I had an amazing breakfast this morning of Dark Chocolate and Sour Cherry Bread spread with a little creme fraiche and jam with a coffee. Of course I had to do some work last night to make it happen!
The recipe came from "La Boulangerie" by Gregoire Michaud who bakes at the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong. The book is definitely not for the inexperienced baker with some instructions being very brief indeed but if you have experience shaping and handling moist doughs you should be fine and there are some excellent flavour combinations in the book, just like the one above.
The information at the start of the book is fantastically detailed giving you ways to calculate the temperature of the water you should use to arrive at the target fermentation temperature taking into account the friction of the mixer. There's also lots of info on steam and how to control it in the home setting, glutenin, gliadin and metabolic pathways for your yeast. Some of the highlights for me are looking through the recipes and seeing some innovative shaping methods and the fact that all recipes are for instant dry yeast.
I halved the quantity to make two boules and although my wife was a bit confused about whether it's meant to be sweet or savoury it turned out well with surprisingly good structure, open crumb and good oven spring. If you're not sure how to categorise it think of it as being like a chocolate croissant.
My only criticism of the recipe is that it seems a little salty but my scales are not that accurate for small measurements and I usually measure my salt by volume. Of course grams are the way to go for accurate measurements because flaked salt will be less dense than table salt giving vastly different results than if you were to go by volume measurements.
Next will be the Pecan and Raisin Boule then the Portobello Mushroom Country Bread!
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