Bread

My name is Robert Pandergast, I’m a chef from the west end of Prince Edward and I’m here today to do some workshops with artisanal bread in the old Acadian wood oven. Today I picked up a little bit of fresh beef, we’re just gonna season it just very lightly with a little bit of salt and a little bit of pepper. We’re gonna roast it by the edge of the fire while that wood burns a bit and then at a certain point we’re gonna pull the wood out and we’re gonna, we’re gonna pull the coals out that are there and we’re gonna hope for some heat enough to bake the bread. Somebody here is gonna be able to tell me some of the ingredients so I can get my recipe together I want to show you the dough, I don’t have to do very much with it I don’t have to knead it for very long. Vous voyez la pâte you can see, et j’ai mis des grains, j’ai mis des grains la dedans, c’était des grains de anis. La pâte c’était faite avec du seigle, avec du blé entier et le blé tamisé but there wasn’t any white, white, white flour, there’s no flour as white as your shirt went into this. It was something the flour I had the unbleached flour is a little bit lighter in color ok, so there was some salt for sure and there was some flour, there was some yeast, some water donc de l’eau. Levure aussi et levure et du sel et la farine, de l’eau. One thing for sure is you can put all kinds of different ingredients; you can put some egg in your bread if you want and some milk and other stuff, cream and if you wanted that would be very fat. Olive oil if you’re Italian or you’re trying to be Italian, but the truth that is you know, yeah that’s actually true the more stuff you put in the more money you’re putting in your bed and I’m a little bit cheap so I don’t want to put too much of that. What I really want is I really want flavour in my bread. J’aimerais que les saveurs soient intéressantes. Ok do you want to just touch it with your finger to see how it feels. We’re gonna put this in the oven so it’s a good time to get it out. Do you think it’s soft or it’s hard, soft, try it. See if you can leave your fingerprint in it like that.

What’s on top, white flour?
That’s just the unbleached flour the same stuff I use to make the dough. Ok so clear out the oven here. Yeah, yeah and we’re not gonna leave many coals inside. So now I want to show you what I would do with this. See it’s ready; it’s swelled up even more than we first thought about it. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna put it on the sheet band because we need to put it on something and the floor of this oven is a little bit too, a little too dirty at the beginning, if that floor was a little flatter I could sweep it out. All right here, then what I’m actually gonna to do is just kind of tuck the ends in a little bit; just straighten them out a bit. You don’t usually want too many small pieces sticking out you don’t want it to burn in one spot or the other. I’m just gonna flatten it a little bit so to keep its shape.

You just use flour, you don’t use any shortening.
No. The exception is that when I put it I use no fat in the dough at all. When I put it inside of here I put some olive oil in my hand and I rubbed it on the inside of the plastic container and I tip the dough into there and then I clean out the other bowl that I was using to mix and the reason I did that mostly was for convenience but with olive oil I find that the flavour is nice too and it keeps it at ease, it’s very very easy to handle then. What I’m gonna do I’m gonna cut something on top of it that’s gonna keep it, just gonna cut a few holes in it from going from one side or the other when it starts to grow. You have to be careful, here we go. And I think we’re gonna be ready to take our chances here it’s still pretty hot inside but it’s gonna be about 20 minutes I think and a little bit more than 20 minutes and we’ll have a nice pretty dark brown, you know very dark brown loaf of bread. We’ll see in a few minutes then it’ll start to grow a little bit more. We’re gonna break the rolls now because mammy always told me that you can’t cut the bread too soon after it comes out of the oven but we’re gonna give this one a try. I’m thinking that it turned out pretty well. More juice for those who want it, you’ll see how it tastes there. Voilà, bon appétit.

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Bread