I just ate a taco and half a quesadilla, despite the fact that I decided to bake bread tonight rather than cook because my stomach is still feeling a little too delicate for a real dinner.
I’m not what you would call “clever.” My stomach is also not feeling what you would call “good.” It’s a good thing the Kaopectate and I have developed such a close relationship over the past week.
Tonight’s adventure was in challah-making via Baking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America
Plus, challah, Even if it comes out not so hot, you can soak that shit in some eggs and honey and heavy cream, fry it in some butter, throw some fruit on top and there’s the best breakfast ever. Scratch that: throw in some sausage and that is the best breakfast ever.
*I can’t help it, I like to watch people demonstrate actual exceptional talent. However: Does ANYONE like the Mary Murphy scream? Clearly, the show is encouraging her to speak as loudly and shrilly as possible AT ALL times. Bring on Mia Michaels, who is able to be batshit insane at standard decibel levels, and stop destroying all my god crystal, show.**
**Heh, “good crystal.” I TOTALLY have that around.
I don’t actually know if it was (1) my lack of bread flour; (2) the really high humidity level today; (3) a terrible, terrible recipe or (4) the fact that God hates me because I can’t help laughing at people when they fall down the stairs, but my dough was more lumpy batter than dough. This picture is after one of the seven thousand additions of flour, and you can still see how wet and sticky it looks. I think I ended up with about double that, or fourteen thousand additions of flour; I must have used at least a cup more than the recipe indicated.
The KitchenAid apparently also enjoys So You Think You Can Dance, because near the end of the knead it was starting to do a little popping and locking across the counter. And still, my dough that should have been “soft but not sticky” was more “sticky and also kinda sticky.” So sticky, in fact, that it stuck to the oiled bowl I finally managed to get it into with no small amount of elbow grease and cursing. I think I broke four spatulas.
Having never made challah before, I don’t know if this rising and shaping process is standard for the bread itself or just standard for the detail freaks at the Culinary Institute of America, a school I considered attending at some future point until I read Michael Ruhlman’s Making of a Chef
Or perhaps the rising procedure was developed by Thomas Keller. I wouldn’t be surprised.
There was an initial 1-hour rise; okay, par for the course. Then, instead of punching the dough down – which is always my favorite part – you “fold” the dough, bringing the corners of the dough (which is in a ROUND BOWL if I may quibble over my own detail, CIA) over the top. This is especially fun when the dough is already sticking to your oiled bowl. I may still be a little bitter about not getting to punch.
Then the dough rests some more.
*Incidentally, this is not entirely different from the reason I wussed out of grad school after finishing my MA despite wanting to get a PhD – a very, very low desire to spend 10 years in a library basement reading 600 year old books written in indecipherable Latin (my scholarly interest is in Wacky Popes of the Middle Ages). Seriously, 15th-century scribes: you can’t just write “Q” and expect me to know which preposition you mean. Although, one bonus: in the basement of the Harvard Law Library, there’s a 16th century book covered in the HUMAN SKIN of a pirate who was captured and flayed alive. I figure, if that’s not enough to get me through 10 years of medieval paleography, nothing is. So I went to law school instead. See above, re: “not clever.”
The you turn it out of the bowl and cut in into three equalish sized pieces.
Then it rests again. Because the process of lying inert on a pastry board and suffering the indignity of being cut twice is apparently quite taxing.
Then you start the braiding process, which you would imagine starts with rolling the three dough hunks out into ropes you can then braid, except that it doesn’t. Each piece of dough is painstakingly patted out into a 6-inch by 10-inch rectangle. The long edges of the rectangle are folded in on themselves twice, the seam sealed and the resulting logs rolled out into ropes you can then braid. I suppose I should just be thankful that each step of this process did not require resting, or I might have had to call out of work tomorrow.
Eventually, you do get to braid…and then cover the dough in egg wash and let it rest and rise for another full hour because being braided, now THAT is an energy-sapper. Then you egg wash it again, and into the oven it goes. And in the meantime, you’ve seen all the filler segments of So You Think You Can Dance and missed all the dance-for-your-life solos, and you’re pretty sure that you’ve over-kneaded your dough because it seems a little more elastic than it’s supposed to be. (So I suppose I can’t begrudge it all the resting.)
This is why I am willing to pay out the ass for artisan bread; I figure you’re not just paying for flour and water, you’re paying by the hour for some poor schmuck who has to get up at 3 in the morning to do this. And for the opportunity to watch So You Think You Can Dance unmolested. That’s worth at least $3.50.
At some point the kitchen started to smell really nice, which is really the main reason anyone bakes bread at home anymore. If I could buy that in a spray can along with my $3.50 bread, I totally would.
Or maybe I just shouldn’t be making a yeast bread at 11:13 on a Thursday night, and the process would be more enjoyable.
In the end, I did manage to produce an intact if fissured loaf of challah. It had a nice deep brown crust that thumped pleasantly when lightly whacked.
It’s not quite as airy as one would expect challah to be, due to the five gajillion mistakes I made while making it. But it smells like challah and tastes like challah and I fully expect that it will make an exceptional plate of french toast this Saturday morning, perhaps in the style of this old favorite. And I will eat it, regardless of the state of my GI tract, and I will love it right up until and including the moment I snatch the New York Times crossword puzzle and sprint for the loo.
Thursday Night Smackdown 
I kind of stopped paying attention after reading about the live flaying of a pirate and the subsequent book cover made from his skin. Good lord.
Last month while making empanada dough, I mistakenly grabbed the small clear canister of confectioner’s sugar rather than the small clear canister of king arthur bleached low-gluten flour, and added 2 cups….
30 minutes later I was screaming imprecations as I added more of my White lily flour for the HUNDREDTH TIME trying to get the dough to set up, not yet having noticed I had added sugar.
I cursed the fucking recipe from Epicurious, I cursed the fucking toe-jam dough, I metaphorically kicked the dog, beat the wife, and punched holes in the walls while reprogramming everything in the house that had a microchip with a very large double-bitted axe.
Mistakes happen.
P.S.: It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you live-blogged S.Y.T.Y.C.D. You have skillz at live-blogging, plus I love the show.
I admire your perseverance, your lack of fear.
maybe the gluten difference in the two types of flour is why yours kept being too sticky? Really, I don’t know about bread, but i spent an hour last week trying to understand the differences in wheat flour. BTW, my grandmother ( the queen of bread and pastries) swore that the heat and humidity always required that you alter the recipe of pasty. Sure wish i had asked how to alter it, and written it down. of course, she also said that written recipes just made you do things wrong, so…
Dude. I went to the CIA (just finished last month) and had to strain consomme through a fucking egg white raft, and it was awful. You can read about it here: http://thespitefulchef.blogspot.com/2008/12/wedding-night-sexin However, I will say that the time I made challah there, it was pretty damned good. Actually, I still have some in my freezer that I stole. My basic point is fuck consomme. Although when reduced it makes some pretty killer glace.
Sorry… I meant here: http://thespitefulchef.blogspot.com/2008/12/wedding-night-sexin.html
Stupid .html
As much as I want to go to cooking school, I know I’ll never have the patience. My knife skills are crappy because I don’t have the patience to stand there and chop things properly for long periods of time. Some friends of mine have a son who attempted a pastry program at the ICE. He was taught to add water to a piecrust WITH AN EYEDROPPER. No wonder he dropped out.
Your bread really does look good. Excellent braiding job. I’d say forgo french toast and go with bread pudding! (Although bread pudding doesn’t go well with sausage if you’re not making the savory variety.)
It looks delicious! It’s not quite the same, but I find pulla dough to generally be very sticky. The firt time I made it, I kept adding flour until it was more of a “dough”, but found that that led to a far heavier bread. With less flour it had more of the airy consistency that i’m used to in challah.
kristin, it was kept in a special box, away from all the other books. when the librarian pulled it out, he was all creepy, like, “hey kids, wanna get in my van? i’ll show you the skin book.”
fuzzy, i would have had a shit fit. and then i might have cried. and then i would have ordered copious amounts of friend pork dumplings to assuage myself.
bev, i was thinking maybe the protein difference b/t the flours was what did it, coupled with the humidity and my own inexperience. i’m hoping someone will eventually show up here and explain it to me.
kristie, i know that you did, and admire it greatly. i have a BIL who graduated from CIA, and another who went to the greenbriar and had to learn to sculpt seagulls out of butter.
i will come to your house for consomme any time.
rachel, the loaf is enormous enough that i think i can do both. or maybe it will become an enormous bread pudding for the friends coming over saturday night.
sometimes i think about just taking a course or two at ICE on knife skills, because thomas keller keeps insisting that i brunoise my vegetables.
and then i don’t.
j-bird, thanks! i definitely ended up on the heavier side here – it tasted like challah, but it didn’t feel like challah.
fuzzy notes: “I cursed the fucking recipe from Epicurious, I cursed the fucking toe-jam dough, I metaphorically kicked the dog, beat the wife, and punched holes in the walls while reprogramming everything in the house that had a microchip with a very large double-bitted axe.”
I would have paid good money to witness that. That may be the best description of a hissy fit, as we call ’em here in the South, that I’ve ever read.
It was indeed the protein differential. (doesn’t protein differential make it sound like I know something here? I just made the phrase up, but the protein thing is real)
Protein = gluten = holding stuff together. The way you can have it soft and squishy and not so sticky is that the protein makes long strands when you knead it, so there’s kind of a lattice holding the eggs and soft fluffiness together. If you take out the protein rope ladders, the fluffiness falls out and the stickiness leaks onto the walls of the bowl.
Kind of like pirates falling off the climby rope things on their ships, so the pope can catch them to flay them alive to bind secret Harvard books to help creepy librarians lure naive graduate students to bad ends.
I need to go lie down. All the sad skinless Challah pirates you made by using all purpose dough are making me cry.
ps even for a mistake the solid-challah looks pretty nice, and I suspect some killer bread pudding will result, if you choose that route.
pps bread pudding is a classic invalid dish, so at least historically it should help the tummy ick.
My challah recipe follows. all purpose flour works fine, and there’s just 2 risings instead of a million. you can add wheat gluten to the recipe to make really fluffy bread, but most people kvell over mine, so try it. Good luck with the bread.
PS-leftover challah makes excellent chicken stuffing also. And Challah kugel.
http://rabbiswife.blogspot.com/2008/06/best-bread-in-israel.html