Bread Flour

This is a favorite bread, especially in the Midwest, where many people have Scandinavian roots.

This is the kind of loaf I like to have hot out of the oven to tear apart and dip in a brothy country-style soup. It’s crusty with large, bubbly holes. For the best flavor, use the overnight method. For the fastest results follow the same-day method. Note that there are two different methods for baking the bread. The crustiest loaf is achieved with Baking Method #1. However, lacking the tiles and rocks, Baking Method #2 is a good alternative.

If you’re a home baker who is interested in making crusty French bread, you will be pleased with the results when you bake the bread in a convection oven. Remember it is also important to have steam in the oven. I keep a pan of river rocks on the bottom rack in my oven and preheat them right along with the oven itself. For added crustiness I place a baking stone or unglazed tiles on the center rack in the oven. The tiles help to maintain an even, hot heat and to stabilize the oven temperature. I place the loaves on a dark, noninsulated rimless cookie sheet. Spraying water on the rocks creates a burst of steam essential for creating a crusty crust.

This delicious flat bread is great cut into 1- to 2-inch squares and served as an appetizer or cut into larger squares to accompany soups and salads. You can create tasty variations by trying different cheese combinations, such as Cheddar, Swiss, or Monterey Jack, or by changing the herbs to oregano and parsley, or chives and shallots.

This focaccia adds onions, olives, and dried tomatoes to the top. Cut into bite-sized pieces, it’s a great appetizer. The dough mixes most easily in a food processor.

Let’s clear something up right away: New York City isn’t the only place in the world to get decent, authentic bagels. The truth is, you can make bagels that are just as good at home, no matter where you live. They’re one of the simplest breads to make, requiring only flour, water, salt, yeast, and malt—and one secret ingredient: time (in the form of long, slow, cold fermentation). Any decent bagel shop knows this and uses an overnight method to stretch out the fermentation process, releasing all sorts of subtle flavors trapped in the flour. While bagel shops often use a type of high-protein flour not available to home cooks to achieve that distinctively chewy texture, regular, unbleached bread flour can also do the trick. The real key is to use a much lower percentage of water than is used for baguettes and other European hearth breads, producing a stiff dough that can stand up to a dunking in boiling water before going into the oven. More than any ingredient or other aspect of the method, this boiling step is what defines the uniqueness of the bagel. That said, bagels do usually feature one other distinctive ingredient: barley malt. While this may seem like an exotic, hard-to-find product, it’s actually commonly available at most supermarkets, usually labeled “barley malt syrup.” If you can’t find it, simply substitute an equal amount of honey. Your bagels might not have that malty flavor, but they’ll still be better than almost any bagel you can buy. One final note: If you like bagels but don’t want to set up the boiling operation for just six of them, feel free to double the size of the batch and bake enough to freeze for future use.

"I like to put these little doughnuts in a brown paper sack with a few shakes of powdered sugar and eat them straight out of the bag."—Ethan Stowell

This classic French bread is rich and slightly sweet, with a soft, golden crust and a yellow, buttery, cakey crumb. It is widely eaten in France – with coffee for breakfast, as a roll with dinner, or as a base for any number of desserts. At River Cottage, we like to toast brioche and serve it with a smooth chicken liver pâté and a little fruit jelly. Contrary to popular belief, as bread goes, brioche is pretty straightforward. The dough is very soft to handle though, so kneading in a stand mixer is easier. You can make and bake brioche all in one day, but it benefits from sitting overnight in the fridge – the very soft dough stiffens as it chills, making it easier to shape.

Whether they're freshly baked or toasted, I love these buns and bake a batch whenever it takes my fancy, leaving off the crosses if it isn't Easter. I also like to vary the dried fruit – a mix of chopped dates, cranberries, apricots, and cherries is particularly good.

These are great for sandwiches. Just split them in half, slather with some Dijon, pile on thinly sliced ham, and add a lettuce leaf.

Up until I was about 12 years old, my parents took my sister, Tracy, and me to Easter service at St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. The only way they could keep us in check during mass was by bribing us to be good and quiet with promises of post-church beignets at Café de Monde across the street. We'd get so excited about the prospect of massive quantities of sugar that we probably would have done pretty much anything to ensure we got beignets before going home. Mom was a bit of a stickler when it came to sweets; I mean, at our house, Raisin Bran® was considered toeing the line of junk food! So you can only imagine how amped up we were at the mere prospect of real, honest-to-goodness fried dough piled sky-high with a mountain of powdered sugar. Like good southern kids we were dressed to the nines—me in my blue blazer, khakis, and white oxfords, Tracy in her Easter dress—and Mom, like all the proper matriarchs, with an Easter hat perched on her head that has a wingspan of at least 18 inches. No sooner had the crispy-fried beignets arrived than our holiday best was coated in a dusting of white powder, as it was our tradition to see who could blow the snowy confectioners' sugar off of the mountain of beignets and onto the other the quickest. After we'd made a complete mess of ourselves, we'd get down to business and devour our crispy-fried beignets, still hot from the fryer and so amazingly tender.

Any leftovers would be great for breakfast.

A bâtarde is a loaf of bread that is slightly thicker but shorter than a baguette. This version gets nice texture and flavor from cooked wild rice. Be sure to cook and cool the rice before making the bread.

A French take on pizza, featuring tapenade, sliced Yukon Gold potatoes, and red pepper, as well as real imported Fontina.

Editor's note: To make your own sourdough starter, follow Beranbaum's instructions. This bread is as homespun as bread can get, using a stiff sourdough starter cultivated from wild yeast. It has a characteristic sourdough profile: tangy, complex flavor; thin, crisp crust; and springy moist crumb with uneven holes of moderate size. I love this small loaf because of the size of the whole slices when cut. Also, for those who may have just one banneton (dough-rising basket), I wanted to provide a recipe for just one loaf. A loaf of this size is ideal for two people for three days, with a few slices to share with anyone who comes by to visit. If your family is larger, you will want to double the recipe. Sharing the sourdough starter for bread is a time-honored tradition around the world. I got my first starter from Kurtis Baguley, a baker in San Francisco. And when my friend Angelica Pulvirenti asked me for a bread recipe to use on her boyfriend's boat, one that was easy and had good keeping qualities (so it wouldn't mold from the humidity), I gave her this recipe and some of my starter to make it. She was especially delighted because sharing a bread starter was a long-standing custom in a small village near Ragusa, Sicily, where she grew up. She said that her mother, at the end of baking day, always passed some of her unbaked bread dough to her friends. She loved the sense of community this imparted and is thrilled that she and I are continuing it. TIME SCHEDULE Stiff Sourdough Starter: minimum 13 hours, maximum 34 hours
Minimum Rising Time: about 9 hours
Oven Temperature: 475°F, then 450°F
Baking Time: 25 to 30 minutes

There's enough dough for one more pizza, so freeze the extra. The vital wheat gluten flour is high in protein and helps create a chewy crust. It's sold at some supermarkets and natural foods stores. Bread flour will also give great results.

In the late nineteenth century, the city of Czernowitz, known as the Vienna of Eastern Europe, was famous throughout Austria-Hungary for its tolerance, civic beauty, culture, and learning. Frequently renationalized over the last millennium, Czernowitz has passed through Romanian, Ottoman, and Austrian control and is now a Ukrainian city called Chernivtsi. At its cultural peak at the turn of the twentieth century, it was populated and governed by Jews from Poland, Russia, Austria, and Romania — it even hosted the first-ever Yiddish-language conference in 1908. Of course, World War II destroyed this idyll, and most of the city's Jews were deported to Auschwitz. This recipe for a classic European challah (pronounced "chern-o-vitzer") comes from the late Lotte Langmann. It is not terribly sweet or eggy, but it is generously enriched with oil. The Austrians traditionally use a four-stranded braid, but this dough holds its shape so beautifully during baking that it is a great choice for showing off any fancy shape. This has become one of my favorite challah recipes.

Inspired by the many delicious recipes I found for apple challah, I set out to create the most intensely appley version possible. I started with a sweet challah dough and crammed in as many apples as possible. To minimize surface area and hence excess apple juice, I cut the apples into very large chunks — I also like the distinctive and succulent way these show up in the baked bread. I avoided cinnamon, to let the apple flavor shine unencumbered, but finished off the bread with a sugared crust. After many tests, the final bread was such a favorite that tester Rita Yeazel worked on improving the method for days, determined to come up with an easier way to incorporate the apples. Because I wanted the apples' flavor to permeate the dough, I had wanted to add them during mixing, not shaping, but that meant a lengthy, messy, and difficult hand-knead. Now, thanks to her persistence, I roll out the dough after an hour of fermentation, when the dough is more extensible and is fairly soft, scattering the apples over it and folding the dough around them. Then, as the dough continues to rise, the apples become an integral part of it — and so the tedious hand-kneading phase is unnecessary. I suggest using Braeburn apples, which are easily available in most areas, have a good spicy flavor, and do not fall apart during baking; but you can substitute any favorite baking apple. This bread is wonderful for breakfast or with coffee. It also makes an enticing Rosh Hashanah centerpiece and a much-appreciated gift.