Baking Bouchon - Recipe 35: Cranberry-Currant Batard

Bread is back!  Unfortunately, someone got the brilliant idea to put dried fruit in it.  I guess it's not terrible, in fact, I kind of liked it.  Maybe I'm getting used to this modified fruit business.

The most important thing about getting ready to make this bread was to revive my levain.  I originally made this levain (basically a bread starter) for the Campagne Boule and instead of continuing to feed it for weeks between making bread, I stuck it in the refrigerator.  Apparently you can keep it there to sleep forever and then just take it out and feed it for a couple of days to wake it up again.

The dough comes together pretty easily with all purpose, rye and whole wheat flours, yeast, levain, water and salt.  Once that gets kneaded for a while you mix in the cranberries and currants.

These guys rose up really well!  After a couple of hours they were pretty huge.  Unfortunately when I transferred them to the oven they deflated a little so the loaves weren't quite as puffy as I'd hoped.

The bread baked up nice and golden brown but I had one minor issue.  One of the loaves of dough stuck to the board when I was transferring it to the oven so it got a little bent.  A lot bent.  It looked kind of like a candy cane.

I mentioned this fact to CA and he said "Oh, I thought you did that on purpose."  I'm not sure who is making candy cane shaped bread out there, but CA will apparently buy it from you.

My biggest complaint is that the crust on this bread wasn't as crispy as I would have liked.  If you remember, this cookbook uses a method of generating steam in the oven right when you put the bread in that involves heating rocks and metal chains and spraying them with water.  The steam is supposed to make the crust crispier.  Instead of using the water gun like I usually do, I took a pitcher and dumped all the water in very quickly which generated a lot of steam and made me super optimistic that the crust would be really crispy.  It just wasn't.  Maybe this whole steam thing is a myth.

The bread turned out OK, all things considered.  Yes, it had dried fruit in it, but I'm over it.  Yes, it's crooked, but I'm cool with that too.  Yes, the crust wasn't crusty enough, but whatever.  It still tasted good.  Plus, I put butter on it and that makes everything better.

Julie