It's been such a busy two weeks that even though I have been doing a fair amount of cooking, I haven't felt like blogging much. This was one of the quietest weekends I have had in months so, here we go!
I am not a huge fan of olives. I love olive oil, of course, but I really don't care for the taste and mouth-feel of olives in general. A little chopped Kalamata is nice over a cucumber/tomato salad and a couple of Castelvetranos are tasty as part of an appetizer, but I won't just snack on black olives and I really don't want them on my pizza! Yet when I saw this recipe, I really, really wanted to make it. No idea.
Here's the cast--I did decide to sub Castelvetranos for the Kalamata that the recipe called for.
It was hard to judge how many olives to use. The recipe called for half a cup, chopped, but I wanted to have some bigger pieces in there. I decided to eyeball it and see how it went. I rinsed the brine off the olives to remove the excess salt.
These olives had pits so I removed them by placing the flat of a knife against them and pushing down on the knife with my hand.
Then I just popped the seed out.
I cut apart a few bigger pieces but otherwise I left them alone. I placed them on paper towels to blot up excess moisture.
All the ingredients go into a large mixing bowl. I found it interesting that this recipe doesn't call for even a little sugar and that the yeast is not proofed before everything gets mixed together.
I used a spatula to roughly mix the ingredients together and then left it alone for about 15 minutes.
I kneaded the dough using a dough hook and a stand mixer on medium for five minutes. The recipe said to add the olives at this time but I didn't want them to get mashed up too much so I decided to add them later.
The resulting dough is rather soft and slightly sticky.
I dropped the dough into an oiled bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and left it for an hour.
The nicely doubled dough.
I floured the counter and gently deflated the dough on top of it. Fortunately Tom was around so he shot the rest of this sequence.
The olives were added at this point. I spread them around the entire surface of the dough and gently patted them in a bit.
Starting from the right, I folded the dough over to encase the olives.
It's hard to tell from the photo but I didn't quite fold it in half.
Then I folded the left side over...
...folded the top side down...
Rolled it around a bit to smooth the ball.
Then used the friction of the counter to tighten the dough ball.
The dough is placed on a parchment-lined pan and left for an hour.
At the end of the rise, I dusted the top surface with some flour--leaving it open to the air meant it had a slight "skin" on the outer surface. It felt nice and taut.
The lame I use is not curved like the traditional ones--it's just a very thin, very sharp razor blade enclosed in two wooden disks.
Three cuts and into a 400F oven for 30 minutes. While the oven heated, I had a small pan on the bottom rack. When the loaf went in, I added water to the hot pan to generate some steam.
I was very pleased with the result--the bread had great oven spring so it was nice and high. The crust was crisp but very light. I let it cool completely on a wire rack.
In retrospect, I should have done more of a Swiss roll to incorporate the olives. They tended to gather at the top and since some of them were big, they created these open pockets.
The texture was fantastic--it tasted like a baguette and when you hit an olive, you got a nice burst of saltiness and a bit of a chew. The uneven distribution actually worked well for our family because Tom said he liked not having a lot of olives and he chose the slices that had less.
The bread went well with our clam chowder tonight and I think it's a great basic recipe. Can't wait to play with it more soon!
Here's the promised link:
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