Yeast

When it comes to holiday and festival breads, the varieties and secret family recipes are endless. But when broken down to their basic components, they are pretty much variations on a theme. This is especially evident in the various Greek breads. Artos is the general name for Greek celebration breads, but they are given particular names and twists and turns for specific festivals. It is the twists ands turns that make the breads special, bringing visual drama, history, and family tradition into the process. For instance, the color of the fruit is different for Christmas breads than for Easter since Christmas is a festival of incarnation, while Easter is a festival of resurrection and transformation. The breads are often brought to church by home bakers, blessed by the priest, and then brought to the table or given to the needy. I love the designs of the nativity christopsomos, with its bread-dough cross laminated on top of a round loaf and of the Easter egg–braided lambropsomo, also called tsoureki (a Turkish variation). The orange and brandied vassilopita, served on New Year’s Day in honor of Saint Basil, always has a gold coin hidden in it, not unlike the three kings cake of New Orleans and Spanish cultures. The following master formula can be used as the base for any of these breads, and some specific holiday variations follow. The formula uses a wild-yeast starter, along with a spiking of commercial yeast, to create an authentic-tasting, yet manageable, bread. Nowadays, most versions are made completely from commercial yeast, but this is only a recent innovation. If you do not have any barm on hand, you may replace it with an equal amount of poolish. The fermentation and proofing times will remain the same.

Now that I live in New England again, after twenty-two years in California, I felt duty bound to revisit one of the great New England breads, anadama, and to come up with a definitive version. There are conflicting stories of the origin of the name. Judith and Evan Jones, in their wonderful The Book of Bread, tell the story of a Rockport, Massachusetts, man who was upset with his wife not only for leaving him, but also for leaving behind only a pot of cornmeal mush and some molasses. The angry husband tossed the mush and molasses together with some yeast and flour and muttered, “Anna, damn ’er!” This was later amended by the more genteel local Yankees, as they retold the story, to anadama. Sounds likely to me. Traditional formulas for this bread are usually given as a direct-dough method, but this version utilizes a soaker and a sponge to evoke more flavor from the grain. Corn is chock-full of natural sugars, trapped in the complex carbohydrate starch base, so any trick we can employ to break the sugars free can only improve the already wonderful flavor.

Get back to basics, and take pleasure in baking your own nourishing bread.

This tart with a lattice top is a real showstopper. Your guests’ eyes will light up when it’s brought to the table. Known as a torta rustica in Italy, versions are served around Easter in celebration of the season. The filling is traditionally spinach, though I’ve incorporated other greens for more contrast in flavors. Other versions can have sausage, eggplant, and peppers as the filling.

This is a very simple bread to make either at the campsite or at home. it requires no kneading, and is baked in a Dutch oven or clay baker. This bread’s flavor is developed through extended fermentation.

Cookbook author Joanne Weir is known for her flavor-packed Mediterranean-inspired food. Her book From Tapas to Meze shows the breadth of her Mediterranean influences. Here, Joanne shares a favorite pizza recipe that we adapted for grilling using a Tuscan grill that fits into the fireplace of her home in San Francisco. The bitter escarole on this pizza is balanced by the sweet pine nuts, creamy cheeses, and the salty olives. The dough for a grilled pizza needs a bit more structure from gluten to keep it from oozing through the grates of the grill, which is why this one is kneaded for a longer time than other pizza doughs.

Peter Reinhart is a well-known cookbook author; his Crust and Crumb, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, and Whole Grain Breads have been graced with prestigious awards. At Ramekins, where he occasionally teaches bread classes, Peter and I baked bread and pizzas together in the wood-fired oven after his last class. This recipe came from his The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It is an amazing formula that can be turned into baguettes, ciabatta, focaccia, and pizza. That baking session was about a lot more than the recipe. It was about the primary message of this book: joyfully cooking and sharing with others at the fire.

Though pita bread is made throughout the Middle East, we have come to identify it with Greece. When baking, it puffs up like a small balloon and then deflates when removed from the oven. This version has a bit of whole-wheat flour in it for extra nuttiness and added flavor. Make a batch or two ahead and freeze some to use later; these pita reheat easily. Try these filled with strips of roasted Mustard and Lemon Chicken (page 92) and topped with a dollop of Greek yogurt.

Coca is the Spanish version of pizza. Here, it is spread with my Smoky Romesco Sauce, a basic in the Spanish pantry. When topped with green onions, roasted potatoes, and sliced hard-cooked eggs, it is an edible canvas of the sunny colors and flavors of this part of the Mediterranean.

These stuffed flatbreads are shaped much like meat-filled galettes. Lamb is the meat of choice in many Mediterranean cuisines, and here it is combined with other key ingredients of the region—eggplant and pomegranate—along with the warm aromatics often used in Turkish cuisine.

Every baker has a favorite pizza recipe, and this one is mine. This is one of the easiest pizza doughs you can make, and it can be used for calzones, too.

It’s not always easy to find good sandwich bread, and when I need just one loaf I enjoy using the bread machine. I don’t bake it in the machine, because I don’t like the look of the loaf, but it’s neat and easy for mixing and rising. Here’s my formula, made in any standard-size machine.

Il Pane della Ninna Nanna (Lullaby Bread). Neither very sweet nor pizzalike in the flat, savory pie sort of way, this is a gold-fleshed, orange-perfumed cakelike bread that, if baked with care, will be tall and elegant, its crumb coarse yet light and full of the consoling scents of yeast and butter. Fabriziana is one of the several “middle” names of the Roman countess with whom I learned to bake the confection in the cavernous old kitchen of her villa that looks to the gardens of the Borghese. Ours were clandestine appointments, with our yeast and our candied orange peels and the tattered recipe book of her mother’s cook. You see, Fabriziana had never cooked or baked in her life, had never made anything from a pile of flour and a few crumbles of yeast. Forbidden in the kitchen as a girl, her adulthood has been always too fraught with obligations to permit interludes in front of the flames. But in the years we have been friends, she has always demonstrated more than a kind interest in my cooking, sitting once in a while, rapt as a fox, on an old wrought-iron chair in my kitchen as I dance about. And one day when I told her I was searching for a formula for an ancient, orange-perfumed Roman bread, she knew precisely where to find the recipe. Trailing off in some Proustian dream, she said she hadn’t thought of the bread in too many years, it having been her favorite sweet at Christmas and Easter. Once she even requested that it—rather than some grand, creamy torta—be her birthday cake. She told of poaching slices of it from a silver tray during parties and receptions, stuffing them deep into the pockets of her silk dresses to eat later in bed, after her sister was safely asleep, so she might share them only with her puppy. So it was that we decided to make the bread together. Wishing to avoid the chiding of her family and, most of all, her cook, we chose to do the deed on mornings when the house would be safe from them. It was wonderful to see Fabriziana at play. Flour and butter were forced under her long, mother-of-pearled nails, and her blond-streaked coif, mounted to resist tempests, soon fell into girlish ringlets over her noble brow. With a few mornings’ worth of trial, we baked Fabriziana’s lullaby bread, the bread of her memories. And once, on a birthday of mine, the countess came fairly racing through my doorway proffering a curiously wrapped parcel that gave up the telltale perfumes of our bread. The countess had learned to bake indeed.

To make the dough taste like more than just plain bread, I proof it for 8 hours. Once you start working with it, use a light touch. Overworking the dough makes it tough and hard to shape.

This was Daddy’s “I quit smoking” bread. When I was in high school, he stopped smoking for good. Being a man who was never still, he started looking for ways to occupy his hands other than smoking. He bought some of the first bread flour ever to hit the shelves in Monticello, Georgia, and started experimenting. He became known around town for his homemade bread, and often made loaves for bake sales and church suppers.