"Baking With Julia" by Julia Child (2004)

[devlin]

Thanks so much folks for the welcome.

Dahome, I've not bought the Levy yet, although it's on my wish list at Amazon. I have her cake book, but have been too preoccupied with other things to even approach it. I started doing the bread from a small book printed many years ago by some monks, I think, that I'd carried around for years and which scared me for all those years, for all the reasons so many people are scared of baking bread (how do you handle yeast, how and how much do you knead, when the heck is it done and how do you tell, that kind of stuff). Pretty basic loaf, sandwich type bread. And then I started looking around on the internet and saw that a lot of folks were recommending both Field and Nancy Silverton, so I got their books and started experimenting. And then I got Daniel Leader's (? -- is that the right name?) book, Laurel's Kitchen book, one of Reinhart's, Wood's Classic Sourdoughs, Artisan Baking Across America, some others I can't think of. I spent several obsessed months working with Silverton's sourdough, had to travel a bit and then ended up throwing it out. I've got a sourdough starter going now which I've been using in everything, and I like my breads more and more, especially over the past several months. In fact, I'm building the oven because I'm planning a bread business. I've got one restaurant tentatively lined up, and that's a plenty good start for me right now. She's impatient for me to start which is good for me to see. A mutual friend recommended my stuff to her.

My husband works for an Italian company, and so we've gotten to travel a bit and I've taken some cooking classes in Tuscany, but baking bread has really turned into a passion for me. I think after three years I've finally got two nice basic loaves down that I love above all breads anywhere so far, and that's a great start. If that sounds ridiculously paltry, well, I guess I'm a little anal retentive, a perfectionist, and I've been trying to figure out the perfect combination of elements for what I like in a bread and don't really expect to be there for another ten years. One of the doughs is the kind of thing you can just add stuff to and end up with a whole new thing -- like olives, herbs, cheeses, that kind of thing -- or shape in any number of ways. Field's book is worth getting for a number of reasons, but if for nothing else for her "cocodrillo" bread, an invention by a Roman baker, a ridiculously wet durum mix that is unbelievable. You can't really touch the dough, you just have to pour it and cut and separate with a bench scraper and let it lie where it is which just happens to approximate the shape of a crocodile, hence the name. The first time I made it I thought it must surely be a mistake, until it came out of the oven. Unbelievable bread. I've been buying my bread flour from Great Valley Mills and the durum from King Arthur, have tried the KA bread flour, among others, but so far really love the GVM. I need to get to a local mill, though, because shipping is just too cost prohibitive. But GVM has beautiful bread flour. Here's a link, if anybody's interested. Look up their hard white flour. I always add about a tablespoon of wheat germ per cup of flour to my doughs and really love the texture and little bit of crunch it gives to the crust:

http://www.greatvalleymills.com/

My husband is a little worried about how the oven might affect the resale of our house, if we ever have to move again (we only moved in 6 months ago). We've had to transfer for his job many times over the past 7 years or so, which is why I started baking and one reason I settled on bread, having to rethink a career for myself, but think we've finally landed in one spot for the forseeable future. We're fortunate to have several acres (for horses primarily), and an attached garage to build the oven in. If I'm going to be consistent with selling to restaurants and the like, I can't just build it out in the back yard as so many folks do. Baking bread in the rain or snow wouldn't quite work. We're going to try to do as much work on the oven as we feel able to do ourselves, so that should help defray some of the cost. It's a little scary, a little nerve wracking, thinking about where this will go, or if it will. I'm encouraged by the responses I've gotten to my breads, though. All more than good. In the long run I'd like to add some Italian-based desserts, ricotta cheesecakes and maybe some tea cakes, for example, some simple things. But till now I've been hell-bent on getting the right thing in a couple of breads, and I'm feeling pretty confident about that. I had a wonderful conversation with a bread baker in Italy, most of it in gestures and a lot of it translated, a man obviously devoted to his bread. When a friend asked how my bread and this particular baker's bread could be so much better than anything he'd ever had anywhere else, I said, "it's art and soul," which somebody translated to the baker who immediately laughed and nodded very vigorously.

One thing's sure, I need to sell this stuff just so I don't end up eating it all myself! I'm going to try the epis next and hope they look even half as beautiful as the pics here. Very wowsville. I like the idea of working on a gallette or even the cheesecake.

Edited March 26, 2004 by devlin (log)

[SethG]

devlin, welcome to eGullet and I wish you the greatest success in your business. It is always inspiring to see a person try to make her dreams a reality. I hope you'll stick around eGullet and give us all some insight on bread, your business, and whatever else you know about!

[SethG]

Edit: I'm changing this post completely.

Here's my walnut bread:

The walnuts, and the huge boule shape, change the mixed starter dough into a different bread entirely. This bread is incredible. The walnuts are put in raw, but by the time the bread is done the whole loaf is redolent of roasted walnuts. The nuts also give the crumb these beautiful purplish streaks. The loaf from the recipe looks nothing like the ones pictured on page 66. Those loaves aren't slashed with a sunburst shape, and they're clearly colored with something (cocoa powder, coffee grounds?).

The crust on this bread is among the best I've ever tasted. And today (the second day) I think the bread might be better than it was yesterday. I just had (who'd a thunk it?) a totally kick-ass turkey and cheese sandwich on this bread!

I really want to try the walnuts in a sourdough. And I want to try putting in some cheese, too.

Edited March 26, 2004 by SethG (log)

[Rhea_S]

I really like that walnut bread. I pre-sliced and froze half last Sunday. I put a couple of frozen slices in the toaster last night and they were still good. Definitely my new favourite.

[foodie3]

i also liked the walnut bread from bwj very much. for comparision i made the walnut levain from maggie glezer's artisan baking, (it is a bit faster to make - i used yeast preferment in the levain) and found the two breads to be almost identical.

[mdt]

I made two apple/pear galettes yesterday and they were great. Needless to say they are all gone! The crust had a nice flake and crispness to it that mixed very well with the softer fruit inside. These were so easy to make that I will be making these with other fresh friuts all the time. Then there are the endless possibilities for savory fillings.

I currently have another batch of the mixed starter going so that I can try the walnut bread. The bread is now down and I have added the picture.

Edited: To add the picture of the Walnut Bread.

Edited March 29, 2004 by mdt (log)

[Ling]

That's a beautiful galette. I'm really enjoying all the wonderful photos in this thread. I'm waiting for my Baking with Julia cookbook now, and I hope to be contributing to this thread when my finals are over and I have more time to bake!

[Dahomechef]

Devlin- Thanks for the background, and best of luck with your business. It sounds like you are going to be very successful. I'm intrigued by the cocodrillo bread--I love those really wet doughs. Have you had any luck with ciabatta? I guess I'll have to get the Fields book.

SethG, your walnut bread is amazing. I didn't think I would make it, just didn't seem interesting till I saw your post.

Baked two galettes:

I used blueberries, pears and apples. Nice combination. Initially, the dough as it came out of the mixer looked more like sludge (very pretty sludge) than dough. But after chilling it rolled out very nicely. I ended up with a bit too much fruit, and the galette on the top is the result of tryingg to stuff it all in. It disappeared as rapidly as the nicer-looking one. I liked the bit of cornmeal, and the recipe is so ridiculously easy I'm sure I'm going to do these often this summer as different fruits come into market. And the savory versions look pretty good too. I'm glad we made this one.

[Abra]

Oh, what a fun thread! I'm new here, having recently found my way here from the other board. I've been making that cocodrillo bread for a couple of years - it really does kick butt. I'm entranced by the thought of having other people to bake with. I don't have BWJ, although I have a lot of other baking books. Do I need to get it in order to play with you all, or will you be moving on to some other book in the nearish future?

[Dahomechef]

Abra - welcome. It is fun, yes? What book did you have in mind?

mdt, your galette looks perfect, and the walnut bread is beautiful. Thanks for the photos.

What's on for next week?

[Ling]

mdt: That walnut bread looks wonderful! Are you a professional baker?

[arbuclo]

mdt: where'd ya get the basket for your walnut bread? Do you use plastic or wood? I'm looking at getting some of those baskets so any tips you provide would be greatly appreciated!

[mdt]

Ling -- Thanks for the compliment, but I am not a professional baker. Its amazing what a banneton will do!

arbuclo -- I use wood bannetons with a good covering of flour before putting the dough inside. You can get them through many internet sites or stores like Sur La Table. They are not cheap, but worth it in my book.

Up next? Hmmm, I will have to look at the book, but those chocolate truffle tarts are instantly coming to my mind.

[SethG]

mdt: your walnut loaf puts mine to shame! I almost bought a banneton the other day, then I rejected it as too expensive. But I think your bread is making me reconsider. Thus far I've taken pride in doing things without the "right" equipment-- I have no peel, no banneton, and I use unglazed ceramic tiles (33 cents each at Home Depot!) instead of a baking stone.

Was your crumb darker than mine and Rhea's? I really wonder how the loaves pictured in the book got so dark. Maybe they just chopped their walnuts finer than we did.

The galettes look great. I'll be making mine today or tomorrow. I like the idea of combining berries and pears.

As for the book question, it looks like we'll be sticking with BWJ for a while yet. We've done a bunch (but by no means all) of the bread, and we've done only a few pastries. We've kind of neglected the cakes. I think we'd all be interested in anyone's ideas for the next book, though.

Personally, I've been thrilled by people's participation in this thread. I proposed it thinking I'd be lucky to find anyone interested, and it's been such a joy to find several folks, of varying levels of experience, interested in baking so often. And it seems like everybody's agreeable about everything, which is so refreshing.

On that note, what are we doing next? Babas?

[Dorie Greenspan]

Dear Bakers,

I've been popping in and out looking at what you're doing and each time I've been so excited -- the pictures of what you've made are phenomenal! The mixed-starter pix are especially swell. Mixed-starter is not exactly the easiest bread to tackle, but it is one of my favorites in the book -- and it almost didn't make it into the book.

When I called Steve Sullivan, the "papa" of the mixed-starter bread, to ask him if he would participate in the Baking with Julia television series and book, his first response was a firm no. He said he didn't think the kind of bread he made could be made at home and he didn't want people who knew his breads to be disappointed in what they'd produce. We talked and talked -- actually, he talked and I begged -- and, finally, he agreed to make a couple of things at home in his ordinary oven and get back to me. A few weeks later, he said he thought it was possible and we set up a date for him to come to Julia Child's house in Cambridge to do the taping.

The day he arrived, the temperature in Cambridge was almost 100 degrees! Not ideal weather for slow-rise breads but he had lots of batches of dough in the works and rising all over the house, inside and out. Steve, who is an extraordinary baker, a wonderful teacher and, ordinarily, a pretty calm guy, was just a little stressed out about his doughs. Because we had only one day to prep, and because the mixed-starter dough needs such a particular rise and so much time, we all knew there'd be no do-over if it wasn't right. But the morning of the taping, he was ready to go, if still a little anxious -- by then, the anxiety was mostly about the ovens. He and Julia worked away on the breads -- everything on Baking with Julia was real and pretty much taped in real time. -- and they were great together. Then came "the moment" -- Steve pulled the bread out of the oven and it was fabulous. Julia smiled her wonderful smile and Steve almost giggled in disbelief -- up until that very last minute, I don't think he really believed the breads could be made at home, but he did it. And now you've done it, too. They look great!

Dorie Greenspan

Author, Baking with Julia

[Rhea_S]

I didn't get any baking done this weekend because I had to fix some friends' computers. Why, oh why, are some people too cheap to pay for antivirus software?

Anyway, I started another batch of mixed starter bread, but I will have to pinch off an ounce and start again because my second stage starter is definitely in sourdough territory. I'm in for babas next week and matzoh. April Gourmet magazine has an article about matzoh.

[SethG]

When I called Steve Sullivan...

Dorie, I for one would love to hear more stories like these, if you don't mind tellling them to us!

Were there any bakers in particular you really wanted who never made it to Julia's house?

I've also wondered a few times if you were surprised or taken aback by any particular baker's method of doing something. Were there any recipes that you would have done completely differently if the project had been yours alone? And were you then pleasantly surprised by the results? Or were there any recipes that you did change a lot to conform to your own ways of doing things?

Just curious. I don't want to smother you with questions-- but if you don't mind, I'm sure the folks participating here would be very interested in whatever you'd have to say.

[alacarte]

My Baking With Julia book arrived from Amazon, hooray!

It's Passover next week. Need to focus on cleaning, not baking. Dang.

Yes Dorie, more stories please. I read every word of Julia's preface, about how all the baking was done in her own kitchen in Cambridge, and she turned her basement into the prep shop. Can you tell us more about how that worked?

[arbuclo]

Dorie, count me as one of those that would love to hear stories too. Makes the book feel more personal!

For those of you looking at getting bannetons, the San Francisco Institute of Baking seems to have them at an excellent price: http://www.sfbi.com/oc.shtml

I think I'll order from them if it's no probs for them to ship 'em to me over in Oz. (No affiliations. I only found out about SFBI last week when I did a tour of one of our fabulous atisan bakeries here. One of the owners said he bought all of their bannetons from there b/c of the good price.)

[devlin]

Dahome, I do a lot of ciabatta, using a sort of hybrid of both Field's and Silverton's recipes. I like both, but found Field more accessible in the beginning because Silverton's bread book is very much devoted to sourdoughs, although you could probably just substitute a biga or poolish for the sourdough starter in all her recipes. By all means get the Field book and try the cocodrillo. It works best with bread flour, though, although I started with all-purpose, Gold Medal and the like, which produced a loaf I found truly startling since I'd never had anything like it. But with bread flour it's awesome stuff.

Dorie, I'm a big fan. I'm thinking a book about your experiences along the lines as the one you just related would be fabulous.

And a question to anybody about experiences with flour: I just raved above about the mill I buy my bread flour from and then immediately got a very questionable batch. This has only happened once before with them and I just soldiered on and didn't say anything. But since it is expensive, especially with shipping costs, and I buy in 25 lb bags, I phoned them this time to ask very politely if there might have been a mix-up in the order. Don't know what that might be, but I didn't want to just come right out and say, "Hey, this flour sucks!" So after some preliminary niceties, the owner asked what exactly the problem was, was it, for example, rising properly? It actually is rising, bubbling nicely, etc., but it tastes overwhelmingly like paste. Even the bread tastes like paste and ends up out of the oven after cooling like a sort of cardboard. I finally said, "I can't really explain it except to say that it tastes like paste, or, as I said to my husband, it tastes dead." And I've made several batches from it just to be sure I wasn't doing anything wrong or just not paying attention to something. He's sending me another 25 lb bag, and was very lovely, but I'm wondering whether anybody has had similar experiences with flour and what the reasons for the extreme difference might be. Just a bad or questionable batch of wheat? Or maybe something else?...

I don't think it's a yeast problem. I buy yeast by the jar and store it in the refrigerator, and I'd used yeast from the same jar in the last batch of good flour just a couple of days before and the bread was fabulous.

Edited March 30, 2004 by devlin (log)

[Dahomechef]

Devlin, I'd love to see a pic of your ciabatta. I'm in a self-imposed no-ciabatta-baking zone due to continued frustration. I know it's not reasonable to expect to be able to create breads like the artisan bakers, but with ciabatta, I fear I haven't gotten close to the open airy texture of the best ciabattas. I don't know where you're located, but around here (SF bay area) I like the Semifreddi ciabatta. Can you replicate that kind of texture?

Glad to hear you are getting a replacement for your 25 lbs of paste. Although people have said a number of things about my breads I don't think I've had one that tasted like paste--yet!

[SethG]

I picked up the Field book at a used book store on your recommendation, Devlin. I'm making olive bread today but that crocodile bread will be a part of my future, I just know it.

And by the way, I checked the Bread Bible out of the library a while ago. I posted my thoughts about it here. I may have been too harsh. The book has a ton of useful info in it. I may end up buying it after all.

[devlin]

Dahome, actually I think the home baker can get very close to the artisanal breads produced by professional folks with their heavy duty, fabulous ovens and such. Can I ask what kind of flour you're using? I started out with the basic, grocery store shelf Gold Medal and Pillsbury and managed to produce some fairly good bread working with books by Field and Silverton and Reinhart and the like. And then because it was clear those flours wouldn't produce what I was after, and by then I was on a mission and unaccountably obsessed by bread, I spent a lot of time reading those authors on flours and trying to figure out where I could get it. I was discouraged, of course, that they all noted it was nearly impossible for the home baker to get good bread flour, or at least not without a lot of work, and so I bought some here and there, ran into a number of dead ends with author recommended mills that had either closed or who don't sell to the public (Giusto's, for example, which so many people recommend as having one of the best bread flours around, although I hear they're about to start providing bread flour to the public), and then was happy to discover Great Valley.

I'm not sure why, but the King Arthur flour just doesn't do it for me. For awhile, before the Great Valley flour, I tried adding suggested additives to help with a better rise and such (malt, for example, which I finally stopped doing just because I found it altered the flavor just a bit in a way I didn't much like), and I've used vital wheat gluten as well which works very nicely. You might try some vital wheat gluten and see where that takes you. King Arthur carries it. And I've actually found it on the grocery store shelf in my very tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. But they also carry King Arthur flours which is peculiar to me, given the area.

I don't know the Semifreddi ciabatta. Ciabatta with ice cream or something chilled? Or something? What the heck is it? We've recently landed in southern Indiana, which is where I hope we can finally stay for a good long while. Just moved into our new home several months ago. We're from Chicago, have transferred around the Chicago area for several years, and then down to the Arkansas Ozarks for three, and now, finally (I hope), here in southern Indiana, close to Louisville KY. It's very pretty here, suprisingly. Not at all like northern Indiana, which is what I'd somehow expected. There's only one place in the area that makes good bread, a Louisville bread and coffee shop with a wood-burning oven. Monster of a thing. One of the owners of the place, a nice young man also obsessed with bread making, took me on a little tour last weekend and showed me how the thing works and told me how it was built. They'd hired an oven builder from Spain who came over and apparently walked around the room measuring with a piece of string, and that was the extent of the actual "plan." But I'm thinking the area can probably accomodate another bread maker.

Here's a suggestion. The cocodrillo method really turned me around in terms what I could expect from a bread. It's a two day ferment and then a several hours rise on the third day, the dough stretched and folded every hour and then set to let rise again for a shorter, final rise just before baking. Field actually just says to "turn" the dough every hour, but after reading about the stretching/folding method somewhere else, I tried that and it seems to work the dough better. You can't use your hands to stretch it, it's too wet. You just use your bench scrapers. You'll have in that loaf exactly the sort of texture you're looking for, the great holey crumb. It's that loaf and the methods used to produce it that made me understand I could do the same thing with other breads and get very similar results. It's the very wet breads that'll get you there. Or anyway that's my experience. I'm a complete novice at this, but I've learned that little bit so far.

[devlin]

I have to stop posting such long messages! And I didn't mean to hijack this thread and turn it into a bread-baking thread. Maybe we should start a bread thread in addition to this one. I'm still interested in working through the JC book as well.

But Seth, just to say one more thing about Field and the Cocodrillo, I'm just dying for you and now Dahome to make the stuff and let me know what you think. So far we've got two big fans of the stuff here (and many of my friends, family and acquaintances), and I'd love to know that other folks enjoy it as much as I do. I've read reviews of the Beranbaum (am I spelling that correctly?), and because I have her cake book and am a little familiar with her history, I was thinking that maybe she would simply be repeating a lot of other people's work and so her book would be a little superfluous for me. I have it on my list of books to buy, but it's way down on the list. What changed your mind about it? What did you find particularly useful?

Edited April 1, 2004 by devlin (log)

[alacarte]

I'm looking forward to baking the petit fours in the back of the Baking With Julia book.