Kevin: Prosciutto Bread Ring Recipe

Republished from Seriously Good.
I read recently that the most popular sandwich in the US (discounting hamburgers, I assume) is ham. Although I presume most people eat of some sort of processed ham on some sort of commercial bread in their sandwiches, even some of those products aren't bad. And when you branch out into less common hams and handcrafted breads you can create some really spectacular sandwiches.

Such sandwiches can be as simple as a couple of slices of Prosciutto or Serrano ham on a single crust of country bread — perhaps with a slice of Manchego or Fontina. This is best enjoyed standing in a tavern in Spain or Italy, but it's good at home too. Grilled country ham on a biscuit is a breakfast mainstay in the South. Fresh baked ham on a good sour rye with German mustard and sliced dill pickles is wonderful on a picnic. And I think my favorite ham sandwich is a Black Forest ham Panini with Bierkase on my own sourdough bread. A light brush of olive oil on the bread before grilling really sets it off.

The last bread book I bought was The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum has a recipe in it for a Prosciutto Ring. Right off the bat I liked the sound of it. Reading further I discovered that it's brushed with bacon fat before baking. Ham and bacon and fresh baked bread? Sounds like a ham sandwich lover's dream!

Prosciutto Ring

2 cups + 3 tbsp bread flour
1 tbsp malt powder (or 1 tbsp sugar)
3/4 tsp instant yeast
1/2 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
3/4 tsp salt
1 c water (70F -90F)
3 oz Prosciutto, 1/8" thick -- cut into 1/2" pieces
4 tsp bacon fat, lard, or butter -- melted

Using the whisk attachment, thoroughly combine flour, malt, and yeast. Add salt and mix. (Note: the salt is added after mixing to avoid it coming into direct contact with the yeast.)

Swapping to the dough hook, add water to bowl and combine with flour at low speed (#2 on a Kitchen Aid) until moistened. Increase speed to medium (#4 on a KA) and knead for seven minutes. Add Prosciutto and mix in on low. Dough should be slightly tacky but not sticky. If it is too sticky add a bit more flour and knead in, if too dry, spray with a bit of water and knead in.

Dump dough onto a lightly floured counter, shape into a ball, dust lightly with flour, and cover with plastic wrap. Allow to rest for 20 minutes.

Place baking stone or a baking sheet on the bottom shelf of the oven and a baking sheet on the bottom of the oven. Heat oven to 450F.

Roll dough into an 18" rope, form into a ring, overlapping ends by two inches on a sheet of parchment paper or Silpain sheet. Cover with a large bowl or oiled plastic wrap and allow to rise until doubled in bulk -- about one hour. Brush with melted bacon grease.

Transfer bread on Silpan or parchment to stone or baking sheet. (Use a peel if bread is on parchment.) Toss half a dozen ice cubes into the pan on the bottom of the oven.

Bake for 15 minutes, remove Silpan or parchment, and rotate bread 180 degrees. Bake another five minutes and reduce heat to 400F. Cook another 10 to 15 minutes. Turn oven off, prop open door, and leave the bread in the oven for five minutes.

Remove bread from oven, brush again with bacon fat or butter, and allow to cool completely.

Note: I ended up adding almost an additional half cup of flour to the dough to get the texture right.

If ever, in a moment of aimless wondering, pondered what heaven might smell like, I know. It smells like a combination of bacon cooking and bread baking. And if you could eat heaven, it just might taste like this bread.

Technorati: Food recipe baking bread artisanal artisan bread baking kevin italy ham prosciutto

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Beth: Italian Breads From Local Breads - Filone

L et's start with the obvious confession: I'm off my game. Way off my game. So far off that I don't even have a razor blade in the house to make a decent slash in an unbaked loaf of bread. Look at that picture! <hangs head in shame..>

Seriously, it has been almost five weeks of one handed cooking, baking, driving, and sitting on the couch with a good book (no, not that book, I'm swiping theKid's copy this weekend) — although, truth be told, there's been a lot more sitting on the couch and than cooking and there's been virtually no baking. (In fact, I'm back to using speech recognition for my writing, and in its usual slightly ironic take on reality it just wrote "virtually no drinking" instead of "virtually no baking" and that's just wrong, because there has been drinking.)

On the one hand, taking a break from a common, almost daily, activity is a sure way to remind you that absence truly does make the heart grow fonder. And it's been very easy to restrain myself from rushing into the kitchen because I usually have a pound or so of neoprene, Velcro, d-rings and let's not forget those lovely pieces of metal strapped to my wrist as a reminder of what I'm not supposed to be doing. Plus, pain as a backup reminder.

So when my copy of Daniel Leader's Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers arrived I was conflicted, some might say of two minds. (others might say I'm always a bit schizophrenic so two minds is a slow day inside my head... but I digress.)

Local Breads: a mini review

Leader's journey across Europe in search of local bread specialties opens with a brief primer on ingredients, followed by a walk through of the stages of baking bread. A chapter on sourdough and other starters is followed by a collection of frequently asked questions about bread baking. These are particularly useful for beginning bakers who may be unfamiliar with the science of baking bread.

Each of the nine regional chapters opens with a bit of context, history, and local color as Leader invites you along on his quest for the taste of each place—the terroir, if bread can be said to have such. (I am enchanted by his description of Amos DeCarlo's dream-inspired Ferris wheel for biga!) Leader examines what sets apart one area's bread from another, and then offers some general advice about how to reproduce a particular type of bread, including things like how to blend flour to approximate European flours not commonly available here in the states. After the recipes, a brief FAQ about that collection of bread recipes wraps up each chapter.

Information about tools and techniques, such as instructions on shaping loaves, are accompanied by lovely sketches, which add an appropriately artisan charm to the book. The photographs, while straightforward and simple, actually show what the bread should look like rather than how esoterically artistic the photographer could get. I kind of like that.

On the downside, there are some inconsistencies in measurements that leave me wondering. In a single recipe, this recipe in fact, 1/3 of a cup of water weighs either 2.3 ounces or 2.6. (It's 2.66) I suspect this is due to Leader's stated preference for weighing everything in grams and the subsequent rounding during conversion back to volume, but it's confusing and I wish it had been addressed directly—as is, it looks like bad editing, which I am pretty sure is not the case. I would recommend using the metric weights, which seem to line up with the baker's percentages and which are, in any case, seemingly what Leader used when developing the recipes.

But the true test of any cookbook is the recipes: are they any good?

On that score, I am giving this book fairly high marks. Susan has been thrilled with the two recipes she has tried and Kevin says the focaccia is the best he's ever made. While I am at a loss to explain the gap between the glam shot of the filone in the book and what I made, I am also willing to take some of the responsibility — and since we're interviewing Leader soon, I have a chance to ask him about it.

I adore new cookbooks, especially baking books, which I am somewhat more likely to actually use rather than simply drooling on while browsing. Bread books are at the very top of my list and Susan has been talking about this one for months. (Confession: I have somehow never laid hands on a Daniel Leader book prior to this one.) Susan has been a happy acolyte of Leader, however, she raves about him, is a one-woman Bread Alone selling dervish — she was also darned adorable the first time she got actual e-mail from him! Now, I must go buy a copy of Bread Alone and read it while I finish healing.)

On the other hand... there's the other hand, the left one to be precise. When turning the pages the wrong way hurts, the gap between tempting recipes and hand in dough looms large. Fortunately for me, I had a deadline pushing me in that direction of the kitchen and a Kitchen-Aid mixer waiting for me on the counter when I got there.

My month on the couch with my copy of Local Breads left me with about a dozen recipes I really wanted to try: sourdoughs, whole wheat sourdoughs, German rye, even a dark Silesian (Polish) rye that just be one of those lost breads of my youth, and a number of Italian breads, including the famous saltless Tuscan bread. Susan shined up her pointy hair and made an executive decision that we were going to make Italian breads, which mostly use a biga starter that takes just a few minutes to make and ferments in less than twelve hours.

Once the parameters were narrowed, my choice became fairly obvious, apparently to everyone. When I told Susan and Kevin that I was making Rosemary Filones, they both said "of course you are". (Hmm, was it the herb garden that gave me away?)

In some ways this was a great choice of recipes, I think one of the best things you can do to homemade bread is add rosemary and olive oil. Really, try it sometime. Almost any non-sweet recipe is improved by adding fresh rosemary and olive oil. In that department this bread did not disappoint, chopped fresh rosemary and a healthy dose of olive oil helps produce a loaf of bread that tastes like a summer afternoon in Italy. We served it to visiting friends two nights in a row, at their request.

But the crumb... Well, I said I was off my game.

I made this bread twice and both times produced a loaf that I would be happy to use for sandwiches. The crumb is evenly dense with a lot of small holes and the crust is distinct yet not too chewy. Sadly, this is not supposed to be a sandwich loaf.

According to the picture in Local Breads, this bread should have a gorgeous open crumb and a substantially thinner crust. See my bread? See the photo in the book? Do they look the same to you?

Tasty enough but just not it.

I think that this is due to a combination of the recipe and my inability to do my usual hands-on approach to a new bread recipe and in this case a new cookbook author as well. The inability to manipulate the dough by hand really gets in the way of making all of the tiny adjustments that go into making any bread recipe work in real life. (The book also seems to have some inconsistency in the conversions of measurements and maybe this is a recipe where that is a factor.)

So this morning I made one last batch with bread flour, which should better support that hugely open crumb — but which also absorbs more water than AP flour and I didn't really adjust for that — and it was a bit better. Not better enough to make me grab the camera, just a little bit.

I think that I can do better with this, and when I can use both hands again, I shall try. Next time: More water, a hotter oven for better oven spring, and real slashes. In the meantime, I want to see what the rest of you do with it. Please bake some and show me what you make.

Rosemary Filone
This is the original recipe from Local Breads in its entirety, with my baking notes [in brackets].

Allow 9 to 17 hours to mix and ferment the biga;
10 to 15 minutes to knead;
1-1/2 to 2 hours to ferment;
45 minutes to 1 hour to proof;
30 to 40 minutes to bake

Makes 2 loaves (~20 ounces/560 grams each)

Equipment
baker's peel or rimless baking sheet
parchment paper
bench scraper or chef's knife
baking stone

Biga<
Ingredients | US volume | metric volume | US weight | metric weight
water tepid (70 - 78F/21-26C) 1/3 c | 80 ml | 2.3 oz | 65 g
instant yeast 1/2 tsp | 2.5 ml | .1 oz | 2 g
unbleached all purpose flour 2/3 c | 160 ml | 3.5 oz | 100 g

Prepare the biga
Nine to 17 hours before you want to bake, prepare the biga. Pour the water into a small mixing bowl. With a rubber spatula, stir in the yeast and flour just until a dough forms. It will be stiff like pie dough. Dust the counter with flour and scrape out the dough. Knead the dough for 1 to 2 minutes just to work in all the flour and get it fairly but not perfectly smooth. (This is a very small amount of dough, about the size of a plum.) Lightly oil the mixing bowl. Round the biga and place it back in the bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Leave at room temperature (70 - 75F/21 - 24C) for 1 hour, then refrigerate it for at least 8 and up to 16 hours. The biga will double in volume (to about the size of an orange) [Mine came to slightly above the one cup line on a pyrex measuring cup], becoming glossy and porous, and will smell mildly acidic.

Bread dough
Ingredients | US volume | metric volume | US weight | metric weight
biga about 1 cup | 237 ml | 5.9 oz | 167 g
water tepid (70 - 78F/21 - 26C) 1 1/3 c | 320 ml | 10.6 oz | 300 g
instant yeast 1 tsp | 5 ml | .2 oz | 5 g
unbleached all purpose flour 3 1/4 c | 770 ml | 17.6 oz | 500 g
sea salt 2 1/4 tsp | 12 ml | .5 oz | 15 g
extra virgin olive oil 1/3 c | 80 ml | 2.3 oz | 65 g
fresh rosemary coarsely chopped 1/4 c | 60 ml | .4 oz | 10 g

Mix the dough
Remove the biga from the refrigerator and uncover it. It will be soft, airy, and a bit sticky. Scrape into a large bowl. Pour the water over the biga and stir it with a rubber spatula to soften it and break it into clumps. Stir in the flour, olive oil, rosemary and salt until a dough forms. [I added the yeast too, even though the copy editor did not.]

Knead the dough
By hand: Lightly flour the counter and scrape the dough out onto it. Knead the dough with steady strokes until it is silky, smooth, and elastic, about 13-15 minutes. Check that the dough is well-developed check that the deal was well developed by pulling off a golf ball sized piece and stretching it into an opaque windowpane. If the dough tears, knead for an additional two to three minutes and test again.

With mixer: With the dough hook, mix the dough on medium speed (four on a Kitchen-Aid mixer) until it is silky, smooth, and elastic, ten to twelve minutes. Check that the dough is well developed by doing a windowpane test, as described above. If it tears, knead for an additional two to three minutes and test again.

Divide and shapes the loaves
Cover a baker's peel or rimless baking sheet with parchment paper and dust it with flour. Lightly dust the counter with flour. Uncover the dough and turn it out onto the counter. With the bench scraper or chef's knife, cut the dough into two equal pieces (19.7oz./560g each). Shape each piece into a log about 12in. long. Place the logs smooth side upon the parchment paper, at least 3in. apart, and cover them with plastic wrap.

Proof the loaves
Let the logs rise at room temperature (70 to 75°) until they spread and look puffy and light, nearly doubling in size, 45 minutes to one hour. Press your fingertip into the dough and your fingerprint will spring back slowly. [Even my oddly dense bread passed the 'puffy and light' and fingerprint tests.]

Prepare the oven
About 1 hour before baking, place a baking stone on the middle rack. Heat the oven to 400 degrees.

Bake the loaves
Slide the loaves, still on the parchment, onto the baking stone. Bake until the logs are dark caramel color, 30 to 40 minutes.

Cool and store the loaves
Slide the peel or rimless baking sheet under the parchment paper to remove the loaves from the oven. Slide them, still on the parchment, onto a wire rack. Cool the loaves briefly, then peel off the parchment paper. Let them cool completely on the rack, about one hour, before slicing. The olive oil in the dough will help to keep them moist. Store in a resealable plastic bag at room temperature for three to four days. [Or freeze.]

Recipe reprinted from Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers by Daniel Leader (c) Copyright 2007 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Technorati: Food | recipe | baking | bread | artisanal | artisan | bread baking | filone | italy

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Susan: Italian Breads From Local Breads - Black Olive Cheeks (Puccia)

If your bakery cafe has 500 locations scattered around the country, launching any new product is a complicated endeavor. First there's the research and development stage, which in many cases can last as long as a year. Creating something that is not only tasty, visually appealing, and on budget, but that can also be easily and exactly replicated around the country — or even the world — is no small feat. Then there are the amazingly expensive, in-store and out-of-store publicity/marketing/advertising campaigns needed to spread the word about your delicious new invention.

If, however, your bakery cafe has only one location, one oven, and one baker, introducing a new item is as easy as flipping through a cookbook, pointing to a recipe and saying, "That looks good!"; baking it up; and sticking the results in your display case next to a handwritten sign stating what it is. Years ago when I had a little bakery cafe in northern California, that's exactly what I used to do.

One of the nicest things about opening a small eatery several miles from any other place folks could buy a cup of coffee or, even better, a still warm chocolate chip cookie and a latté made from freshly roasted coffee beans, is that you quickly develop a band of very loyal customers. And although some of them happily ordered the same thing day in and day out, I was fortunate to have a share of eager guinea pigs. These adventurous folks were always willing to try something new and different, no matter what it might be. Some of my experiments, such as the pistachio olive quick bread, never made it onto the permanent menu (or even into the oven a second time), others, like the pesto piezones, were instant bestsellers. This ongoing creative challenge was one of the most enjoyable parts of the job.

Shaping Rolls

I once knew a guy who had worked as a cook in a restaurant famous for its five different types of homemade rolls. I said something about what a pain it must have been to shape all those little pieces of dough, and he said it wasn't hard at all. "I'd just tear off pieces and throw them in the pan," he said, using hand gestures and sound effects to demonstrate his technical prowess. "I could make about 60 rolls a minute."

The nice thing about homemade rolls is that they, obviously, don't have to each be perfectly formed. I'm not a real stickler for perfection, but I do like my rolls to look nice, so my method takes a little more time than one second per roll. If I want to be sure they're all the same size, I simply plunk a few down on my digital kitchen scale to gauge how I'm doing.

There are many ways to shape rolls. Basically whatever works best for you is the best way to do it. I use the same technique as I do for making large rounds. I hold up the hunk of dough and pull pieces of it underneath the ball, pinching them so that a taut "skin" is formed. Then I set it down on the counter, cup both hands around it, and turn it in a few tight circles while lightly pressing it into the counter so the ball is pulled into shape.

Since describing things in three-dimension is clearly not one of my strong points (can anyone actually follow what I just described?), here's the method for making rolls in Local Breads:

The technique for shaping small round rolls is similar to the technique for shaping a larger round. Place a small piece of dough on an unfloured work surface. cup one hand slightly and cover the dough ball with it. Rotate your hand in small circles, applying a little pressure to the dough. As you rotate, the dough will eventually form into a ball.

Rustic rolls may also be formed simply by flattening a larger piece of dough to a 2-inch thickness. Use a bench scraper or chef's knife to cut 2-inch-wide strips. Cut each strip into squares or rectangles.

I haven't been trying many new bread recipes lately, because I've been focusing on refining the five or six breads that will be the mainstay of the small wholesale bread bakery we're building here on the farm. But the other day I had an enlightening realization. When it comes to offering additional items for sale, things won't be much different than they were at the cafe. Testing out a new type of bread will simply be a matter of finding a recipe that sounds interesting, baking a few dozen loaves, loading them into the delivery truck, and seeing if our wholesale customers want to offer them to their customers. If the response is positive, we bake more. If not, there's no big loss.

That was all the excuse I needed to start baking new breads. Add with the publication of my new favorite bread book, Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers, by Daniel Leader (renowned baker and author of my previously favorite bread book, Bread Alone), and my priorities around the farm have suddenly shifted. Weed-filled garden, piles of dirty laundry, ravenous baby chicks, and scorching summer heat be damned — I'm on a bread baking roll.

We're devoting this month at A Year in Bread to Daniel's latest book. Because we haven't tackled sourdoughs here yet, we decided we would each bake a bread from the Italian section as they most often begin with a biga, which can be made in several hours, as opposed to sourdough starters which take several days to create from scratch. After you mix up the biga and let it sit for an hour at room temperature, it goes into the fridge for at least eight and up to 16 hours, so it's not hard to make this recipe fit your schedule.

This is the second recipe I've tried from Local Breads, and both of them were easy to make and are definite keepers, the first article was on "Parisian Daily Bread". The book, which I highly recommend for bread bakers of all levels including total beginners, will be available in stores on August 13th. You can pre-order copies now at Amazon.com for $23.10, which is 34 percent off the cover price of $35.00, plus there's no tax and free shipping on orders of $25 or more.

We're also going to be holding a contest here at A Year In Bread and giving away two signed copies of Local Breads to lucky and skilled bakers! More details will be posted soon.

I have to admit the cute name of these tasty little rolls is what first caught my attention. With the discovery that they're made with those strong and salty oil-cured olives I love so much and Daniel's introduction, I was hooked. He says:

Plump with olives, smooth and round, these rolls look just like puccia, little cheeks. I first saw them in Lucca, a walled city in Tuscany famous for its superior olive oil. I arrived by train, and when I left the station in search of food, these rolls beckoned from the only bakery I found open during the midday lull. They were the perfect snack for a hungry traveler, moist and tender with the delectable crunch of cornmeal on the bottom crust. Dark, oil-cured olives give these rolls richness and great flavor. . . Serve the puccia as an antipasto, with some pecorino cheese and a glass of Chianti.

I also almost never eat crusty breads plain or without reheating them, but I found myself nibbling on these straight from the bag on the counter. They're delicious reheated and slathered with butter, too, and make scrumptious mini sharp cheddar & homegrown lamb salami sandwiches. When I tasted the first one still warm from the oven, my immediate thought was that it would be wonderful with a glass of red wine. Yep.

As with nearly all breads, these rolls freeze beautifully. I pulled out a couple this morning, and for lunch I sliced them in half, toasted them in my beloved toaster oven, and covered them with cream cheese and slices of juicy garden tomatoes. Oh. My. God. If you can keep from gobbling them all up plain, black olive cheeks have all kinds of possibilities. Next time I'm going to make a few larger ones for lamb burger buns.

Black Olive Cheeks (Puccia)
This is the original recipe from Local Breads in its entirety, with my baking notes [in brackets.]

Allow 9 to 16 hours to mix and ferment the biga;
10 to 15 minutes to knead;
1-1/2 to 2 hours to ferment;
45 minutes to 1 hour to proof;
20 to 25 minutes to bake

Makes 20 rolls (2.1 ounces/60 grams each)

Equipment
2 baking sheets
bench scraper or chef's knife

Biga
Ingredients | US volume | metric volume | US weight | metric weight
water tepid (70 - 78F/21-26C) 1/3 c | 80 ml | 2.3 oz | 65 g
instant yeast 1/2 tsp | 2.5 ml | .1 oz | 2 g
unbleached bread flour* 2/3 c | 160 ml | 3.5 oz | 100 g

*[I used Heartland Mill organic, unbleached, strong bread flour that I order in 50-pound bags from my local natural foods store.]

Prepare the biga
Nine to 17 hours before you want to bake, prepare the biga. Pour the water into a small mixing bowl. With a rubber spatula, stir in the yeast and flour just until a dough forms. It will be stiff like pie dough. Dust the counter with flour and scrape out the dough. Knead the dough for 1 to 2 minutes just to work in all the flour and get it fairly but not perfectly smooth. (This is a very small amount of dough, about the size of a plum.) [Mine was more like the size of a peach.] Lightly oil the mixing bowl. [I used Trader Joe's baking spray, which is what I've been using lately to oil my baking pans. It's made with canola oil and flour and works really well.] Round the biga and place it back in the bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Leave at room temperature (70 - 75F/21 - 24C) for 1 hour, then refrigerate it for at least 8 and up to 16 hours. The biga will double in volume (to about the size of an orange) [mine was bigger], becoming glossy and porous, and will smell mildly acidic.

Bread dough
Ingredients | US volume | metric volume | US weight | metric weight
biga About 1 cup | 237 ml | 5.9 oz | 167 g
water tepid (70 - 78F/21 - 26C) 1 1/2 c | 356 ml | 13.2 oz | 375 g
instant yeast 1 tsp | 5 ml | .2 oz | 5 g
flour* 3 1/4 c | 770 ml | 17.6 oz | 500 g
sea salt 1 1/2 tsp | 7 ml | .4 oz | 10 g
oil-cured olives pitted & coarsely chopped 1 1/2 c | 356 ml | 5.3 oz | 150 g
coarse cornmeal for dusting

Mix the dough
Remove the biga from the refrigerator and uncover it. It will be soft, airy, and a bit sticky. Scrape into a large bowl. Pour the water over the biga and stir it with a rubber spatula to soften it and break it into clumps. [I used my hands.] Stir in the yeast, flour, and salt until a dough forms. [I used the US volume measurements, but because I'd ended up using quite a bit of extra flour making the Parisian Daily Baguettes, I measured out my flour in cups and then weighed it on my digital kitchen scale. Turns out my 3-1/4 cups of flour only weighed 456 grams. That extra 44 grams to reach the designated 500 grams was nearly a half cup, which I did end up adding while kneading. Click here to read Beth's recent article, "Weights & Measures", which discusses this very subject.]

Knead the dough
By hand: Lightly flour the counter and scrape the dough out onto it. Knead the dough until it is soft and almost smooth, about 10 minutes.

With floured hands, press the dough into a very rough rectangle and spread the olives over it. They will seem overabundant. Roll up the dough to contain as many of the olives as possible and continue kneading until the olives are evenly distributed and the dough is smooth and elastic, 3 to 5 minutes more. If olives pop out as you knead, push them back into the dough. They will tint the dough a grayish color.

By machine: [I haven't tried this.] With the dough hook, mix the dough on medium speed (4 on a KitchenAid mixer until it is fairly smooth, about 8 minutes. Stop the machine, scrape down the hook, and add the olives. Knead the dough on medium-low speed (3 on a Kitchen Aid mixer) until they are well distributed and the dough is smooth, 2 to 3 minutes. Or knead them in by hand as directed above. They will tint the dough a grayish color.

Ferment the dough
Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled, clear 2-quart container with a lid. [I used an inexpensive plastic freezer container that I sprayed with Trader Joe's baking spray.] With masking tape, mark the container at the level the dough will reach when it has doubled in volume. [I used a Sharpie permanent black marker, which washes off with dishsoap and a scrubbie sponge.] Cover and leave it to rise at room temperature (70 to 75 degrees F) until it doubles in volume, 1-1/2 to 2 hours. When you press your finger into the dough, the fingerprint should spring back slowly. [My kitchen was 83 degrees, so I put the container of dough in a cooler with an ice pack during fermentation. I should have checked it sooner; after 1-1/2 hours the dough had already more than doubled in size.]

Divide and shape the rolls
Sprinkle a light coating of cornmeal over the surface of the baking sheets. [I lined my baking sheets with unbleached parchment paper first. I didn't have coarse cornmeal, but the regular stuff worked fine.] Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured countertop and pat into a rough rectangle. With a bench scraper or chef's knife, cut the dough into 20 equal pieces (2.1 ounces/60 grams each). [I cut the dough into pieces and then weighed them on my digital kitchen scale, adding or subtracting bits of dough to make them all about 60 grams each.] Shape each piece into a ball. Place them smooth side up on the baking sheets, about 1-1/2 inches (4 cm) apart. Sift a veil of flour over the tops of the rolls and drape them with plastic wrap. [I was too lazy to pull out the sifter so I sprinkled the flour with my fingers, then covered the rolls with a damp tea towel instead of plastic wrap.]

Proof the rolls
Let the rolls rise at room temperature (70 - 75F/21 - 24C) until they expand to the size of a mandarin orange, 45 minutes to 1 hour. Press your fingertip into the dough and your fingerprint will spring back slowly. [The baking sheets wouldn't fit in my cooler, so I just let them proof in the 83F/28C kitchen for 45 minutes. I'm not sure how big a mandarin orange is, and this may have been a bit too long as the dough barely sprang back, and the rolls didn't rise very much in the oven. They looked and tasted great, though.]

Prepare the oven
About 15 minutes before baking, place one rack in the top third of the oven and another in the middle position. Heat the oven to 400 degrees.

Bake the rolls
Uncover the baking sheets and slide them onto the oven racks. Bake until the rolls are honey-colored, 20 to 25 minutes. [I baked mine about 5 minutes longer.] Halfway through baking, switch the sheets so the rolls bake evenly. [I'm usually paranoid about baking two racks of anything at once, but I wanted to follow this recipe exactly, so I tried it. Surprise! It worked great.]

Cool and store the rolls
Remove the baking sheets to a wire rack. Cool the rolls briefly, about 5 minutes, and enjoy them slightly warm. [Finally a bread that doesn't have to cool for 40 minutes before you can taste it!] The oil from the olives will help to keep them moist. Sstore uneaten rolls in a resealable plastic bag at room temperature for 1 to days. [Or freeze.]

Recipe reprinted from Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers by Daniel Leader (c) Copyright 2007 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Technorati: Food | recipe | baking | bread | artisanal | artisan | bread baking | TAGNAME

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