Scaccia Ragusana

Scaccia is a flatbread that has been stuffed and folded over onto itself a few times to create an alluring layered effect in the finished loaf. The dough is rolled out very thin prior to folding so that when it’s baked the outside crust become hard and bread-like while the inside dough, absorbing moisture from the tomato sauce and cheese, retains the soft consistency of a baked pasta. It’s for this reason that scaccia (or scacce, plural) is sometimes referred to as lasagna bread. The dish is a Sicilian specialty native to the southern province of Ragusa.

I was initially alerted to the existence of scaccia by Saveur magazine in this article and knew immediately that I had to give it a try. Their recipe suggests baking the bread in a loaf pan, which looks very pretty in the article photos, but I opted for the more traditional free-form approach. When researching the dish further I also couldn’t find a hard and fast rule on the proper bread dough recipe so I used my basic pizza dough to keep things simple.

Rolled out dough.

Initial topping (onion, olives, ricotta, and tomato sauce mix).

Turn in the sides.

Fold 1 and add additional topping.

Fold 2.

More sauce mix.

Fold 3 and more sauce added. The final step is folding the whole thing in half.

Bake at 400℉ (205℃) for about 1 hour, until the crust sets and begins to char.

 

You get to choose whatever you want as the filling ingredients; I watched many Italian scaccia videos on YouTube that included things like eggplant, sausage, Ragú, hard boiled eggs, or just plain cheese. For my first attempt at the dish I mixed together marinara, sauteed onions, chopped black olives, and homemade ricotta cheese to form the filling. While tomato sauce and ricotta are standard in the most basic scaccia when all was said and done I found myself wishing I had been a bit more bold, perhaps adding a healthy dose of garlic or thinly sliced salami.

Maybe next time.

 

 

Dutch Crunch Rolls

I first heard of this style of bread through the blog Bakers and Best back in January and after that started seeing it mentioned everywhere. Apparently the word is out and Dutch Crunch is the new fad in bread (even though it’s been around for as long as anyone can remember in the Netherlands and since the 1940’s in San Francisco). So when the latest issue of a cooking magazine arrived in my mailbox with a Dutch Crunch recipe I decided it was time to jump in and give it a go.

In the Netherlands this bread is called tijgerbrood  or “tiger bread”, in England it’s called “giraffe bread”, and in San Francisco, where it’s found throughout the city, it’s referred to as  “Dutch Crunch”. All of which reference to the look and feel of the mottled, crusty top on each roll, created by slathering a layer of sweetened rice flour paste over the bread dough just prior to baking which hardens and cracks in the oven.

The bread and topping recipes I’m posting below come from Katie Leaird and were published in the April/May 2016 issue of Cook’s Country magazine. I followed the recipes as written to delicious result but I’ve also heard you can apply the rice flour paste to just about any sandwich bread or dinner roll recipe you prefer. So give it a try! It made for some really excellent sandwiches.

Pain au Levain

It’s been a long while since I baked, and posted about, a straight sourdough bread. I made these as part of my prep for a cross-country flight to visit family and since I was mostly pleased with how they came out I decided to take a couple of photos.

This is the “quintessential French sourdough” from Daniel Leader’s book Local Breads. As an addendum to his basic recipe Leader includes some ways to spruce up the flavor by adding cheese, or bacon, or seeds, or nuts, or alternative flours. I went in two different directions since the dough makes enough for two loaves. The raisin and pecan combination creates a lightly sweetened bread that is just begging to be eaten toasted with butter for breakfast, and the sunflower seed loaf is a hearty bread perfect for lunchtime sandwiches. I’m not taking the time to write the recipe here but if you’re interested you can find the whole thing transcribed at The Weekend Loafer.

For the most part I followed the directions in Local Breads but with a couple minor changes: In addition to the sunflower seeds I added about ¼ cup of soaked wheat berries to bring out the grain flavor, and instead of a 20 minute autolyse I gave my flour a full 8 hours soak while I was at work. Gluten development without the effort, that’s how I roll.

Czech Christmas Braid

It was a successful December 25th, 2015 here in Missoula. I spent the day doing two things I love: baking bread and enjoying the outdoors.

This particular recipe comes from Daniel Leader’s book Local Breads (see here). It’s called a Christmas braid, which is why I was inspired to bake it on this Christmas day, but in reality it’s just a delicious, lightly sweetened bread, excellent for breakfast on any day of the year. In fact in his preface to the recipe Leader notes that while this bread used to be reserved for the holidays it’s no longer so specific and can be found baked fresh daily in the markets of Prague. If you’re having a party over for brunch some weekend a braided loaf like this would make an excellent centerpiece for the table; try baking it in advance and keep it stored fresh in a plastic bag once cooled.

Green Tomato Cake

Okay, so technically this is a neither pizza nor a bread but it does include at least some flour and if you’re a farmer/gardener who has recently watched your tomato plants die to  frost it’s particularly topical. Not to mention delicious.

This recipe comes from the farmers at Greentree Naturals Organic Farm in Sandpoint, Idaho. If you’re looking to use all those tomatoes left green on the vine at the end of the growing season then you can’t go wrong with Green Tomato Cake. It is both sweet and a little sour, and if you add dried fruit and nuts to the mix it makes for an excellent breakfast treat.

Harvested unripened tomatoes. Destined to make salsa and cake in our house.

Focaccia with Cherry Tomatoes

Focaccia is a flatbread, enriched with olive oil, and very often topped with Mediterranean flavors from tomatoes to olives to grapes to herbs. It’s an ancient form of bread with a history dating back to pre-Roman times and is believed to be the bread style that eventually morphed into what we call pizza today, sometime around the 18th century. The name focaccia is derived from the Latin word focacius, meaning “of the hearth”, because the bread was traditionally baked among the hot stones and ashes of the fireplace floor. These days a basic focaccia recipe calls for just five ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt and olive oil, with additional oil spread over the top to seep into the dough for flavor as well as to help retain moisture while baking. This afternoon, in addition to the oil and some salt sprinkled on top of my flatbreads I’m pushing my end-of-season cherry tomatoes into the dough to make a perfect puttering-around-the-house snack.

This focaccia recipe, below, comes from Daniel Leader’s book Local Breads, one of my personal favorite bread books. The tomatoes that I’m using are called Sungolds and I chose them for this task because they are the variety I have a lot of right now, but really any cherry or grape sized tomato should work.

Jalapeno Cheddar Bread

Jalapeno-cheddar is one of my absolute favorite breads to bake and eat. We keep homemade pickled jalapenos around the house just for the purpose, and you’ll find me digging into our stores to prepare these spicy loaves through every season of the year.

This recipe makes use of an Italian baking, pre-fermentation technique called a biga. Bigas are a small bit of dough (yeast, flour and water) mixed and allowed to ferment for up to 24-hours before being incorporated into the primary loaf. The technique is meant to bring complex flavors into the fresh loaf as well as to increase the shelf life of the bread. For this recipe prepare the biga the night before you intend to bake, it takes less than 5 minutes to mix and knead.

On the day of baking it can take up to five hours to put together these jalapeno-cheddar loaves, including three hours fermentation and one hour for final rise. I assure you, though, when you bite into a slice of this cheesy, spicy bread, you’ll agree it was time well spent.

Eating Bread, Out of Doors – 06/05/2015

No Friday night pizza for us this week. Instead Sarah and I decided to skip out of town after work and hike to a high mountain lake in the Bitterroot Range south of Missoula. We arrived about dusk, set up camp, enjoyed some dinner, and settled in to watch the stars appear. For unwinding at the end of a long week nothing beats a placid lake surrounded by mountains. In the morning we fished for trout and drank coffee before hiking out for home.

Dinner was a concoction I prepared for the trip using the Bavarian Pretzel dough recipe from Daniel Leader’s Local Breads book. Only instead of twisting into pretzels I shaped these into triangles and stuffed them full of spinach and feta like a Lebanese fataya.

Our campsite was here 

Scalded Rye Sandwich Bread

Each year I look forward to Saint Patrick’s day. I’m not Irish or even remotely Catholic but it’s the only time of year when the grocery stores around here bother to sell corned beef to the masses. To my mind life simply does not get better than when eating a hot Reuben sandwich and, unfortunately for me, the dearth of German/Jewish delis in Montana means there aren’t a lot of opportunities to enjoy them. I take advantage of the Irish holiday as an annual excuse to make my own Reubens, which means in addition to boiling beef it’s also a good time to bake some rye sandwich bread.

An American sandwich, invented by either a German or Lithuanian immigrant, with meat available thanks to the Irish, on bread baked with German spices and Scandinavian techniques, topped with Swiss cheese. Hooray for globalism (as it pertains to sandwiches)!

Eating Bread, Out of Doors – 03/01/2015

Yesterday we took advantage of clear skies and temperatures hovering in the mid-30s (℉) to head out of town and soak in some nearby undeveloped hot springs. It was a beautiful blue sky day but you wouldn’t know it from these pictures because I have no patience for photography when I could otherwise be relaxing in a natural hot tub it was rather late in the afternoon with the sun low on the horizon.

The stream running alongside the hot springs was (objectively) frigid but made for a beautiful picnic setting. Among the snacks we brought were hot cross buns I had made, for the first time, earlier in the day.

Hot water flowing out from the ground to warm the local stream

Eating Bread, Out of Doors – 01.31.2015

The weather has been unseasonably warm recently in Montana. At the close of January I should be out skiing or snowshoeing to stay active but yesterday morning I woke up to blue skies and sun; it felt a picture perfect Spring day. With no other plans on the docket I packed a few provisions and headed out to explore Missoula’s hills from a trailhead just down the street from our house. Among the things in my backpack I brought a fresh baked loaf of rosemary sourdough bread, which I used to make a very tasty sandwich of lettuce and smoked trout cream cheese. Nothing better than being out in the sun, relaxing and surveying the city from a vista at lunchtime.

Missoula’s North Hills with the Bitterroot Mountain Range in the background. Missoula, MT

Roasted Red Pepper and Chèvre Fougasse

This week’s Friday night pizza isn’t technically a pizza, consider it more like the French cousin of a calzone.

Fougasse is a style of flatbread associated with the Provence region in southeastern France. Most traditionally fougasse is prepared by mixing Mediterranean flavors, like olives or sun dried tomatoes, directly into the dough, which is then rolled out flat and sculpted or slashed into attractive designs. The bread is baked in a hot oven for a short period and is finished with a rub of herbs and olive oil as it cools. This traditional version of fougasse makes a wonderful appetizer as the crisp, light bread is excellent for dipping in oils and the open designs provide for nice table presentation. Tonight, however, I was looking for something a little more substantial to make a meal and so I took an alternative approach to the fougasse style, which was to fold the flatbread over onto itself and bake it stuffed full of vegetables and cheese. Stuffed fougasse is so similar to an Italian calzone that it’s almost a negligible distinction but I believe the main differences being that the French version must include a top dough that has been sliced open and that the filling should not include tomato sauce.

I stuffed my fougasse full of roasted red peppers and a soft goat cheese (chèvre) infused with roasted garlic.

Tartine Basic Country Bread

“Tartine Bread” by Chad Robertson. It’s a beautiful book filled with stunning photography, well explained recipes, and an enjoyable narrative. I was given a copy for Christmas, along with a new banneton to feed my baking addiction, and now that the post-holiday season calm has settled in I’ve had some opportunity to look into it.

The first recipe in the book, and the bread I attempted this past weekend, is the ‘Basic Country Bread’. It’s the recipe and baking method that made this bread book a huge success,and has garnered an endless amount of praise from the baking world.

This book came out in 2010, which makes me late to the party. By now it seems like every baking blogger plus the New York Times have already reviewed this loaf in detail, leaving little else that needs saying. Perfect! At the moment I have nothing unique to add. Mostly I just wanted to write a post because in the process of making this bread I accidentally screwed up, flipping the dough cattywampus into the cast iron (dutch oven), yet somehow the combination of my ineptitude plus the patterns left by the banneton resulted in a super awesome looking loaf! I suppose it speaks to the quality of the recipe that even in the hands of somebody careless a beautiful bread can emerge.

Pita Bread

I decided to make pitas today; partially because I had some free time on my hands, partially because I’ve never made them before, and mostly because I really wanted an excuse to also make falafel.

Given my own relative inexperience with this type of bread I decided it inappropriate to attempt a recipe and step-by-step instructions in this blog post. For that I refer you to the expertise of The Fresh Loaf or King Arthur Flour. I will however offer a few helpful tidbits that I discovered while baking my pitas.

Winter Squash and Sage Bread

It’s a cold November day here in Montana, the kind of day that calls for puttering around the house keeping warm and preparing a nice hearty soup for dinner. This being a baking blog it stands to reason what comes next, with soup must come bread and it just so happens that one of my favorite Sunday, house-puttering activities is getting flour all over myself and the counters to knead up something tasty.

Since it’s autumn I wanted to experiment with flavors of the season, more specifically with the winter squash that our basement stores are chock full of. A quick search online confirmed my suspicion that most baking recipes featuring winter squash (or pumpkin) are muffins and other sweet breads, which for soup that certainly wouldn’t do. To complement a stew what is needed is a bread loaf with a developed crust that can be thickly sliced into portions sturdy enough for dipping. Recalling that as a kid I loved eating potato bread, which substitutes out some flour in favor of mashed potatoes, I started thinking “why not do that but with squash instead?”

So that’s what I did.