Dianna Wara of Washington, Ill., was the winner of Wednesday’s National Festival of Breads baking contest.
Contestants from around the country gathered in Wichita for the event sponsored by King Arthur Flour and the Kansas Wheat Commission. Watch the cute video.
Okay, so if you are a purist you might not like what I did to the Parmesan Olive bread recipe on the No-Knead Bread Variations page, since I cheaped out on some of the ingredients and still got a sort of astonishingly datable loaf of bread:
Cheap Thrills Olive Parmesan
First of all, I didn’t get the good parmesan cheese where you grate it up, mainly because I don’t even know if we have a cheese grater. I’m sure we do but as a rookie baker I’m still a visitor in the kitchen and my wife was at work so I just went with the oh-so-convenient perfectly sized 7 ounce plastic bottle of grated parmesan.
Probably not perfect but I had more shopping to do, and considering that the recipe describes this loaf as so wildly expensive that you would probably only bake it for a prospective mother-in-law while you were still trying to marry the girl, I was worried about how much the Kalamata olives were going to cost.
Sure enough when the HyVee helpful smile in every aisle person showed me where the olives were, the pricing was somewhat on the order of investor items. Something like gold futures. Like around 8 dollars a bottle.
I should mention that I’m a rookie shopper, too, when it comes to baking supplies (but really good at other essentials, like Power Bars and Gatorade). Your experienced cook/shopper, reading this (if they have managed to swallow their horror at what I have done already, and kept reading) will be thinking “Dear Hopeless Rookie, you should have looked for the bulk olives…”
It’s very possible that our HyVee had bulk olives but since:
- I didn’t have the recipe with me so I was worried that just the olives in this thing were going to cost a collection of essential appendages
- My wife had already told me she didn’t think she’d be into the olive bread
- She is also the budget chairperson
- It’s against the Man Laws to ask directions more than once a day
I went for (drum roll) the regular cheap black olives that you can get piled (lightly, darn it) on your sandwich at Subway.
Did I mention that I don’t like any other kind of olives anyway? Even Popeye’s girlfriend never really did it for me.
Or anyone else that I know, really.
In any case, the generic black O’s in a can still needed to be sliced in half, which makes a guy feel like he is sort of like, actually cooking, since he is touching some kind of food thing before heating it up, and (in this case) also resisted the temptation to just throw them in whole. Of course, cutting up the little slipperies means you get more olive effect for your 2/3 cup, so that paid off.
Ready to go. Here's your chance. Bring butter.
So, I saved probably 6 bucks on a loaf that I think the wife may like after all. Admittedly it’s not that big on olive-y flavor, due to the GIGO rule of computer programming, but it has that parmesano thing in a big way and I only wish you all could be here right now to have a slice.
A couple years ago I talked about my experience with baking bread in an outdoor grill. One solution to baking yourself out of your own home during the hot summer months. Recently, Breadtopia reader Marianne Preston posted a photo of her success using a Big Green Egg to accomplish the same thing. Since the bread looked so good, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind ellaborating on how she did it. Read her account below.
Thanks very much, Marianne. Great job!
Bread Baked in a Big Green Egg
My bread baking experiment in the Big Green Egg was only my 4th attempt at using the Egg. We had just bought it the previous week. It’s is pretty easy to regulate the temperature in the Egg once the Egg’s ceramic has had a chance to reach the appropriate cooking temperature. I’ve found that it’s best to start to close off the air entering the bottom damper door and the air going out the daisy wheel top as the cooker is approaching the correct temperature. It’s harder to reduce the temperature because the ceramic holds the heat so well. Even when you open the Egg to put in the bread or to remove the cloche, the temperature returns to baking temperatures within a couple of minutes (assuming the Egg is properly preheated)–without adjusting the damper door or the daisy wheel.
When baking in the Egg, it’s recommended that you use the Egg’s plate setter (http://www.biggreenegg.com/setters.html) or make your own version using firebrick. Here’s a link to the firebrick configuration:
http://www.nakedwhiz.com/firebricks.htm
The firebrick acts as an additional heat sink as well as a shield for the pizza stone which is placed on top of the brick. If you look closely at the picture I posted you might be able to see the way I had it set up.
I was aiming for a temperature of about 500F. I made the mistake of increasing the airflow after I loaded the bread into the Egg and the temperature crept up to 550F. Should have left it alone. I used no-stick aluminum foil under the loaf (Alcan Slide) instead of parchment paper. After 20 minutes, I removed my terracotta pot as well as the foil and baked for an additional 15 minutes. I should point out that this was a recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and was a smaller loaf than the ones you usually post on your site. I wanted to start “small”. 
The loaf was great although the bottom did get a little too dark, but I managed to scrape off the burnt parts. Next time I will try to leave the aluminum foil in place and/or try to keep the temperature at 500F.
From my experiment it looks like you bake the bread at the same temperatures as in the kitchen oven for about the same length of time. And, you pre-heat the pizza stone for about 30 minutes. Obviously, using a live fire is a little less precise and requires a little more attention, but I think it’s well worth the effort. I’ll certainly do it again.
Marianne
