My regular bread requires little effort. In fact it allows me the luxury of rolling out of bed at 9am and still having fresh made-from-scratch bread on the table in time for lunch. It’s a recipe that my mother-in-law has been using for years and it’s pretty fool proof. The best part is that it still tastes delicious. Either make it in a bread pan or just pop on a baking tray for a more rustic look.

Bread

Bread

However, every cook likes to experiment and when I received a book titled “Artisan Baking” (by Maggie Glezer) for Christmas I couldn’t wait for our house to warm up enough (remember the stories of no upstairs heating, in fact you were pretty much sure to freeze if you moved more than 1/2 a meter from the wood stove) to try some of the recipes. Now spring has defiantly sprung (it’s 28oc out today) and so has my experimental side.

So what is Artisan (Artisanal) Bread, I hear you ask? According to the dictionary (quoted in the book also), “artisan” refers to a person working in a skilled trade or a craftsman. However, like me, Maggie Glezer wasn’t happy with this unclear definition and hence polled several well-respected bakers. The only conclusion that can be drawn from their varied responses is that for bread to be considered “artisan”, at least one part of its production must be performed by hand and it must be of good quality!

Being overly ambitious Cameron and I took a very big jump in at the deep end with our first attempt at artisan bread – a rustic baguette. The fact that the recipe called for 2 different starters should have been enough to warn us off. We tried and I must say we didn’t completely fail. We ended up with a rustic baguette that was cooked to the point where it may have made a reasonably good baseball bat. Overcome the crust, however, and the bread had a delicious flavor.

Attempt number two – Royal Crown’s Tortano! We’d bought one of these delicious breads at the farmer’s market last weekend and I was keen to make my own. The bread is flavored with honey (syrup in my case since we didn’t have any honey) and potato. It only has the teeniest tiniest amount of yeast yet rises to an enormous size with lots of careful handling and attention. It takes approximately 19 HOURS to make this bread – don’t worry there is only about 30mins of active work… just make sure to plan ahead.

Tortano

Tortano 2

For lunch today we cut the bread into thick slices and smothered it with butter and English mustard… between the two chucks we sandwiched slices of gammon and fried eggs. On hind-sight I should have taken a photograph but I’m afraid they were munched before I even had time to contemplate the idea.

Tags: artisan bread, baguette, baking, cooking, eggs, gammon, maggie glezer, recipe, tortano

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 12:10 pm and is filed under day to day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.