The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [64]
CULTURED MILK PRODUCTS
Yogurt and buttermilk add a rich flavor and tenderness. As with fresh milk, you will want to keep the quantity you use below half the amount of liquid in the recipe. The other liquid will usually be water. We find, in fact, that this works out in other respects: too much yogurt makes the bread taste yogurty (rather than marvelous), and too much buttermilk makes it so tender that the dough can just fall apart. How much is too much? It depends on your yogurt, but ⅓ cup per loaf is a good amount. Buttermilk is subtler, and can make up as much as half the liquid in any bread.
It is especially important that the the cultured products you use in your bread taste fresh, because if the flavor is off, likely enough the culprit is alive and active, and quite capable of sabotaging your bread dough.
BUTTERMILK
In times past, buttermilk was what was left over from making butter. Nowadays, commercial buttermilk is cultured from lowfat or nonfat milk, usually, and varies a lot in flavor from brand to brand both in consistency and tartness. If you make your own butter, you know how good buttermilk can be, but when we call for buttermilk in this book, we mean the commercial kind. Since it is almost always salted, the quantity of added salt in these recipes is low. If you have unsalted buttermilk, ¼ teaspoon salt per cup of milk will bring the dough to the saltiness intended in the recipe.
YOGURT
Yogurt gives bread tenderness, a fine texture, and a unique richness of flavor that is fuller and tangier than that you get from buttermilk. Be most particular about the freshness of the yogurt you use in baking: a lot of fellow travelers can set up housekeeping in a batch of yogurt, and some of them make the bread taste weird. We have friends who cultivate their yogurt with an expansive “let it be” policy about protecting the starter from outside influences. The yogurt is pretty interesting stuff, with a kind of ripeness you might look for in Camembert or an old Gorgonzola. When one of these was used in A Loaf for Learning, the normally light, subtly flavorful bread emerged dense and bluish-gray, with a strange beerish flavor.
COTTAGE CHEESE
Cottage cheese plays the part of a liquid in bread, providing impressive amounts of protein and calcium and extra rising power, too. Bread made with cottage cheese is usually very light and moist. For all its advantages, though, these days a cup of cottage cheese can more than double the price of a loaf of homemade bread, so unless you are looking for a way to sneak a lot of protein and calcium into someone’s diet, it’s a pricey option.
CHEESE
From Tillamook to Gruyère, cheese is even more expensive. Delicious on whole wheat bread, cheese just doesn’t make much of a show in it, unless you use a powerful lot. But if you have an occasion that merits really sensational cheesy rolls or loaves, it can be done, for sure. Choose any plain light bread recipe, like Fresh Milk Bread, for example. Add at least a cup of grated sharp cheese to the dough for each loaf’s worth of bread, working the grated cheese into the dough after the kneading is nearly completed. To help the flavor sing, include some complementary spice or herb: for example, a tablespoon of dill weed with Swiss, or a teaspoon of chili powder with cheddar. The milk protein and the added fat from the cheese will enhance the rise, so the bread should be light and airy. Be careful not to overbake cheesy rolls or breadsticks, or they may become dry.
BUTTER
Butter is the only fat we use that can be called shortening, meaning that it gives the bread crumb the velvety-soft quality called short. Because it can stay unmelted in the dough, butter actually lubricates the gluten, making the loaf noticeably higher. (You have to use at least twice as much liquid oil