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Salmon Koulibiac

Funny how memory works! You make a dish which has been a family favorite for many many years and suddenly all of those who ever shared it with you show up in your mind and heart as if they were ready for a chat and a hug.

The recipe was given to me by my friend Cricri who lives in a village near Paris in a tiny yellow house with blue shutters. Her small kitchen opens onto a walled old garden where the scent of her baking mixes with the fragrance of the nodding lilac. My friend Nicole, who also lives near Paris, likes it so much that the year she turned 50, I made sure our yearly trip to France coincided with her birthday celebration and I baked two of them for her party: I still remember the assembly line she created on her dining room table (her kitchen was way too small) and the arriving guests milling around us, glasses of sangria in hand. My friend Do (who lives in a 17th century house in Versailles and whose father was Russian-born) bakes a mean koulibiac too but she uses fresh salmon fillet and I always liked the smoked salmon version better. Sorry, Do !
My mother-in-law (who hailed from Denmark but whose mother was Russian and who grew up in St-Petersbug) loved it because it brought her back to her early years in czarist Russia: the swishing noise of the sleds in the street below, the jingling of the bells, her niania (nanny) with her towering bonnet and her grandpa sitting at the head of the table, a large white napkin tucked under his flowing beard. Magic tales of yesteryear to one who had been brought up on Russian novels!

Before Cricri baked this recipe with me, my own most memorable experiences with koulibiac were with the ones my parents ordered for very special occasions from the Italian caterer on Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris, near our home. It was shaped like a log, not like a fish and the hard-boiled eggs were always left whole and lined up in a single file in the middle of the spinach filling, so that each slice of the koulibiac featured a beautiful yellow sun against a dark green background. Lovely! Personnally, however, I still think the fish shape is more spectacular but if you decide to stick to more traditional koulibiac shapes, just google the term and dozens will appear.
I don’t make the dish very often (usually only once a year for New Year’s Eve) because the process is rather time-consuming. Even when all the ingredients are ready, it usually takes me two and a half hours to assemble it. But it is creative and fun and I get to visit in my mind with all the people I ever baked it with or for and that’s a big plus.
I wasn’t planning to blog the recipe so I wasn’t set up to take any pictures. But almost half-way through, I though, why not? Maybe some of you would enjoy making it as much as I do and starting a new family holiday tradition. So here we are. The pictures are from my phone and they are not very good. Also since I thought of taking pictures kind of late in the game, I don’t have any from the beginning of the process. Still I think they give a good idea of the assembly process, don’t they? Happy New Year!
Ingredients (for 8 people):

  • 735 g puff pastry (3 frozen puff pastry sheets)
  • 340 g smoked salmon, sliced
  • 8 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
  • 1 big bunch of parsley, chopped
  • 4 shallots, minced
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 250 g cooked rice (I use brown basmati rice)
  • 750 g leafy greens, steamed and squeezed dry (I use a mix of spinach and Swiss chard leaves)
  • Egg yolks (for egg wash)
  • For the sauce:
  • 450 g sour cream (you want the regular one, not a low fat or no-fat one containing thickening agents)
  • 2 lemons (if they are juicy, you actually only need one and a half)
Method:
  1. 30 minutes before starting, take the dough out of the freezer
  2. Flatten the dough (patching one whole sheet and a half-one together) using a rolling pin and cut out the shape of a fish (remembering to leave a 2-cm border all around). This will form the bottom crust
  3. Using the bottom sheet as a template, cut out the other sheet and a half, leaving a wider border (at least 4 cm) to provide for the filling. This will form the top crust. Do not throw away the leftover scraps of dough as you will need them for the fins, the eyes and any other decoration you might wish to use
  4. Incorporate the chopped eggs in the rice
  5. Incorporate the minced shallot and garlic in the chopped parsley
  6. Place the bottom fish crust on a semolina-dusted parchment-lined half-sheet baking pan (I forgot to do that one year and had to transfer the assembled koulibiac from the countertop where I had rolled out the dough to the baking sheet without the assistance of any paper or liner. Not a mistake I am likely to make twice!)
  7. Keeping 2-cm away from the edge on the bottom sheet, start building the different layers spreading half of the rice and egg mixture first, then the greens, then the salmon, then the shallot-garlic-parsley mixture, then the remaining rice, making sure the fish is entirely covered save for the border
  8. Salt and pepper to taste (be careful with the salt since the salmon might be rather salty)
  9. Make sure the edges are clear of rice, egg or parsley and paint them all around with egg wash
  10. Carefully position the top sheet of dough over the bottom and press all around the edges so that the top and the bottom fish are firmly stuck together
  11. Add fins, eyes (when there are little girls around, I like to make it a she-fish with long eyelashes, mouth, etc.)
  12. Paint all over with eggwash, draw scales and tail as desired and crimp the edges all around
  13. Bake in preheated 350°F/177°C oven for about an hour, checking frequently to make sure it is baking evenly. You may need to tent foil over it at some point to prevent overbrowning.
  14. While it is baking, squeeze the lemons and, using a fork, incorporate the juice into the sour cream until the cream liquefies a bit
  15. When the koulibiac is ready, bring to the table to slice so that your guests can decide whether they want a piece of the tail, or the eye, or a fin. My oldest grandchildren – who were always adventurous and appreciative eaters – liked to be able to choose.
  16. Serve hot with the sauce on the side. (Over the years I have found that the best way to pair the sauce with the fish is for each guest to gently lift the crust on his or her slice of koulibiac, pour a generous tablespoonful of sauce over the steaming filling and fold the crust back over the whole thing.) Blissful!

    Printable recipe

The Salmon Koulibiac is going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

Nice and Naughty: Butterless Brioche and Plastered Plums

…or will it be naughty and nice? Your call!
For the brioche recipe, look no further than Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. If you don’t own it and your local library can’t get it for you, you could go browse the book on the amazon.com website, look inside and search for brioche. If you are lucky enough (I was the first time I tried), it will let you browse pages 151-152 where you’ll find the olive oil brioche recipe. Alternatively if you speak Spanish or don’t mind using Google Translate, you can check out Madrid Tiene Miega, the blog where I got the idea of making this dessert bread to accompany the wickedest, meanest, craziest plums I have ever had the pleasure of serving.
Tartine’s olive oil brioche has a delicate and complex taste. I was a bit hesitant to use our regular extra-virgin olive oil as I thought it might be a bit too fruity but Chad says to use a strong-flavored oil, so I went for it and found that it played a wonderfully supportive role to the poolish and the levain. You don’t actually taste it (at least I couldn’t) but you definitely taste more than slowly fermented grain. A truly intriguing combination.
The original recipe calls for orange-blossom water, which may not be easy to find if you don’t have access to a Mid-Eastern market. If that’s the case, steeping a few crushed cardamom pods or whole saffron threads in the warm milk for a few minutes is a good substitute. Both go well with the taste of the brioche provided you err on the side of caution with the amount of spice and you make sure to strain the milk before using it in the dough. Skipping the extra flavor is also an option.
I had no luck finding orange-blossom water, so I used green cardamom pods (3 g total which I crushed in a mortar with a pestle). I halved the original amounts given in the book for all the ingredients (which I now regret as it would have been just as easy to make the whole batch and freeze half), especially as the dough is a pain to work with. It is super wet and looks like pancake batter for the longest time. I must tell you as well that I ended up adding about 120 g of flour to make it finally come together. I also switched the mixer to high speed – instead of medium – for the final couple of minutes. That may explain why I got a tighter crumb than I had been shooting for.
Halved, the recipe yielded one big brioche and about 20 small ones (scaled at 50 g raw). In half-a-dozen of those (the ones which were to accompany another dessert), I hid two or three of the exquisite chocolate-covered cherries my friend Kim, a talented baker if I ever saw one, had sent me from Wisconsin (thank you, Kimmy!). I love the tangy taste of cherries both with cardamom and with saffron although I don’t know how well it would fare with orange-blossom water. The crumb looks a bit dry on the picture below and it was: since I had forgotten to take a crumb shot, I had to photograph the last surviving brioche. It was 5 days old…
I just gave you nice. Ready for naughty? Read on!
Back in France when I was growing up, dried plums were these dark oblong unidentified objects which were so hard that you had to soak and simmer them before you could eat them. Once cooked, they tasted watery and you had to watch out for the pit or you’d crack your teeth. I never liked them then but they were supposedly good for us, so in the winter they appeared regularly as a dessert on our dinner table. Some years later, we had fleshier ones which we pitted, stuffed with almond paste and rolled in crystallized sugar. They were a special Christmas treat and definitely a step up!
But now, oh now, I have stumbled upon a completely different beast, one that will probably remain forever my ultimate winter after-dinner treat: dried plums slow-soaked in vodka… It definitely takes a while for them to bloom into their magnificent taste and texture, so even though it might be tempting to make them for the holidays this year, if I were you, I would just make them now and then wait until the end of January to enjoy them. They will be an excellent antidote to the winter doldrums and, provided you are not tailgating it and having to drive home but watching the game on your couch with nowhere else to go, you might even make them the star of your Super Bowl party if there are no teenagers around (although as long as you tell them it’s prunes, they probably won’t go near the stuff anyway).
The fruit sold in some parts of the country as California prunes and in others as California dried plums (isn’t it interesting that some states are more prune-tolerant than others?) has almost nothing in common with what I knew as a child. It is fleshy to the point of quasi-roundness and it has been pitted. It is quite tasty on its own if you actually like dried plums, which I do.
Now every summer, back when I lived in France as a grown-up, I used to make “framboises à l’eau-de-vie” (raspberries in brandy, literally acqua vitae) with a special spirit they sell over there just for macerating fruit. Since raspberries were delicious and plentiful this summer in the Pacific Northwest, I decided to preserve some in brandy for the winter. I couldn’t find a suitable brandy at the local liquor store however, so I used vodka (100-proof). It does pack a wallop. A less potent version would do just as well, I suspect.
The vodka-marinated raspberries retained their plump shape and even some of their color and they looked pretty but the taste wasn’t what I was looking for. Of course the reason could be that I really don’t like vodka, never did and probably never will and they tasted like vodka flavored with children’s cough syrup (probably because I misguidedly decided to flavor the vodka with a few hyssop leaves). In any case, not a success…
I was contemplating the berries and wondering what to do with the leftover vodka (I had bought a large bottle) when I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Since I always keep dried plums in the house, why not try and see if they would work? After the raspberry fiasco, I had little hope. Still, ever the optimist, I took a small jar (one which had contained jam or jelly in another life) and packed it tight with the fruit, then filled it with vodka (not the raspberry-infused vodka but fresh vodka) to the brim, screwed the lid back, put it away and forgot about it for six weeks.
When we opened the jar, the vodka was gone! It had mostly been soaked up by the fruit and whatever was left had turned into a syrupy boozy liqueur which tasted fantastic. I have since made two big jars of the plums, one which I am keeping at low temperature (in the garage actually) and the other one at room temp, just to see if it makes a difference (I’ll let you know if you are interested but I won’t find out for another four weeks). I have also added some vodka to the new jars at the two-week mark as I found the plums had been at the sauce again and the top ones were no longer covered. But one thing you need to know is that each time you add vodka you are thinning out the liquor which means you will have to wait longer until you can fully savor the plums. In other words you have to choose between having more or having sooner. As I said, it’s your call…
The Butterless Brioche and Plastered Plums will be going to Susan for Yeastspotting, her weekly roundup of breads and other baked goodies.

Gérard Rubaud on working the levain

For someone who has no means of going online and checking out what’s happening in today’s web of bakers, Gérard Rubaud has formed a rather accurate idea of the way many of us go about our baking. Although he welcomes the renewed interest for boulange au levain (baking naturally-leavened breads) which the Web in general and blogs in particular contribute to feed throughout the world, he also warns against bee-like behaviors which detract from the big picture: going from one blog or one website to the next and picking up fragments of techniques or advice which do not coalesce into a harmonious whole. In his opinion, it is close to impossible to make really good bread that way. The starting point should always be the taste and texture one is looking for. Once that has been decided, then the baker marshals the tools he/she knows to be necessary to obtain that result.

Of these tools, the most important is the levain. Properly fermented, a good levain will get you half-way towards your goal. Three main variables will determine its performance: its degree of hydration, the number of wild yeast cells it contains and its temperature. The baker must seek the perfect equilibrium point between temperatures and fermentation times. In today’s brouhaha about bread, it is easy to forget the two go hand in hand. A one-hour fermentation at + or – 5 degrees F can yield hugely different results: five degrees cooler and you need to wait two more hours for your levain to double. Five degrees warmer and the fermentation runs ahead of you. In the absence of specific fermentation time/temperature indications, a good reference point should be the doubling of the levain at 80°F/27°C. When that has happened, you know you are good to go.
Gérard cannot insist enough on the fact that the baker needs to have his/her thermometer in hand at all times. He himself makes bread five days a week, 51 weeks a year, which means he does three levain builds five times a week. On his two days off (which are not consecutive), he keeps his levain in the fridge and feeds it only once a day. A home baker could keep his or her levain in the fridge for five consecutive days (feeding it once a day and putting it back in the fridge as soon as it has fermented enough to reach the top of its container), take it out on Day 6, give it three or four feedings and bake with it on Day 7. It is fundamental that the levain be brought back to warm room temperature (at least 75°F/24°C and as close to 80°F/27°C as possible) prior to incorporating it into the autolyse (by autolyse Gérard means the shaggy dough resulting from the incorporation of final dough water into final dough flour in the absence of salt). A colder levain is harder to incorporate; the baker has to mix longer, thereby running the risk of tearing the gluten network and over-oxidizing the dough. Gérard advises keeping the autolyse at 80°F. The warmer the dough, the more malleable it will be. That means always controlling the temperature of the water you add to the flour.
A good quality levain will boost the elasticity of a well-hydrated dough provided its consistency and temperature are similar to those of the dough : if your autolyse is hydrated at 55% and your levain at 65%, you need to boost the hydration of the autolyse. Matching the hydration of the autolyse to the hydration of the levain isn’t a routine proposition however: each time Gérard gets a new flour delivery (and we are talking the same brand and quality of all-purpose flour he has been using for years), he needs to run a test to see how much water the flour will absorb. The variations in protein content (which governs absorbency) from one monthly batch to the next had become so distracting that Gérard recently switched his flour delivery schedule from one-month to three-months intervals. These discrepancies between batches of the same flour mean that the quantity of water given in a recipe should always be treated as an indication. The baker has to use his or her judgment to determine how much to add or take away. Another good rule of thumb is to adjust the hydration of the levain to the type of dough you want to get: it is hard to make a very wet dough with a very stiff levain for instance.
As an aside, it is interesting to note that accomplished bakers such as Jeffrey Hamelman and Gérard Rubaud are both somewhat dismissive of the current obsession with huge holes in the crumb: Jeffrey joked during his recent class on Baking with Locally Grown Grains that some bakers seem to consider the number of alveoli in their crumb on a par with their sperm count as an indicator of their masculinity. As for Gérard, he sees what he calls “les bulles” (the bubbles) as important (they do contribute to the taste of the bread) but not fundamental: at the end of the day, “on ne les mange pas” (you don’t get to eat them).
However if an airy crumb is what you want, your levain can help you achieve that goal too: feeding it as soon as it doubles triggers a huge proliferation of wild yeast cells and a proportionate acceleration of the fermentation process. One way to make baguettes au levain with a very open crumb is to feed the levain three times at 6 hour-intervals prior to mixing the dough.
Gérard’s experimentation over the past few months have led him to modify his formulas, both for the levain and for the final dough. He has reduced the proportions of freshly milled whole grains in his bread, using none in the third (last) build of his levain and only 13% (instead of one third) in his final dough. He said that by doing so, he has lost a few rustic aromas but he has improved the texture of his bread tremendously. Also he has found that new, very delicate aromas were being created during fermentation. His dough has gained in elasticity and resilience and can now readily absorb more water, which helps get a more open crumb.
As related in my post Revisiting Gérard Rubaud, Gérard is now retarding his shaped batards for 10 hours and more. The long proofing changes the texture of the dough by making it more elastic and more malleable, which makes it possible to up the hydration even more. There is no doubt in my mind that Gérard’s formula will keep evolving as he lives and works by one simple motto: “Tout peut toujours s’améliorer” (there is always room for improvement).
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Revisiting Gérard Rubaud

Visiting Gérard Rubaud is like taking a huge leap sideways over the Atlantic to the French Alps and once there, a few steps back in time. Maybe not to the 18th century, although judging from old engravings, his bakery looks a lot like the ones found there before the Revolution of 1789: of course those didn’t have electrical light or hot water on demand or a mixer (even a 40-year old one) or an electronic scale or a floury radio blasting Radio Canada 24/7. But you certainly feel you traveled back as far as the fifties at least…
As for himself, he owns neither a television (“When would I have time to read or to listen to music if I did?”) nor a computer (same answer). He doesn’t own a camera, digital or otherwise (“I don’t think I ever took a picture in my life”) and of course no smartphone (or even a simple cell phone). But he does have a regular telephone and it rings very often. Gérard may be short on modern life accoutrements but he is long on true friends and many of them often call or drop by.
In the two years since my first visit in 2009, we have become friends too. We speak on the phone, I visit, we have been on field trips together. I have learned a lot about boulange au levain (naturally leavened bread-baking) and he has discovered a few things about blogs, computers and the Internet. Not that he cares that much, to tell you the truth, except as a new and convenient way to disseminate and perpetuate age-old baking skills. Bread-baking is his lifeline, his raison d’être (literally: reason for being).
When a stroke confined him to a wheelchair a few years ago, he would have let himself go were it not for the tweaking he was constantly giving his dough in his head: he wanted to walk and work again to see if the actual results would match the dreamed-up ones.
When asked how come he doesn’t grow tired of baking the same bread 51 weeks a year, year in and year out, his eyes grow round with surprise: “But it’s never the same, that’s the challenge. First of all, every time I get a new flour delivery, I have to adjust the formula. Plus I am constantly experimenting, adding or subtracting grains, lowering or increasing temperatures, varying fermentation times, etc. It is actually a lot more fun to stick to one dough and see what you can do with it and make it the best you possibly can than to divide your attention between several different ones.”

He probably doesn’t approve of the fact that I am frivolous enough not to be satisfied with a firm levain, so that I keep a liquid one as well and enjoy making “pains fantaisie” (breads that contain ingredients other than cereal grains, flour, salt and water) but he has come to tolerate my difference and not to look (too) skeptical anymore when I tell him how delicious these other breads can taste. I was actually going to bring him some this time so that he could try them for himself but because of the hand injury I sustained a few weeks before our trip, I had to forego baking for a while. That experience will have to wait.
You have probably guessed by now that Gérard has his own (very specific) ideas about the “right” way to bake: he applies the methods he was taught as a teenage apprentice. He is also a fervent admirer of Raymond Calvel whose book Le Goût du pain (The Taste of Bread), he seems to know by heart. So I expected him to balk at my suggestion that he experiment with retarding his dough overnight at a cool temperature and naturally I wasn’t disappointed.
“Retarding has been invented by bakers who wanted to sleep longer nights. It has nothing to do with improving the dough.” (Gérard has trained himself to sleep very short nights, complemented during the day by numerous 12-minute naps: beyond 12 minutes, he gets groggy and can’t function properly. So he sets the timer, lies down on the bench in the bakery, lifts his arms above his head -an old trick which works wonders for him- and seconds later, he is asleep. He wakes up with the timer, fully refreshed and in good spirits, all set to go back to work.)
I had an uphill battle to fight to convince him to try retarding. But I was spending a few days at the bakery, he had time off – no production deadlines – and I gave it my best shot. In the end he gave in, provided we didn’t go for too low a temperature. “Below 68°F, you start getting undesirable acids. It’d be best to let the shaped breads proof overnight at 70 to 74° F.” We settled on 68° (which happened to be the temperature of the bakery that evening).
He mixed the dough. I photographed the process. How I wish my camera could have captured aromas… Those coming from the mixing bowl were simply heavenly.

The breads were set to proof at 8:40 PM. He said he would check on them in early morning. I promised to come and join him the minute I woke up. When I entered the bakery the next day around 6:00 AM, Gérard met me at the door. His face looked grim. “What’s wrong?” I asked innocently. “Come and see! I checked on the breads at 4:00 AM and they were already completely overproofed. I knew it wouldn’t work. I kept them for you to see before I throw them in the trash”. Well, I could see them all right. They had reached over the edges of the couche to kiss each other’s brows and made for a huge mess indeed. And of course I wasn’t surprised either: after all, I had never heard of retarding for hours at room temperature when room temperature is close to 70°…

However, being a morning person, I can be annoyingly cheerful when the day is young. So I told Gérard how two summers ago, when we had friends visiting from France at our little house on the river, I had made a batch of his rustic batards and set them to proof, only to forget all about them and go boating for six hours. When we came back, they had looked even worse than today’s misfits. Still I had baked them and they had turned out a bit flattish but excellent with a wide open crumb.
Gérard didn’t seem impressed. He started tucking at the kissing loaves (which parted reluctantly) and chucking them in the trash one by one. I protested so vehemently that he finally relented and spared two, one of which he disgustedly folded over itself like a limp parcel. Those two, he baked, still grumbling: “We won’t get any rise; all the sugar has been eaten up; they won’t brown; I should have added malt to the dough, etc.”

Meanwhile the bakery was filling with its usual aromas and Gérard’s brow gradually cleared (Has anyone ever studied the mood-enhancing benefits of bread baking?) to finally settle in an expression of amazed delight when the two loaves came out of the oven: they had magnificently risen to the occasion and shone golden in the morning light. By now Gérard was eager to slice them open and had started casting regretful looks towards the trash can where the discarded dough was gasping its last breath like a carp out of water…
The rest, my friends, history and by that, I mean a phenomenon of historical proportions in Gérard’s life as a baker: when he cut open the loaves, he was greeted by a burst of lovely aromas and he saw a crumb which he deemed to be more open than anything he had ever achieved before. We each had a first slice, then a second one slathered with Vermont butter: the flavors were magnificent. Rustic and intricate. Marvelous…
Gérard said: “Well, you were right and I was wrong. I learned something today. Thank you!”. His face was a bright as the rising sun. His mind was running a mile a minute. I could see he was already thinking up various ways of adapting his baking to this new discovery. Meanwhile he kept slicing and savoring, a blissful expression on his face. The man may be a tough nut to crack but I like it that his ego isn’t what gets in the way. Bread is. And it wins. All the time.
Updated news, three weeks later:
I just talked to Gérard on the phone: today is his day off and he is hard at work refining his timeline. Laughingly he tells me he is now retarding his bread for 10 hours at 70-72° F. To avoid overproofing, he has halved the percentage of levain in the dough down to 20% from the 40% he normally uses in the winter. Which means he still gets the acids he is looking and none of the undesirable ones. Wow!
He says his bread has never looked or tasted better. He gets a fabulous crumb, full of oval-shaped holes (interestingly and inexplicably half the holes are vertical, half horizontal). His only complaint is that the crumb is a bit moist on the first day and reaches its peak the day after. To solve that problem, he is planning to bake his bread a bit longer at a lower temperature.
You have got to love that about the man: he may be reluctant to enter the game but once he catches the ball, he does run with it so fast and so far that it’s hard to catch up. I bet that next time we talk, his production schedule will cover three full days (he says he’s leaning that way and I bet he’s serious too). I forgot to ask if he’s now among the bakers who sleep full nights…

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Camembert in a Sourdough Jacket

My niece Flo whose beautiful and passionate blog, Makanai, is a treasure trove for gourmets and gourmands of all ilks as well as a mine of information on food intolerances and ways of coping with them – in French, I know, but there is always Google Translator) recently called attention on her Facebook page to a most appealing and ingenious appetizer, Camembert rôti en croûte de pain (literally Camembert baked in a bread crust), posted by Cindy of Food for Thoughts.
Baked Bries or Camemberts are nothing new. But a French cheese baked inside a miche au levain (a sourdough boule), now, that’s something I had yet to see. As luck would have it, we had just bought a pair of French Camemberts at Costco.
I had no boules in my freezer and no immediate prospect of baking one since my levain was still in reactivation mode after our long absence. However our local Trader Joe’s came to the rescue once more: I found there a boule of just the right size, made exclusively of flour, water and salt. Perfect!
I followed the original recipe to a t (except that I didn’t use sugar and that, having no garlic powder on hand, I just rubbed the inside of the hollowed-out miche with a fresh clove). I am not kidding myself that our baked Camembert was as flavorful as Cindy’s. It did come from France but it wasn’t made from raw unpasteurized milk, so it was certainly a good bit tamer than the one she was able to find in London. But it was still good enough that nobody seemed to mind (the bread was crisp on the outside and the cheese deliciously velvety and smokey-spicy). At least I imagine that’s the reason why it vanished so fast. Thank you, Cindy, for this great idea! Just in time for holiday entertaining too…
Make sure the cheese fits inside the hollowed-out boule
but don’t bake it with the wrapper still on!

Ingredients:

  • 1 Camembert from France (preferably made from raw unpasteurized milk if available in the country where you live)
  • 1 small sourdough boule (not San Francisco sourdough though as the sourness might overpower the cheese)
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon chili powder (I used chipotle chili)
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder (see above for possible substitution)
  • 1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
  • 1 tablespoon salted butter
Note: the original recipe also calls for 1/2 teaspoon of sugar but I didn’t use any.
Don’t you love the fragrance of garlic on fresh crumb?
To maximize it, split the clove in two
Method:
  1. Pre-heat the oven to 356°F/180° C (using convection if available)
  2. Cut off the top of the boule and set aside
  3. Hollow out the center of the boule and of the lid (making sure the Camembert easily fits into both)
  4. In a small bowl, mix chili, garlic powder (if using. If not using, rub the inside of the bread and of the lid with raw clove of garlic) and mustard powder
  5. Lightly butter the inside of the boule and of the lid
  6. Generously sprinkle the inside of the boule and of the lid with spice mixture
  7. Pre-cut the boule all around to make it easier to pull out croûtons later on (see picture)
  8. Scrape the Camembert all around, not forgetting the sides and bottom
  9. Place inside the hollowed boule, scatter rest of spice mixture over it
  10. Place the lid over the cheese making sure it fits the bottom snugly
  11. Bake in pre-heated oven for 30 minutes
  12. Let cool a few minutes before serving (serve the top alongside so that guests can rip chunks of it to dip in the melted cheese when the sides of the boule are all eaten up).
All dressed up and ready for the oven
The Camembert in a Sourdough Jacket goes to Stefanie whose marvelous blog, Hefe und mehr, is hosting this week’s issue of Yeastspotting.