The Art of Baking Bread

It’s easy to take a twisty off of a bag of store bought bread. It’s easy making toast, or a sandwich. But what really goes into baking bread? I watched Katie, pastry chef at Erin’s Fine Foods bake bread from scratch. So let’s just say a lot of work goes into baking bread. Her pastries along with her breads are what are served at Erin’s Fine Foods in the North Hills area, and Erin’s Deli, downtown Pittsburgh.

This particular day, while working with Katie, I watched all the steps that went into her ciabatta bread. I also watched her place the dough into the bed pans and bake them in the oven. When they were finished, the top of each bread loaf was the perfect golden brown color.

With all the steps that go into preparing the bread dough, and with the baking – it takes a total of four hours. To get a jump on the day’s bread baking, Katie mixes the dough and leaves it in a big covered bucket overnight. Then she can put it into the large sheet pans of bread pans to bake.

But I particularly watched Katie go through the different steps for her ciabatta bread.

Step I – Katie put in the yeast, flour water, and olive oil and mixed the dough in the commercial mixer until it was smooth. Then she lets it ferment until the dough doubles in size.

Step 2 – The dough back into the mixer with more flour and salt and mixed until it doubles in size once again.

Step 3 – Katie sprays a large sheet tray, and then sprinkles it with corn meal before she spreads the dough on to the sheet tray. She makes sure that the dough is spread to the sides and leaves some air pockets in the dough. Then she places the sheet trays on the racks until the dough doubles in size again. When it is time, Katie places the trays in the oven and bakes the bread.

Let me just say that I have been to the downtown Deli and had a fantastic sandwich called The Woody. The sandwich has salami, capicola, roasted red peppers, sharp provolone cheese, arugula, balsamic aioli on ciabatta bread. Both the sandwich filling and the bread complimented one another.

Katie – your bread is amazing and so are you!