Ciabatta with my poolish

Sept 4, 2008 -- Since making the 5 minute bread I have changed the recipe in the refrigerator to a 100% poolish so the dough can age somewhat before making bread. This increases the flavor. Here is my ciabatta made with the poolish. Any recipe can use this method by taking equal (gram) quantities of the water and flour and useing that from the stored poolish, then complete the recipe with the remaining ingredients. That's my theory anyway and this is, therefor, a test. It came out pretty good. The loaf in the back of the oven got too close to the back oven wall and burned slightly. See in the last slice where the very top of the slice is blackened.

See www.theartisan.net/Ciabatta_Indirect_Poolish.htm for the original recipe.

Plain White 5 Minute Bread with Ribs

We had ribs! But we needed to have white bread with barbecue. There was this 5 minute bread dough in the refrigerator, so I made it up in a bread pan and baked it in the oven while the ribs cooked on the grill outside. Oh, boy this stuff works really well. There is nothing like white bread with barbecue!

5 Minute French Loaf with Flax Seed

July 13, 2008 -- A 5 minute bread french loaf with flax seeds. This came out pretty good. The dough has had a chance to mature in the refrigerator for a couple of days. I bought a box of flax seed after going to the fair and getting sold on flax as an internal medicine to make you healthy. I bought the flax at the store, not at the fair. It works nice on bread. We had medallions of pork, homemade cole slaw and bruschetta with tomatoes and goat cheese. Really good.

5 Minute Bread, the boule

July 11, 2008 -- This is my first loaf using the 5 minute bread recipe that can be found on the web. I didn't buy the book, just watched the video on YouTube and went from there. This is just a plain boule made from a grapefruit sized piect of the dough. It cam out OK with a nice rise and OK crumb, but the flavor was lacking. It needs to age more than this did.

So I'll tried again later...

Ciabatta pizza

July 2, 2008 -- I made a pizza using a ciabatta recipe for the crust. This crust is really wet and very hard to handle. I poured it out onto the parchment paper! I struggled to get it into somewhat of a pizza crust shape, but finally made it. The oven was as hot as I could get it, over 500 deg F. And, I put it on the pizza stone on the very top shelf of the oven to get the maximum heat. I trimmed the parchment to the size of the pizza so it wouldn't burn in the hot oven. It was charred when I took it out. Cooking time was about 11 minutes. The pizza in the picture is on the pizza pan for cutting. It was baked without that pan directly on the stone. It tasted great, crisp crust with lots of big holes. What do you think?

White Lily hamburger buns

June 28, 2008 -- Here are some quick hamburger buns I made using White Lily soft wheat white all purpose flour. This is our local flour company and the flour is renouned for making light airy biscuits. Since my last effort to make hamburger buns came out tough using bread flour, I thought I would make some using a soft wheat flour. See for yourself how they came out.

Quick Hamburger Buns

We needed hamburger buns, so I decided to make some using a recipe I found for 40 minute Buns. I thought these should be quick, and they were. It uses a lot of yeast to get the fast rise, 2 tablespoons. Also there is oil and egg which should make a soft dough. I used Hodgson Mill Naturally White flour that I had on hand. I also added 1 teaspoon of dried onion to add a little flavor. These are supposed to be fast, to I took a picture of the clock as I started.

I let the yeast dissolve in the warm water then mixed all the ingredients by hand to get everything wet, then I turned on the oven to 425 using the Bread Bake setting that gets the oven completely hot before saying it is ready. With the oven heating, I used the KitchenAid mixer to knead the dough for 5 minutes as called for in the recipe.

I turned out the dough and formed it into 12 buns and placed them on my baking sheets. I used the last piece of parchment for one and oiled the other sheet. Here they are.

The clock is running and at this point it appears that we have used 30 of the 40 minutes promised in the recipe. The oven wasn't hot yet, so I covered the buns with cloths and misted the cloths with water while I waited for the oven to get hot. Note for future baking: Turn on the oven early, not at the last minute. The buns go into the oven at 5:38 for 8 to 12 minutes. I think I used about 11 minutes for baking. I used a cup of hot water in my hot cast iron frying pan in the bottom of the oven, so there was steam for these. They cracked during baking. Not good for hamburger buns. And the little bit of onion I put in turned out to be quite potent. This is what they looked like when out of the oven.
The crumb is OK. Nice and tight. The crust is crispy and a little too hard for a hamburger. I guess I will reduce the temperature next time to, oh, 375 and I won't use steam. Here is the crumb.
And the clock says we are done at 5:58, about 1 hour and 10 minutes for everything. I guess bread takes a little longer to make than you think and generally longer than the recipe says. Here is the last clock image.