baking bread – In Good Taste

BBA Challenge (Week 16): Kaiser Rolls

Maris Callahan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to come right out and say this. I have long since thought that New York food is overrated. First though, let’s take a step back and start from the beginning. I made Kaiser Rolls, the 16th bread in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, recently. They were a nice change from my usual whole grain sandwich bread, but what I enjoyed most about eating them was realizing that the big, crusty, sesame-seed encrusted rolls seemed so New York. I might have bittersweet feelings towards my city, but I suppose that New York food is not all overrated. The Big Apple, is, after all, home to some of the best restaurants in the world. The problem is, most of those great restaurants are tucked away in Soho, hiding in the West Village, so that visitors often miss them in lieu of places like bustling pizza and pasta joints like Carmine’s or the famous that is the Second Avenue Deli. It’s not that any of these places are bad, but when I’m in a new city, I like to wander off the beaten path and look for hidden gems that I haven’t read about in the guidebooks. Places that the locals know and love. Though […]

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BBA Challenge (Week 14): French Bread

Maris Callahan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, a friend and I were talking about narcissism. Bloggers spend a great deal of timing writing into space, on our blogs and on Twitter, about ourselves, hoping people will read them, hoping people will like them, hoping people will like us. We write about what we had for breakfast, we write about our dogs, our kids, our boyfriends and our parents. We right about the trivial moments of our lives and we write about the most important moments in our lives. Are we narcissistic or just outgoing? Do we have a lot to say or do we say too much? I think that there is a boundary, a happy medium that’s defined by how genuine you are. Is it all good, all the time? Or are you just sharing stories from your life as they happen, when they happen, because you havre a passion for that? Well, I talk about my great cooking all time but I’m going to be honest with you when I tell you about this week’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge: it was a flop. I. Am. Bad. At. Hearth. Baking. When you bake certain types of breads from the book, Peter Reinhart instructs you to replicate a […]

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BBA Challenge (Week 11): Cranberry Walnut Celebration Bread

Maris Callahan — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Peter Reinhart and I have a very different idea of what it means to celebrate. Now, keep in mind that I’ve never even met Peter Reinhart, let alone celebrated with him, but I’m basing my statement on substantiated evidence. In The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Reinhart has a recipe for Cranberry Walnut Celebration Bread. Now, I like bread as much as the next person (maybe even more, as evident by the fact that I’m doing this challenge in the first place) but when I celebrate, I want to be celebrating with a rich, decadent dessert like my favorite chocolate cake. I admit my initial skepticism but when I pulled the finished loaf from the oven, those hard feelings were instantly replaced by awe: why had I not started baking braided breads sooner? Not only are they elegant and impressive but the fat, floppy braids hide mistakes quite well. Now, I’ve never been accused of being perfect, but I dare you to tell me where the mistakes are in that loaf of bread (and since I moderate comments, if you do tell me, I’ll probably just delete you…the world will be none the wiser). While I probably won’t start baking Cranberry Walnut […]

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BBA Challenge (Week 7): Ciabatta Bread

Maris Callahan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Today I’m going to tell you a story about a girl who does not know how to read directions. Or rather, a girl who knows how to read directions but who sometimes bites off more than she can chew and neglects to follow them. This girl is a repeat offender in the multitasking arena. She’s been known to drag her unwilling laptop into the kitchen so that she can Twitter while she’s cooking dinner. Sometimes she has her radio and her TV on at the same time, so that she can watch the Food Network but if a song she likes comes on the radio, she can rock out to that instead. At work, she sometimes opens the Microsoft Outlook icon in her task bar to discover that she has not one, not two but thirteen active e-mails open at once. So it’s not surprising that she misread the directions to the ciabatta bread in her Bread Baker’s Alliance book and instead of wonderful, crusty ciabatta loaves, she ended up with, well, not very crusty, dense loaves of white bread. I mean, they LOOKED good and they tasted just fine but the texture was all wrong. I know that baking […]

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BBA Challenge (Week 6): Challah

Maris Callahan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Since I began baking in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge six weeks ago, I’ve received some great response from a lot of my readers. Namely, I’ve had people ask me: what in the world do you do with all of that bread? Seeing as I live alone and try to eat from food groups that don’t consist solely of “unbleached bread flour” you are correct in assuming that I don’t consume all of the bread that I bake. So for your reading pleasure, here are a few things I’ve done with some of the breads I’ve baked since beginning the challenge: I give it away It would be nice if I could tout my selflessness here and say that I’ve donated homemade breads to local homeless shelters or community agencies but that’s not quite the case. It turns out that homemade bagels make a great hostess gift and I haven’t walked into my mother’s house in ages without being greeted by “what kind of bread are we getting?” I say no to store bought bread I’ll admit to Pepperidge Farm and anyone else who’s interested that it’s been a long time since I’ve purchased store bought bread. It’s not just […]

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