Rustic Italian Bread Views
I love to bake breadF—that's why I opened my first bakery, Amy's Bread, in Manhattan 9 years ago. When I'm not managing operations or handling business decisions and I have the chance to get my hands in dough, I usually bake a Rustic Italian Bread. It's such a simple and delicious bread, and it satisfies all my goals as a baker. The dough is soft and sticky, so it is challenging to knead, but it provides great tactile pleasure. The ingredients are the simplest available: unbleached flour, water, yeast, and salt. That means that when they are handled well, they express the baker's skill and technique. These same ingredients are used by traditional bakers around the world to make an infinite variety of breads. Whether you are making ciabatta, baguettes, or a white pan loaf, it is the method of combining these four basic ingredients that makes all the difference in the final result.
Baking Rustic Italian Bread is not only fun: it provides visual pleasure too. Its bumpy, striated surface is golden brown and crispy. It's not easy to get a gorgeous brown crust in your home oven, but by spraying plenty of water from a plant mister around the sides of your oven, you can simulate the steam injection of a large bakery oven. That's what I do when I bake bread at home. But best of all, the fragrance of bread baking is intoxicating, and the taste is toasty, wheaty, and delicious.
The recipe for Rustic Italian Bread that follows is one I have perfected after years and years of baking. The dough is so versatile that it can be turned into many other breads as well; once you make the master dough, you can add pitted oil-cured olives to create Olive Bread, or fold in chopped Prosciutto and freshly ground black pepper for a savory Prosciutto-Pepper Loaf. You can flatten the dough, then top it with tomatoes, herbs, and olive oil, and you have a simple, succulent Tomato Focaccia. My personal favorite is to stretch the dough into a rectangle, coat it with lots of sesame seeds and a bit of coarse sea salt, and bake Sesame Breadsticks. If I ever leave sesame breadsticks on a cooling rack in the bakery, they disappear mysteriously. More than any other bread in my repertoire, they have secret admirers!
Biga: Biga is a yeasted starter, the equivalent of France's poolish. Don't be scared off by making a starter: it takes less than 5 minutes and adds so much character to bread. The crust will be crunchier, the crumb moister, and the bread more flavorful-plus, the bread will have a longer shelf life. To make it easier to get the biga starter out of the measuring cup, oil the inside of the cup lightly; that way the starter will slip right out of the cup. The recipe below yields 28 ounces of starter, enough for 1 recipe of Rustic Italian Bread.
Rustic Italian Bread Images
