Lessons as I attempt to follow five challenging bread recipes from a yeasty holy grail.
Lessons as I attempt to follow five challenging bread recipes from a yeasty holy grail.
Join National Review associate editor Sarah Colleen Schutte twice a month as she attempts various culinary feats with the help of YouTube and copious amounts of flour. She hopes you’ll join her in the kitchen as she plans dinner parties, explores historical recipes, makes bread for her neighbors, and much more.
P ermission to write a food column is not to be taken lightly, so my inaugural attempt needed to be something impressive, something flashy. I’m known in my family circle as a fairly talented baker, so bread was to be my debut. Tackling five complicated recipes from that holy grail of cookbooks, Bread Illustrated from America’s Test Kitchen (ATK), certainly I’d have plenty of time to bake them all, try them, photograph them, and write about it all in one week.
The bread gods scoffed, and rightly so.
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The kitchen is the heart of the home. Better writers than I have extolled the blessings of a happy, busy kitchen, full of laughter and conversation. It is a place of learning, not just of the culinary arts but of life lessons and virtues. It’s where I burned gummy pancakes, messed up boxed mac-n-cheese, and mastered the art of scrambled eggs. More than that, for me it was a place where late-night chats happened organically and where the meaning of preparing food for those you love was driven home.
Cooking for nine people is no small feat, but watching and then helping my mom do just that gave me the basic skills and confidence to strike out on my own. I know my way around a chicken, but baking is my delight. Banana chocolate-chip muffins, lava cakes, chocolate-mousse cakes, lemon bars, even cream puffs (my specialty) were well within my wheelhouse.
Most importantly, though, each of these treats had a purpose. Ingredients are expensive, and besides, it’s rarely fun to bake for yourself. Whether it’s brownies for the family with a new baby, spice cake as a house-warming gift, or allergy-friendly cookies your roommate can enjoy, one of the greatest goods of food is how it can bring others together and give them pleasure.
And this is where I stumbled a bit.
My five intended recipes were: mallorcas, Portuguese sweet bread, fougasse, croissants, and English muffins. They each take considerable planning and often require two days to make, but they are all recipes I’d been eager to try. My English-muffin dough started out strong and was fairly simple to mix. The fun parts were zipping back and forth between the mixer and my laptop, where Rich and Co. were recording The Editors, and then letting the dough proof in the sunshine spilling over my bedroom floor (a cheaper option than heating up the oven).
English muffins need to rest in the fridge overnight — this allows time for the flavor to deepen — squished between two baking sheets. This is when I realized that having more than two such baking sheets is vital to a functioning kitchen.
There are three trademarks to a good English muffin: the cornmeal crust; the flat, spotty-brown top and bottom; and the craggy interior. You achieve the first through, well, six generous tablespoons of cornmeal sprinkled about and pressed on. The second requires a hot skillet and twelve minutes of stovetop cooking. The third comes from the dough’s high water content and a specifically executed set of turns during the rising process.
Unfortunately for this batch, I misread the directions and was overly vigorous in my turns. Upon slicing open the fresh muffins, there was nary a crag in sight. Tragedy.
Next up: croissants.
Last Christmas, I spent two days painstakingly following ATK’s croissant recipe, but ended up with small, slightly tough ones. I’d wanted to try again, and it was Claire Saffitz’s New York Times Cooking video on these fancy pastries that gave me confidence to do so.
My biggest takeaway? When the recipe says to keep everything as cold as possible, it isn’t joking. Croissants are layers of dough surrounding layers of butter, which softens very rapidly as you try to roll everything out. Also, you must use European-style butter, which has a flexibility to it that our brittle American butter doesn’t possess. The process, though time-consuming, is enjoyable, especially when you start to encase the thin sheet of butter into the dough. You build layers through a fair amount of rolling and folding, freezing and chilling, and then one long overnight chill to help with flavor.
The recipe required me to roll the dough out to 24 inches in length, eight inches in width. Eight inches? Easy. Twenty-four? Not so much. I’m not known for my precision, but I was determined to honestly try for it with this recipe, so 24 inches it would be. Which led to some vigorous rolling . . . and torn layers of dough. Butter poked through, and I called it a night before it could turn my counters into a sticky mess.
Day two dawned bright, and I began to boil water to create my own proofing drawer: Saffitz’s directions have you place boiling water in your oven to make a humid environment — perfect for proofing delicate croissants. This done, I turned my attention to that pesky slab of dough, which was determined to be 14 inches long when I now needed 16 inches. We wrestled, and I won. Eight long triangles were sliced and rolled into fat croissants, popped into their steamy new home, and left to rise until jiggly.
Experts say the smell of fresh-baked cookies will help you sell a house, and I’m certain that the scent of fresh croissants would have the same effect. It’s heavenly. My pastries had proofed for just over two hours, which, in hindsight was a bit too long for four of them and just right for the other half. Brushed with egg yolk and pulled straight from a 20-minute fridge stay, they were now puffing up gloriously. To my even greater joy, they weren’t leaking butter everywhere.
“Lacquered” is a favorite descriptor of mine, and it captures the look of my croissants. After they cooled, we had some fun as I posed them by the window in my feeble food-photography attempts. I’d finally done it! Almost-bakery-worthy croissants, right out of my own oven, all made by me, and done between editing NRO pieces and putting up podcasts.
“But you stumbled! Where?” Bread is best shared, and in my haste to “have something to write about,” I’d neglected to make it for someone.
Luckily for me, the English muffins were happily accepted and rapidly consumed by my students’ family (hearing of my crag-less woes, they told me to try the sourdough-and-Dutch-oven version next time). And I could thank my flight instructor for his time with some of the fresh croissants, while my siblings devoured the rest.
So, mallorcas, sweet bread, and fougasse, you’ll have your moment. Sadly, I was defeated by the clock and will have to tackle you another time. But next week, I’m making a decadent chocolate cake. It will be the best one I’ve ever made, and you, dear reader, will hear all about it very soon. But most importantly, I’m making it for people, and we will enjoy it as good food should be enjoyed: together.