Bialys: Little pockets of Yum!

Bread number 16 in the Mellow Bakers‘ roster of recipes from Jeffrey Hamelman’s amazing book [easyazon-link asin=”0471168572″]Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes[/easyazon-link] are Bialys, the plural form of Bialy and pronounced “bee-Al-ees” – yes, I had to look it up. It’s a small yeast roll that originated from Jewish bakers in Bialystok, Poland. It looks somewhat like a bagel but without the hole. Instead, the center is an indentation and the dough is stretched to a thin membrane. In this little pocket is placed, typically, a tasty onion mixture.

The other aspects that make it not like a bagel is that this bread is not boiled and is ridiculously quick to make. Start to finish (minus cooling) took me about 4½ hours. And this was my first time at it. In fact, I’d never heard of these until I saw them in the book.

And do they compare to bagels? Let me show you…

First thing I did was prepare the onion filling since it had to sort of sit and “meld” for a couple of hours and that also happens to be how long the bulk fermentation takes. How handy!

I took half a large-ish sweet onion (the book says a medium onion will be fine) and chopped it up quite fine. I added a little bread crumbs – supposed to be 10% of the weight of the onion but I didn’t weigh, I just eyeballed. This is then stirred and set aside. Alternatives suggested are using garlic instead or as well as onion, using poppy seed. I changed my mind after I took these pictures and added a half teaspoon of chopped garlic. I pondered adding some parsley flake for a little more colour but decided to not go too far off the recipe on my first try.

With the onion mix ready and set aside, i got all the ingredients together for the dough.

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Grissini with a Twist

Here we are in mid-May and this is already the third and last of the May Challenge breads to do in the MellowBakers group bake. And this one is way easy! With just a mix and knead of the dough then a one hour proofing the biggest concern here is: what to put IN the bread.

Grissini, as noted in a previous post Mambo Italiano, is the Italian term for bread sticks. Yep, plain ol’ bread sticks. Except not like the stuff you get in a box from the grocery store. Oh no. These are wonderful little invitations for creativity. Sure, you could make them just plain or with a little salt and sesame seed. But you’ve got your whole spice cupboard – and more – to toss into the mix here so why not get creative?

Now unlike other blog entries here, I sort of did this one very much on the spur of the moment so we’re going to miss the first couple of steps but you’ll probably not miss them this time around. Because these are SO EASY TO MAKE!

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Corn Bread

When a lot of people think of “corn bread”, they picture the soda-risen American style quickbread that’s a staple in American culture with endless personalized recipes handed down from grandmothers. Well made, it’s delicious and relatively fast to produce.

This isn’t that. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

This is a yeasted bread made with corn. And it’s made with a pre-ferment so that a lot of flavour is drawn out of the wheat flour. Unlike it’s quickbread counterpart, the crumb is … well, I won’t give too much away quite yet, we have a whole process to get through before we get into the final results. There’s a sneak peek of it in the header pic but let’s see how we got there, shall we?

Oh, and this is a Mellow Bakers bread, one of three selected for may 2010 from Jeffrey Hamelman’s great book [amazon_link asins=’1118132718|1118132718′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’rainbowzoneco-20|cakescanada-20′ marketplace=’US|CA’ link_id=’9518943c-c2c2-11e8-b994-f9da925fe8aa’]

NOTE: At this point, the Mellow Bakers’ trip through the book is long done but you can certainly follow along with us on that site and bake whatever breads you feel like tackling and any order you wish! 

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Rustic Bread for MellowBakers

My third bread in the MellowBakers.com group bake, the Rustic Bread from Jeffrey Hamelman’s wonderful book Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes is a pre-fermented loaf and has a combination of white bread, rye and whole wheat flours. Although it takes about 22 hours from start to finish, the time actually spent doing anything besides ‘waiting’ is really not that different from other breads.

The pre-ferment is designed to allow a portion of the dough to ferment and age, bringing out a lot of the wheat’s flavour without needing the whole batch of dough to sit about for 12-16 hours. I pretty much went from start to finish doing everything as expected, except for a little extra hand kneading after the first rough mix to add a small handful of flour as the dough was just a little too sticky.

As I noted, this bread used a pre-ferment so let’s start with a look at this step.

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Hot Cross Buns! First MellowBakers bread

Well, here we go, the very first bread in the MellowBakers.com group bake!

Having run to the store the day before to pick up candied lemon peel, I was all ready today to get this bread started up. The whole recipe, which is from Jeffery Hamelman’s book [easyazon-link asin=”0471168572″]Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes[/easyazon-link], should take about 4.5 hours or so from start to finish – or until the buns are set out to cool.[easyazon-image-link asin=”0471168572″ alt=”Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51OV5EvTM6L._SL160_.jpg” align=”right” width=”130″ height=”160″]

If you don’t count the big mistake I made along the way, that is. I’ll get to that as we go along.

So as always, we’ll begin with the Mis en Place which is supposed to help avoid problems.

If you’d like to make this bread too, a recipe based on the Hamelman Bread recipe has been devised and posted by Susan on the WildYeastBlog.com so hop over there and print out a copy. Hers is slightly different but you should be able to follow what I’m doing here even if you use that recipe.

For those visiting the blog for the first time, you may like to know that almost all smaller photos (except headers) usually link to a larger version. Larger photos may not; hover your mouse over each pic to see if it will lead to a larger, more detailed version.

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