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Second International Holma Workshop in Naturally Leavened Handcrafted Bread in Beautiful Scania, Sweden

October 21, 2014 · by Barbara · Leave a Comment

I am happy to announce the Second International Holma Workshop in Naturally Leavened Handcrafted Bread. This intensive 2-day workshop will be held during a weekend at the end of March 2015. Specifically, sign it on your calendar, the 28th and 29th March 2015. The workshop will be held in the Southern part of Sweden, at close range from the international airport (and beautiful city of) Copenhagen, Denmark. Holma is an organic farm located in the green plains of Scania, right across from Denmark. Accomodation will be in site and organic, scrumptious, meals will be included in the package.

And now to the coolest part, the baking.

Holma has a fully equipped kitchen with a big professional oven, professional stand mixers, large fridges for dough retardation, and… it’s own mill for freshly grinding flour from organic grains.

The workshop will cover the main areas of naturally leavened handcrafted bread. First, you will learn all you always wished to know -but never dared asking- about wild yeast. You will be introduced to several different sourdough cultures, including liquid and solid wheat starters, rye starter, and fruit-based wild yeast. Then you will be taught how to keep them alive and in great shape. And, best of it all, you will leave Holma with clones of those starters.

Then you will be introduced to, and taught how to master, the basic bread baking techniques using natural leaven, including:

– Basic and flavored country batards and boules
– Sourdough baguette
– Whole rye bread
– Heritage emmer bread
– Sourdough ciabatta
– Laminated sourdough dough (croissant and Danish pastries)
– Sourdough pizza and focaccias

Doesn’t it sound like heaven?

Special focus of the workshop will be how too handle high-hydration dough and how to achieve an open crumb, even when working with whole wheat and heritage flours, and how to creatively score loaves in order to make them look beautiful.

Apprentices will also learn how to play with dough, enriching it to their liking with seasonal goodies.

The main teacher will be Holma Organic Kitchen’s Chef Beesham Soogrim, who is an expert in working with fresh and seasonal ingredients and has recently gained attention for his high-skilled and creative mastering of sourdough bread baking. Beesham is a former pupil of Master Manfred Henoksson, and has held with him the First International Holma Workshop in Naturally Leavened Handcrafted Bread. To help Beesham, there will be… moi, Barbara Elisi in blood and flesh (finally!!). So, if you ever wondered how to obtain my open crumb, Holma will be the right place to learn it, directly from the source.

Within the 2-day workshop we will be honored by the presence of Bengt-Göran Carlsson and Hans Larsson from the nonprofit organization OrdBildarna, who will teach us about heritage grains in general and local varieties in particular.

So what are you waiting for?? Let us know your interest as soon as possible, there are only 7 places left out of the 10 available. The fee is 370 Euros, and includes: the course fee, 3 nights stay, and all meals cooked by the wonderful organic vegetarian kitchen at Holma. Mail your interest ASAP to Beesham: beesham63@gmail.com (mobile: 0046 739960721).

Looking forward to meet you and bake the hell out of those ferments in Holma!

Filed Under: Uncategorized ·

Breads of Italy: Pane Ibleo or ‘U Pani Ri Casa

July 22, 2014 · by Barbara · 9 Comments

The inspiration for reconstructing this traditional Sicilian bread comes from a drawing I saw in an agricultural article comparing different flours [L’Informatore Agrario, Supplemento 13/2006]. More and more my interest for bread is moving away from books about baking technique to go closer to the source. The bakers, the millers, and the farmers. The article, provided by the mill I have recently visited during my trip to Sicily, described some of the durum wheat varieties I brought with me to Sweden. The bread in the drawing, traditionally made in the Iblei region with Russello durum flour, was so oddly shaped that it captured my attention, driving it away from the text of the article (which I have not yet finished, I admit).

After some research of online sources, I came across a couple of recipes with tutorials for this Pane Ibleo, also called simply ‘U Pani Ri Casa. As the name suggests (pani ri casa means home-made bread) these loaves were made at home by women. This tradition was repeated every week, using mother dough from the previous week, and baking it in the closest wood-fired oven. The bread is based on a stiff levain and a stiff dough, it is folded on itself and cut in a particular way. I realize now that the central fold and the cuts may have served to better cook the crumb, a pretty dense one which does not incorporate many bubbles -and consequently does not incorporate much steam either, which tends to fill the air pockets during baking, helping the crumb to cook well (I have read this beautiful explanation in Pollan’s chapter on bread in his recent “Cooked” book).

Since I was using stiff levain like in the traditional bread -rather than commercial yeast like in the tutorials I found- and since I was using whole wheat durum from an ancient variety of Sicilian durum (Russello wheat) -rather than finely ground modern varieties- I had to figure out the recipe myself. The tutorials did help with the shaping, although I feel still far from being able to recreate the real thing as seen in drawings and pictures. My central cut did not open quite as much as it should have had, and this is because of the flour I used and because I don’t have a wood-fired oven. According to a local belief these loaves should not hold large hole or something bad could happen- maybe to warn home bakers from those fake air pockets given by the detachment of the crust?- so I am quite happy about my dense crumb here. And the bread was truly delicious eaten in the traditional way. Cunzato with fresh tomato juice and olive oil dripping into further cuts made into the crumb and seasoned with oregano and sea salt. Sicily in a nutshell.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Buns, Italian, Loaf, Regional, Sourdough, Traditional, Vegetarian · Tagged: Ancient Grains, Heritage Wheat, Molini Del Ponte, Pane Ibleo, Pane Ri Casa, Russello, semola, Sicilian Wheat, whole wheat

A Sicilian Heritage Wheat Bread For A German Knight

July 15, 2014 · by Barbara · 17 Comments

Each time I go to back to Italy, my homeland, I try to make the best out of it as I know that I am not going to be there again for another year or so. This time I made sure to visit two artisan bakeries and a mill specialized in rare heritage grains. I will talk diffusely on all these experiences in later posts. For now I want to focus on the first of the several Sicilian heritage wheat flours I bought at the mill.

In Southern Italy the most commonly cultivated type of wheat is grano duro (durum wheat, also called semolina flour in the US and UK) but there are also some rare examples of local grano tenero (the “usual” type of wheat we all use). Madonita wheat is a grano tenero which grows around Le Madonie mountains in Sicily. As far as I know, Madonita wheat is not generally used to make bread by locals -they use grano duro for bread- but it is instead used in some traditional local cookies and cakes. The flour is stone-milled and sold whole, but I asked the miller to burattarla, which means, to sieve part of the bran away in order to make it a tiny bit lighter. Isn’t it wonderful to know in person and be able to make requests to your miller? As I am the daring type, I decided to make my first coming back home loaf using this flour. I may have been the first person in decades -or longer- to make a sourdough out of this flour but now that I have tasted the bread I am very happy I did.

Incidentally these loaves, naturally leavened and hand crafted using an ancient Sicilian wheat, would have fit perfectly on the table of Götz von Berlichingen, the German Knight With the Iron Hand, who lived and died in the 15th hundred. So I am dedicating this bread to him and to my dear friend Karin, author of Bröt and Bread and skilled community baker, who kindly invited me and other fellow bakers to bake a loaf worth of the fame and carisma of this unstoppable warrior. I am sure the nobleman would not have been turned away by a Sicilian sourdough. To make bread out of this flour was not the easiest of things and I guess that the flours available for Götz von Berlichingen‘s bakers were not much easier than the one I used. But oh the pleasure to eat a non industrial loaf, made out of non genetically modified grains, grown without pesticides, milled in a 150 years old water stone mill. I invite you to try my method on any heritage wheat you may find. Or simply on a good whole-wheat flour. Still you are crafting it by hand and with natural leaven and I am sure Götz von Berlichingen would like such a bread, too. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Italian, Loaf, Regional, Sourdough, Traditional · Tagged: Ancient Grains, Grano Tenero, Heritage Wheat, Madonita, Molini Del Ponte, Sicilian Wheat, whole wheat

Artisan Bread: What Is It and Why Bother About It? A Conversation With Don Sadowsky and Eli Colvin

July 3, 2014 · by Barbara · 14 Comments

There are few things I like even more than making bread and one of them is talking about bread. So when my bread pal Don Sadowsky started one of his mind challenging –and insanely interesting– discussions around my favorite topic, bread, I was totally captured. The discussion revolved around threats to artisan bakers from supermarket bread labeled as artisan, so we decided to bring into the discussion a professional bread baker and not just anyone but Eli Colvin, the head baker of the acclaimed Model bakery and the initiator of the rEVOLUTION Bread project.

We asked ourselves, what does artisan mean and why did it suddenly become so relevant to some of us? The first time the term artisan is known to have appeared in the English language in the 16th century was referred to a “Few artysanys of gud occupation”, in other words, to a class of skilled manual workers such as carpenters, weavers, pottery and shoe makers. “It’s about making things with a high degree of skilled labour” says the owner of Gail’s Artisan Bakery, UK [source: Brett Ryder, An Artisan Article, Intelligent Life magazine July/August 2014].
Considering the origins of the term artisan, we can conclude that an artisan product is to be made by a skilled manual worker. And what is so fancy about that? Why is it suddenly so incredibly relevant that a food item like -just a random example- a loaf of bread is made by a person, and not by any person but an artisan, i.e. a person initiated to the craft of bread making?

Probably the contemporary appeal of the term artisan applied to food in general, and bread in particular, is because food in general, and bread in particular, are increasingly made by machines rather than skilled artisans. So it is a little revolution, as Eli says, to buy that loaf of bread that does not come out of a factory but out of the hands of a real baker. And following Pollan way of thinking (Michael Pollan’s book “Cooked” is full of insights), it means giving ourselves more decisional power, because the independent baker made a loaf according to his knowledge and liking rather than following standardized factory procedures. By supporting that baker we are clearly standing for independence and for a closer connection to the production of our food.
Too bad, industrial food is already extending grasping hands towards the term artisan, especially in relation to bread. And so our discussion with Eli began… [Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Contemporary, Review · Tagged: artisan bread, Bread Revolution, Discussion, Don Sadowski, Eli Colvin

Barley Semola Sourdough

June 6, 2014 · by Barbara · 18 Comments

Some loaves just come out happy. This dough, made with no other ambition than having bread for the week, just happened to make loaves with a perfectly moist and open crumb and a crunchy and fragrant crust. That’s why I feel like sharing this simple, yet rewarding, recipe.

Of course the main ingredient is a lively starter, there is no way around it. So go check my previous posts on how to rise and keep a starter cause my beloved 3-year old wheat sourdough culture is a good 70% of my satisfaction in bread baking.

For the variety of shapes showed here, including the cute margueritte you can spot at the end of the post, I used the same dough. The dough was mostly made out of stone-ground organic wheat (also called high extraction wheat) where the majority of the seed is ground into the flour (80% in the one I used). Since I like to experiment with different flours I have also used a part of freshly milled barley flour and a part of finely ground semola (super fine durum) flour. Scroll down to read the simple, yet complete, method. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Buns, Loaf, Sourdough · Tagged: Barley, crusty, high extraction wheat, open crumb, semola

Dairy-free Sourdough Doughnuts

May 31, 2014 · by Barbara · 14 Comments

I warn you. After reading this post and looking at the pictures, all you will want to do is to go frying some fermented dough. This is what happened to me after seeing the doughnuts made by Francesca of Creando S’Impara, a blog full of scrumptious leavened goodies. The recipe is in Italian and since I have been so happy with it I take the time to translate it for you guys, including my tips – very few indeed as the recipe was perfect the way it was.

The butter is substituted by olive oil and although there is an egg in the dough these doughnuts are easy to veganize if necessary, scroll down to read my tip about that.

Do you like the flowery shape? I went crazy looking for my fancy doughnut cutters -which I used only once when making my vegan doughnuts, a few months back- and while I was quickly precipitating into an instant depression -the dough was all ready to be cut and fried, and I do fear an overproofed dough- there I find another set of cutters that I actually never used. Needs to be said, sometimes it does come in handy to have a kitchen appliances/utensiles addiction… I was also happy to have managed to use up ALL the dough, frying the little inside of the flowers, and shaping the last leftovers into two more doughnuts. The crumb came out divinely open and the whole thing was extremely light, did not have a “fried-taste” at all. Really hope you will give these a try, cause they are just incredibly satisfying (and easy!).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Breakfast, Buns, Chocolate, International, Sourdough, Sweets, Vegan · Tagged: Addictive, Chocolate, Dairy-Free, Doughnuts, sourdough

Answer to Don: The “Holey” Bread That Fed Generations

May 19, 2014 · by Barbara · 20 Comments

Yes it’s true: we suddenly became all concerned about how many holes we can fit in our slice of bread. When I say “we” I refer obviously to bread nerds, but also to the wider audience of bread lovers, people who don’t necessarily know how to rise a loaf but who appreciate a slice or two (or three or four or a whole loaf) of good rustic sourdough with a moist and open crumb and a crunchy, thick, crust. This wider, somehow unaware, audience is what has made the success of bakeries like Tartine in US, and of similar bakeries happily flourished all over the globe. (Above: Home-milled/home-sifted/home-baked 50% whole wheat sourdough)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Contemporary, Fooling Around, Review, Sourdough, Traditional · Tagged: Bread Commentary, Bread Revolution, Country Sourdough, Crumb, Holes, Holey Bread, Pain de Campagne

Guest Post: The Hole Truth by Don Sadowsky

May 18, 2014 · by Barbara · 13 Comments

Recently, there has been quite a lot of discussion on forums for bread acolytes regarding the how and why of the current trend toward open crumb’s loaves, also named, “holey” bread. My bread pal Don Sadowsky seemed to have some good explanation about this and I asked him to put his ideas together in a piece for this blog. I will be commenting on and expanding this topic in my next post, bringing in the discussion my own ideas (which don’t always coincide with Don’s). Until then, I hope you will find ten minutes of your time to comfortably sit and enjoy this engaging article on my favorite topic, bread.

“OK, admit it. You feel the pressure, don’t you? You have to have them. Lots of them. Big ones and small ones (but mostly big ones!), deep ones and shallow ones, irregularly spaced, hinting at an endless internal labyrinth complete with its own Minotaur. You know what I’m talking about.
Holes. Holes in your bread. The holey grail of artisan baking.
If yours are tiny you want to compensate by buying a really long bread knife. Your baking friends may make all the appropriate noises, they’ll crow about your beautiful crust, or how high your bread rose, but you know they’re shaking their heads at your pinprick misfortune and hoping that it’s not contagious. Meanwhile you look at the gloriously pitted interiors of their breads and you bow your head in shame.

Baker Contemplating Tiny Holes , Edvard Munch, 1893

How did we get to such a state? Does it really make sense that a slice of bread resembling the surface of the moon is prized over one that resembles a piece of cake? (Maybe Marie Antoinette had a point!) Geez, isn’t bread supposed to hold your jam without dripping? Whatever happened to form follows function? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Fooling Around, Review · Tagged: Bread Commentary, Bread History, Crumb, Guest Post, Holes

PANISSIMO April Round-up and la Colomba di Terry

May 2, 2014 · by Barbara · 4 Comments

April has been a pretty hectic month for my second life in bread. Hosting Panissimo, helping to plan a bread workshop and the challenge of baking my first colomba. For Panissimo collection, here we are: almost 100 breads, for every taste really, each with a recipe. As expected, this month we received several special Easter breads both sweet and savory, to bookmark and save for next year (or do like me: bake Easter breads all year round). Thank you so much for your continuous partecipation, this collection is very dear to me and to my partner in crime, Sandra, who will host the next two editions of Panissimo for the coming May and June. So go to Sandra this month and the next to submit/look at beautiful freshly baked breads.

And what about the colomba?

Until recently, I did not pay enough attention -the attention they truly deserve- to grandi lievitati, big (in the sense of difficult) Italian sweet naturally leavened breads like panettone, veneziana and colomba. Colomba is basically a panettone shaped like a dove, using -like in panettone- pasta madre (a stiff starter) as a leavening agent and an insane amount of eggs and butter. So much of them that the leavening is slowed down and it takes a good 24 hours in a warm spot for the dough to rise plus one all day of preparation of the starter, which needs to be boosted and show super powers.

Well, after one 15 hours rising and 2 extremely long kneading sessions, the dough looked like… a sticky blob. I wasn’t that optimistic…

And I would never have dared hoping that it would have ended up with an aethereal tall crumb which tasted like nothing ever tasted before. Or, better, which tasted like colomba from my childhood (if you are an Italian who was a little kid before the 80’s you know what I am talking about).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Breakfast, Cakes, Chocolate, Festive, Italian, Loaf, Panissimo, Regional, Sourdough, Sweets, Traditional · Tagged: Cioccolata, Colomba, Easter, Fool-Proof, Grandi Lievitati

International Workshop in Handcrafted Bread in Beautiful Scania, Sweden

April 30, 2014 · by Barbara · 7 Comments

_I am proud to announce a 2-days workshop -August 15th and 16th, 2014- which will interests all of you who just can’t stop dreaming of handling dough, learning about natural fermentation, ancient grains, and the art of crafting beautifully looking and incredibly good tasting loaves.

The workshop will be led by the master baker Manfred Enoksson -simply one of the best bakers in Sweden.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Fooling Around, Sourdough, Swedish · Tagged: artisan bread, sourdough, workshop

Panissimo April after One Year and My Latest Loaves

April 1, 2014 · by Barbara · 27 Comments

One year ago me and my Tuscan friend Sandra, driving the successful blog Sono Io Sandra -a joy for the eyes and for the mind- decided to do something together. Something that had to do with bread… We called it Panissimo and it became first a blog event, collecting sweet and savory breads from Italy and the world, and later a baking group based on FB. Thanks to Panissimo I got to know hundreds of new (to me) home bakers, and a few professional ones. From all of them I have learned and I keep learning a lot.

Panissimo bread collection has become a “travelling” event lately, with different blogs hosting it every month. This was great and I am extremely grateful to all our hosts (check out the amazing March collection by Il Castello di Pattipa) and to all the enthusiastic bakers who keep sending us their breads. But I have to admit that it feels nice knowing that Panissimo is back home now and for a while. Celebrating a year since it started, me and Sandra will be back doing as we did in the beginning: alternating editions between mine and her blogs and keeping the event bilingual, so that both Italian and international bakers can participate. Scroll down to read instructions and to insert the link to your April breads directly in this page. At the end of the month every bread will be presented in a round-up. Happy baking!

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Panissimo · Tagged: bread collection, raccolta di pani

Red Lentil-Turmeric Sourdough

February 23, 2014 · by Barbara · 30 Comments

One day I was reading a lovely post from my friend Che Foodzheit and the post was about a yummy linseeds bread he baked for a Bread Baking Day. Now, since I am very distracted and time disoriented I first thought the bread was made with lentils (linser in Swedish), then after realizing it wasn’t I made yet another mistake, thinking the challenge (more proteins in your bread) was for February when it was instead a January theme…

Anyway, from two mistakes I made one good bread. With lentils, cause the idea of a lentil bread had already passed my mind a few times in the past and this linseeds bread reminded me that I still hadn’t tested a sourdough with lentils in it. So I boiled some red lentils with a little water and a lot of garlic (yeah!!) and added them to a well hydrated sourdough dough. To improve the color, which would have been not that appealing otherwise I added a couple of pinches of turmeic (curcuma longa) powder. Man, was this bread good! And it is packed with proteins and minerals as well, cause it has a 40% lentils in it (and how about all the vitamins in the garlic and the curcuma?). To be enjoyed feeling you are feeding yourself with a wholosome food. Which incidentally also looks darn cool. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Bread, Contemporary, Loaf, Sourdough, Vegan, Vegetables · Tagged: Curcuma, lentils, sourdough, turmeric