So a buddy and I decided to teach ourselves bread baking by following The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. For our first session we decided to make cornbread and Italian bread. The recipe for the cornbread was dead simple. Rather than using a 10″ baking tin we used an 8″ cast iron pan that was pre-heated in the oven and loaded with bacon fat. The trickiest part of this recipe was handling a hot cast iron pan while filling it up with the cornbread mixture. The end result was a moist and delicious bread that MUST be eaten hot!
But the star of the day was the Italian bread! Making this bread was a long and arduous process. From beginning to end it took the better part of 5 hours to complete and 2 days worth of preparation. The day before you need to prepare the biga which is a pre-ferment used to develop flavour.
The day of baking you need to cut up the biga and then let it sit for an hour to get to room temperature.
With the biga at room temperature you mix in all of your ingredients and begin to knead. We did two batches, one by hand and the other with the stand mixer. It took the both of us 30 minutes and multiple turns at the dough to get it to a consistency that we were happy with. We were aiming to get to the consistency where you stretch a piece of dough between your fingers and it’s paper thin enough to let light through – this is called the window pane test. We were not successful getting the dough to that consistency. Our dough was stiff and tough but fortunately after an hour of rest the dough rose again and was once again tender.
We then formed our loaves, let them rise a second time, scored them, then baked them. The bread turned out tender and moist with a nice chew. The crust was soft and the bubble structure was fine. It was a denser dough similar to a sandwich bread. The flavour was pleasant with a delicate sweetness. Definitely a good bread and alot of work!
