Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [6]
4. Beat the egg with 1 tablespoon water and brush over the top of the loaf. Bake for 35 minutes.
5. Remove from the oven, slide the bread out of the pan, and cool on a rack. Cool completely before slicing. Store in a paper bag at room temperature for up to a week.
Makes 1 loaf
BAGUETTES
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Acme baguette—a long, crenellated wand of bread with a shiny, crackly crust—is the best you can get. I’ve never baked a baguette that came close. After producing countless indifferent baguettes, I found Acme’s own recipe in Maggie Glezer’s Artisan Baking Across America. Glezer agrees with me about the Acme baguette: “Their Rustic Baguette has a soft, creamy yellow crumb almost frothy with huge gas cells, and a lightly flavored crust that is brittle eggshell thin. Its flavor is pure sweet wheat.” The recipe covered four oversize pages and I got very amped up about the whole endeavor. I started the night before by making both a poolish and “scrap dough.” In the morning I mixed the poolish with flour and yeast, put it down for a rest, got it up again to mix in the scrap dough, kneaded, let it rise, rotated it, let it rise, and rotated it, for what sometimes felt like ad infinitum. There were many steps, staggered at intervals until I baked the baguettes. They emerged from the oven like very thick bread sticks. They were not beautiful; the flavor was not pure sweet wheat. Baguettes are tricky and they’re for the serious bread hobbyist, which, after years of experimenting, I have figured out that I am not. Unless you want to devote yourself to the worthy and venerable craft, buy your baguettes.
APRICOT-GINGER BREAD
I first tasted the apricot-ginger bread from the Noe Valley Bakery in San Francisco, while chaperoning a third-grade field trip. I bought a loaf, took it home, and ate the whole thing. If I lived closer I would buy a loaf every other day and they’d have to bury me in a piano case. To come up with this recipe, I adapted the no-knead technique developed by Jim Lahey, owner of New York City’s Sullivan Street Bakery, and popularized by New York Times columnist Mark Bittman. This bread is chewy, tangy, and studded with apricots that make it look like a stained-glass window. For this you want plump, bright orange dried apricots, not the shriveled, dark, unsulfured ones.
Eat this bread with almond butter or Camembert, or plain.
Make it or buy it? Make it, though if I lived next door to the Noe Valley Bakery I’d give them my business.
Hassle: Easy
Cost comparison: It costs $2.60 to bake this bread at home, including fuel to heat the oven. It costs $5.30 to buy a slightly smaller loaf from the Noe Valley Bakery.
2½ cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons cold water or whey from making yogurt
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 tablespoon kosher salt
¾ cup dried apricots, cut into quarters
1. In a big bowl, mix all the ingredients. Stir briefly; do not knead. The mixture will seem very wet and clumpy, which is as it should be.
2. Cover with a clean, damp dish towel and let the dough rest for 18 hours in a draft-free spot. No need to dampen the towel again and don’t worry too much about the time; a little more or less makes no difference.
3. Dust a clean, dry dish towel with flour. Scrape the dough into a round onto the flour. Gently nudge into a ball, and then swaddle in the towel. Let the dough rise for 1 or 2 hours.
4. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F with a covered cast-iron Dutch oven inside. I use an oblong 2-quart Le Creuset, though you can use a bigger pan if you like. (The pan does not serve to give the bread shape but to trap heat and steam as the inside of a brick oven does, yielding bread with a crunchy, hard crust.)
5. When the oven reaches 475 degrees F, open the Dutch oven and carefully slip the dough inside. Cover and bake for 30 minutes.
6. Take the lid off the pot and bake for 15 to 30 minutes more, until, as Lahey writes, the bread “is a deep chestnut color