crustacular bread.

and then some.

All I want to do is bake bread. I thought that I’d hit the jackpot when no-knead bread made the rounds on the internets, but this preferment stuff is really something. Toasted, with a slice of cheddar cheese? I think that’s a luxurious breakfast.

This particular recipe is based off of the following:

Master Recipe: Baguette Dough for Batards

from the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook

192g poolish (1:1, AP:water with pinch of yeast, fermented 15 hours)
437g AP flour
1g instant yeast
12g salt

knead, fold every hour on the hour for three hours, proof, then bake at 460 until the internal temperature hits 200F.

To this recipe I added:

1. 1 tbsp honey… because I thought that the yeast would starve. (it turns out that I tend to overfeed everything in my life – myself, my husband, my parrots, my FarmVille animals… I feel guilty! I can’t help it!) But since I only had to ferment it for three hours, versus the overnight retard-ferment that I did for the focaccia, this was unnecessary. It didn’t introduce any honey flavor so I will omit it next time.
2. rye flour because I wanted to see how it would behave. Swapped 1/7 of total AP with rye. Didn’t matter much though… Maybe I will swap 1/2 next time and see what happens (although the rye bread recipe in the book says “fragile”)

Also, the recipe is intended for batard shapes, baked with pizza stones and a steam-generator composed of rocks and chains to ensure a great crust… I find that baking a boule in a dutch oven is much more easier to do at home. Just preheat the oven with the dutch oven inside for 30 minutes, plop in your dough, bake 30 minutes covered, then 15-20 uncovered. I don’t use the lid on my dutch oven though, because the bake-lite handle can only take up to 350F, whereas bread is baked around 450-ish. Aluminum foil has done a great job though.

While the bread was baking, I also roasted a chicken… Because why not? They’re both high heat recipes. Kill two birds with one stone!
The chicken is based off of the Zuni Cafe Cookbook recipe. Basically pat dry a chicken, lather it with salt (about a tsp per pound), let air dry, stuff with herbs, brown on a saute pan, and bake in said saute pan until the chicken is cooked (an internal temperature of 165 is best for me – it’s going to carry-over anyways, and who wants dry chicken?). The book says to stuff the breasts with herbs, but my cooking school teacher was always against this. She would say, “why separate the connective tissue that keeps the juice in? Just stick it up the butt.”

Eveyrthing that she has taught me works, so I obey.