pain á l'ancienne and au thé

the bread I bake this week had two reasons. First one, as my last post said, I propose to bake this month a bread with tea, with any kind of tea and any kind of technique.

I am a user of El foro del pan, a spanish bread forum. I read and check it frequently because you can find anything about bread and its ingredients, techniques, etc, and you can find there people who knows quite a lot about bread and they are always up to help you. Highly

recommended. This week one of the users propose to everybody bake this famous and nice bread, pain á l'ancienne. I have to admit that it is one of my favorites and you can see it in this blog very often, as Lidia is a big fan as well.

So I decided to join both proposals in one and I bake this pain á l'ancienne with tea. I used both same ingredients and technique that Ibán asked in his post (click here to check it out):

565 g strong flour

11 g salt

15 g fresh yeast (slightly more than Ibán recipe)

455 g cold water

And now my modification, simple anyway. I added a tea bag in the cold water and left it there for 10 min. As the water was cold, the final result was a very light brown water. I didn't want to add a strong tea flavor to the bread, but more some back light flavour.

I folded 4 times the dough waiting 10 minutes between each one. I have to say that the house was very warm, and by the time I put the dough in the fridge, this one had fermented some. Then I kept the dough for 48 hours in the fridge.

After those two days, I took out the dough (it had doubled in the fridge) and cut it in three pieces. Waited one hour before putting it in the oven, so the dough fermented again. Here you can see a picture of the dough before placed in the oven.

Oven at 250 celsius degrees for 12 minutes with a tray of water and then without of the tray at

190 degrees for another 20 minutes. I allowed the bread to cool down a few minutes in the oven off with the door open.

The result was a really nice bread, as usual pain á l'ancienne is. This time the only different was a very light tea flavor, not strong to be predominated but enough to taste that characteristic bitter flavor, but as I said just very light, so sweatiness was more predominated.

I am very happy in general with this bread but I am going to bake another one where the tea is a stronger flavor so we can really say it is a tea bread. So people, I want to see yours. Bring them on!

Tea

picture by Romain Guy

Ok lads, new year, same blog but with some news. As I said in the last post, Lidia visited me last week here in Belfast for a few days. We had a fantastic time and even if we didn't bake any bread we were talking about bread almost everyday.

I came with a idea to spark the blog this year. Each one of us is going to propose with an ingredient, a technique or a type of bread (or any other baked product) so the three of us (and anybody else who want to join us will be more than welcome) has to bake with that ingredient, technique, etc that month.

As I came with the idea, Lidia told me that I should be the first one. Fair enough. So for January I thought that it'd be a nice start use one ingredient that it is not very common in bread but I am sure all of us enjoy: tea. Like bread, tea is a whole world (and I'd say a whole universe in this country).

So let's start thinking in what are we going to bake. I will post mine during the weekend, it is already in the fridge. And Almudena and Lidia, I am looking forward to see what you will propose for the following months.