Glen Powell: So Judith, today we’re going to do bake some bread from your book.
Judith Fertig: Right.
Glen Powell: Okay, so, let’s start this through.
Judith Fertig: All right, well we’ve got a little bit of dough made here. This—the only four ingredients in this dough are flour, water, Instant or Bread Machine Yeast and salt. That’s it.
Glen Powell: Four ingredients.
Judith Fertig: Four ingredients and you can use four really wonderful ingredients, you can use organic flour, you can use spring water, you can use fleur de cell, all that kind of stuff or you could if you’re on a budget, you can use bag of grocery store flour, tap water, you know table salt.
Glen Powell: Just regular table salt?
Judith Fertig: It will still work and it will still be good.
Glen Powell: So I don’t have to buy a special flour, I can just use the all purpose —?
Judith Fertig: You can just use the all purpose, right. These are all the different shapes of breads that you can do. The round shape is called the ball. These are little rolls and you get this shape by you know, you just create a round of dough and then you cut this with scissors. So that is very easy. We have the baguette which is that one is a braided baguette. This is batard, you can also bake this dough in a loaf pan. So all kinds of—it can take all different kinds of shapes.
Glen Powell: Do you have to be terribly concerned about the shape?
Judith Fertig: No, what you do have to be concerned about is that you get the slashes especially in these dough—in these loaves that just go right on the baking sheet because they do have to—you know, it’s part of the design but it also, this part of the dough sort of blows out and it helps the bread bake more evenly.
Glen Powell: Okay.
Judith Fertig: So we’re going to do a field or a swirled loaf that you can then make into rolls. So I am just going to dust a little flour and take our dough out. Put this over here. Dust this with a rolling pin and what I love about this dough is that feels like a baby skin. So even though you are not kneading you still get that like ahhh, you know it’s relaxing kind of an activity.
So—and we’re just going to roll this and it your dough were sticking to this, you would use your dough scraper that just sort of go like this, help it along.
So we’re just going to roll this and I like to get excess flour off of it and I am just doing a little portion here, just to show you how it works okay.
Normally you would do this in a rectangle but if it becomes sort of an oval, that is okay too. This is a bread that is meant to be like rustic bread. To me it reminds of like a Labrador or a retriever, you know that your kids can play with and it’s the easy going dog and it’s kind of the same way with this dough.
Glen Powell: Okay.
Judith Fertig: You can do all kinds of fillings on this one. I am doing kind of a savory filling that would be great for the holidays for like you know if you’re having people or for wine, this is fig preserves and I like the fig with gorgonzola and you would just spread this over the dough.
You can also use pesto with sun dried tomato. You know anything that you can spread and put on this. You can very easily do so and we’re just going to do the gorgonzola, a couple crumbles. And this is yummy.
Glen Powell: So once you got the base dough recipe down?
Judith Fertig: Yeah.
Glen Powell: You can pretty much—
Judith Fertig: You can branch out every chapter in this book. It teaches you something new; a little something new.
Glen Powell: Okay.
Judith Fertig: So you’re doing a new technique or you are adding flavorings to the dough. You are learning a different shape. You can make bagels, Montreal bagels by the end of the book. You can make French croissants. So—
Glen Powell: So you start at the beginning—
Judith Fertig: Yeah.
Glen Powell: And just slowly ramp up your skills at.
Judith Fertig: Slowly ramp it up. Okay, so I’m just going to roll this you know. So you could see it’s very easy to do and what you want to do with this bread is if there is a seam down here, you want to pinch that closed because if you don’t all this filling is going to go out and then I like to turn this over and you see you have a seam right here and so you just want to pinch that close. Okay, so what we have here is a small batard.
Glen Powell: Okay.
Judith Fertig: And then you would put the slashes down here. If sort of like this one only, that is a larger one. If I wanted to make this into rolls, I would just slice these into rolls and then turn this up and you would see the spiral in the roll. Just like our cinnamon rolls over there.
So, and then different fillings, you could apricot and pistachio, a cinnamon filling, all kinds of different things and it’s a very easy way to customize the bread. That is one of the things that—about this book. I encourage people to use this as a blueprint and customize it as to what you like.
Glen Powell: And it also teaches people to, ‘bread isn’t scary.’
Judith Fertig: No. It’s not scary at all. Bread is your friend.
Glen Powell: Well yeah and then I mean it doesn’t—if you start with this book, you don’t really need to have any special skill.
Judith Fertig: No you don’t. No, again you could start if you bake brownies before from a mix you can do this.
Glen Powell: To make the bread.
Judith Fertig: Yeah you can do this.
Glen Powell: Well, thank you very much
Judith Fertig: Well, thank you Glen.
Glen Powell: Nice to meet you.
Judith Fertig: Nice to meet you.
Glen Powell: Hope everybody enjoys the book.
Judith Fertig: Yeah.
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