Il Forno

Pirogi

The old Soviet block, today's Eastern European countries are not be the first (probably not even the tenth) place to come up in most people's list of countries known for their great food. Still, for many East Germans I know who have spent their childhood in what still was the GDR, Eastern European food, especially Russian, retains the same fascination of exotic food mixed with the nostalgic longing for childhood. I have to grin every time Daniela talks of Russian candy. She hates desserts that are too sweet, but buys these candies whenever she finds them, ignoring their cloying sugar content. I suspect she eats them because they brings back special memories, and not for the taste, so I've stopped making jokes about the contradiction in personal food tastes.

Daniela is not the only one with a sweet tooth for  Russian goods. Some local grocery stores carry a section with Russian goods, canned and frozen mainly, and we even had a little Russian store for a while in Jena selling a nice selection of Vodkas. After they closed the candy supply dried out. Until a few months ago, when I came home to find Daniela munching on a Russian sweet smiling. A new Russian shop had opened. It took me month's before I managed to get there: being out of my usual way I never managed to make it before the early closing time. Once I did manage though, I found something much more interesting than candy to me: pirogi.

Flavored Dinner Rolls

Usually my bread taste goes in the rustic/sourdough bread direction. Yet, from time to time, I crave for those fine buttery dinner rolls that seem to be out of fashion among food lovers today. I had one of these butter rolls attacks just last week. Having some time to prepare a special dinner -more about that later- I decided to give myself a little extra work and make some rolls for the occasion. I was looking for something which could be flavored easily, since I wanted to bake a few different kinds of bread, so I took a rather standard recipe and added either chopped fine herbs, crushed green pepper or chopped pistachios and pine nuts. I also gave each flavored bread a different shape to increase the feeling of variety.

Chestnut and rosemary bread

I can hardly believe it has been almost two months since my last bread baking post, I should seriously think about changing the blog's caption. Not that I haven't been baking in the meanwhile but I've either made stuff I wrote about already or backed from books I've mentioned before, mainly Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery and Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme. I don't want to turn this blog into the Alberto/Nancy or Alberto/Pierre project, and since I lack the slightly histeric wit and catching writing style Julie Powell has, I prefer to give it a miss and not concentrate on only one source. So nothing too interesting has been going on inside my oven until I came up with something of my own last week.

Nancy Silverton's rustic bread and breaking my head on ciabatta

A few weeks ago I baked for the first time bread from Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery. I chose probably the least time consuming and easiest of the lot two start, the rustic bread, her own version of the Italian ciabatta (slipper in Italian, because of its shape). I intended to write about this bread at the time but my blog posting backlog (still growing) delayed at least in part this entry. What played an even further role was trying to understand what a ciabatta is and where it really comes from. The bread I baked, although delicious, had nothing to do with the ciabattas you get in Italy and this is not the first time I notice this. Recipes from other US, UK and German baking books I tried before gave varying results, some to die for other to kill (the book's author) for, but never anything like what I was used to. So why is this bread so popular (there's even a nice German blog called Chili und Ciabatta) if we're actually talking about completely different breads?

Some serious bread baking

Since I started this blog I have had a mixed feeling about the compliments I receive about my baking posts. On one hand I'm really pleased about them, they're a great morale booster and mood-improving. On the other I know there's quite a few people out there who are much more serious than me and much better bakers. Don't get this wrong, please continue with your nice comments ;-). It's just that I'm well aware of the fact that there are too many interesting things in the food-drink world for me to keep concentrated only on baking. A few days ago I received an e-mail regarding my blog entry about baguettes with a very good recipe from Petra. Petra is definitely what I mean with serious baker. She keeps, since 2002, an incredibly good baking website, sadly for most of you out there, only in German. It contains around 140 recipes, concentrating mostly on wheat flour based breads and containing a large rolls and buns section. Even if you can't read the German text I'd have a look: most recipes come with a mouth-watering bread pic.

Petra was kind enough to answer a couple of questions I had about her interest for bread. She explained to me how her passion for bread was stimulated by tasting breads abroad, so different from those she was used to. She then tried to reproduce them at home. It was really interesting to find out that her source of recipes and inspiration is, like mine, American baking books. It's funny that countries as Italy and Germany that do have an Artisan Bread tradition (long proofing, starters and so on) don't manage or want to spread the knowledge to amateur bakers. I, like Petra, turned to American books frustrated by the lack of decent baking books in my mother language. Given my weakness for books, this "inspiration" can be at times critical for my account balance :-). At least now I can go to Petra's website for some free ideas... I think I already have two or three to try out.

Happy Easter!

An Easter bread of some form is something that many European cultures have in common. It may be sweet or savoury, flat, dome shaped or plaited, but it always plays a central role in the Easter lunch. In Naples me and my friends would visit each other's houses and inevitably have a taste of tortano or casatiello (and of course the sweet Pastiera, but that's another story), the two classic Neapolitan savoury Easter breads. Each one of us would have his or her favourites but inevitably for all of us the end of Easter holidays always brought a few more kilos on our frames. It would have been bad manners to refuse a taste, or not? This year I was really tempted to bake one of these two breads but one bread, in a German baking book caught my eye. I bought the book on impulse, sadly I must say, since all the recipes I tried have been disappointing and the recipe amounts often silly. On the other hand the book's stuffed with loads of potentially nice ideas so maybe it wasn't all wasted money... Oh, but that Easter bread! I just couldn't get it out of my mind. So I took the recipe, changed it trusting my (limited) experience with brioche-like dough and for once the result was quite nice. At least looks nice, doesn't it? And tasted good too!

The baguette challenge: part 2

About two weeks ago I wrote about my problems with baguettes. Writing that post only made me more determined to bake a good baguette myself. If you wonder why such obsession with the famous French stick, let me explain the reasons. Since I started baking for fun I felt the need to build a certain repertoire of bread "classics". A bit like learning to play jazz: you need to hammer in those classic if you want to go free-style. Having to stay home with little Saami for a week (hit by chickenpox) I took the chance and played around and tried as many different baguette methods as I could in the time available. I think I'm finally quite happy with the baguettes I made at the end. I also found out one or two tricks to baguette making that work in my conditions (i.e. in my oven). But most of all I have to admit that what really helped was baking each day some baguettes, in two occasions even twice a day. As usual, silly as it may sound, practice, practice and again practice are the best tools to improve.

On Baguettes, cups and... building blocks

In the past week I've been trying out baguette recipes, four different ones to be precise. The main reason for this is that the ones I can buy here are OK, but nothing more than that, and the ones I baked in the past ranged from so-so to only decent. So I bought a big bag of type 550 flour, took out my baking books from their shelf and got to work. I'm still far from getting a baguette I like, so no recipe or method this time. Hopefully that will happen sometime in the near future. On the other hand I've made two important (for me, and maybe for other baking nerds like me) discoveries:
1) I'm never going to use cup measurements again. NEVER, EVER! If I do kick me in the shins. Please :-). From now on, only mass units here.
2) You can use kids building blocks to build your own baguette pan, at least for proofing. IF your son/daughter lets you ;-).

Bakeries: local favourite(s)

I've been thinking about posting this for a while. I guess most of you out there will find this irrelevant, but maybe it might tickle the few Germans reading out there. I wanted to tell you about my favourite bakery here in Jena, and in short about a couple of other ones I like too. Now, bread in Germany is usually quite nice, at least in its traditional forms: rye bread, whole grain bread and so on. I don't mind the compact, heavy texture of the traditional breads. But every now and then I feel like something else, something a bit less down to earth, more frivolous maybe: Italian and French breads. Sadly most bakers either don't produce any of these breads or offer really pale copies. So I was quite happy as, a few months ago, I discovered a market stall selling good looking French and Italian breads. The stall was that of the bakery Panetoni, a bakery from the nearby town of Apolda.

The crumb strikes back: pane Siciliano

Recently I seem to be attracted to breads covered with sesame seeds, I just find those little seed give a great flavour to the bread. The bread I baked on Sunday is no exception. Pane Siciliano is a sesame dusted bread made with a high percentage of semolina flour, plus, as fun factor for the baker :-), it comes in unusual shapes. I've been a few times in Sicilia and although I've often seen bread shaped this way, it always seemed to be made with normal bread flour. Reading the very interesting L'Italia del pane from Slow food I found the bread I baked is quite similar to the so called pane casareccio di Lentini, typical of the province of Siracusa. The bread was a success but not perfect in its looks (my fault, as usual).