reinhart explains that "most of the great French breads tht we love today . . . came to France a couple hundred years ago via the Austro-Hungarian empire." The difference between this Vienna bread and French and Italian is that Vienna bread includes some enrichments.

It starts with a pâte fermentée, which is supposed to rest in the fridge overnight. Instead, I started it early in the morning, put it in the fridge once it doubled, and took it out seven hours later. I figured seven hours could be overnight, right?

A big highlight for me is that I used baker's math for the first time! This recipe calls for 13 ounces of pâte fermentée, while the recipe makes 16 to 17 ounces. Instead of throwing some away, I just adjusted the recipe, calculating that I needed 7.75 oz of flour rather than the 10 called for in the original recipe. Then I adjusted everything else accordingly using the percentages in the book. Success!

I mixed bread flour with salt, sugar, yeast, barley malt syrup, butter, egg, water, and the pâte fermentée. I kneaded the dough in my stand mixer for six minutes. The dough seemed buttery, like brioche dough, even though there was only a tablespoon of butter. It just didn't seem to have the right gluten development and it seemed almost sticky, but it was time to sit down for dinner. I scraped/poured the dough into my prepared measuring cup, and then gave it a stretch-and-fold after a while and another one ten minutes after that. What the stretch-and-fold can accomplish just amazes me!

After two hours, the dough had doubled and felt much more like dough. I divided it into two, shaped it into boules, let it rest, and then shaped it into batards.

Meanwhile, I made the Dutch crunch topping. Peter Reinhart explains that rice flour or cream of rice cereal are the perfect base for this topping, but I didn't have either, so I used semolina. Based on advice of those who have gone before me, I cut the recipe by thirds. I mixed semolina, bread flour, yeast, sugar, salt, vegetable oil, and water, and made a paste.

After the loaves had risen again and the oven was preheated, I had two more items of business before baking: scoring the loaves and painting on the Dutch crunch. I just didn't know which one to do first. I went back and forth and finally re-read the instructions that "the paste is brushed on the dough . . . just before the bread goes into the oven," so I decided to score them first.

Big mistake. As I'm sure more experienced bread bakers will predict, while I was painting on the topping, the loaves started to collapse and spread outward. By the time I took my fake-steam-oven aluminum pan off of the loaves after the first ten minutes of baking, the loaves were low and squat with zero evidence of scoring. I was so bummed.

But while the look of the bread was disappointing, the bread itself was not. We could definitely tell that this bread is related to French and Italian breads, but the presence of the enrichments was clear as well. It has a very similar flavor to baguette, but with a texture that makes it well-suited to making a sandwich.

And that's exactly what we're using it for: Picnic sandwiches for our Mothers' Day trip to the zoo . . . Happy Mothers' Day, everyone!

Modern Baker Challenge: Real Welsh Scones

I have a confession to make: I'm not much of a baked goods person. Weird, huh? I mean, I love a good homemade cookie, I love a good hearty whole grain bread for my sandwich at lunch, and I love a piece of buttered bread with a bowl of soup, but that's about it. I'd take a piece of chocolate candy over any cake, pie, muffin, or any sort of quick bread, any day. It doesn't even have to be good chocolate candy.

But I love to bake, and my family loves baked goods of every kind, so it all works out.

The one exception to the quick bread thing is scones; I've always enjoyed a good scone. Something about the texture when it's just made just right: not too crumbly, just a little moist, almost hearty. And that slight hint of sweetness. Yum. I've been really wanting to try the scones in The Modern Baker, so tonight, I decided to have breakfast for dinner so I'd have an excuse to make them.

This is by far my favorite recipe from the Modern Baker Challenge so far. I could eat these scones every day. And given how easy they were to make, it probably wouldn't be too much of a stretch to have them in the house every day (although probably not so good for us . . .).

These were a cinch with the new food processor that hubby bought for me last Christmas. Pulse all of the dry ingredients together, throw in chunks of cold butter, dump it all into a bowl and slowly mix in egg and milk. My dough seemed a lot wetter than the pictures in the book, but I just dipped my hands in a little water before forming it into circles and it worked out okay. They baked for the maximum fifteen minutes, and we finished the first one within sixty seconds of removing them from the oven.

We tried them with butter and with jam, which were unnecessary, but certainly didn't hurt the scones in any way. Hubby loved these, the kiddos did, too, and I couldn't stop eating them. YUM!

Modern Baker Challenge: Chocolate Spice Bread

One of the best things about the Modern Baker Challenge (at least for now, while we're in the quick breads section), is that if I feel like baking something but don't have a lot of time, I know there's a perfect recipe just waiting for me. And most of them use ingredients that are sitting right in my cupboard, so I can get right to work!

This morning I felt like whipping up a quick bread while the kids were eating breakfast. I let the little guy choose, and he picked chocolate spice bread.

This was an easy recipe: whisk flour, sifted cocoa, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, and fresh nutmeg. Whisk eggs and sugars in another bowl; add sour cream and melted butter. Stir it all together. Pour it in a pan. The kiddos even got to help with the whisking from where they sat at the breakfast counter. The only thing that surprised me was how thick the batter was; more like a thick fudgy cake rather than a quick bread.

I baked it for a few minutes longer than required until I got a dry(ish) toothpick (I didn't want it to be too dry). We (barely) waited a few minutes until we sliced into it; I sliced off a chunk to leave with hubby and the kiddos and grabbed the rest to take to the Lunch Bunch as I headed out the door.

I'd been on the road for five minutes when hubby called me. "Why didn't you leave us a bigger piece of the bread?!? It's already all goooooooonnnnne!!!" Needless to say, it was a hit at work, too. Moist with a slightly spicy, lightly chocolately, complex flavor: much loved all around!

The official blogger for Chocolate Spice Bread was Phyl over at Of Cabbages and King Cakes. (He's actually already finished a bunch of the Modern Baker recipes; check it out!)

Mellow Bakers: Grissini (May)

So I just had to get that Tuscan bread off the top of my page. Looking at the Mellow Bakers' breads for May, I noticed that grissini seemed to be a fairly quick one.

Indeed! At 3:20, I mixed the ingredients (bread flour, yeast, salt, olive oil, softened unsalted butter, and water) and kneaded them in my stand mixer for five minutes. The dough was beautiful: silky, smooth, not sticky at all.

When I first read the description of grissini (p 256 in Hamelman's Bread), I planned to try both the roasted garlic version and the cheese and pepper version. Unfortunately, making these tonight was a spur of the moment decision and I didn't have any garlic roasted (except for a tiny bit of frozen and I was worried about what it would do to the temperature of my dough); you're supposed to add it to the ingredients at the beginning. So I proceeded with the dough, and I roasted some garlic while the dough was fermenting, using the speedy method detailed on the King Arthur website.

I put the dough into a cup to ferment for an hour. It didn't move. Luckily, I had read Steve's experiences and remembered him saying that his never moved either, but that the breadsticks turned out fine.

Then I divided the dough into 1 1/3 ounce portions and let them rest. And then I realized that, since I was in the middle of cooking dinner, I probably should've just rolled them and cut them with my pizza cutter. But they were already in pieces, so I rolled each one out by hand; actually, it went pretty quickly. I experimented with four toppings:

My variations:
* rolling the sticks in Parmesan and freshy ground black pepper
* rolling the sticks in sesame seeds and kosher salt
* pressing the dough into a rectangle, spreading roasted garlic on it, and then rolling them up
* combination roasted garlic inside and cheese outside

Then I put them in a 380F oven for 25 minutes (they were not golden after 20).

Verdict: Easy peasy recipe! Started at 3:20 and by 5:30, we were sitting down to spaghetti and homemade breadsticks. These were very tasty! Even my non-bread-eater little guy liked them. I'm excited to experiment with other variations. Hubby and I both prefered the plain garlic ones the best. The cheese and garlic combos were our second favorite and then the cheese-only. I didn't like the ones with salt and sesame seeds. I think next time I will make them with the garlic incorporated in the batter, although I may use more than Hamelman calls for . . . I roasted an entire head of garlic and it was only enough for about a dozen breadsticks, and even in those, the garlic flavor wasn't very strong. But I'm really excited to add such a quick and tasty recipe to my repertoire!

No salt added?! Tuscan bread (BBA #38)

Hubby says that we've all given Tuscan bread a bum rap because, unlike the rest of the breads in the Bread Baker's Apprentice, this bread is not meant to stand out on its own, but is just a vehicle for other flavors.

Nonetheless, I still was so startled by the flavor of this bread that I spit out my first bite. (Then I ate it, of course.) But the bland, slightly sweet, almost non-flavor really caught me off-guard.

This recipe started out strangely by pouring boiling water over flour, stirring it into a paste, and leaving it to sit on my counter for a day.

The rest of the process was pretty standard, except that my dough kept the paste-like consistency for quite a long time. Well, and when you add more flour, yeast, olive oil, and water, you don't add salt; that was weird. And (maybe because I wasn't excited about this one based on the reviews its gotten?) I didn't seem to have enough patience to let the dough do what it needed to do; instead, I added too much water, then had to add more flour, then more, then more. Finally it achieved a normal, non-play-doh-like texture and I was able to proceed with the recipe.

The dough doubled in exactly two hours. I shaped it into a boule and let it rise for another hour. Sprinkled it with flour and slashed it. Baked it with a steam pan filled with water and a few water spritzes. After twenty minutes, it was exactly 200F internally.

Hubby and I tried this one by itself ~ very plain, although it had a really soft, almost Wonderbread-like texture. We tried it with salted butter ~ I couldn't believe how clearly I could taste the salt in the butter. We tried it with honey and butter ~ the honey really dominated. Hubby tried it sprinkled with salt.

Today, I've got an artichoke dip on the menu; maybe Tuscan bread will be a good vehicle for that.

UPDATE: Didn't end up making the dip. We needed bread for sandwiches, so we used up most of the Tuscan for PB&J and PB&B. Seemed to resemble good ol' PB&J on Wonderbread . . . however, I have never been a white bread fan and I really didn't enjoy it. Still, hubby and the kids seemed to enjoy their sandwiches, the loaf is almost gone, and we will not be making it again. On to bigger and better loaves!