Gluten Free Brioche Rolls

The time has come. We are finally at the last recipe. Every cookie has been baked, every tart assembled, and every croissant devoured. As last recipes go, this one is a cake walk, pardon the pun. Is it ironic that this is a gluten-free recipe, since we've used so much flour during this project?

Instead of flour, we are using Cup4Cup, the gluten-free blend made by Thomas Keller, and developed by Lena Kwak of the French Laundry.  It does just as its name suggests, substitutes for wheat flour cup for cup. They've already created the perfect blend of flours and starches to mimic the effects of wheat flour in most baked goods. If you didn't know it was gluten-free, you'd never guess. 

These rolls are great for any dinner, be it Sunday night with your family, a dinner party with friends, or for the holidays too. They're light and fluffy and buttery, perfect for accompanying any meal. You can easily whip up a batch one day and freeze them for later, then pop them in the oven just before you need them. All in all, a great ending to a great chapter, and a great book.

Pretzels

These fun twists are soft on the inside but have a delicious dark crust on the outside. Legend says that the dark soft pretzels we know and love today came about by an accident in the kitchen, when they were brushed with a lye solution before baking. The end result was so delicious, it became the norm. 

This recipe is the same used for the French Laundry's pretzel bâtards, but shaped in the traditional loops and twist. The lye solution and dip is initially intimidating, but absolutely essential for the authentic pretzel taste. They won't last long, which is great, because they're best eaten right away. Leftovers will not be a problem with this recipe!

Garlic Comté Breadsticks

These super tasty breadsticks are a gourmet take on another childhood favorite, Cheez-It crackers. Garlic oil and comté cheese make these more refined, but equally delicious. The essence of the cracker shines through, without any of the artificial colors and flavors. These would be lovely served with salami and a cheese platter at a dinner party. They're sure to get gobbled up quickly!

English Muffins

These flat rounds of bread are the perfect breakfast food. In fact, in England, where they're from, they're called breakfast muffins. We only call them English muffins in the rest of the English speaking world to differentiate them from sweeter "American" muffins. These are most commonly eaten split and toasted, with a variety of toppings. Butter, jam, cream cheese, peanut butter, the list could go on and on. Not to mention the endless sandwich possibilities! But they're most often used as delivery vessels for eggs, either Eggs Benedict or as a McMuffin. Bouchon's version is baked instead of cooked on a griddle. These homemade muffins would elevate any breakfast to a gourmet feast. 

Dead Dough

This dough is meant solely for practicing shaping and scoring. It's just flour, salt and water, with a touch of yeast, and not meant to be baked or eaten. Kind of like playing with Play-Doh! It can be re-rolled multiple times to try new shapes and scoring designs. It's a great tool for novice bakers to practice shaping before working with "live" dough. 


Tania

I wish I had skipped ahead to this recipe before starting the bread chapter. It would have helped my confidence so much! That being said, it was still fun to play around with the dough. Practice makes perfect, or so they say. I divided the dough in two, and shaped each half into bâtards. 


I tried each scoring method, 6 in total. Five were on the bâtards and one on the boule. There's something therapeutic and fun about slashing through dough with a sharp blade. I used an Exacto knife, which worked well. 

Single Cut and Sausage Cut

Dutch Crunch Demi-Baguettes

This unique looking bread gets its name from the crunchy topping and the pattern it makes. The bread is popular in San Francisco, but it's originally from the Netherlands, where it's called tiger bread. Hence the name, Dutch Crunch. It's used for sandwiches, and every deli and sandwich shop in the city offers it. The topping is made from rice flour and yeast and is piped on to the baguette before baking. It dries in the oven and leaves a striped crunchy exterior, which is a nice complement to the soft bread. 

Pain-au-lait Pullman loaf

Another bread recipe baked in a loaf pan, this one uses the Pullman pan, named for the Pullman train car. The story is that these flat lidded pans were designed specifically to fit on the train, allowing room for 3 pans instead of 2 regular pans, where the bread bakes up rounded. The bread we made this week in such pans is a pain au lait, which means bread of milk. However, this recipe uses cream cheese instead of milk, so it should really be called pain au fromage à la crème. It has a delicate crumb, perfect for toasting. The shape of the bread makes it ideal for sandwiches, and the possibilities are only limited by your imagination and pantry. It's an easy bread to make, good for beginners and pros alike. 

Nanterre

Nanterre is a town in France but also a delicious loaf of brioche bread. We've made brioche before in the book (craquelins, hot cross buns, and sticky buns), but this is the first of the brioche recipes to be classified as a bread. The dough is divided and rolled into balls, which are placed in loaf pans to rise. The end result is a beautiful loaf of eggy, buttery brioche. The French Laundry used to pair this with foie gras, but since it's been banned in California, instead Thomas Keller recommends using it for the ultimate BLT sandwich. Either way, it's an indulgent treat. 

Vegetable Demi-Baguettes

This rather unique bread uses vegetable stock instead of water to hydrate the dough. It gives the bread a fantastic flavor, rich and fragrant. It's meant to be the perfect complement for a summer tomato, but it would pair well with any fresh veggies, and maybe some soft cheeses as well. The combinations are deliciously endless!

Whole Wheat Pecan Demi-Baguettes

The book says that this bread was created specifically to complement roast turkey. The dough has brown butter and brown sugar, but no starter. It relies only on commercial yeast for leavening, the first to do so in this chapter. The result is a dense, sweet dough, studded with pecans. It has a rich and wholesome flavor perfect for a turkey sandwich.

Pain Rustique

This bread is very similar to last week's bread, pain palladin. The only difference is the ratio of flour to starter, and the omission of olive oil. They are free-formed, with no shaping. According to the book, this is the bread served at the French Laundry. So even if we can't get a reservation, we can still enjoy this tasty bread at home.

Pain Palladin

This bread was named after the famed chef, Jean-Louis Palladin, the youngest chef to have won two Michelin stars at the time. It's a simple, rustic bread, loosely shaped. Its cousin, which we bake next week, is Pain Rustique, and they are very similar. The only difference being the addition of olive oil and a longer fermentation time for the pain palladin. This bread is best enjoyed as an accompaniment to heartier foods, as it's rather subtle in flavor. Toasted and smeared with avocado and a drizzle of olive oil would be perfect!

Sourdough Boule

Sourdough- the official bread of San Francisco. In fact, the lactic acid bacteria, which gives the bread its sour taste, is called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. Although it's named after this city, you can produce perfectly delicious sourdough anywhere in the world. 

This is a straightforward recipe. Just flour, a tiny pinch of yeast, water, salt and starter. What makes it different is the amount of starter used. While most breads so far have used a smaller ratio of starter to flour, this one uses almost as much starter as flour. The result is a wetter, more sour dough, which we shape into a boule. 

Sourdough is best eaten plain, to fully taste the sourness. It also makes an amazing grilled cheese sandwich. Even if you don't live in San Francisco, you can still enjoy a delicious sourdough loaf at home.

Rye Bread

Rye is wheat's more nutritious cousin. It's high in fiber and low in fat, and is low on the glycemic index. Although similar to the wheat plant, the taste and color are completely different. When making rye bread, you can completely change the outcome by the proportion of rye to wheat flour. This is a traditional rye bread, using at least 50% rye flour. 

It's a very simple bread to make, with only a few simple ingredients. It also is the quickest bread to make in this book, with only a 30 minute fermentation and an hour of proofing. This dough does not require multiple folds or shaping, so it might be a good introduction to bread-making for a novice baker. 

Although we traditionally think of rye bread with caraway seeds, Bouchon omits them. It varies from country to country, so we are keeping with the French style. The end result is flavorful and perfect for a slathering of butter or a sandwich with spicy whole grain mustard. 

Multigrain Bread

This bread is for anyone who feels a bit guilty about eating white French bread. It's loaded with whole grains, adding lots of nutritional value without sacrificing any of the delicious taste and texture we love in our baguettes. Adding whole wheat flour, rye flour, oats, quinoa, flax seeds, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds loads this bread up with tasty rustic goodness. 

The fermentation time for this recipe is quite short, only an hour total, unlike any of the recipes so far. So it's entirely possible to have a freshly baked loaf of multigrain bread in less than 4 hours. 

The recipe gives instructions and measurements for both bâtards and demi baguettes, so you can choose which shape to make, or make both! The bâtard lends itself better to sandwich-sized slices, but the baguette is great for just snacking. At the end of the recipe, there's a note for fried eggs on toasted multigrain, which sounds just amazing, and would be a perfect breakfast, lunch or dinner. 

Cranberry-Currant Bâtards and Walnut Bâtards

Now that we've mastered basic doughs, it's time to get creative. These two variations on the country bread we did last week incorporate nuts and dried fruits. It's amazing how you can take one master dough and add different mix-ins and get two completely different breads! While the dough base is a pain de campagne, the shape is a bâtard. So we're really using two techniques that we've learned so far in this one recipe.

Pain de Campagne

Moving along in the bread chapter, this recipe is our first use of liquid levain. Levain is different from poolish, which we've used previously, in that it's only flour and water, and the yeast is derived from the natural bacteria in the air. It takes a lot longer to develop, since it's relying on wild yeast instead of instant yeast, but the flavor that results is more complex, and can vary based on how often you feed it. Yes, you have to feed your starter, with more flour and water, twice a day, forever. The flour is food for the yeast, and at some point the yeast eats all the food in the flour so you have to add more. Based on how often you feed your starter, you can make it more or less sour in flavor. When added to bread dough, it provides flavor and leavening. 

This dough uses three kind of flour: all purpose, rye, and whole wheat. These all lend different flavors and textures to the finished product that makes it more rustic than the bâtard dough. It's meant to be a simple country bread, something that farmers' wives baked while their husbands were out in the fields in the French countryside. The easy round shape is no-nonsense, and I can imagine it being baked in a large cast iron pan over a glowing hearth. It's great just slathered with butter, or as a vehicle for meats and cheeses. 

Demi Baguettes and Demi Epis

After last week's introduction to breadmaking, it's time to make everyone's favorite: the baguette. However, it is impossible to make a full-length baguette in a home oven, so we're making demi-baguettes instead. These little half-sized baguettes are still just as satisfying as their full-sized counterparts. Another variation of the baguette is the epi baguette, which is exactly the same except for the shape. Epi in french means wheat, and the baguettes are cut in such a design to resemble a wheat stalk. It's especially nice for sharing, since it's so easy to tear off a leaf. Either version is a delicious treat, just begging to be slathered with salted butter. 

Baguette Dough for Bâtards

It's finally here, the last chapter we tackle in the book: Breads. Everyone has been anxiously awaiting this moment, ever since last year when we visited the bakery in Yountville and got hands-on instruction from head bread baker Matthew McDonald. The book goes into extreme detail about the bread making process. It's essential to read and re-read the introduction a few times to get a good grip on what's needed.

And it turns out what's needed is a bit of specialty equipment, lots and lots of flour, and practice. While most avid bakers are likely to have some of the necessary components, such as a baking stone and pizza peel, it's unlikely that anyone would think to have river rocks, metal chain and a super soaker on hand. Yet that's what is required to create bakery-quality crust at home without a commercial bread oven. And since we'll be using this setup every week for the next few months, it's worth investing in.

This first bread recipe is a good introduction, bâtards. The dough is simple enough, just flour and water and salt, leavened by a poolish. The dough is meant to be very wet, and the shape is simple enough for a beginner bread baker. Having everything ready and in place is very important. Fortunately, the book helps you prepare, down to a timeline for mixing, proofing and baking the bread.