Stand Mixer

Make all three flavored balls, or prepare just one or two, adjusting the ingredients accordingly.

There are some terrific baking books that focus on 100 percent whole-grain bread, and this style of bread has a fanatically loyal, and growing, following. I began my bread journey thirty years ago as a devotee of organic whole-grain bread, mainly for philosophical and health reasons. Though I’ve branched out to explore the entire bread kingdom and its infinite permutations, I still have a soft spot for what we used to call “pure bread.” The challenge a baker faces in making such breads is extracting the best of the grain flavor while overcoming some of the grassy and bitter tones of the bran and germ. Another challenge is attaining a crumb network that opens up both flavor and texture. The best way to evoke flavor, as we show in many of the formulas, is to give the enzymes enough time to break out sugars trapped in the starches. One way to do this when working with whole grains is to use a large amount of pre-ferment, such as a poolish or soaker. In this version, we will use both methods. A soaker is especially effective when coarse grains are part of the formula, and it also leaves open the option of substituting other grains, such as corn or oats, in place of the wheat to vary the texture of the finished loaf. Using a poolish to extend fermentation time contributes more flavor by developing acidity, balancing out the grassy flavor of the bran and germ in the process.

White bread is known under many names, including pullman, milk dough, pain de mie (bread of the crumb), and just plain old white bread. It has many uses, including dinner and knotted rolls, sandwich bread, burger buns, and hot dog buns. This style of dough is often referred to as milk dough because in most versions the hydration is primarily from fresh milk (or powdered milk and water). These white breads fall into the category of enriched breads, as they are made with the most often used natural dough conditioners: fat (butter or oil), sugar, and milk. These cause the crust to caramelize quickly and, when fermented correctly, give the finished bread a light-as-air quality with a very soft texture. The internal temperature need only reach just above 180°F for rolls and 185° to 190°F for loaves. Because of the enrichments, it is best to bake full-sized loaves at 350°F and small rolls at 400°F, but never at 450°F, as you would with lean hearth breads. The three variations that follow give you some flexibility regarding ingredients. You may substitute powdered milk (DMS) for the liquid milk and vice versa, and you may also substitute in equal measure low-fat milk, buttermilk, or skim milk for the whole milk. Making these substitutions will affect the final outcome slightly in both flavor and texture, so try making the breads with the variations and see which version you prefer (I tend to be a buttermilk guy). You can also freely substitute margarine or shortening or even liquid oil for the butter. Again, the type of fat you use will affect flavor and texture, but they all tenderize the bread. Shortening gives the softest texture, butter the best flavor.

What makes this version of rye different from the more popular German and deli ryes is the use of licorice-flavored aniseeds and fennel seeds, along with orange peel and a touch of cardamom. Nutritionists are now quantifying the therapeutic benefits of orange peel, licorice-flavored spices, and bitters as digestive aids that various traditional cultures have espoused for centuries. By making the bread with a combination of wild-yeast starter and commercial yeast, this formula creates an even more complexly flavored version of the bread than the more customary versions leavened only by commercial yeast. The lactic acid not only conditions the flour, predigesting it to an extent, but it also gives it a longer shelf life and better flavor. Think of this bread as a baked version of anisette.

A technique that is unique to this bread is the use of a cooked flour paste, made the day before. The gelatinized starches release flavors, giving this bread a distinct quality.

When you look at recipes for European holiday breads like panettone, stollen, tsoureki, and christopsomo, it seems as if they are all related, often sharing similar ingredients and proportions of fat and sugar. Often, the main difference is in the shaping and in the history and symbolism of each bread. But heaven help any of us if we propose that thought to someone who grew up with any of those breads. I once made stollen, panettone, and kulich (Russian Easter bread) from a recipe for multipurpose holiday bread for a group of chefs and explained my theory of their similarities. Later, one of the American chefs told me I had offended some of the Germans who grew up on stollen and who were adamant that stollen is nothing like panettone. So I will resist the temptation to call this formula a multipurpose holiday bread (though I have made many types of bread from it) and instead limit it to its application as Dresden stollen. Dresden is considered the spiritual home of this traditional Christmas bread. The bread symbolizes the blanket of the baby Jesus, and the colored fruits represent the gifts of the Magi. As in nearly every festival bread, the story aspect of this loaf is culturally important, for it is a way parents teach their children about their heritage. When such a story is accompanied by the flavor memory of a particular food, you have a tool much more powerful than didactic or pedagogical teaching. I’m convinced this must be the reason I offended those Germans that day when I implied that a stollen was like a panettone. Perhaps in taste and ingredients, yes, but never in association.

For twenty years I have been fascinated by, and have experimented with, rye breads in their many manifestations, but pumpernickel has always impressed me as the definitive rye (maybe it’s just that it has the best name). There are countless versions of pumpernickel bread. Many Americans think the name simply refers to a dark rye, made dark by the addition of caramel coloring. What the name really refers to is a loaf made with coarsely ground whole-grain rye flour, the distinguishing characteristic of this particular type of rye bread. Some versions, though not the one that follows, are extremely dense, what I call cocktail rye, which needs to be sliced very thin. People who love this dense rye really do passionately love it, but it has a rather small following in the United States. In some eastern European villages, this bread was, and still is, made by adding the bread crumbs from previously baked loaves to the new dough. This gives the bread a wonderful texture. You can make the following formula with or without rye-bread crumbs, but it’s a great way to use up dried-out leftover slices from the last loaf.

I love anything with sunflower seeds, and this bread is loaded with them. The seeds are nutritious, taste good, and are “loyal” (that is, they leave a long, nutty finish that fills the mouth so that you enjoy the bread long after you eat it). This is a variation of a formula developed by Craig Ponsford and the Coupe du Monde team in 1995. This new version utilizes a firm wild-yeast starter instead of pâte fermentée. The dough requires the starter, commercial yeast, and a soaker, so it entails a commitment, but the results are so memorable that it is well worth the effort.

The most famous bread baker in the world is probably Lionel Poilâne, whose boulangerie in Paris’s Latin Quarter makes only a few products. The most famous is a round, two-kilo, naturally fermented (wild-yeast) country bread that he calls a miche but that everyone else calls pain Poilâne. His system (described on pages 18–19) is simple—each baker, Poilâne’s personally trained apprentice, is responsible from start to finish for his loaves. This entails mixing and baking as well as stacking his own firewood and stoking his own fire. Poilâne teaches his apprentices to bake by feel as much as by formula, so there is no thermostat in the oven. The baker must determine when the oven is ready by holding his hand in the oven or tossing in a piece of paper to see how long it takes to turn to parchment and then burn. Poilâne critiques a loaf from each batch daily to keep abreast of the work of his men, since there are nearly twenty bakers in his stable, most working outside of Paris at his manufacture in Bièvres. The key to the Poilâne method is comprehending the craftsmanship of hand work, including understanding the fermentation process and commitment to the finest ingredients. Poilâne’s flour is organically grown and is sifted to a partial whole wheat, a 90 to 95 percent extraction rate (this means that much, but not all, of the bran is still in the flour). The finished bread is somewhat dense and very chewy, its flavors changing in the mouth with each chew, and it keeps for about a week at room temperature. Bread pilgrims come from all over the world to buy a Poilâne loaf (this includes those who visit Lionel’s brother Max, who makes similar loaves at his own bakeries scattered around Paris). When I visited Boulangerie Poilâne on rue du Cherche-Midi, I noticed some very attractive gift boxes, complete with cutting board and knife. Apparently, many visitors buy these and have them shipped to family and friends. It speaks volumes that one man can become so iconic because of a commitment to his craft. Of course, it’s fitting that in France this craft is bread baking. The following version of the Poilâne-style miche utilizes a long fermentation and a three-build system (the barm counts as the first build). It makes creative use of common kitchen bowls to replicate the difficult to find banneton proofing baskets of Poilâne’s operation. As always with baking, necessity is the mother of invention, and a home kitchen can always be modified to imitate, on a small scale, a commercial bakery.

There are many ways to make rye bread, but very few versions contain 100 percent rye flour. Rye has so little of its unique type of gluten (6 to 8 percent) that it is hard to develop the structure and lift necessary for a decent crumb without the addition of a fair amount of high-gluten wheat flour. However, there are many people who love dense rye bread, and there are others who eat it because they can tolerate the gluten of this bread but not the gluten in wheat breads. A lot of drama goes on inside a sourdough rye bread. Rye flour is high in natural sugars and dextrins and contains pentosan, a gum protein that causes the dough to become gummy if it is mixed as long as wheat breads. Also, the wild-yeast starter creates an acidic environment that slows down the enzymatic release of sugar during the mixing cycle, but at the same time allows for the sugars to emerge from the grain during the fermentation cycle as the enzyme activity kicks in. If properly mixed and fermented, the result is a sweet, creamy, yet chewy texture quite unlike that of any other bread.

I grew up on two definitive deli sandwiches: roast beef, chicken fat (schmaltz), and onion; and corned beef, coleslaw, and Russian dressing. Both sandwiches had to be served on onion rye to complete the experience. At least twice a month our family would head out to either Murray’s Deli, Hymie’s Deli, or the Chuckwagon on City Line Avenue (the delis are still there, but the Chuckwagon is long gone), and the big decision for me was which of the two sandwiches I should order. I never tired of either and years later, after emerging from a long vegetarian period, the first meat dish I sought out was a corned beef, coleslaw, and Russian dressing sandwich on onion rye. These days I limit my intake of corned beef, and especially of schmaltz, but I still chronically yearn for those sandwiches. However, I do continue to enjoy onion rye whenever I can get my hands on some, often making it myself.

Pugliese refers to the southeastern Italian region of Apulia (Puglia in Italian), but the variations on loaves with this name are endless. Many of the versions I’ve seen in the United States are similar to ciabatta—sometimes they actually are ciabatta, but are called pugliese just to differentiate them from the competition. What is the same is that both of these breads, along with many others, fall into the category of rustic breads, which we define as hydration in excess of 65 percent, usually approaching 80 percent. In Italy, where the flour is naturally more extensible than the very elastic North American flour that we use, there is no need to overhydrate. But here we need to pump more water into the dough in order to stretch the gluten strands, giving the loaves their distinctive big-hole structure and delicious nutlike flavor. One distinction between ciabatta, which originated in the Lake Como region of Lombardy (northern Italy), and pugliese is that pugliese breads are usually baked in rounds rather than in the slipper shape of ciabatta. The French version of a rustic bread, pain rustique, is also slightly elongated, but more of a bâtard than a slipper shape. Those, along with the pain à l’ancienne baguette (page 191) and the very elongated stirato and stubby pain rustique (pictured on page 135, made from the ciabatta dough), are all rustic breads, each with its own shape and ingredient makeup. An important distinction of the true pugliese bread, and one not often seen in American versions, is the use of golden durum flour, finely milled and packaged as fancy or extra fancy durum flour. Fancy durum is milled from the same strain of durum wheat as the sandy semolina flour that is sprinkled underneath hearth loaves and used in pane siciliano (page 198), but it is milled more finely. There are bakeries in Apulia that make this bread with 100 percent fancy durum flour and some that use a blend of durum and regular bread flours. In the following formula, I suggest a blend, but feel free to play around with the proportions, moving even into a 100 percent durum version when you feel adventurous. The challenge for anyone tackling this bread is getting comfortable with wet dough. Once you do, you will find it difficult to resist the desire to make rustic bread all the time; the softness and pliability of the dough give it a wonderful feeling in the hand. Combined with the flavor enhancement of long fermentation, this formula brings forth a loaf that is so dramatic, so delicious, and so much fun to make that it will forever change your standard of what constitutes great bread.

Rosemary has become a popular herb as culinary interest has grown and many of us have discovered how easy it is to cultivate it in our kitchen or backyard. It also has been overused, or used with a heavy hand in some instances, so I always advise restraint with rosemary: a little goes a long way. The Italians call this bread panmarino, and it is to them that we owe thanks for this interesting concept. This bread is a good one for answering the question, What do I do with these leftover mashed potatoes? The potato starch softens the dough and gives the bread a pleasing tenderness, while the dough delivers other bold flavors from the biga and rosemary infusion.

Bernard Ganachaud, in the early 1960s, made the poolish baguette the first legitimate alternative to the 60-2-2 baguette of the Parisian masses. When he retired thirty years later, his la flûte Gana was a licensed commodity, and bakers who paid for the right to make it were allowed to charge an extra franc above the government-controlled price. In the Coupe du Monde bread competition, the poolish baguette is now the standard that all countries must replicate. In my visits to the boulangeries of Paris, the poolish baguette made at the original Ganachaud Boulangerie was the second best baguette I ever had (the first being the pain à l’ancienne of Philippe Gosselin). Ganachaud has a special medium-extraction flour (with his name prominently displayed on the bags, naturally) from which he makes his baguettes, and there isn’t any flour quite like it in America. It is slightly higher in ash content and bran than regular bread flour, more like clear flour (whole-wheat flour that has been sifted only once instead of the usual twice to remove the bran and germ). The closest I’ve come to replicating that flour is described below and it makes a wonderful baguette, perhaps as good as can be done outside of the magical environment of Paris and without true Ganachaud-endorsed flour. Some people prefer it to the Gosselin baguette. See what you think.

Now that I’m living on the East Coast, I am in the center of Portuguese sweet bread universe. When I lived in California, I knew it as Hawaiian bread, but upon closer reading of the label, I learned that even the Hawaiians give credit to the Portuguese for this big, soft, sweet, round pillow of a loaf. One man I know from Los Angeles who summers on Nantucket told me he was in love with the sandwiches made on this bread from a small shop on the island. He was the first person I met with the same passion for this bread that many people feel toward rustic and wild-yeast breads of the artisan movement. When I began teaching at Johnson & Wales University, I found that each of my classes included at least one student who shared my friend’s passion for the sweet bread. Each of these students vows to improve upon the general formula, and this version is a result of the many tweakings the students who grew up with the real deal gave to the original version in an effort to make it conform to their childhood memories. The most distinctive aspect of this bread, besides the softness and the shape, is the flavor imparted by the powdered milk. I have tried making versions with whole milk and buttermilk, but once you get the taste of the powdered-milk version in your mind, no other taste will do.