The Scali Has Landed

My friends, I have been remiss in my posts. But I assure you my absence was productive. You see, I encountered a challenge--a nemesis even--that demanded my full attention. What started as an innocuous-seeming request from a potential customer--develop a recipe for whole wheat scali bread--quickly morphed into a nearly uncontrollable monster. An obsession. A bitter quest. There will be blood. And there was. Blood.

For those of you considering franchising the Chow Rhode Island column for a Boston version, you'll have to put scali bread on your list. Scali bread is a soft, crusty braided white Italian bread heavily encumbered with sesame seeds. Hugely popular in the Boston area, it is particularly good sandwich bread (especially with some Boah's Head cold cuts, motto "It's Gotta Be Boah's Head!"). It seemed easy enough to test a few recipes using whole wheat flour, make a few tweaks, and bada boom.

Er, and, technically, that's what happened. But that doesn't make for good blogging. Blood! I bled for this bread! Back to the melodrama!

I started out with King Arthur Flour's recipe, which uses a weird proto-starter. Something between a biga and pate fermentee (remember your lessons?), this starter didn't seem to add much to the flavor and made mixing the dough a pain. This dough was fairly soft, but rose nicely and was happy to be rolled into the three logs for braiding. At this point, I encountered my first serious problem: I don't know how to braid. I consulted my phalanx of bread books, none of which had any helpful information. The closest thing I could get was from "The Bread Bible", where Rose Berenbaum instructs the reader to start at the center of the braid. Gee, thanks. I eventually arranged the logs into a braid, but couldn't say how. The loaf rose nicely, went into the oven... and quickly flattened out like the nation's GDP. While the flavor was okay, the form was a complete failure.

Working off the assumption that the stiffness of the dough contributes to its eventual holding-togetherness, I tried a different recipe that had similar methods but a much lower hydration percentage. This dough was so stiff our poor Kitchen Aid took a few jabs at it, looked at me, and said "Yeah, um, I'm on my break." Heaving away at the dough by hand, I could see the machine's point. This dough, though containing a huge amount of yeast, barely rose at all. Things were not looking good when I divided it and began shaping the logs. It was stiffer than Al Gore on Pants-Off Dance-Off. By the time I'd gotten the logs into loglike shapes, I was fully prepared to throw the whole thing away, but decided that I could at least use the braiding practice. This time it went much better, since I stopped thinking about the actual convolutions and simply let my lizard brain take over. Lovely braid. Baked: terrible bread. I was cranky. And, bitterly going in to hack off the first slice, the knife slid off the surface of the bread and bit deeply into my index finger. As I stood and bled all over the white bathroom sink, I wondered if I should photograph this macabre nadir of my nascent baking career. I did not.

Instead, I made a real biga. This morning I woke up, found my biga had grown to a perfectly gelatinous state, and mixed a combination of whole wheat and bread flour to the point of tackiness but not actual stickiness. Rose it, shaped it, baked it in a hot oven, and voila.

And it tastes great too.