Island bread making and the Alpine Baguette
I came back from England determined to make the absolutely delicious ‘Alpine baguette’ that has become one of my sister’s signature loaves. While we were visiting she used it to make little thin toast rounds, on which to serve a soft goat brie with just a touch of honey, all gently grilled. Quite an hors d’oeuvre.
The irony was that the recipe was from a book I had given my brother in law - LOCAL BREADS, by Daniel Leader. It’s in my kitchen too, but I had never read far enough to find that recipe.
The recipe uses a rye sourdough starter - cultivated in the usual way over 3-5 days, unless you already have a dormant one in the fridge just waiting to be called into service. After that the flour is all unbleached white bread flour, but the secret of the bread lies in the rest of the ingredients: sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, sesame seeds, all soaked overnight with rolled oats, before being incorporated into the dough.
The danger of adding seeds and nuts to a bread dough is that they will dry it out in the baking - absorbing the available moisture. The genius of this recipe is that soaking the seeds, and also adding soaked oatmeal, ensures that the final product will still be moist, while chock full of all the flavor and texture the seeds add.
The first time I baked the baguettes I borrowed a baguette pan from Barb Fernald, island almost-neighbor and fellow bread enthusiast. It had three perforated ‘valleys,’ and one recipe produced three petite and crunchy loaves. I’d made a double recipe, so the others had to sit on a flat baking sheet. That was OK, but they were a bit flatter, and the bottoms not as crunchy. Then I ordered a pan, but the one I found had only two bigger valleys, and although they accommodated the dough just fine, the bigger loaves just aren’t quite as pleasing, at least to this baker.
So yesterday we were ‘off island’ with a long list of errands, and found time to hit Ellsworth’s premium cookware and specialty food store - Rooster Brothers. Sure enough, they had Barb’s three-baguette pan, so now I’m the proud (if somewhat guilty) owner of not one but two professional pans. A tangent - the day was wicked hot, and by the time we got to Rooster Brothers we badly needed a cold drink. I had my first cucumber soda - utterly fantastic.
Two final things to say before getting to the recipe. The first is that I’ve discovered you can add a half cup of the soaked oatmeal/seed mixture to the New York Times no-knead recipe, without adjusting any of the other measures, and come up with one more tasty variation on your basic loaf. I used one cup of white, one cup of spelt and one cup of pumpernickel rye for the flours - but I think any flour combination would be just as successful.
The second thing to say is that I’m discovering that my Achilles heel with these recipes that require multiple stages for proving and resting and kneading and so on is that there comes a point in the day when my schedule deviates from the dough’s schedule - and if I take liberties with the timing, I sometimes get away with it, but not always! A few days back it was so hot in the middle of the day that I went for a swim, just to lower my body temperature, and when I got back my doughs had over-proved and collapsed. If the day had been less hot it probably wouldn’t have happened - but equally I wasn’t in the kitchen when I should have been.
I’m thinking about how to rewrite the recipes for myself so that the time line is more front and central - and I can judge more easily whether the day is going to accommodate both my needs, and the dough’s.
ALPINE BAGUETTES
Prepare Sourdough and Soak Seeds: 20 minutes (night before)
12-24 hours before you bake (a generous ‘overnight’ is usually my answer to this), refresh your rye sourdough:
Ingredients for sourdough:
- 1/4 cup rye sourdough starter
- 1/2 cup warm water
- 1/2 cup fine rye flour
- measure 1/4 cup of your culture (this assumes you’re keeping it in the fridge, having already gone through the 3-5 day starter process - see earlier post!) into a clean container and discard the rest. It seems wasteful, but honestly the discarded starter would get progressively more acidic and distasteful, and your new batch will give you the extra to put back in the fridge for the next time.
- Stir in 1/2 cup warm water and 1/2 cup finely ground rye flour. Stir vigorously until the mixture is fairly smooth (it doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth).
- Scrape down the sides and cover with plastic wrap. Let it stand at a warmish room temperature (75 degrees is about right, 5 degrees in either direction is still good).
- It’s ready when it has about doubled in bulk, and tastes tangy.
Also 12-24 four hours before you bake, prepare your seeds.
Ingredients for seeds:
- 1/3 cup rolled oats
- 1/3 cup sunflower seeds
- 1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
- 1/3 cup flax seeds
- 1/4 cup sesame seeds
- 3/4 cup warm water
Pour the rolled oats and seeds into a small bowl and cover them with 3/4 cup warm water. Soak them overnight, uncovered, so they plump and soften.
The Real Start: Mix the dough: 10 minutes max
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups warm water
- 1 tsp instant yeast
- 3 1/4 cups unbleached bread flour
- 1 1/2 tsps sea salt
- 1/2 cup sourdough starter
Pour the water into a large mixing bowl. Stir in the yeast, bread flour, soaked oats and seeds, and salt, using your dough whisk or a rubber spatula. Stir down the rye sourdough, which will have bubbled up, to invigorate and deflate it. Measure 1/2 cup of the mixture, pour it over the dough, and mix it in - just enough to bind it. (The rest of the new sourdough starter goes back into the fridge for next time.)
Knead the dough: 30 minutes total
Dust the counter with bread flour. Scrape the dough on to the counter and knead, with smooth steady strokes, flouring hands as necessary, for 10 minutes. (Good to have a scraper on hand for those moments when the dough sticks to the counter!) Cover dough with plastic wrap and let it rest on the counter for 10 minutes. Then knead for another 5-8 minutes, until the dough is soft but not excessively sticky, smooth, silky and elastic (how’s that for a description!).
Ferment the Dough: 2 to 2 1/2 hours
Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled container. If you have a two quart container with a lid, use that. Otherwise, a mixing bowl will do fine - just cover it with a plate or with plastic wrap. Think about what the dough will look like when it has doubled - that’s what you want, and it should happen if you give it 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a warm room temperature - 70 to 75 degrees. When you press your finger into the dough, your fingerprint should spring back slowly.
Prepare the Oven
You want to light the oven about an hour before the bread goes in. So if you light it once the dough has done its doubling, you’ll be about right. Put a baking stone on the middle rack, and a cast iron skillet, or the closest thing you have to that, on the lower rack. Heat the oven to 450 degrees.
Divide and Preshape the Baguettes: 15 minutes
Lightly flour the counter. Scrape the dough out. With a bench scraper or chef’s knife, cut the dough into three equal pieces. Flatten each piece of the dough into a rough rectangle, fold it in thirds as if you were folding a business letter, and turn it smooth side up. Drape the pieces with plastic wrap and let rest on the counter for 10 minutes.
Shaping and proving the baguettes: about 50 minutes
Shape each piece of dough into a baguette about 12 inches long and 3 inches wide with rounded ends. Basically you’re stretching the dough log - and the easiest way to do it is to put your hands together, palms down, over the middle of the log, and then use light even pressure as you roll it back and forth, gradually spreading your hands apart.
If you are using a baguette pan, lift the baguettes into their channels. If you are using a baking sheet, dust it liberally with cornmeal, or bread flour, and line the baguettes up on the sheet, leaving room between them.
Let the loaves rise at 70 to 75 degrees until they look puffy and light, which will take between 30 and 40 minutes. Use the fingertip test again.
Baking the Loaves: 25-35 minutes
Slide the loaves, in or on their pan, on to the baking stone. Toss roughly 3/4 of a cup of ice cubes into the cast iron skillet or equivalent to produce heavy steam. Bake until the baguettes are reddish brown.
When you take them out, leave them in or on their pan for about five minutes, and then transfer them on to a rack for further cooling. You can eat them warm, or store them, once properly cooled, in a brown paper bag, for up to a couple of days. You can reheat them in a 350 degree oven for 7 minutes or so to recrisp the crust. For longer storage, freeze in heavy duty plastic bags - for not more than a month, if you want them to still taste really good!
TIMELINE
Here’s my first effort at an organized timeline. For these purposes I assumed I wanted the loaves still to be fresh out of the oven for dinner, with guests invited for 6:30. So … the loaves needed to be done by the latest at 6:00. Here’s how the day then looked:
