Category: Bread

Kugelhopf Recipe

I’ll be starting with Gaston Lenôtres famous Kugelhopf recipe, though I’m not ruling out that I’ll change it a bit, since one or two very interesting ideas came in from reader Regine last week and I intend to explore them. For now here’s the starting point.

1 1/2 ounces (3 tablespoons) rum
3.5 ounces (1/2 cup) sugar
3.25 ounces (1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon) water
4.5 ounces (generous 1/2 cup) raisins
3.5 ounces (1 cup) slivered almonds
14-16 ounces brioche dough, chilled and ready
egg wash
powdered sugar for dusting
melted butter for the top of the cake
orange flower water, or a few drops of the extract of your choice

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Making Black Bread (Pumpernickel)

Here’s how I like to eat a real pumpernickel: with lox, cream cheese and capers. Why? Because this moist, ultra-dense bread calls out for accompaniment. Smoked fish and cheese. A nice slice of pork fat with onions and chili powder on top. Something — and something rich. Oh, and beer.

Not that this bread doesn’t taste great on its own of course. This is an all-rye bread. No white wheat flour, no caraway seeds, nothing to mask it’s pure, peasant the-wheat-crop-failed-this-year-and-we-have-nothing-else-to-eat rye-ness. You’ll get it when you taste it. It ain’t no sandwich bread but it’s great for canapés, toast, or just eating with butter.

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How to Make Rye Starter

A rye starter is basically the same thing as a white or whole wheat starter: a fermented mass of wet flour, only with rye flour as a base instead of some other type. Rye flours are quick to ferment for reasons that will be discussed later this week, meaning you can make one in a bout half the time of a white wheat starter: about three days. All you need to do is mix maybe an ounce of rye flour with an ounce of water, stir it and let it sit out overnight. The next day add two ounces of rye flour and two ounces of water and again let it sit out overnight. The next day add four ounces of rye flour and four ounces of water…and you should have a ready starter about four hours later. Bingo.

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Black Bread (Pumpernickel) Recipe

This recipe, for a very dark Polish and/or Lithuanian-style rye, diverges from most in that it uses neither espresso powder nor cocoa for color. That’s the upside. The downside is that you have to special order both dark rye flour and rye meal to execute it. Happily both are available on Amazon via Bob’s Red Mill.

Notice that this recipe, while very “Old World” in that it uses starter and is built in several stages, is still “spiked” with commercial yeast at the end to prevent it from becoming a complete brick. God love the modern world and neo-traditionalist bakers! This recipe is adapted from Inside the Jewish Bakery by Stanley Ginsberg and Norman Berg. It makes one large free-form loaf or two smaller 11″ x 4″ sandwich loaves. I may well adapt this to fit a pullman pan at some point in the coming week.

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Making Sausage in Brioche

This is a sort of high-end French pig-in-a-blanket. It makes a fabulous light dinner or picnic along with a little salad, grilled vegetables and cold beer. Here I made mine in a pullman pan since I sourced a large garlic sausage and I like the presentation: the circle with the square. You can use different sausages if you like of course. A large kielbasa works nicely. If you want to forego the form and hard-to-source encased meats you can just use standard 1″ sausages, roll them in thinner pieces of brioche and bake them free form. They taste just as good!

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Making Pain de Mie

White sandwich bread, also called a “Pullman loaf” or pain de mie, is about as simple and easy as homemade bread gets, especially if you have a Pullman pan, since it eliminates the need to shape and top your loaf. The Pullman pan delivers exactly what it’s designed to deliver: a loaf that is crustless, tight-crumbed, semi-bland and perfectly square. In other words a specialty bread that’s superior for sandwiches, toast, canapés, bread pudding, French toast, the list goes on.

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Pain de Mie Recipe

This simple, fast-rising recipe incorporates some semolina flour which is not traditional but gives this loaf a bit more “tooth”, meaning it’s soft and light but not Wonder Bread fluffy.

12 1/2 ounces (2 1/2 cups) bread flour
5 1/2 ounces (1 cup) semolina flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
12 ounces (1 1/2 cups) milk or water if you prefer, room temperature
1 1/2 ounces (3 tablespoons) soft butter

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Making Lavash

Now THIS is something I’m very excited about: homemade lavash. Wrap up some of your best sandwich fixin’s in some of this, straight from the oven, and get ready for the blank stares of wonder. In my universe lavash is the ultimate “wrap” bread, far preferable to tortillas, not only because it’s more flexible and tender, but because it’s larger and can more easily enclose…lots of stuff. Try this and you’ll probably never go back. Start by getting your ingredients together. Put the dry ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle.

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Lavash Recipe

This is another very simple dough that you can have ready in less than two hours. It contains:

2 teaspoons instant yeast
16 ounces (about 3 1/4 cups) bread flour
2 teaspoons salt
12 ounces (1 1/2 cups) water
3 tablespoons olive oil

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, stir together the dry ingredients. Combine the water and oil and add it to the mixer. Keep stirring until the dough comes together, then turn up the mixer to medium high and beat for about 5 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic. It will be quite wet…that’s a good thing.

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