Rosemary and Roasted Pepper Bread

My husband bought me a book by Jim Lahey, the founder of the Sullivan Street Bakery.  This bakery is famous for producing massive loaves of crackled, crunchy, crusty loaves with chewy, soft interiors. I really didn’t want the recipes so much, but I was dying to know his technique because my breads often have uninspired crusts. 

It turns out I have been timid with temperature, baking my doughs like they were biscuits and

cakes.  To get a fine crust, the pan should be preheated and the oven very hot. 

Today I was inspired by two wildly different recipes from different books.  I attempted to recreate neither, but used both as jumping off points.  The first of the two resulted in a somewhat unattractive freeform loaf that was incredibly tasty, crunchy and chewy.  That is the one I am giving you the recipe for today.  We stuffed ourselves with it, imprudently.  (I am supposedly beginning a diet.  Ha!) 

The second loaf was inspired by a cinnamon swirl loaf recipe that I made only once because it was too high in sugar and white flour for a “bread” – a naughty, tempting treat not far from being a cinnamon bun.  Recently a health conscious relative surprised me by asking for the recipe.

As I was copying it, I was thinking that the proportions of one large egg to one cup of flour and all the butter probably accounted for the very fine, nearly cake-like crumb.  How many cups of whole grain, stone ground flour could I use without making it unbearably heavy?  How little yeast could I get away with?  How long should I adjust the rise and amount of liquid?  What if I cut out all but just a tablespoon or two of the sugar, just enough to give the dough a kick?  What if it were made with Earl Gray tea and cardamom, two of my very favorite flavors? 

I wrote down some ideas on scratch paper and made an enormous loaf (about 7.5 c. flour; I thought I’d love it!)  The crust and crumb were both great, but although I’d cut the yeast almost in half, the taste of it was still too strong for me, and the Earl Gray and cardamom not strong enough.  I ended up with a big, bland bakery loaf with a good crust. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much food in this bread.  However, the dogs happily lie down, sit and beg for the crunchy bits.  And my husband does like this bread, so I haven’t suggested feeding it to the chickens yet. 

I’m going to tinker with the recipe and report back.

So back to the first recipe, a winner in every respect. 

As I said, my breads always tasted good, but the texture wasn’t anything to brag about.  I’m actually going to quote myself (from my last post) here, which may seem pompous, but I’m going to do it anyway:  

Bread crust is something I want to master.  Twice in my life I have had truly fantastic crust.  Chewy, crunchy, bitter and sweet crust, slightly over-brown and cracked like plaster from a wall of an ancient villa in a sun baked place like Italy or Greece or the south of France or Morocco.  The kind of place where gangsters and writers hole up, jilted lovers blow their brains out and American tourists with cameras stray away from their tour buses because they want a picture of that cat sunning in the vacant window.

I was walking slowly through the cooking section of Powell's, in case anything jumped out at me.  The cover of Jim Lahey's My Bread did. The crust actually didn't resemble those poetic thoughts.  What stopped me and made me pick up the book was that the bread was in a cast iron pot.  One of my great-great-great-great grandmothers cooked her bread in a cast iron pot.  (I know because we have a book written by her grandson.)  But when I tried it, my bread stuck so badly I had to sic our Boston Terror-to-food dog on it to gnaw on the pot for half an hour before I scrubbed it myself for another half hour.  His mouth was rubbed raw and pink and so were my hands.  Does the pot on the cover of this book look like it needs to be rescued by a Boston Terrier?  No?  I didn't think so, either.   

Then, when I was flipping through the book, I saw several loaves with crunchy, chewy, crackly outsides and stretchy insides.  One studded loaf reminded me strongly of one of those two fabulous loaves of bread I have eaten... 
 

In the introduction, Lahey describes his apprenticeships to artisanal bakeries in Italy.  He learned to measure by weight, to knead and shape loaves, to let them rise, to fire up a wood oven to exactly the right temperature and also to use commercial ovens.  When he started producing a large volume of loaves seriously in his own bakery, he developed his no-knead method.  Clearly the ancient Romans did not spend a huge amount of time kneading white flour, commercial yeast doughs on floured bread boards! 

Lahey discovered that he not only saved himself and his two employees significant effort by trading kneading for a long rising time, but he also improved the flavor of the bread.  Like me, he is not fond of the strong flavor of commercial yeast, so he was delighted to be able to use a lot less of it.  The lengthened rise allows a small amount of yeast to multiply naturally and the flavor of the grain predominates.

Lahey recommends a heavy pot with a lid, preferably enameled cast iron, regular cast iron or a heavy all ceramic pot.  After the second rising, the dough is placed into the preheated pot.  The dough will, of course, collapse a fair amount since you just can’t slide it into the pot perfectly.  However, it will rise again when placed in a hot pot in a hot oven, so it will come out ok.  As I found out today, the soft freeform loaf I made first re-rose nicely.  I scored a pretty little design into the second loaf at the end of the second rising and lost it during the transfer into the pot, when the bread collapsed.  There was only a ghost of the design left.  I’ll work on that.   

Lahey stresses the importance of leaving the finished loaf alone to cool on a rack for a few minutes after removing from the oven.  The steam escaping from the interior through the crust will help with the final texture of the dough.  It’s too hot to eat, anyway! 

Following are the ingredients for Lahey’s basic loaf:

3 c. bread flour

1 ¼ tsp. salt

¼ tsp. yeast

1 1/3 c. water

I had in my head a more exotic loaf and I have been wanting to use up last year’s rosemary from my garden since I’ll soon be picking more.  (So I’m putting rosemary in all kinds of stuff!)  I also don’t like to use all white flour in anything except brioche, which I will probably eventually convert to a half-rye recipe because it’s been on my mind to do so.

So I jotted this on a scrap of paper last night, made it just like I wrote it and it was yummy:

Rosemary and Roasted Pepper Bread Ingredients

2 c. bread flour

1 c. whole wheat (I use malted, stoneground)

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. yeast (I use more yeast because of the stoneground wheat.  Use the yeast in a jar and refrigerate it if you will make a lot of bread)

1 ½ c. water (more water because of the wheat)

¼ c. olive oil (because I wanted the flavor)

1 tbsp. honey or sugar (to boost the yeast since I was dumbing it down with the oil)

1 tsp. garlic

1 tsp. somewhat crushed dry rosemary leaves (crush them so the diners don’t have the sensation of gnawing on sticks)

2/3 c. chopped lightly pickled roasted red bell peppers with the liquid squeezed out

½ c. additional bread flour

Baking spray

Cornmeal for dusting

Mix together yeast, water and honey, preferably in a big electric mixer bowl.  (Here I differ with Lahey, who says you only need to mix the ingredients just a little since the long rising will take over.  The more whole grain flour I use, the more suspicious I am that this will work, so I use my mixer just in case.  It’s no big deal to just leave the dough in there, covered, to rise, anyway.)

Add the flour, salt, olive oil, garlic, peppers and rosemary a little at a time so as not to make a big mess all over the kitchen.  When the batter is mostly mixed – and yes, it will resemble a thick, sticky batter - turn the mixer on higher and beat it some more.  Remove the dough hook, cover the bowl and leave the dough to rise at least 12 hours, until doubled.  I covered mine at 8pm and came back to it at 8am, which was very convenient to me since I usually don’t work or go to school until mid-day. 

When you come back to the dough, it should be somewhat bubbly looking as well as doubled in size.  

Punch down the dough, mix in 1/2 cup of bread flour and knead the dough within the bowl.  Shape it into a round and recover it for a second rising.  This is not the same as Lahey’s instructions to move the dough to the board.  I just made a mess doing that, even though I hadn’t added the peppers yet.  I even tried to use wax paper, but the dough stuck to it.  So I’m recommending you save yourself some trouble and do it all in the bowl.  Since the dough will fall some when you move it into the hot pot, it really doesn’t matter where you punch it down and reshape it.  Also, I used more flour than he did because peppers are wet so the dough needed it. 

Let the dough rise until it has doubled in bulk again.  Assuming your house is around 70 degrees, this should be about 2 hours total.  About 1 ½ hours in, turn the oven on to 475 degrees, spray your heavy pot with cooking spray and put it into the oven on the second to lowest rack. 

When 2 hours are up, make sure the dough is adequately risen.  Remove the pot from the oven.  Give it a quick second spray, then sprinkle the bottom and sides liberally with cornmeal.  As gently as possible, slide the dough out of the bowl and into the pot.  Careful not to burn yourself.  Cover the pot and put in the oven.

Lahey says to bake the bread half an hour with the lid on the pot, then remove the lid and continue baking the bread another 15 to 30 minutes.  I was very skeptical about this.  Remember, this is a 475 degree oven, with a very hot pot and a fairly small loaf of bread!  However, it was not burned to a crisp.  The bottom was a smidgeon dark in spots and we did have to sic the Boston Terror on the pot to work loose the parts of the bread that stuck.  But our pot wasn’t a good quality, heavy pot, either.

The reason I didn’t take any pictures of the bread after we pulled it apart and admired how crunchy the crust was and soft and well-flavored the inside was – honestly – was because I couldn’t get the bread to come out of the pan without tearing it into a bunch of pieces.  I did NOT spray the pot, like I wrote in the recipe.  I just sprinkled it with cornmeal.  Lahey didn’t spray his, either, but he used a better pot!  

Also note that I used a stock pot – Lahey’s pots are just slightly higher than the bread.  I’m sure the size of the pot is also helpful with making a good crust.  However, our bread was darn good, anyway.

Once I wrestled the bread out of the pot, we just fell at it.  And then we couldn’t take pictures, because there was hardly a crumb left.

Tomorrow we diet.