David Dubrow

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Breadhead Friday: Focaccia

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The only experience most of us will have with focaccia is a dry piece flatbread served at chain restaurants as an Italian-style appetizer or part of a more ambitious bread basket.  Which is a shame, because properly prepared, there are few things in the world more delicious than focaccia.  Moist with herb oil and a tender, almost creamy crumb, you won’t believe how good it can be.

By properly prepared, I mean you need to have a high hydration dough to get this to work (75%-80%).  The recipe I use is very similar to this raisin bread recipe, though I obviously leave out the dried fruit for more savory ingredients.

Before baking. Sliced tomatoes and plenty of herb oil

After baking: note the char. The herb oil cooks the tomatoes a little, too

A word of explanation about percentages: a 75-80% hydration dough means that if the weight of flour equals 100%, you need to have 75-80% of that weight in water, also.  So if you add a pound of flour, you have to add .75 or .85 lbs of water.  A more detailed explanation of baker’s percentage can be found here.

Pepperoni pizza focaccia

Typically, I treat it like a pizza, and put various toppings on it.  We’d have it more often, but it’s a bit time-consuming to make: lots of time and care.  But it’s worth it.  Every delicious bite.  Make some.  You won’t regret it.

Left: tomatoes and cheese. Right: tomatoes, sauteed onions and cheese

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Breadhead Friday: Lean Bread

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A lean bread is one that has very little fat or sugar in it, if any.  Most sandwich breads aren’t lean breads: they’re enriched, so they contain things like sugar, butter, oil, flavorings, and other such things.  They’re great, but I wanted to make the lean bread recipe from Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day.

The recipe is very simple: water, flour, yeast, and salt.  You mix until everything’s combined, and instead of kneading it traditionally, you do the stretch-and-fold method four times, going in ten minute intervals.  It’s amazing how just one stretch-and-fold can take a rough, coarse, wet mess and turn it into a glossy, springy dough.

Shaping the dough

To develop flavor in the wheat, this dough requires an overnight rise in the refrigerator.  When you’re ready to bake, you take it out, shape it, and let it rise at room temperature for at least two hours.

More shaping

Typical hearth baking is next: a pan of hot water at the bottom of the oven to create steam, and bake at high heat.

The finished loaves. We both need to work on shaping and scoring

Overall, a fun project, and one that produces tasty bread.  I achieved a few larger holes in the crumb, but the important thing is that my little boy and I did this thing together.  We’ll see if he picks up the bread bug.

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Breadhead Friday: Ciabatta

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My go-to bread recipe is Jason’s Quick Coccodrillo Ciabatta bread.  The term “quick” can be a bit of a misnomer in our gotta-have-it-now society, as it takes more than three hours to make, but compared to other breads with overnight rises and a dozen ingredients, it can’t be beat.

Puffy, wobbly, but on the peel
The simplicity of it is incredible.  It’s only made of four things: flour, water, salt, and yeast.  And somehow it provides flavor that’s way beyond what you’d expect for something so basic.  The crumb is pleasantly chewy, and the inside is almost creamy in texture, full of those big holes that artisan bakers love to achieve.
Goodness baked right in
This is the bread my favorite pizza crust recipe is based on.  There are a few tricks to it, like placing the fragile, wobbly loaves onto a peel without ruining the air pockets, but once you have that down, you have bread that truly unlocks the flavors trapped in the wheat.
Your obligatory cross-section
The dough’s terribly wet and sticky, and doesn’t behave the way you’d like it to.  You can’t really shape it, but if you wanted, you could put it on a parchment-lined French bread pan and make a cylinder out of it.  It needs the flour to grab onto, so you can’t just oil everything for this one: you need to dust the parchment and the dough with plenty of flour to get it right.
Look, look!  I got the big holes!
If you like good, simple bread, make this ciabatta.  I’ve done a little experimenting with putting herbs and powdered garlic into the dough, but the best treat is just eating it straight.  You would not believe that plain white flour, salt, water, and yeast could taste so good.
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Breadhead Friday: Pizza Sauce Recipe

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Pursuant to the post on making pizza at home, I want to give out my recipe for pizza sauce.  It’s easy, quick, and tasty.  There’s a brightness to it from the red wine vinegar, a little heat from the red pepper flake, and enough spices to give it great flavor, but not overwhelm the toppings and crust.

And the best part is that you don’t have to cook it.  The sauce cooks on the pizza itself.

This recipe is the product of trial and error across dozens of pizzas, and will make enough sauce to cover five (5) average-sized pies.

Ingredients
1 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes
1 28 oz. can of tomato puree
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 and 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tbsp basil
1 and 1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp black pepper
A few shakes of red pepper flake
Salt to taste

Mise en place

All you have to do is put the ingredients into a bowl and mix them with a whisk.  Couldn’t be easier.

In the bowl, ready to be whisked

Once you’ve got it mixed together, give it a little taste.  I know it’s not cooked, but it’ll be okay, I promise.  The tomatoes have been steamed as part of the canning process.  If it needs salt, add salt.

All mixed up

If you use the pizza recipe linked at the top of this post, you’ll see that the pizza is baked at a pretty high heat (500 degrees F or higher).  So you don’t need to cook the sauce: it’s a thin layer on the dough that will get cooked as part of the baking process.

The sauce is on the pizza – REPEAT: the sauce is on the pizza

Portion out the sauce into five containers and freeze or refrigerate them as you see fit.  You may want to make this sauce a couple hours before making the pizza to allow the flavors to meld.

The distribution of pepperoni here is reminiscent of the Tunguska Explosion of 1908

There you go.  Now you’ve got one less excuse to go to Pizza Hut.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Pizza Hut.

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Breadhead Friday: The Agony and Ecstasy of Raisin Bread

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My earliest memories of raisin bread involve tearing off the top crust to eat the icing and throwing out the rest of the slice.  My brothers did the same, so my dad stopped buying it.  It just wasn’t very good.

This focaccia-style raisin bread from Peter Reinhart is the complete opposite of that.  It’s extraordinary.  It’s the apotheosis of raisin bread.  It’s what raisin bread is supposed to be.

I won’t duplicate his recipe here; you can get it from Artisan Breads Every Day or from his Craftsy class, which is worth purchasing if you want to learn how to make delicious bread and pizza at home.  The main difference between the savory focaccia recipe and the raisin bread recipe is that you have to use a little more water in the raisin bread dough to plump up the dried fruit.

For these loaves, I used a combination of dried cranberries, raisins, and dried cherries.

Dough ready for overnight rise

The recipe makes three 9-inch loaves (or discs) of raisin bread, and requires cake pans, parchment paper rounds, and a little oil to drizzle on top of the dough to help in shaping.  I used a combination of vegetable and canola oil.

Portioned, cold dough
The shaping in the pan consists of little more than dimpling it: evenly pressing it with your fingertips so that it fills the entire pan.  When it starts to resist, you leave it in a warm place to relax for several minutes.
After the first dimpling
After the third and final dimpling; ready for a rise
Then the loaves get baked in a hot oven for around 10-15 minutes, depending.  You don’t need the pizza stone for this bread.
Baked and cooling – note the bubbles
For icing, I just whisked together confectioner’s sugar and whole milk and drizzled it on the cooled loaves.  I like a stiff sort of icing, so I only put in a few drops of milk.  For a looser, more gooey icing, put in more milk.
Iced and ready to eat
You could add vanilla or almond extract to the icing if you wanted, or even put in some orange zest or Grand Marnier.  Or substitute coconut milk for the whole milk.  Experiment, go wild.  
The obligatory close-up

The sweetness of the icing works very well against the tartness of the dried fruit.  The texture is light, with a pleasant crunch and moistness.  Even if you don’t like raisin bread, you’ll like this.  
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Breadhead Friday: Struan!

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Struan is of Scottish descent, and according to master baker Peter Reinhart, “It was originally conceived of as a once-a-year harvest bread, incorporating whatever grains and seeds were available from the previous day’s harvest.”

At first glance, Reinhart’s struan bread recipe looks like a major pain in the neck.  You need wheat or oat bran, coarse cornmeal, brown rice, and oats, only one of which I typically have in the pantry (the oats).  And you have to cook the brown rice.  Never having had good brown rice before, I put off making this bread for years because of it.

Loaves risen and ready for baking
But then I caught a wild hare and decided to go for it.  The Saveur recipe for brown rice actually turned out a very nice, tasty product that I’ll make again.  There was a lot of weighing, measuring, mixing, and kneading, and as I shaped the cold struan dough after an evening’s rise in the refrigerator, I had to ask myself: was all that worth it?
A bit dense.  Note the yellow flecks of cornmeal
Yes.  Yes it was.  It was delicious.  Now I know why so many people raved about it.  The cornmeal gave it a pleasant, subtle crunch, and the addition of the other grains added depth of flavor without making it bitter.  Obviously I’ll have to work on the shaping a little more in future efforts, but overall I ended up with two really tasty sandwich loaves that were worth the work.  
You owe it to yourself to make a struan bread at least once in your life to see what the fuss is about.
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