I’m still here! I just looked at the date on my last post and realized I haven’t posted anything since Sept. 1 and I can’t believe it’s been that long. This month has been a wash due to the fact that I’m moving. Again. Less than a year after I moved back to Orlando. Ugh. But I’m moving to the literal greener pastures of Virginia, which I’m extremely happy about it because it suits me much more than Florida ever did. We weren’t planning to move but my boyfriend found a new job in Charlottesville and we both hate Florida, so it seemed like the best decision for us, despite being incredibly inconvenient. We’re moving up there next week and once I finally get settled in my new apartment — which I chose entirely because of it’s large, well lit kitchen — I’ll be able to start cooking again and posting regularly.

But first I thought I would give an update on the BBA Challenge since I haven’t posted about it in forever. I’m still plodding along with it, though most people are WAY ahead of me. For awhile I was keeping up with our fearless leader,Nicole but then I got behind since I haven’t had the time to bake in a few weeks. I’ll have to catch up next month.

For now I wanted to post about the three recent breads I made, which I’m calling The European Trifecta (because I think that sounds cool). They are: French Bread, Italian Bread and English Muffins. I’ll also mention the other previous breads, some of which I don’t have too much to say about, but I wanted to make sure to post about each of them anyway.

Click here to get the recipe for BBA Challenge: The European Trifecta (and some other stuff) »

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It seems like every week I keep saying “this is my favorite”, but hands down, these two breads are my favorite from this challenge. A couple of reasons for this:

1. Both recipes were extremely easy. No waiting a day for pre-ferments, just mix up the ingredients, knead, shape, proof, bake and boom: you have yummy bread in about 4 hours.

2. They’re just good. Period. The raisin bread tasted just like the raisin bread you buy at the store. The cinnamon rolls were just amazing. I could have eaten about a million of them. In fact, after picking out the photos for this entry (it’s been a few weeks since I actually made them), I got such a craving for them that I had to make another batch.

Click here to get the recipe for BBA Challenge: Cinnamon Rolls and Raisin Bread »

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The seventh recipe for The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge was Ciabatta. This was one I was really excited about attempting but also pretty apprehensive. It’s probably one of the most complicated breads we’ve done so far and from surveying other BBAers on twitter and the forum it was pretty apparent that “results may vary”. Good Ciabatta is full of big giant holes and that involves having a very wet dough, which you can imagine, is hard to work with. In addition to working with the very wet dough for the first time, making this bread involves some special tools as well as setting up your oven in a very specific way, so there’s quite a bit of prep involved.

There were two different versions, using different kinds of pre-ferments: poolish or biga. These are just mixtures of bread, water and yeast that sit out for a certain amount of time to develop flavor and texture. Later you add the rest of ingredients to make the final dough. I chose the biga because the consensus seemed to be that it resulted in bread with bigger holes. I also switched bread flour for regular AP flour as I read several accounts saying they got better results that way as well.

Click here to get the recipe for BBA Challenge: Ciabatta »

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So I’m still going at a normal pace for the BBA Challenge, but I’m behind on actually posting about it. I keep going back and forth about whether I even want to post about every single bread and that leads to more procrastination. But I think ultimately, I do want written and photographic evidence that I did in fact bake every single bread in this book, in order. I may do these combo posts for bread I have less to say about, but for instance, I have LOTS to say about the Ciabatta I did this week, so that’s going to be it’s own post (hopefully next week).

Click here to get the recipe for BBA Challenge Catch-up: Brioche, Casatiello and Challah »

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The second week bread was Artos or Greek Celebration bread. I really didn’t have any trouble at all with this bread because it was really similar to my King Cake except that Artos has a lot more spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves. The only trouble I had was the shaping, of course. I can tell it’s going to take a lot of practice to get good at shaping things because I’m just not good at that at all. The version of artos I did was called Christopsomos (though I made it plain, it’s technically supposed to have nuts and dried fruit in it), which is shaped into a boule (an oval, the only shape beside a loaf that I can do without much trouble), but then you roll out two strips of dough and lay them on top of the boule in a cross and then you split the ends and roll them up into curls. Why did I even attempt this?! I’ll fully admit to being an underachiever, but that doesn’t seem to apply to baking. I could have just shaped it into a boule and been done, but no I had to go overboard. The main issue was the curly parts at the end. I guess I didn’t stick them back into the dough well enough, so some of them unrolled while they were baking and well—I’m just gonna say it—they looked like little penises. Sigh. My artos was NSFW. You can sort of see it on the left side in this picture, otherwise I tried to take pictures of the bread’s “good side”.

Click here to get the recipe for BBA Challenge: Artos and Bagels »

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So I decided to do something a little crazy. The awesome Nicole at Pinch My Salt started a group to make every single recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. When she first announced it on Twitter, I was interested but ultimately decided it would be too much work. But then more and more people started joining with her and I kept thinking about it until she announced she was closing the group to new members. As soon as I heard that it made me realize how much I wanted to do this, so I emailed her immediately to join the group.

I would definitely call myself a bread person. The only reason I like pizza is because of the crust, most of the time I even take all the cheese off before I eat it (I HATE greasy cheese). My favorite restaurants are the ones that give you bread and if it’s a choice between finishing that bread and finishing my entree, well, I can always get a doggy bag. I gave a waiter a HUGE tip a few weeks ago just because he gave me a whole new loaf of bread to bring home with my leftovers.

Despite my love of bread, I’ve never done any bread baking. I’ve always loved baking cakes and cookies, but yeast bread just seemed so complicated. Anyone can make a cake, but to me, bread always seemed like something only trained professionals could do: the kneading and rising and all that. And the yeast! That word is just scary. Plus I take almost all of my cooking cues from my mother and I can’t remember her ever making bread. Quick bread like banana bread, yeah, but never any kind of yeast bread. I don’t even remember either of my grandmothers making fresh bread. We were definitely a frozen roll kind of family.

Click here to get the recipe for Bread Bakers Apprentice Challenge: Anadama Bread »

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