cross arms

bertinet's crust makes its debut in my home today. bertinet's version sprinkles rock salt and sesame seeds. but i don't like those; mine are sprinkled with cinnamon sugar instead.
this is the white dough i made yesterday night. left it in the refrigerator overnight to ferment, but forgot to take a photo of the fermented dough.

the pain de mie i made last week was a straight dough bread - the dough was made in one single mixture of all the ingredients. as opposed to that, these pretzels are made with a pre-ferment - the dough is made by mixing the ingredients with another bit of dough that was already prepared in advance. the use of such a pre-ferment makes for a lighter bread, because of, i think, the added leavening power of the thriving yeast in the pre-ferment. it also gives the bread a deeper and more complex flavour, owing to the longer fermentation process.

(the 100% wholemeal bread was also made with a pre-ferment. it was called a 'poolish'. there is another type of bread made with a pre-ferment - the sourdough. this uses a starter that is grown with wild yeast caught from the atmosphere. i want to try this some day, but because of the complexities of the process involved, i've planned to start it only at the end of this year.)
the final dough mixed together and then rested for one hour. it got really big, and the alcohol smell was so strong.
divided and shaped into the pretzels. they're supposed to look like monks praying with their arms crossed. mine were not very pretty; i couldn't roll them long and thin enough to make the shapes well.
i don't know if the texture's right, but they tasted a bit wrong. not that there was anything wrong with the yeast or dough or anything. it's just that the pretzels were a little salty, yet the topping was cinnamon sugar. probably explains why the original recipe used rock salt and sesame seeds for topping.
this is so pretty it should be a work of art. it's the cinnamon sugar left on the baking sheet when i sprinkled it over the pretzels. you can see the different stages to which the sugar was caramelised (and burnt) in the oven. there's everything from brown to amber to black.

on other news, i have finally opened the packet of ghirardelli twilight delight chocolate that 姑姑 gave me, and am eating it with a slice of bread, like a pain viennois.