The Baking Bible: Swedish Apricot Walnut Bread

This week's project was the Swedish apricot Walnut Bread--a little loaf chock full of raisins, walnuts, and apricots with a slight hint of rye. This bread is meant to be served with a cheese course but it is still delicious with a healthy slather of butter.   
 

I have made bread only a couple of times, and I missed last month's Panettone, so when I saw this week's project was BREAD I took a deep breath and read the recipe 1000 times. I have made a bread similar to this (Whole Wheat Bread with Golden Raisins and Pecans) and it was a bit of a bust, as the bread was pretty dense due to serious user's error. So I was determined not to fudge it up.


First up: make the biga. Now, I only know what a biga is because the Alpha Bakers needed to make a biga for the panettone, and I read as many of the baker's blog posts as I could. Basically it is a blob of flour, yeast, and water that hopefully sits around in the fridge for 72 hours to develop depth of flavor. This biga had equal parts pumpernickel and bread flour. I couldn't find pumpernickel, but I did find dark rye flour and used it instead. Mark kept pulling the biga out of the refrigerator and asking, "what is this??" as if he was hoping he could throw it away. Sadly, my biga never really got bubbly and doubled, so I suspect my yeast is on the way out. I used the biga anyway.

bribe the baby with puffs so the biga can get made!

Next up: make the dough. Walnuts are toasted and skinned and set aside. The biga is cut into pieces and plopped into the mixer with a bit of water. Then more bread flour, salt, and yeast are added and the KA goes to town kneading the dough. Golden raisins and walnuts are kneaded in and then the dough is ready for the first rise.

I noticed that many Alpha Bakers rose their panettone dough in the microwave with a cup of boiling water (Rose suggests this in the back of the Baking Bible) so that's what I did, too. It worked like a charm.

The next step is to degas the dough and give it another rise. Rose gives the option to do the second rise overnight in the refrigerator, so that is what I decided to do.

The next morning the dough had only risen about halfway to doubled so I left it in there to continue doing its thing. And it continued to sit at halfway to doubled all day. By that evening I was a little panicky so I asked the Alphas what they thought was going on. Thankfully many of them told me that their dough didn't rise much in the refrigerator and so I toned down my panic and went to bed. Yes, my dough ended up spending 48 hours in the fridge.

The next day I pulled the dough out in the morning to come back to room temperature. Then around lunch time I bribed the child with the ruler so I could shape the dough, add the unsulphered apricots and leave it for a final rise. Then a couple of hours later I preheated  the oven, and an hour later I finally popped the bread into the oven. I would never call the Swedes a relaxed mellow people, but this bread certainly seemed it as it didn't care how off the schedule I was.

never doubt the power of the ruler

The bread emerged from the oven with a nice thin, crisp crust. Mark was very sad to hear we had to wait 4 hours before we could eat it. When we did cut into it, it revealed a very fruity and nutty inside. The bread didn't seem like a dense mass like that Whole Wheat etc bread was, but honestly there's not a ton of bread to fruit and nuts. That could be due to my possibly dying yeast, but who knows. We enjoyed the bread that night with butter, the next morning toasted with more butter, and later that afternoon with thin slices of cheddar (the only cheese we had in the house). A good bread, and really pretty easy to make. It feels nice to have put the ghost of the dense bread behind me.