Sourdough is officially the thorn in my side. This loaf was my 3rd try at the Bread Baker’s Apprentice version. I tried it when I first bought the book and it broke my stand mixer. Granted, it was no Kitchenaid but it wasn’t exactly a dinky mixer – it did make brioche for me. I threw my starter away after that and vowed not to try sourdough again. Then I joined the BBA group and knew I’d have to try again. I made another starter and ended up with flat, hard sourdough. My starter had failed me. The starter was working fine on it’s own so I wasn’t sure what happened. For the sake of the challenge, I tried again and added a tiny pinch of yeast to the dough. It did the trick but I’m still feeling like a sourdough failure.

I made this bread a couple months back and since then I’ve had to throw that starter away. I’m working on yet another starter to finish out the sourdough breads in the book but can I tell you how frustrated I am by sourdough? I consider myself a fairly decent bread maker and it’s super annoying that there’s a bread I just can’t conquer.

The bread was good. Not as sour as one that had been made with only wild yeast but it was still obviously sourdough. I would actually love to make it again once I get my starter issues worked out.

If you’re interested in trying Peter Reinhart’s sourdough formula check out The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and then visit the BBA blogroll to see how the other bakers are doing.

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I’ve been putting this BBA bread off for awhile just because the picture in the book bored me. From the picture you can’t tell that it’s baked as boules or that you get to mark it with a pretty design. Now if the picture had shown me that instead of boring looking slices next to some grapes, I probably would’ve gotten to this one a lot sooner.

Like most breads in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, it wasn’t difficult but it did take 2 days. Day 1 was mixing up a biga and after fermenting for a couple hours, it’s refrigerated overnight. Day 2 involved a little mixing, a little folding, and a whole lot of waiting.

This bread isn’t kneaded at all. It’s stirred vigorously and, like I mentioned, folded a few times. The only issue I had with that is that when I went to shape them into boules I degassed them way too much which gave me a fairly tight crumb instead of big, beautiful holes.

Right after these came out of the oven (and I sliced into one to make sure it was edible), I took a loaf over to my grandparents house because I know my grandfather is a huge fan of bread. He told me that the bread was terrible as he sliced his second piece. ;)

When the loaves first came out of the oven the crust was very crispy and delicious but overnight it definitely softened up and is more chewy than crispy. The book mentioned this would happen but I’m still a little disappointed.

The Pugliese is on page 222 in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and is definitely worth checking out. Make sure you visit the BBA blogroll to see how the other bakers are doing.

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I’m one of those annoying list making people. I make lists, check things off, and feel accomplished. The most important list I make is my “What I’m making/blogging this week” list. I schedule a post for each day and one of the first things I do every morning is get the post up. I like to follow that pretty closely and when things don’t go exactly as my list says, I break down. It’s because I’m nuts. I own it.

So this bread… it caused me to break down. I broke down hard. See, I had it scheduled today so I started working on it yesterday morning because it’s a one day bread. I waited and waited and then waited some more. It never rose. Part of the problem was that we’ve moved to a much colder place and I’m just not used to baking at this temperature, but I’ve also seen other BBA bakers talk about how long this bread had to rise. At the end of the day it looked like this:

It’s supposed to fill the bottom of the pie plate and rise up fairly high. I reached out to the BBA Twitter posse and Kelly suggested that I microwave a mug of water ‘til steaming and then throw the bread in with it. So I did that and left it overnight. This morning it had filled out the plate and had risen just a teeny bit. So I did what any normal person does. I put it in my car where it was considerably warmer. But then I forgot about it and took off on some errands. It became the traveling sweet bread dough:

At that point it had been rising for 24 hours. I was so tempted to just toss it out the window and move on to the next bread but it eventually started moving. I don’t think it got as big as the ones in the book but I also think the book used much smaller pie plates. I would definitely use a 6 incher if I was to make this again.

The end result? Ehh… I don’t think fruit extracts belong in bread so I’m not a huge fan. I do think the crumb was lovely and the super dark crust was something different. If you don’t mind fruit in your yeast bread, you will definitely love this. Just be sure to turn your heater on to speed up the rise time.

You can find the Portuguese Sweet Bread on page 215 in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Make sure you check out the rest of the BBA blogroll to see how the other bakers are doing.

The next bread in the book is the Potato Rosemary Bread which I already made and blogged (I think it may have been my first 2 day bread!) so I’m going to skip on over Pugliese. Once I recover from this traumatic bread experience of course.

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