Pain a l'ancienne

Pain a l'ancienne is an interesting and fun style of bread to make.  The recipe that I first learned, and the one I used here is from Peter Reinhardt's book The Breadbaker's Apprentice.  It's a different method for making bread with results in a loaf with a very different flavor, a sort of bright, sweet, nutty flavor.

The dough is a very wet one.  The general recipe is:

  2 1/2 cups cold water (i.e. ice water)

  2 tsp dry yeast

  6 cups flour

  2 1/2 tsp salt

The method I used was to soften the yeast in the water, then add all of the flour and salt to the bowl of the mixer.  I then mixed it on low speed for 30 seconds or so until the flour was all hydrated.  Then I mixed on medium speed (this is a stand-up Kitchen Aid mixer) using the dough hook for about two 

minutes.  In my case, the dough was so sticky that I added some more flour, on table spoon at a time, to encourage the dough to not stick too badly on the mixing bowl.  Still, this is a very wet dough, and it will stick at least on the bottom of the bowl.  You just want it to crawl at least somewhat up the dough hook.

You don't really want to knead it for long, the gluten is going to form in while it sits in the refrigerator overnight.  However, when the dough is this sticky, transferring it is lots of fun.  I used a silicon spatula that I wetted down with cold water to scrape it from the mixing bowl to my heavy rising bowl.  Here's what I looked like:

Looks like fun to work with, doesn't it?

Now you cover it with plastic wrap 

and put it into the fridge and leave it at least over night.  

The next day, I took it out (well Patty did) about four hours before I was going to be working with it.  That allows it to get up to room temperature and continue to rise.

  By the time I got home, it had more or less doubled in size and looked nice and bubbly, like this:

From here, I put a nice layer of flour on the countertop (like a half cup or more) and had the flour container standing by for refresh as need be.  I took my silicon spatula and wetted it again and used that to scrape the dough out of the bowl and onto the countertop.  More flour onto the top of it; you pretty much always need a

 layer of flour between your hands and the dough, because if you get into it you may never be able to separate yourself from it.

I used my dough scraper to cut it into two pieces, and rounded them each up into a ball, which I then let rest for a few minutes.  From there, I flattened one of the balls out into a rectangle, more or less 12x7 inches, always using enough flour to keep things from sticking to each other.  Then, I cut the rectangle into three strips using the dough scraper.  At this point, it comes time to shape the dough.  This is definitely my weak point with bread, and with this dough I'm not sure how much you can do anyway.  Bu

t what I tried to do here was to stretch the dough evenly  into three "baguettes" each about 14 inches long and 2 inches wide which I placed on a sheet of parchment that was set on a cookie sheet.  You can see from the picture, that even stretching didn't really happen for me...

 

At this point, I set the cookie sheet out and let the dough rise while I worked the other piece in the same manner. Now I heated the oven to 500° and let the dough rise for about 30 minutes while it gets nice and hot.  

The bread rises, but it also spreads a lot, kind of like a ciabatta dough.  I mist the oven well with a spray bottle of water and put the slip the parchment sheet right onto my baking stone, baking one group of three loaves at at time.   The baking time is on the order of 25-35 minutes, you just want to watch for the caramelization to appear.   Technically Reinhardt says to measure the internal temperature of the loaves at 205 before declaring them done.  I just look for something like this:

I know, the shape is goofy, but believe me the smell and the flavor make you forget all about that.  And perhaps with enough work, I can figure out this whole shaping thing.

Owls

It's been a bit of a stressful time over the last month or so with all of the things going on in our lives.  I came home after a long day of meetings at work today; it was a drizzly warm evening, with a bit of a fog in the air owing to the super high humidity.  When I got off of the car, I thought that it seemed like a good night for a walk.

After dinner I asked Patty to go for a walk with me.  We went out and I noticed that it had cooled off a bit and the fog was gone.  Still everything was wet from the rain and it was a great night to be out walking.  As we walked through the neighborhood we noticed that the moon was mostly full.  Everything was bathed in moonlight; it was very beautiful and peaceful (in spite of the noise from Mopac).  We walked hand-in-hand just talking, working out as much stress as we could and enjoying the evening and each other's company.

After twenty minutes or so, as we approached home, I just suddenly felt and I stopped, took her in my arms and kissed her.   As we held each other tight, off in the distance I heard an owl.  You hear them sometimes here in town, but it's not that common and it just felt like a special moment, that I had chosen just this time and spot to stop and linger for a bit.  We listened and remarked that it must be a special sign of some sort.  

Eventually we moved on, not really wanting to leave the moment, but understanding that it couldn't last forever.  But as we passed 29th street, I thought I heard the owl down in that direction, so we turned there and walked on towards home.  Sure enough, the owl sounded closer as we walked and then it sounded like two different owls calling back and forth.  Pretty soon it was obvious that we were getting closer.  And then, it was right across the street from us.  We looked up in a pecan tree across the street, and there, high in the branches we could see the outline of a large owl where the sound came from.  Soon the companion called, and he was clearly nearby too.  In fact, as we looked for a bit we picked him out as well, in the same tree just over on the other side.  They continued to take turns calling back and forth, one higher pitched than the other, in spite of the more-or-less constant noise from the cars that passed underneath on a regular basis.  

We stood and watched for a while, not wanting to leave the moment.  I think I remarked that I could stay all night; I've never been that close to an owl calling that I could see so clearly.  But eventually, after several minutes we finally moved on towards home.   But still, that moment will live with me for the rest of my life.  It's frequently not the big things, but the little moments that make up the most special memories.