Farine

Goat Cheese Foccacia with Cherries and Shallots

I felt I had posted enough flatbreads this summer already, so I wasn’t going to post the recipe for this foccacia for fear you guys would think I’ve gone no-knead and flatbreadish all the way! But it is simply too delicious to be kept a secret. I have to share. No way around that…
As explained in A Convenient Dough, the original recipe can be found in Healthy Breads in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois (a book to which I came reluctantly but which I found to be a good source of ideas and inspiration). Although it was love at first bite, I now make it with fresh goat cheese and I think it tastes even better. Try it and let me know!

If you have the dough ready (I use no-knead naturally leavened whole grain pizza dough which I keep in the fridge but you can buy ready-made whole wheat pizza dough) , it’ll take you 5 minutes to chop two shallots and set them to marinate together with a fistful of dried cherries (not the sour kind) in a bit of red wine diluted with water and seasoned with salt and black pepper , another 2 or 3 to scoop out a grapefruit-size chunk of dough and flatten it as thin as possible on a parchment-paper covered sheet pan or pizza pan.

Everything gets to rest for 30 minutes (including you) while the oven heats up to 450ºF/232ºC. Then you drain the cherries and shallots (blotting them out with a paper towel if necessary), spread them on the waiting dough (pressing down the cherries), crumble fresh creamy goat cheese over the cherries and shallots, add some more salt and pepper and slide the foccacia into the oven. Twenty minutes later (during which your kitchen fills up with a complex and delicate fragrance), I guarantee you will be in tastebuds’ heaven!

Tips:

Don’t overdo the cherries, especially if they are really sweet (I use Stoneridge Orchards organic whole dried Montgomery cherries and find that the foccacia comes out better with more shallots than cherries)
If desired, paint with (just a drop of) extra virgin olive oil after baking.

This foccacia goes to Susan’s Wild Yeast for Yeastspotting.

Stenciled Miche

I know it’s been a while since I promised to do a post on stenciling. Sorry it took me so long! Time-wise I often bite more than I can chew, especially in the summer where I always think I’ll finally get to whatever I couldn’t do during the rest of the year and of course I never do. Oh, well! Better that than being idle and bored, I guess… Anyway the kids and grandkids are gone, we have a couple of quiet days left here on the river and the time for stencils has come!

Stenciling isn’t really difficult and it is a lot of fun as it makes it possible to vary and personalize the appearance of your loaves almost endlessly. If you know how to draw, you can make your own designs, you can also download an image or reproduce one you find in a book. Once you have the design, you transfer it to construction or other sturdy paper and you cut it out, just as I did for this one which I used for the Essential Sweet Perrin:

But I mostly use store-bought stencils which I find at arts & crafts stores such as Michael’s or JoAnn:

Sometimes I use cut-out shapes, as can be seen above in the blog’s title banner:

Or I use ornaments, for instance this one (found at Michael’s)…

…or even decorative odds and ends as with the Lovebird Loaf

I got the stencil below at Ikea. I think it was part of a cupcake decorating kit…

For the above miche, I used a stencil I bought in France in the kids’ section of a big stationery store. It came in a set of six and there were many more to choose from…

…but they were almost twice as expensive as the ones available in the US (sturdier too but that’s not really necessary), so I only got the fruit set.

If nothing else is available, I just use my hand as in the Double Apple Bread!

And then of course, if you want to write on your bread, you also need a set of letters. I own three or four different alphabets and I am always on the lookout for more as they are more fragile than the stencils and the letters get lost more easily. I buy them in the scrapbook section of arts & crafts stores.

When I was at SFBI last fall, the instructor who teaches German breads told me he always stenciled his breads in the last twenty minutes or so of baking: he takes the loaves out of the oven, sprays them very lightly with water, does the stenciling and puts them back to finish baking.
I do my stenciling just before sliding the loaves in the oven as I find them easier to handle when they are not hot. I do keep his technique in mind though and it has happened once or twice that my stencil got kind of washed out in the oven, either because of the amount of steam or because I hadn’t scored the bread in the right places and the dough moved differently from what I had expected. So I took the bread out, redid the stenciling and finished the baking. It worked very nicely. But for this miche, I just used my regular method.

What I do is that I wait until the proofing (the second rise) is done and the oven is ready for baking…

Then I gently transfer the dough (which is upside down in the basket) to a sheet-pan lined with semolina-dusted parchment paper, so that is now right side up. I put the stencil where I want it. Here I put it off-center and high up as I knew I needed space to write something.

Then I dust the open part of the stencil all over with flour using a small sugar shaker (make sure you use one with tiny tiny holes) …

I remove the stencil very gently (sometimes it sticks a bit and you don’t want to pull hard) and here we are…

Then I select the spot where I am going to write (and it’s best to pick the word ahead of time as some words take up a lot of room and you don’t want your letters to start climbing down the sides of your loaf).
In this instance, I chose a very short word to go with the grapes. I know we still have one month of summer left but, hey, for I figured, why not go for it and stencil my way to fall. At least this year I won’t be dragging behind as I am wont to do. 😉

Here comes the trickiest part as the letters tend to stick quite a lot (they are made for scrapbooks after all) and it is easy to mess up when you remove them (if you do, just brush off the flour, use the tiniest amount of water to freshen up the surface of the dough and start again), so if you don’t have dainty fingers (I don’t), it’s best to use tweezers.
I use these (which come from my old computer toolkit from the days when I still had a desktop and needed to open it up now and then). It has little edges which make it easier to grasp and hold the letters but I imagine regular tweezers would work too.

And that’s all there is to it. You just need to remember not to spray water directly on your bread when you put it in the oven. When baking a stenciled bread, it’s usually best to do the steaming from below using a small pan heated up with the oven in which you pour a cup of cold, hot or boiling water (every baker has his/her own opinion as to what the temperature of the water should be. I normally use cold water but for this recipe, I followed the author’s advice and used hot. Actually she says to bring the water to a boil but it was too complicated, not to mention dangerous, considering my innate clumsiness. So I used hot water from the tap).
Note that some kinds of bread do not stencil well or at all. I have never seen a stencil on a ciabatta for instance as wet dough just absorbs the flour and the design vanishes.

Now I wasn’t going to post the recipe for this bread as the post was really about stenciling and miche has never been my favorite bread but it was my first time making this particular recipe which I found in the revised and updated Amy’s Bread by Amy Scherber and Toy Kim Dupree and the miche came out so delicious that I know I will make it over and over from now on. Its taste reminded me once again that the bigger the bread the more intense the flavor.
My firm levain is naturally very tasty since it is fed a mixture of freshly milled grains which still smell like the wind over the fields they come from but some recipes showcase it more than others. This one enhances its complex and rustic fragrance in a way that almost brought tears to my eyes, such was the wave of nostalgia that suddenly swept over me.This is truly a bread from my childhood, from before I even knew how to say “bread” in my own language. For me at least, it is the perfect French peasant bread and so here is the recipe with heartfelt thanks to Amy for bringing me this Proustian moment.

Ingredients:

57 g very warm water (105 to 115º F/41 to 46ºC)

1/2 tsp active dry yeast (I used 2 g of instant yeast instead)

600 g cool water (75 to 78ºF/24 to 26ºC)

165 g firm levain (I used my regular wheat-spelt-rye levain which has an hydration rate of 60%)

635 g organic unbleached flour

200 g organic rye flour (I milled my own right before mixing)

18.5 g salt

medium cornmeal or semolina, for sprinkling

Method: (as adapted from the book)

Combine the very warm water and the active dry yeast in a measuring cup and stir to dissolve the yeast. Let stand for 3 minutes (since I was using instant yeast, I skipped that part and added the yeast directly to the flour. I added the corresponding amount of water to the dough)
In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook, combine the cool water and the levain and mix on medium-low speed for 90 seconds to break up the levain
Add the flours and salt and mix on medium-low speed for 2 minutes, then scrape down the sides of the bowl, increase the speed to medium and continue mixing for another 5 minutes (since my mixer only has one speed, which is pretty low, I just kept going)
Turn off the mixer, cover the bowl and let the dough rest for 10 minutes
Mix again for 2 minutes at medium-low speed. The dough will not be fully developed at this point, which is what you want (in other words you stop short of a window-pane)
Put the dough in an oiled bowl large enough to allow it to almost double, cover it with oiled plastic wrap and allow it to rise for 30 minutes at the end of which it will be slightly puffy and very sticky
Moisten your hands with cool water or a little oil and give the dough a turn by gently folding it from the sides to the middle to de-gas it, then turn it over so that the smooth bottom side is up, cover it and let it rise again for 30 minutes
Turn it again and let it rise a third time for 30 minutes. The consistency of the dough will be still soft but it should now be stronger and feel slightly springy
While the dough is rising the third time, generously flour a banneton or a towel-lined colander. The dough will stick to any unfloured areas, so be sure every inch is heavily coated with flour
Pour the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and gently shape it in a round ball, keeping your hands floured or moistened so that they don’t stick to the dough. Try not to tear the skin of the dough
Place the ball seam side up in the prepared banneton or colander, cover it with the oiled plastic wrap again and let it rise until it has almost doubled. This will take an hour or more depending on the temperature of the dough
Thirty minutes before baking, preheat the oven t 480ºF/249ºC (with a baking stone on the second lowest shelf and an empty metal bowl on the shelf below)
Sprinkle a parchment-lined half-sheet pan with cornmeal or semolina flour. When the miche is ready, remove the plastic wrap and carefully turn it upside down on the pan.
Stencil the top of the miche as desired, then score the dough (for this miche, I scored in a circle around the stenciled top, then vertically all around on the sides)
Open the oven and slide the miche onto the baking stone, still on its paper
Quickly pour 1 cup of hot water in the metal bowl and close the oven door
After 3 minutes, add another half-cup of water
Check the loaf after 20 minutes, rotate it if necessary (a must for me as my oven is much hotter in the back than in the front) and remove the metal bowl from the oven, to make sure there is no residual moisture in the oven
Reduce the oven temperature to 450ºF/232ºC and bake for a total of 50 to 55 minutes, until the loaf is very dark in color and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. The inside temperature should register at least 210ºF/99ºC
Place on a wire rack and cool completely before cutting into it (it is actually best to wait 12 to 24 hours if possible as the flavor really increases as the bread rests).
Enjoy!

This miche goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Spicy Olive Oil “Cookies”

As I was waiting at Charles de Gaulle Airport last spring for my flight back home, I picked up a copy of Elle à Table (a handsome French food magazine with beautiful photos and excellent recipes) and happened about an article on Youssef Gardam, written by Clotilde Dusoulier from Chocolate & Zucchini .

Gardam is the young French entrepreneur of Moroccan descent credited with having propelled Moroccan olive oil onto the world culinary stage. His oils can be found in the best European grocery stores under the label Les Terroirs de Volubilis and, from what I understand, are also now available in the United States.

He produces three different olive oils: the fruité vert, made with green olives (sharp and spicy, delicious with salads or fish), the fruité mûr, made with olives picked when they turn purple (less pungent, perfect on pasta or vegetables) and the fruité noir, made with very ripe olives (very fragrant, ideal for pastry and delicate dishes). I would love to try all three but I have yet to see any of them in the grocery stores around where I live.

So for now I use Trader Joe’s Premium Extra Virgin Olive Oil (the one that’s sold with a little pour spout attached to the neck of the bottle). I love its flavor and consistency. I am sure it is not in the league of Gardam’s oils but, hey, we like it and we don’t need to mortgage the house to enjoy it.

Clotilde came up with a recipe which uses either fruité mûr or fruité noir. I made it with TJ’s oil and the cookies (also flavored with white wine and orange zest) turned out excellent. At least so said the Man who devoured them with gusto, feeling especially virtuous because they didn’t contain any butter or egg.

They were certainly flavorful with just the right amount of crunchiness but since I am not a huge fan of anything sweet, I decided to develop a recipe for spicy savory cookies we would both enjoy with “apéritif” (the French word for a drink before lunch or dinner).
I pretty much followed Clotilde’s recipe but skipped the sugar and added salt, freshly grated parmesan cheese, cracked black pepper and smoked Spanish paprika. The resulting “cookies” are just spicy enough with a hint of smokiness (I’m using the word “cookie” for lack of a better one: in French, I would call them “croquants” as Clotilde does because they are deliciously crunchy when you bite into them or “sablés”, the French word for shortbread, because they crumble very nicely in the mouth). They go very well with pre-dinner drinks. But I must warn you: they are quite addictive. It is hard to keep from reaching for another one…Ingredients: (I can’t tell you for how many cookies because I forgot to count them. But I had enough for two half-sheet pans and each pan must have contained 25, give or take. Clotilde makes them twice as thick and gets 25, so that sounds about right)
160 g unbleached all-purpose flour
90 g high-extraction flour (Clotilde uses “farine bise” a grade of flour which doesn’t exist in this country. I used La Milanaise’s organic sifted bread flour which contains more bran and germ than “farine bise” and is therefore more nutritious. It is hard to find here however. If you don’t have access to it or another high-extraction flour, replace the 90 g high-extraction flour by 55 g all-purpose flour and 35 g whole wheat flour. You might also try substituting it by 90 g whole-wheat pastry flour but I can’t guarantee the result as I haven’t tested it. Let me know if you give it a shot)
5 g aluminum-free baking powder
80 g freshly grated aged Parmesan cheese
80 g dry white wine
80 g fruity extra-virgin olive oil
5 g smoked Spanish paprika
1 g cracked black pepper
4 g saltMethod:

Pre-heat the oven to 356ºF/180º C and place a sheet of parchment paper on a baking sheet (my oven is small and I used two half-sheet pans)
In a bowl, mix the flours, the baking powder, the grated Parmesan cheese, the salt and the spices
Make a well in the middle and pour in the oil and the wine
Mix with a fork then knead briefly until the dough is smooth (don’t overknead)
On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out to a 0.5 cm-/0.2 inch disk (Clotilde rolls her dough out to a 2 cm-thickness, i.e. almost 0.8 inch, but I prefer thinner cookies)
With a sharp knife, cut out squares or diamonds 3 cm (1.2 inch) wide and place them on the prepared sheet-pans, taking care to leave some space between them
Bake for 15 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 300ºF/150ºC and bake another 15 minutes, until the cookies are golden
Repeat with the other batch as necessary
Cool on a wire rack. Enjoy!

Whole-grain pizza (“au levain”)

The last thing I thought I would end up doing this summer is to go back to no-knead doughs. I had been there, done that, not been convinced that it was really for me and moved on. But here we are in our little camp by the river with a flock of kids and grandkids and, despite the long list of breads I’d like to try making, I have actually much less time than anticipated for mixing, folding, proofing and experimenting.

So I am mostly sticking to the rustic batard recipe, making a batch every other day to cover our basic needs and I find myself going no-knead for pretty much everything else. What can be more convenient than mixing all the ingredients briefly in a bowl, setting the dough to rise at room temperature until it rises, sticking it in the fridge for a few days and taking out what you need when you need it (no pun intended)? Moreover this dough doesn’t need to proof (I just keep the pizza on the counter until the oven reaches the desired temperature) or be rolled out.

My grandkids, even the pickiest among them, love whole-grain pizza (they don’t actually know or care whether or not their pizza is made with whole grain or with bleached white flour, they just love the taste), so I tried to come up with a 100% whole grain no-knead recipe that would use levain (of which I always have an ample supply) and no commercial yeast (to avoid the risk of phytic acid blocking the absorption of nutrients) (see the last three or four paragraphs of A Convenient Dough).

I started by using too much levain and found the dough too acidic (although none of the kids commented on it and they all ate their pizza with the same gusto), so I reduced the proportion and now use 150 g firm levain for 950 g of flour. You may find you need to use a slightly bit more or a slightly bit less, depending on your levain and your taste.

I have an electric mill, so I mill my own whole grain flour, using wheat, spelt and rye berries. I mill it fine enough that I don’t have to sift it. If you don’t have access to a mill, you can use a mix of whole wheat, whole spelt and whole rye flours (dark rye flour) in the same proportions.

Ingredients (for a batch of dough that yields at least 4 large pizzas)

150 g firm levain (hydration rate: 60%)

950 g whole grain flour (45% wheat, 45% spelt and 10% rye)

50 g gluten

787 g water

18 g salt

100 g extra-virgin olive oil (optional)

Method (adapted from Healthy Breads in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois)

Whisk together the flour, yeast, salt and gluten in a 5-quart bowl
Add the liquid ingredients and mix without kneading using a spoon. You might need to use wet hands to get the last bit of flour to incorporate
Cover (not airtight) and allow the dough to rest at room temperature until it rises and collapses (or flattens on top), approximately 2 hours
Refrigerate it in a lidded container and use it over the next 7 days
On baking day, preheat the oven to 400 F/204 C with a baking stone in it
Take the dough out of the fridge, dust its surface with flour and scoop out a 450g (grapefruit size) piece. Dust the piece with more flour, knead it for a few seconds (to make it more cohesive) and quickly shape it into a ball
Slightly oil a pizza pan (preferably with olive oil) or a baking sheet
Using your hands, flatten the ball of dough onto the pan, making sure it is about the same thickness all around
Add the desired toppings and bake for 20 to 25 minutes minutes or so (putting the pizza pan directly on the baking stone, checking after 15 minutes and turning the pizza around if necessary)
Allow to cool on a rack.

We were sharing the pizza with our 5-year old grand-daughter who doesn’t tolerate anything but sauce and cheese on her pizza. So I painted the whole pizza with pizza sauce (store-bought) and went about 50-50 with the toppings. On our side, I used raw portobello mushrooms, thinly sliced, and fresh sweet red peppers topped with Parmesan shavings and smoked Spanish paprika. On hers, just store-bought shredded mozzarella. She ended up eating most of her half (she kindly allowed her grandfather to have the last small slice).

This pizza goes to Susan’s Wild Yeast blog for Yeastpotting.

A Convenient Dough (no-knead, 100% whole wheat)

When Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois came out last fall, it didn’t even make a bleep on my radar screen. I didn’t read any review or go to a bookstore to browse through it or check it out of the library. Everyone was coming out with a no-knead bread book and I just didn’t have the energy to deal with one more.

Then Joanne from Eats Well With Others mentioned in one of her posts a lovely whole-wheat black-pepper dried cherries foccacia from the book and when I asked her about the recipe, she was kind enough to send it to me.

It so happens that almost at the same time, I received the book as a present. We were about to leave for our little camp by the river and I took it with me.

As I had local maple syrup at hand, the first recipe I tried making from the book was a 100% whole grain maple oatmeal bread. Neither of us liked it (a very rare occurrence when bread is concerned) and I felt even less motivated to read on. Then we had friends from France visiting for a week and I decided I would make the black-pepper cherry foccacia for “apéritif” (happy hour) during their stay.

So I mixed the dough (with a minimum amount of yeast) and let it ferment in the fridge for about 5 days. It looked supremely soupy and I had serious doubts about anything good coming out of it.

However the foccacia (which calls for soaking dried cherries, black pepper and shallots in red wine for 30 minutes) turned out to be particularly delicious. The topping is to die for and the dough was surprisingly light with a beautiful cherry wood color. Maybe because I was under the spell of the margaritas our friend had just mixed and poured, I totally forgot to take pictures but trust me! it was one stunning whole wheat foccacia.

I can’t tell you about other recipes in the book as I haven’t really tried any yet (although several look interesting). I was so surprised by the way the 100% whole wheat dough came out, by the fact that my family, including picky grandkids, was gobbling up the resulting pizzas and foccacias as if they were freshly baked baguettes and by how convenient it was to have them on the table in minutes that I have kept a batch of fermenting 100% whole wheat dough in the refrigerator ever since (it can be kept for as long as 7 days).Variations are endless, depending on what you have available. I thus made:

A fresh fennel-Vidalia onion foccacia with black olives and fennel seeds

A prune-hazelnut foccacia (the pitless prunes I had were a tad too dry so I soaked them in red wine for 24 hours. I toasted and peeled the hazelnuts. A few were caramelized and ground).

A potato-roasted red pepper pizza with onion, black olives, Italian sausage, basil and za’atar

A dry berries-crystallized ginger foccacia topped with poppy and pumpkin seeds (which I didn’t remember to photograph after baking)

And just yesterday for the kids’ breakfast a dark chocolate-marshmallow pizza that even the little ones loved

Here is the recipe for the dough.

100% Whole Wheat Dough with Olive Oil from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day

(makes enough dough for at least four 450g-foccacias or pizzas)

Ingredients:

910 g whole wheat flour (I used flour from Moulin de la Rémy)

5 g instant yeast

15 g sel

35 g vital wheat gluten

788 g lukewarm water

105 g olive oil

Method: (my version)

Whisk together the flour, yeast, salt and gluten in a 5-quart bowl
Add the liquid ingredients and mix without kneading using a spoon. You might need to use wet hands to get the last bit of flour to incorporate
Cover (not airtight) and allow the dough to rest at room temperature until it rises and collapses (or flattens on top), approximately 2 hours
Refrigerate it in a lidded container and use it over the next 7 days
On baking day, dust the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour and scoop out a 450g (grapefruit size) piece (despite the olive oil, these foccacias do not have a long shelf-life, so it’s best to make them just the size you need) . Dust the piece with more flour and quickly shape it into a ball
Elongate the ball into a narrow oval (for a foccacia) or flatten it into a circle (for a pizza) and allow it to rest for 30 minutes on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and dusted with semolina flour (I don’t cover the dough at this stage as it is extremely wet)
Preheat the oven to 400 F/204 C
Add the desired toppings to the dough and bake for 30 minutes or so (checking after 15 minutes and turning the bread around if necessary) (because the dough is so wet, I use no steam but the authors do, so maybe their dough is a bit drier)
Allow to cool on a rack

Now for the healthy claim. Honestly I don’t know. This dough calls for added gluten, so it is obviously not for people suffering from celiac disease or other forms of gluten intolerance. I wouldn’t want to try it without this gluten boost however as it would probably turn out like shoe leather.

But beyond that, how nutritious are whole grains when fermented with commercial yeast? From what I understand from a long exchange on the Bread Bakers’ Guild of America‘s forum and other sources, notably Hubert Chiron’s Les pains français (a major reference for French master bakers) or Andrew Whitley’s Bread Matters, a long levain fermentation generates phytase, an enzyme which prevents the phytic acid naturally present in whole grains to block the absorption of calcium, magnesium and other nutrients by our bodies. Fermentation of whole grains with commercial yeast doesn’t generate phytase and could conceivably lead to nutritional deficiencies if our bodies do not absorb these nutrients from other foods.

But is it the long duration of the levain process which enables the production of phytase or is it the nature of the micro-organisms involved? In other words, does a long fermentation with a minimal amount of commercial yeast (a condition the above dough undoubtedly satisfies) present the same benefit as a long fermentation with wild yeast?

Since I am neither a scientist nor a nutritionist, I don’t know. So I decided not to take a chance, especially since I am feeding a flock of grandchildren who need all the calcium they can get. I mean, what’s the point of feeding them yogurt, cheese, beans and greens if the bread they eat interferes with nutrient absorption? So, with them in mind, I developed this no-knead 100% whole grain pizza dough recipe which uses levain and no commercial yeast.

These flatbreads are going to Susan’s Wild Yeast blog for Yeastpotting.

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