It can’t be that hard, can it? I mean, they’re unicellular organisms. What’s funny to me is how few people have ever thought to do it until recently. One of the results is pain à l’ancienne, though as I said a couple of days ago, Peter Reinhart has since expanded on the technique to create […]
READ ONSo what can this bread teach us about ovens and heat? How does bread baked in a regular oven get such a nice, open crumb? First of all there’s the wetness of the dough, which means more steam and more expansion. However you need heat penetration to create that steam, and more than that rapid […]
READ ONI’m a perfectionist about a lot of things, but pain à l’ancienne isn’t one of them. I take the term “rustic” seriously here, so the more oddly-shaped, bulbous and goofy these things turn out, the better. I don’t even care if my dough portions are the same weight…is that gettin’ nutty or what? This bread […]
READ ONPerhaps a couple of you wondered that looking at yesterday’s oven photos. In fact it was my version of Peter Reinhart’s pain à l’ancienne. There’s a lot of interest in this bread in the baking community. Or should I say there has been, ever since he first published the recipe eight years ago in his […]
READ ONThere is another advantage to adding heavy pizza stones, or even actual bricks, to your home oven that I didn’t mention yesterday. That is consistency of heat. Most of us assume that when we heat up our home ovens they stay consistently and uniformly hot. This is not the case. In fact if you could […]
READ ON…a new friend at Underbelly wrote in with this hilarious comment on all the grief I’ve been getting: As a fellow ridicule-worthy food elist, I share your scorn of merely stupid food elitists. Thanks for the great blog. Not normally Joe Pastry style, but I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.
READ ONHigh ratio flour is used almost exclusively by professional cake bakers, though it’s also found in store bought cake mixes. What makes this type of flour special is that it’s ground very finely and treated with either heat or chlorine (or both). What does that do? It allows the flour to disperse very, very evenly […]
READ ONThis recipe is taken from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, an outstanding book that I recommend to all. This dough needs an overnight rest. Basically you mix it in the evening, rush it into the fridge until the next day, let it rise 2 to 3 hours, then shape the loaves and bake. Quite […]
READ ONMr. Nick checks in to point out that it’s important to avoid spritzing hot glass surfaces, and it is. I remember the first time I tried this technique many years ago. I spritzed my oven’s light bulb, which then exploded, raining fine shards of glass down onto my unbaked bread (not good eating). It is […]
READ ONIt’s funny how many people seem to think their ovens are too cheap/old/junky to be improved by things like pizza stones and pans of water. The fact is, the junkier your oven is, the greater the difference these tricks will make. The first thing you want to do to make your oven more hearth-like is […]
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