Artos: Greek Celebration Bread

This is Reinhart's version of a holiday bread.  My mother-in-law makes a similar bread at Christmas with cardamon, but the BBA recipe uses cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and allspice.  I made the poolish version of this rather than the sourdough as the method for making the sourdough starter or barm seemed a bit ambitious to me at this stage.  It also would take too long!  One other change - I left out the almond extract - can't stand the stuff, which is weird because I love almonds.


First step: make the poolish and let it ferment for several hours followed by an overnight retard in the refrigerator.

The next day is basically adding all the other ingredients and kneading until it is ready (about 10").  I use Penzey's spices and have always been impressed with their service and quality.

I did want to highlight my nutmeg grater.  It has been a kitchen workhorse for me since I purchased it on the island of Grenada in 1992.  It consists of a few simple pieces of wood and a perforated coffee can!

Finally, I decided I would do the design on top of the boule, but I did not want to do the traditional crucifix.  I decided on something a bit more....aquatic:

I dub thee OCTOBREAD!!!!

After baking, the tentacles pulled apart a bit, but it still looks pretty darn cool.

Anadama Bread

I made this one last night, and I hope I don't kill the suspense by saying that it was terrific.  My wife's family is from the Rockport area, and they have had plenty of the real stuff, so I wondered what they would think, and it passed muster with flying colors.

Reinhart makes this recipe (like nearly all of them from BBA) a two day affair, but the first day is super easy.  Just soak some cornmeal in water.  He recommends a coarse cornmeal, and I was fortunate enough to find a good Portugese brand for a fraction of the "specialty flour" price.

Then it was a matter of soaking overnight.

The next day, the real fun begins.  The soaked cornmeal is added  to bread flour, more yeast, salt, molasses, and butter.  That gets kneaded together and allowed to rise, and finally put into loaf pans.

Finally, it goes into the oven, and - voila! - my first BBA Challenge bread is done!

This is really good bread.  It has a hint of the sweetness from the molasses, but not nearly as sweet as my usual oatmeal molasses bread.  In fact, I think this bread could easily support a savory sandwich without the sweetness being too cloying.  So far, though, more thna a loaf has disappeared in the toaster for butter and jam!

The Challenge

Last week, we had a brunch at our house for the purpose of planning our next scuba diving trip to Bonaire.  This presented a problem.  One of my favorite brunches is fresh chewy bagels with smoked salmon, fresh tomatoes, mimosas, Bloody Marys, and good coffee.

I roast my own coffee now, so I've got that licked. 

It's still fresh tomato season, so no worries with that.

Mimosas and Bloody Mary's are easy...

Which brings us to the fresh chewy bagels.  I am from NY City.  I was weaned on H&H, Bagel Oasis, and Ess-a-Bagel.  Heck, even the corner bodega had the good ones.  But now I live in Massachusetts.

Big problem.  The bagels up here are big pillows of round bread.  And not very good bread at that.

I had bought Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice some time ago with the ambition of turning out tasty fresh loaves of bread, but never really got around to it.  So I cracked it open and found a recipe for bagels that he claimed was as good as the real thing.  What the heck, I gave it a try.

Oh.  My.  God.

They fulfilled my fondest wishes, despite not having high gluten flour, and a minor mishap with the stickiest parchment paper in existence (don't ask).  I made 2 dozen and they were gone in no time.  My guests had a great brunch and I had a new favorite cookbook.

I then discovered it was a lot of people's favorite cookbook, and that there was something called the BBA Challenge.  Basically, it comes to this:  bake every bread in the BBA book in order and blog, tweet, or otherwise rhapsodize about it.  SO that is what I'll be doing on this blog.  I also plan on adding in some of my other recipes and culinary misadventures.