Chocolate Babka with cinnamon and spice

I typically don't bake sweets.  I'm not big on cakes, pies or cookies.  Not on baking them, not on eating them.

Well, my blueberry yogurt cake is a little sweet, but you know what I mean.

Anyhoo.  My office is hosting a bake-off this Friday, and entries must be sweet.  I brainstormed with Mr. Bread Maiden about making the blueberry yogurt cake, since it's super easy and I would have to make this thing on a weeknight.  He said that wasn't special enough.  So instead, I came up with this: chocolate babka.

I've never made one before, but Peter Reinhart has a recipe in Artisan Breads Every Day, and the man has never steered me wrong.

Also, one of my favorite baking blogs, Smitten Kitchen, made a beautiful babka pattern that I've been itching to try.

For two bread-pan-sized loaves, you will need:

For the dough:
2 Tbs instant yeast
¾ cup milk, warmed
6 Tbs/85 g melted butter
6 Tbs/85 g sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 egg yolks
3 1/3 cups/425 g flour (all-purpose or bread flour)
1½ tsp salt

For the filling:

170 g cold semisweet chocolate (chips, chunks, or chopped)

50 g cold dark chocolate with chili powder
¾ tsp cinnamon (more if you like)
¼ cup/57 g cold butter, cut into small pieces

For the glaze:

1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup hot water

1. Mix the yeast and milk in a small bowl; set aside.

2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar.  add the vanilla to the eggs and then add them one at a time to the butter and sugar mixture.  Then add the flour until it is the consistency of bread crumbs.

Add the yeast and milk and knead the dough for five minutes on medium speed.

3. Let the dough rest for about ten minutes, then transfer to a large oiled bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place for 2 hours.

4. While the dough is rising, prepare the filling.  Using a food processor, pulse the chocolate until it is very fine.

Add the cinnamon, then the cold butter until it almost comes together.

I didn't have enough regular chocolate so I added some chili powder chocolate.  I was hoping it would give the bread a tiny kick but you really can't taste it.

 Transfer the chocolate to a small pyrex bowl and microwave until melted, about one minute.

Peter Reinhart says to spread the chocolate onto a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet, then refrigerate the chocolate until it is firm.  But Deb Perelman doesn't have you refrigerate the chocolate, and I think next time I'll skip that step.  I think it would roll easier if it were melted.

5. When your dough has risen about 1 1/2 times its original size, place it on a clean, floured counter and cut it in half.  

Roll one half into a large rectangle, then spread the filling into a thin film on the dough.  Carefully roll the dough up, then cut it straight down the middle using a pastry scraper.

 

 

 

This method of braiding the babka is Israeli in origin and called a Krantz cake. 

6. Spread out your two halves next to each other, pinching one set of ends together.  Carefully braid the two halves together so the layers of chocolate and dough are visible.  When you are done, pinch the bottom ends together.  Transfer the dough to a bread pan lined with parchment paper.

7. Repeat steps #5 and #6 with the second half of dough.

8.  When your dough have risen to about the top of your bread pan, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.  Generously brush your sugar glaze over the top of each loaf.  Bake the loaves for 20-25 minutes, then rotate and continue baking until each is a deep, deep brown.

 9. Remove loaves from the oven and let cool in the bread pans for about 10 minutes, then remove to a cooling rack.  Slice when the loaves have completely cooled.

Fingers crossed, guys!  The bread tastes like angels singing, but it's pretty understated as far as sweets go.

The Science Behind... Baking, Part II

Hey everyone!

I decided to break the baking science post into two posts so it's not information overload.  In the first post, I touched on the following questions:

1. What is baking?
2. What does the yeast do when it's baked?  What does baking powder/baking soda do?
3. What does the gluten do?
4. What does the water do?

In this post, I'll cover:

5. What is oven spring?
6. What temperature should I bake my bread at?
7. How can I get a hard/soft crust?
8. How will I know when my bread is done baking?

Ok, let's go!
 
5. What is oven spring? It's the moment you've been waiting for - oven spring!  This is probably the most exciting part of the whole baking shebang.  The bread puffs up until the yeast are exhausted or the crust hardens, preventing it from puffing anymore.

Sometimes you want to control how the dough puffs up during oven spring.  This is called scoring - creating a pleasing pattern in your baked loaf by cutting into the dough with a knife or razor blade, creating a pleasing pattern.   Scoring creates weak points in the gluten net that will expand more than other areas.

The bread puffs up during baking because the yeast go crazy with the high temperature in the oven.  The process of yeast eating the sugars and burping out carbon dioxide gets faster and faster the hotter and hotter it gets, until at a certain temperature the yeast all die off.

If your dough is really high hydration and you can't score it, the bread will have uneven oven spring - which can give your bread a very rustic look.

Often if you don't get enough oven spring, it's the result of too low an oven temperature, or lack of good gluten formation.  The temperature of your oven needs to be hot enough that the yeast go into a frenzy and release bubbles of carbon dioxide before the crust gets too hard.  375 degrees F is about the lowest you can go and still get oven spring.  Too little oven spring could also mean that you didn't have enough gluten formation in your dough - the carbon dioxide was able to escape because your gluten net was faulty.  This results in a dense loaf of bread.

Another symptom of poor gluten formation is if you get a big bubble right under the crust.  This means your small carbon dioxide bubbles were able to amass and attempt to escape the dough - until the crust hardened and trapped the now very large carbon dioxide bubble.

6. What temperature should I bake my bread at?  First, let's talk a little bit about heat.

When bread is baked, it is exposed to two kinds of heat: convection and conduction.  The first, convection, is created by the oven.  The oven heats up the air all around the dough.  This type of heat causes the crust to harden.  Conduction is heat transfer through whatever hot surface the dough is placed on.   Exposure to a hot surface causes the heat to move into the interior of the dough, activating the yeast to produce lots of carbon dioxide.

Here's the problem bakers face: you need both convection and conduction to occur to get good oven spring (big holes!) and a crispy crust.  HOWEVER:  if your oven is really hot (needed for crispy crust), the crust will harden before the dough is done expanding.  In order to get lots of oven spring, you want conduction to be the key player FIRST, then allow convection to give you a crispy crust.  Bakers have lots of tricks for doing this.  Most commercial kitchens have a steamer oven that injects moist steam into the oven to prevent the crust from hardening too early.  Home bakers have improvised all kinds of ways to inject steam - pouring water into a baking sheet at the bottom of the oven, throwing ice cubes in there, using a sprayer bottle to spray the crust with water, etc.

My favorite method is the dutch oven method, shown here starting at 2:55.

Here's how it works.

When you preheat the oven, allow the dutch oven (covered) to warm up inside the oven.

Then, when the oven is ready, transfer your dough to the dutch oven and put the lid back on.  Bake, covered, for 25-30 minutes.

Then remove the lid and continue cooking for another 15-20 minutes or until the bread is done (see #8).  The dutch oven creates a smaller space for air to circulate, and it traps the water that leaves the dough during baking, creating its own steamer and keeping the outside of the dough moist while oven spring is occurring.   Then, when you remove the lid, convection can occur, creating a crusty crust.


7. How can I get a soft crust/hard crust? There are a few ways to control the type of crust you get.  Most importantly, the temperature of your oven is a big factor.  A cooler oven will result in a softer crust.  A hotter oven, a crustier crust.  Most enriched doughs are baked around 375 degrees F, while baguettes and other crusty breads are baked between 450-550 degrees F.

Not all doughs will result in a crispy crust, though.  You need lots of gluten formation, which means you want to remove all dough softeners like milk, eggs, butter, fat, and oil.  You also want to remove anything that might burn in high heat, such as raisins or bacon.  

If you are looking for that soft crust, you can also brush the top of the loaf with butter, water, egg wash or milk to keep it moist while the dough is baking.

Keep in mind when you are going after that soft crust that, due to the lower temperature of the oven, you won't get large holes in the crumb. 


8. How do I know when my bread is done baking?  There are three ways to tell your (yeast) bread is ready, with varying degrees of accuracy.  I'll get to quick breads in a second.

• First, taking your bread's temperature.  A bread that is done baking will register an internal temperature of 190-200 degrees F.  This is the most accurate measure of whether a bread is done baking.

• Second, giving your bread a big ol' thump with your fingernail.  If your bread sounds hollow, it's done baking.  This also gives you a chance to feel the crust and see if it's nice and crusty.  If your fingernail can push into the loaf, it's not done yet.  Even a soft crust should feel hard at this point (it'll soften as it cools).

• Third, looking at the loaf to see if the outside is nice and golden brown.  This is the least accurate of your three options, since a brown crust is not always an indicator that the inside of the loaf is cooked through.  But it works when you are checking on the dough through the oven door.  

If you are making a quick bread using baking powder or baking soda (such as biscuits, banana bread, muffins, or Irish soda bread), doing a fingernail thump is out of the question because the dough isn't as airy as a yeast dough and the crust doesn't get as hard and crusty.  So you will have to rely on three different techniques to determine doneness.

• First, take its temperature.  Again, bread that registers between 190 and 200 degrees F is done.

• Second, the toothpick test.  This is probably the test for doneness that most people are familiar with.  Using a wooden toothpick, stick it into the middle of the loaf (or as close as you can get), then draw it out.  If the batter sticks to the toothpick, it's not done yet.

•  Third, pressing down on the top of the loaf.  This is different from the fingernail thump, since quick breads don't typically develop a hard crust or sound hollow.  But they should feel solid to the touch, not mushy.  

At this point, you've had a lot of science thrown your way.  In order to make it simpler to understand, I created this (sorta scientific) chart.

To read it, start from the lowest time and temperature (when you put your bread into the oven) and work your way up.  Hopefully this clarifies how each step and ingredient work together to create bread.

In researching this post, I found a website on bakery technology that is awesome.  If you feel the need for an even deeper dive into baking, click on the link.

That's it!  The science behind baking.  There's only one more post left ... the science behind cooling and staling.  Stay tuned!

The Science Behind... Baking, Part I

Hey everyone!

At this point, we are almost done covering the science behind the baking process.  Now, we get to the most exciting part of all: baking!

In this post I will cover:

1. What is baking?
2. What does the yeast do when it's baked?  What does baking powder/baking soda do?
3. What does the gluten do?
4. What does the water do?

In the next post, I will cover:

5. What is oven spring?
6. What temperature should I bake my bread at?
7. How can I get a soft crust/hard crust?
8. How do I know when my bread is done baking?

Ok, let's get started!

Wait!  First I must confess: this post was a bear to research.  Sometimes I felt like giving up.   I spent a lot of time thinking about how best to present all the information I had found, and how deep to go into the science.  I didn't want to under- or overestimate my readership.  That's why I finally decided to split this post into two parts.  That way it's not information overload, but it also keeps everything that is important for understanding the baking process.

Now we can continue.

1. What is baking?  When we talk about baking, we are talking about two main things: 1) the crust solidifies and gets brown and crusty.  2) the dough puffs up and the interior solidifies around big holes.

But you probably knew that already.  What is baking really?

Baking is the chemical and physical processes whereby a dough solidifies into bread using heat.  During the baking process, the yeast get all frenzied from the heat, release carbon dioxide bubbles, and then die off.  The gluten proteins surrounding the gas bubbles coagulate around the bubbles, leaving air pockets. Gelatinization of starches, and water being removed from the surface of the dough, cause a hard brown crust to form.

That's my quick and dirty definition of baking.  But there's so much more to explore.  I'll admit, this is the part of the process that required the most research on my part.  There is so, so much going on during baking, more than I could ever include here.  If you want to learn more, at the end I've included a link to a website that was helpful to me, and it goes into much more detail about the various chemical reactions taking place during baking.  
 

2. What does the yeast do when it's baked?  What does baking powder/baking soda do? As I mentioned in Question #1, yeast DIES when it gets baked.

Ok, let me back up for a second.  Yeast is a single-celled organism that eats the sugars in the dough and releases carbon dioxide gas as a waste product.  This carbon dioxide causes dough to rise.  Have you ever noticed that when you let a dough rise in a warm place, it rises faster?  Or that if you put a dough in the refrigerator, it doesn't rise at all?  That's because heat causes the yeast to digest sugar, release carbon dioxide and reproduce more quickly.

 If you get a chance, check out Alton Brown's clips on baking, where he demonstrates the yeast life cycle using sock puppets!

At the beginning of the baking process, that is exactly what the yeast does - as the dough rises in temperature, the yeast's life cycle gets faster and faster.  Eventually, when the internal temperature of the dough reaches 130 degrees F, the oven is too hot and the yeast get killed off.  Which is why oven spring (more on that later) only occurs in the first part of the baking process. 

What about baking soda and baking powder?  Unlike yeast, which are living organisms, baking powder and baking soda are made up of mostly sodium bicarbonate, a chemical.  When mixed with an acid such as vinegar or yogurt and heated, the sodium bicarbonate releases carbon dioxide just like the yeast.  However, because the process is nearly immediate, there is no time for gluten proteins to form.  We'll talk about why this is important in Question #3. 


3. What does the gluten do?  Oh my goodness, I feel like a broken record when I talk about gluten.  As you might remember, gluten is formed when two proteins, glutenin and gliadin, mix with water to form long protein strands.  These strands stretch around your dough, creating a taut net that holds the dough together and traps the carbon dioxide bubbles being released by the yeast.  No gluten formation = no airy holes in your bread.

During baking, these gluten strands coagulate and solidify, much like egg whites coagulate when they are cooked.  In fact, that is a good mental picture for the gluten coagulation - think of a fried egg white cooking in the pan, slowly going from liquid to solid form.  This is what gives bread its chewy texture.  In the same way that egg whites can get rubbery, high protein flours like bread flour or all-purpose flour create breads that are chewier than breads made with whole wheat flour or that include gluten softeners like fats.

Quick breads made with baking powder or baking soda must be baked quickly because the chemical reaction between sodium bicarbonate and acid is almost instantaneous.  Therefore, no gluten really develops (nor would we want it to - most quick breads are prized for their tenderness and would be ruined by gluten's chewiness!).  These breads tend to be dense because they lack the gluten proteins necessary to coagulate around the carbon dioxide to create air bubbles.  Instead, these types of breads often rely on EGG protein to coagulate and create the loaf's structure.

4. What does the water do?
 This is really interesting- I had no idea the role water plays in successful bread baking.  I used to think that oven spring (more on that in Question #5) was caused by water in the dough boiling and releasing steam, but I now know that that is not the case - the bread doesn't ever get hot enough (212 degrees F) for the water within the dough to boil.  It does have a role in oven spring, just not how I thought!

Instead, the water does four different things over the course of the baking process.

• First, about 5% of the water at the surface of the dough is released as steam.  By using my dutch oven technique detailed in Question #6, you can trap some of the steam, keeping the surface of your dough moist to maximize oven spring.

• Second, the starch in the dough (basically, the sugars) starts absorbing lots of the water in the dough in response to the heat.  Where does the starch get the water?  From the gluten strands, of course!  As the dough bakes, the proteins "denature," releasing some of their water content.  This causes the gluten strands to become rigid.  

• Then, around 122-140 degrees F, the starch molecules burst, releasing their gel (remember, they've sucked up lots of water) in between the gluten strands.  Where the starch proteins were originally well-structured, the gelatinization process causes them to lose their structure.  This gel includes amylase and amylopectin glucose molecules, two of the elements responsible for the browning (also the staling) of the crust.  

• Finally, when the surface of the dough has released most of its water to the dry air in the oven, the amylase molecules, proteins and amino acids from the flour are able to react to the heat to form the browned crust.  So in a sense, at this stage it is the ABSENCE of water that makes the difference.

So this is the end of The Science Behind...Baking, Part I.  For Part II, go here.

In researching this post, I found a website on bakery technology that is awesome.  If you feel the need for an even deeper dive into baking, click on the link.

I hope you enjoyed this very detailed look at baking.  The next post, on cooling and staling, will be shorter, I promise!