| BBA Challenge #9 Cinnamon Walnut Bread | | Print | |
| Monday, 13 July 2009 14:03 |
 Well, yet another week has passed and I have one more of the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge breads completed. This week's bread was an easy Cinnamon Walnut bread that required no sponge, poolish, or biga. While reading through the recipe before I started, I noticed that Peter Reinhart included an option to create a cinnamon swirl inside the bread which sounded like an amazingly perfect idea to me! I set about mixing together the flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and cinnamon in my table mixer to which an egg, shortening, buttermilk, and water are added. Now I did not have shortening in the house (yes I SHOULD have read through the recipe the day before!) so I used butter, and having never seen buttermilk in Italy before, I used the book's alternative which was whole milk. The bread mixed together nicely, and I kneaded it by machine for about 8 minutes before removing it to the counter to knead in the raisins and chopped walnuts.
The first rise or ferment is said to take about 2 hours, but as usual in my warm kitchen the dough had doubled it's size in less than an hour and a half. I then divided the dough into two equal parts, and rolled them out so I could sprinkle them with the cinnamon and sugar mixture. I then shaped them into loaves and placed them in my lightly oiled bread pans. Now another issue I have here in Italy is that you cannot find 8 X 4 inch, or 9 X 5 inch loaf pans, so I simply used my 3 X 10 inch pans instead. The bread is left to rise again until it crests above the pans which took about an hour for my two loaves. The bread was baked in a 350 degree F oven for about 20 minutes, turned and then baked for another 20 or so minutes or until the internal temperature of the dough is 190 degrees F. Once cooled and sliced I was quite disappointed not to see the as obvious cinnamon swirl through the bread as was shown in the book's photo but the bread tasted delicious irregardless, and was even better the next morning when I toasted it and spread it with butter. Although I have made similar types of bread in the past, I was quite pleased with how this bread turned out and would consider making it again in the future. Next week's bread is Corn Bread! For those who haven't read my earlier post about the BBA Challenge, this group has taken on the challenge of baking every bread in this great book written by Peter Reinhart on a schedule of about one bread per week. I will post the schedule I am following and invite any IFF readers to join me as we develop our bread baking skills. We have decided that we will bake the 43 main bread recipes in the book, not taking on all the many variations of each. You can join me at any time during this challenge, the only requirement being that you have your own copy of the book as I cannot share recipes from the book as it would in fact be copyright infringement. Here is the schedule I will be following in the upcoming weeks if you want to bake along with me. Corn Bread Cranberry Walnut Celebration Bread English Muffins Focaccia August  The Bread Sliced ~ Only A Faint Cinnamon Swirl Is Visible  My Cinnamon Walnut Loaves Cooling On My Window Sill To order this book simply click on the photo below!
 July 13th, 2009 Deborah Mele
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I think you have to roll it out bigger than PR says in order to see the swirl.
I love your website.
It will be the first strike of bloggers ever!
On July 14, 2009, Italian bloggers will muzzle themselves in the Web as well as in Piazza Navona in Rome, at 7PM where they will meet to protest against an Italian government bill (the Alfano decree) introducing a number of new rules which will limit the freedom of expression in Italian internet. The so-called "obligation to rectify" imposed to the manager of an information site (blogs, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc) clearly appears to be a pretext. In fact such imposition, in termsof bureaucratization of the net- work and of very heavy penalties for users, shall make of the new decree an internet-killer. The practical effects shall be to cause the independent sites and blogs to cease or materially reduce their publications. The apparent intent of introducing criteria of responsibility hides the attempt to make life difficult or impos- sible for bloggers and users of shared sites (for example: You Tube...)
The fact is that bloggers are already entirely liable, from a penal standpoint, in the event of crimes such as insults, defamation etc: there is no need to introduce unbearable penalties for "citizen-journalists" who do not intend to submit themselves to the bureaucracy and the burdens contemplated in the Alfano decree. The plurality of information, regardless of the media, internet, newspapers, radio and tv networks etc, is a fundamental right of men and citizens, on which democracy and freedom are based. The Alfano decree is an attack to the freedom of all media, from the major newspapers to the smallest blog. For this reason we invite all Italian blogs and sites to a day of silence, in the day in which newspapers and tv networks will also remain silent. It is a mes- sage of all operators in the media world, who jointly shout to the political world: "we don not want to be gagged". We therefore invite all citizens with a blog or a site to publish this logo and mantain it for the entire day of July 14 next. Defending the press, the tv and radio networks, the journalists and the Web, we firmly defend the basic freedom of information and the future of our democracy.
Alessandro Gilioli Guido Scorza Enzo Di Frenna
Read more at Divina Cucina
Kristen Dine&Dish