The Bread Bible Week 1: Brinna’s Pugliese

This week I’m baking Brinna’s Pugliese from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible. This is a dough that requires a biga started at least 6 hours before, so it’s not a dough I often feel I have time for. But as luck would have it, I was flipping through the book yesterday afternoon, which gave me plenty of time!

I started my biga around 4pm on Sunday, which meant getting it into the refrigerator at 10pm. It was then ready to start step 2 on Monday morning!

One of the things I love about rustic hearth breads is that, while they may take a lot of time to rise or ferment, each individual step is very short in hands-on time. That was true for this bread as well. It was easy to fit each step into my day around a toddler, which is always important!

We ate much of the loaf as egg salad sandwiches and all enjoyed it! The addition of rye flour gives the dough a little extra depth over an all white loaf. Unfortunately, while I might have an appreciation for the crusty ends of hearth breads, the small child does not, so this might not be a bread we put into our regular rotation. But it was a fun one to try!

Baking through Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible

 Sean and I have been baking for years. When we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, we primarily did sourdough because it was so simple to get it right! Then we moved to Colorado, and struggled with finding the right balance with our sourdough starter. But, we started turning to The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum more often. We found that even at altitude, her recipes come out well very reliably!

Fast forward a couple years. We stopped baking as much after the Munchkin was born, because who has time for bread when you’re working and taking care of a baby?

Fast forward some more to spring 2020. Like much of the nation, we were home and grocery stores were seeing shortages. We started baking again as a way to provide for our family and bring some regularity to the week (Mondays became sandwich bread days, Fridays became challah days.) This continued until January 2021, when I got pregnant with #2 and nausea set in so badly that I couldn’t stand to be anywhere near the kitchen. 

Well, after months of pregnancy nausea, I can finally cook and bake again! Some things still trigger the gag reflex (Sean is still in charge of any raw meat) but I’ve been able to find joy in baking again! Munchkin enjoys it too, since he’s now at the perfect age to help stir with lots of supervision. Since we’re baking regularly again, I thought I’d try doing a series I’ve thought about for ages, and bake my way through The Bread Bible. Rose Levy Beranbaum has so many amazing recipes here, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of this book! My goal with this series is to try a different recipe each week, photograph and write about it. Hopefully this will be a good way to take notes as I bake, and maybe act as a review of her delicious recipes.

Happy baking!