Bread Baking

My mom was recently lamenting the lack of good bread around here. So I bought a copy of Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day. I’ve been meaning to try out it out for a few weeks but the recipes generally involve allowing the dough to sit in the fridge overnight, I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

With the cold weather hitting New Jersey, it seemed like the perfect time to have the oven on. Last night I made the dough for Lean Bread. It almost seemed silly to use my stand mixer, but I still did. Two minutes later I had dough. I stretched it the required 4 times and put it in the fridge.

This morning I too the dough and made 12 dinner rolls, 1 small boule and one large boule. They had their 2 hours to proof while I got the oven ready for “hearth baking”. (Note there is a video of Peter Reinhart discussing how to prepare the oven for hearth baking on Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/mQY9QPSPY9EJL)

I used a round pizza stone, so I had to bake in 2 batches. I’m wishing I had a larger rectangular one. Anyway, the bread turned out amazing.

Someone brought home a huge jar of Nutella from Costco this afternoon and I just HAD to test out a roll with it. Delicious! Those dozen rolls disappeared well before dinner, so we had slices of the small boule with our potato leek soup.