Grissini In A Blender!!

by A.J. Coltrane

This Grissini recipe uses two formulas from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice — Pate Fermentee and French Bread. Really, it’s the same recipe twice. The Pate Fermentee is made 24 hours in advance then refrigerated. The exact same ingredients are used again and combined with the (warmed) refrigerated dough to make French Bread. Reinhart suggests a number of different potential bases for Grissini, I used the French Bread version because it’s only flour, water, salt, and yeast — all stuff I had on hand.

This is the first time I’ve done a recipe using weights instead of volumes. I did this for three reasons:

1.  The Reinhart formulas inevitably call for volumes that are too much for one loaf. The French Bread winds up using 4-1/2 cups of flour, intended to make three baguettes. For reference, I use 1-1/2 cups for a large pizza. I definitely didn’t want to make three large pizzas worth of Grissini.

2.  Scaling the recipes down tends to make lots of weird measurements and oddball math. Halving the following formula below would mean halving 1-1/8 cups of each flour, which comes to 1/2 cup + 1 TBP. Halving the salt would be 3/8 teaspoon. That’s all assuming the scaling isn’t 1/6 of a recipe or something. “Makes 6 baguettes, 6 to 8 pizzas, or one 17 by 12-inch focaccia”.

3.  Baker’s Percentages allow working in grams, and the metric system is waaayyy easier to scale than messing around with cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons.

The nice thing about Baker’s Percentages is that everything is weighed relative to the total weight of the flour. The “65” in the water column means that for every 100 grams of flour the formula uses 65 grams of water. It couldn’t be simpler. Especially with a calculator.

The table:

The 75 grams of each flour was pretty arbitrary — it was loosely half a recipe. Had I realized how close it was to a half recipe I might have gone with exactly half a recipe, though at the time I was more interested in the nice, round 150 grams of flour to use as a base for the rest of the math.

The recipe in short form:

1.  Knead all of the ingredients, place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover, and let it rest in the refrigerator overnight.

2.  Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let it warm up for an hour. Cut the dough into about 10 pieces and mix together with the “new” ingredients. Knead and let rise about 2 hours.

3.  Roll out the dough and divide into strips. Let the strips rise, covered, on parchment lined baking sheets, about 60-90 minutes. (I used a pizza cutter to make the strips.)

[One difference between what Reinhart calls for and what I actually did:  I rolled the dough out on semolina flour. I wanted some crunch on the outside of the breadstick.]

4.  Reinhart simply says “To drive off the moisture for crisp breadsticks, bake them for a long time at low temperatures, 325F to 350F, until dry and crisp. For soft breadsticks, bake hotter, at 400F to 450F, until the sticks turn golden brown.”

I wanted not-super skinny grissini with a little bite and soft insides. Looking around the internet, I settled for 400F for 20 minutes. At the 20 minute mark there was no browning, so I gave them another 5 minutes, then gave up on brown.

In retrospect, a small amount of fat on the outside of the sticks, or a higher temperature, might have made for an appearance closer to what I’d visualized as a target.

Of course, I don’t own anything to use to serve or display the breadsticks, therefore it’s

GRISSINI IN A BLENDER!!