Tuscany in December is unusual but still beautiful. The days are shorter and it can get wet and chilly most days, but as with anything, you learn to cope, and discover a host of other things to enjoy. In our case, it's ribollita, a hearty Tuscan winter soup made with beans and good old Tuscan bread.
In this post, I will talk about my first attempt at making Tuscan bread, just because this cold, winter day in New York, bread seemed like a good idea, and seemed like a comfort to make.
I don't particularly like bread (I'm a rice person) but bread-making, I find therapeutic. Something about creating something that looks nothing like the ingredients that you started with, inspires my motivation to create. I found a recipe on Tuscan bread here, and basically followed that recipe except I substituted whole wheat flour for most of the flour requirements. I read in a post that whole wheat flour will not yield the same results as regular flour, but in my case, I thought it worked out pretty well.
The thing I was most excited about in this recipe, is making the biga. I know that in bread making, letting the yeast mixture stand is pretty standard, but I've never heard of letting it stand this long (close to 24 hours). Apparently it is pretty standard in Italian bread making, and it makes your finished product deeper and more complex in flavor--something that I really wanted to do in recreating our Tuscan bread experience.
The first time I made the biga, it didn't rise at all. I attribute that to the inaccurate measurement of the flour amounts in the mixture. Without a kitchen scale, it is pretty tough to measure out flour in grams; according to my research there's no exact equivalent in cups. It largely depends on a lot of environmental factors such as moisture content of your particular bag of flour, so it took me a while to be at peace with the amounts that I put in.
My second attempt at the biga, I saw the difference. The yeast mixture, after a couple of hours, really does come alive. I put it in a plastic container with a lid, and a few hours in, it broke free of the container and was almost alive, crawling on the countertop of my kitchen in all its sticky goodness. I went to bed that night hoping I won't wake up to a dough-covered apartment.
I made the bread about 18 hours after I let the biga stand, overnight. It turned out to be almost exactly like the Tuscan bread we had in our vacation. Drizzled with some good quality Italian olive oil (which we had just bought at the Italian store in Chelsea market), it was pure heaven. :)
In this post, I will talk about my first attempt at making Tuscan bread, just because this cold, winter day in New York, bread seemed like a good idea, and seemed like a comfort to make.
I don't particularly like bread (I'm a rice person) but bread-making, I find therapeutic. Something about creating something that looks nothing like the ingredients that you started with, inspires my motivation to create. I found a recipe on Tuscan bread here, and basically followed that recipe except I substituted whole wheat flour for most of the flour requirements. I read in a post that whole wheat flour will not yield the same results as regular flour, but in my case, I thought it worked out pretty well.
The thing I was most excited about in this recipe, is making the biga. I know that in bread making, letting the yeast mixture stand is pretty standard, but I've never heard of letting it stand this long (close to 24 hours). Apparently it is pretty standard in Italian bread making, and it makes your finished product deeper and more complex in flavor--something that I really wanted to do in recreating our Tuscan bread experience.
The first time I made the biga, it didn't rise at all. I attribute that to the inaccurate measurement of the flour amounts in the mixture. Without a kitchen scale, it is pretty tough to measure out flour in grams; according to my research there's no exact equivalent in cups. It largely depends on a lot of environmental factors such as moisture content of your particular bag of flour, so it took me a while to be at peace with the amounts that I put in.
My second attempt at the biga, I saw the difference. The yeast mixture, after a couple of hours, really does come alive. I put it in a plastic container with a lid, and a few hours in, it broke free of the container and was almost alive, crawling on the countertop of my kitchen in all its sticky goodness. I went to bed that night hoping I won't wake up to a dough-covered apartment.
I made the bread about 18 hours after I let the biga stand, overnight. It turned out to be almost exactly like the Tuscan bread we had in our vacation. Drizzled with some good quality Italian olive oil (which we had just bought at the Italian store in Chelsea market), it was pure heaven. :)
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