Cinnamon Bread

I found this recipe on Pinterest (imagine that!?!) and decided that it sounded way too good to not try it out.

Amish Cinnamon Bread was what the recipe was called, but then she talked about how it was an alternative recipe to traditional Amish cinnamon bread which, apparently takes a long time to make.
I have to say, this one didn’t take long at all.

And it was really, really good.

Most definitely worth the trouble to make. And, really, it wasn’t that much trouble anyway.

As you can see here, the recipe makes two LARGE loaves. As a matter of fact, next time I make it I will probably make three loaves. See the “overflow” in the oven there? It was like the incredible alien-possessed bread when it baked.

It rose

and it rose

all over my oven.

So, a word of caution to you. Put a cookie sheet under your loaf pans when you bake this.

And maybe consider putting into three loaf pans instead of two. Makes good gift-giving.

The bread itself is very light and fluffy. Almost cake-like. But not too sweet. Just enough. Especially with a cup of tea in the morning (or coffee).

I think, too, it would be good to make in muffin form to have for easier sharing for a crowd.

Of course, this is so good you are not going to want to share. But there will be plenty so share away.

Cinnamon Bread

Makes 2 or 3 loaves

Batter:

1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups buttermilk
( You can make buttermilk with 2 C milk + 2 Tbsp vinegar or lemon juice. – Let it sit for about 5 minutes before you use it.)
4 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda

Cinnamon/sugar mixture:

1 cup sugar
2-3 teaspoons cinnamon

Instructions:

Cream together butter, 2 cups of sugar, and eggs.
Add milk, flour, and baking soda.
Put 1/2 of batter (or a little less) into greased loaf pans (1/4 in each pan).
If you are making 3 loaves, split the half of the batter between the three loaf pans, reserving the other half for the next step.
In a separate bowl, mix cinnamon and sugar together.
Sprinkle 3/4 of cinnamon mixture on top of the batter in each pan.
Add remaining batter to pans; sprinkle with remainder of cinnamon sugar mixture.
Swirl with a knife.
Bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 min. or until toothpick tester comes clean.
Be sure to put cookie sheets below the loaf pans in case you have some overflow.
Cool in pan for 20 minutes before removing from pan.
(this is important or it will fall apart. this is not a bread you can eat straight out of the oven)
Slice & serve.

Adventures in Artisan Bread Baking (part 2)

I mentioned a while ago that I had received Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish as a Christmas gift and that it had started me on a quest to make great artisan bread at home. You can read my adventures with the first few recipes I tried in that book here.

Not long after I tried my hand at baking the breads in that cookbook, I found out that Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day was on sale in the eBook version. So, I hopped on over to Amazon and got the Kindle version. I couldn’t wait to try out another style of baking artisan breads and the “five minutes a day” hook was certainly intriguing to me. Especially after taking two days to make a loaf of bread using Forkish’s methods. Don’t get me wrong, those breads were totally awesome, just time consuming. But as he says, good bread takes time. So, how would a five minute bread compare?

I was ready to find out.

The secret, as they call it in the book, is to make enough dough to last several days (or for several loaves) and keep it in the refrigerator. You mix once, and bake many.

I can do that, I thought. Let’s give it a shot.

As with Forkish’s method, their dough is a wet dough. Much wetter than the other bread doughs I’ve been accustomed to making. But since I’d just made the other breads, it didn’t seem strange to do it this way. I found a 2 1/2 gallon bucket that I’d had stashed and mixed up my dough in that. Just as with the Flour Water Salt Yeast bread those were the only four ingredients. What was different was that there was no long proofing time and no long rise time. Strange, I thought.

I made my first batch one afternoon and let it sit in the refrigerator overnight although the book said you could mix the dough in the morning and bake your bread that evening if you chose. I didn’t mix my dough until late in the day so I let it rest overnight.

The next afternoon, I baked the bread. Another difference was the baking method. With Forkish’s method, you bake in a covered Dutch oven to get the steam going and crust development. With the 5 Minute method, you bake on a baking/pizza stone and use a separate container of water in the oven to accomplish the steaming and crust development. I was curious to see what differences there would be, if any.

So, I baked, and peeked through the oven door watching it baking and wondering how the final bread would turn out.

I tried the Light Whole Wheat Bread recipe. The recipe states it will make four 1-pound loaves. In my first batch, I only got two loaves out of the mix. However, I think my loaves were closer to 2 pounds each. I decided that rather than doing a free-form loaf baked on the pizza stone, I wanted to try using my Pampered Chef stoneware loaf pan. I figured the stoneware would work the same and I’d get a pretty loaf-shaped loaf of bread.

I was not disappointed. It turned out well. So well, in fact, that we gobbled it up almost immediately. Fresh, warm bread out of the oven, slathered with a little butter. What could be better?

As I continued to read the book, I saw that they say the later loaves from the dough (that have sat for a few days) bake up with a sourdough taste to them – from the ongoing fermentation of the bread that happens as it sits in your refrigerator. The second day’s batch was even tastier than the first and it did indeed have more of a sourdough flavor to it. Not the same complexity of flavors as the breads I made from Flour Water Salt Yeast, but still good. Perfectly good for sandwiches and everyday eating. Especially since I mixed the dough once and got two separate batches of bread out of it. I loved the quick prep times and the easy payoff of bread dough waiting in the fridge to be popped in the oven.

My only complaint? That the bread didn’t rise very much. It didn’t have the big bubbles and high rise of the other artisan breads. Now that could be (and most likely is) my fault. I may not have had the water hot enough. (or too hot) I may not have measured my yeast accurately enough. It was rainy so the dough may have been too wet. There is no telling. Bread is a delicate balance of all of these things – so it’s always a guess as to what goes right or wrong when you bake. The only secret is to keep baking, take notes, and replicate what works well.

And so that’s what I’ll do.

I’ll keep baking.

I’m planning to continue to try recipes from both cookbooks. I figure eventually I will come up with a recipe and method that works for my family and schedule. And then bread nirvana will be obtained.

Until then, I’ll have lots of fun tasting the samples.

Get your own copies of the books:

Adventures in Baking Artisan Bread (part 1) (thoughtsalonglifeshighway.com)

Adventures in Baking Artisan Bread (part 1)

For Christmas, SuperMan got me a cookbook I had been dying to get.
(he is awesome that way)

It’s Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish – I’d heard him speak on Martha Stewart radio one day while I was waiting in the carpool line. I was impressed with his story – leaving the tech industry to pursue his passion – and with the fact that he says even the home cook can make excellent home-cooked, artisan breads. I went home and added his book to my wish list.

Thankfully, SuperMan read the wish list 🙂

The Adventure Begins

His book is both a cookbook and a teaching instrument. The first few chapters are dedicated to his story, the principles of artisan breads, familiarizing the reader with different types of breads (levain, poolish, etc.) and then the recipes. I took the book with me to Mom’s house with plans to read it cover to cover before beginning any baking.

My brother, on the other hand, took one look at the book and decided we were baking a loaf THAT NIGHT. He’s adventurous in the kitchen like I am and so we decided to go for it. Or rather, I decided to let HIM go for it and watch the results.

He decided on a basic overnight bread recipe and we ended up staying up until well after midnight (which was fine for his pacific time zone body, but not so nice to mine) waiting for the final steps to complete before we put the dough to “bed” for the final long, slow rise in the refrigerator overnight.

We had quite the adventure making the bread at Mom’s without all of the suggested tools but we made do. One thing you absolutely need to make bread via the “Forkish method” is a cast-iron dutch oven. The proofing baskets, dough tubs, scales, etc. that he suggests I’ve managed to do without (or work around) and we did just fine that first time without them, too.

But, the dutch oven is required because it’s what you use to capture the steam from the bread baking and create a fantastic, crispy crust and light, springy bread. The bread we ate the next afternoon was some of the tastiest home-baked bread I’d ever eaten. We devoured it, all two loaves of it, in a matter of a few minutes. The kids loved it. The adults loved it. And we began to contemplate our next foray into artisan bread baking.

Continuing to experiment: success and disappointment

After our initial attempts, I stepped back and read the book. Not cover to cover, but the first four or five chapters where he goes over technique and tools and the basic recipes. I have to say, this is the best book I’ve ever read for explaining the process of making bread. He explains the whys, wheres, and hows… in great, but very interesting, detail. He provides beautiful pictures – with step-by-steps just where you need it and pictures of “this is what this is supposed to look like.” Which is great when you’ve never, ever made bread this way before.

I kept referring back to those pictures over the next two weeks as I made a few more batches of bread. The first I made at home I used my own, home-ground wheat. It was good, but heavy. The next batches I made using store-bought flours. It was much lighter and tastier. The kids and SuperMan loved it. (Ken doesn’t say anything about using home-ground wheat flour. I just decided to experiment with it to see how it would come out)

I want to emphasize that the most important ingredient for making good bread is plenty of time…
Chapter 2: Eight Details for Great Bread and Pizza

Me? I wasn’t quite as in love with it as they were. It didn’t have anything to do with the flavor, though. The flavor was spectacular. Like something you’d get from a fancy bakery. It was the time involved. It took me about 2-3 days to bake a loaf or two of bread. That’s a LONG time. Granted, Forkish does not make any promises of quick bread production. As a matter of fact, he cautions that good bread takes time. A lot of time. And he wasn’t kidding.

Working from home, I originally thought it wouldn’t matter that the process took time, and for the most part, it didn’t. Up until I wanted to plan for fresh-baked bread for a dinner party I was hosting. My head hurt reading his suggested time-tables and trying to back into when I would need to start the process (the day before) in order to have hot bread at 5PM on Sunday night. I gave up. I went to Publix and bought some of their whole grain bread. Everyone was happy. No one knew any different.

But I was dissappointed. I love, LOVE to bake for people. What’s the point of not being able to share this goodness with folks? I mean, I’m sure I can. I just need to figure out the timelines (or be happy serving not-fresh-out-of-the-oven bread) I am not, by any means, giving up on the book or the recipes. The bread is simply too good to do that. I just need to figure out a timeline that works for me and my schedule.

The good news is most of the time that is required is not active time, but fermenting, rising, and proofing time. You just have to be around when it’s time to move to the next stage.

The bread I made was a pre-fermented dough (poolish) which fermented for 12-14 hours before being mixed into the final dough. From there, the dough had a rise of about 2-3 hours and then a final proof about an hour. So, if you start the poolish at dinner the night before, you can expect to have bread around lunchtime the next day. What I haven’t tried (or figured out) yet is whether or not I can extend that ferment or rise time (or a rest between) so that I can have the dough ready at dinnertime instead. I plan to do just that, but need to wait until I’m not baking for company to experiment.

The poolish bread was excellent. Really, really, really good. And it kept a lot longer on the counter than a traditionally baked loaf of bread. I think it has to do with the fermentation process giving you some extra preservative factor, but the true science of it escapes me. I got close to a week on the counter before the bread started to mold. I think it would’ve gone even longer if it hadn’t been 100% humidity (with 4 days straight of monsoon-type rain) and stored in ziplock bags. That’s a sure recipe for mold if you ask me.

And my plans for the future

Next, I want to try the Levain breads. Levain is the French word for “sourdough.” I’m thrilled to have an “official” guide to creating these as I’ve been wanting to make sourdough breads for about a year now and have been intimidated by the whole process. With this book, I feel much more equipped and those little ferments don’t frighten me quite as much. No more nightmares of sourdough starters taking over the refrigerator while I sleep. 🙂

Overall, I have to say, I am really glad I got the book. I am looking forward to baking my way through the recipes this year, which include pizza and foccacia recipes as well.

I’ve been continuing to experiment in baking artisan breads and in my next installment I’ll share the other cookbook that’s got me baking and serving artisan breads every.single.night. And loving it.

Stay tuned.