BLT Challenge Entry | Best Interpretation of a Classic

 

Italianate BLT

Since I made my bacon with a pancetta cure, I decided to give my BLT an Italian motif.

The Components

• The First Bread “The Ciapita”, Craig Ponsford’s ciabatta from Artisan Baking by Maggie Glezer using commercial yeast.
• The Veggies Homegrown cherry tomatoes (I wish I had thought to grow some Roma tomatoes), lettuce grown indoors in my AeroGarden (you can hardly grow lettuce outside after February in South Louisiana), and homemade pesto from my basil.
• The Mayonnaise Hand-whisked using my neighbor’s free-range egg (I trade him bacon for the eggs; our breakfast club) using Michael Ruhlman’s recipe from Ratio.
• The Bacon Home-cured, pancetta-style, hickory-smoked (can I get another adjective?) bacon using Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s recipe for pancetta for the cure mix; and following the instructions for hot-smoking bacon in Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing.

The Construction

Salt and drain cherry tomato slices.

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Apply mayo to top and bottom of bread and skim a bit of pesto on the bottom.

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Distribute cherry tomatoes over the bottom. I like the way the small slices are easy to eat without pulling a slice of tomato out of the sandwich.

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Add the lettuce and fried bacon.

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Oh, my! This was good

BLT Challenge Entry | Best Photograph

Close-up of the crumb structure of the “ciapita”, The First Bread.

It looks to me like an alien landscape. My husband said the same thing when he saw it.

BLT Challenge Entry | Best Overall Preparation

 

I chose this version for the best overall preparation category because I think the bread turned out closer to the ideal for the type.

The Components

• The Second Bread  The Master Recipe:  Ciabatta from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg & Zoe Francois with commercial yeast.
• The Veggies  Organic, homegrown tomato and lettuce grown indoors in my AeroGarden (you can hardly grow lettuce outside after February in South Louisiana).
• The Mayonnaise  Hand-whisked using my neighbor’s free-range egg (I trade him bacon for the eggs) using Michael Ruhlman’s recipe from Ratio.
• The Bacon  Home-cured, pancetta-style, hickory-smoked (can I get another adjective?) bacon using Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s recipe for pancetta for the cure mix; and following the instructions for hot-smoking bacon in Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing.

 

The Construction

Salt tomato slices and drain on paper towels so the sandwich isn’t too sloppy.

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Nickel-thick layer of mayonnaise on top and bottom of bread. Lettuce on the bottom to help protect the bread from still-juicy tomato slices.

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Layer tomato slices (with a little sea salt [I wiped most of it off blotting the tomato slices] and fresh-ground pepper) and bacon on bottom piece of bread.

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Looks like two Frankenstein monsters grinning at each other.

BLT Challenge | The Bacon

This is my fourth batch of bacon. I’m indebted to Kevin Weeks of Seriously Good for posting about Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn a couple of years ago.  I’ve greatly enjoyed making my own sausages, pate, peperone, and bacon.

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Brown sugar, kosher salt, and pink salt.

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My husband and I prefer the more savory pancetta seasonings for our bacon rather than sweeter maple type. There are juniper berries, black peppercorns and bay leaves in the processor. I ground the pepper in a mill last year, and even though it was a Magnum, it took forever. I figure as long as the peppercorns are cracked it’ll be ok.

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As I’m curing 36 lbs. of pork belly this time, it takes 30 cloves of garlic.

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All buzzed up and ready to go.

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Lovely Niman Ranch pork bellies.

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My husband experimented with lots of thyme from the garden for one belly.

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I lurve the full width meat/produce drawer in the bottom of my Viking fridge. I fit four pork bellies in there!

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After ten days curing it’s a beautiful color. Washing off the spices is the worst part of the whole process. I felt I was wallowing in raw pig juice. I washed down the kitchen with Lysol in a 10’ radius around the sink after I was finished and then took a shower.

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Drying in the fridge overnight with a garbage bag drip-guard. I’ve learned that if I want to feel flush enough to give away some of this awesome bacon, I need to make a lot of it.

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Hot smoking with hickory chunks in the Weber Smoky Mountain Smoker Cooker (or the “Bullet”).

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My husband fried some of the smoked pig skin for a snack.

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My husband slices while I vacuum seal.

It keeps very well in the freezer.

BLT Challenge | The Mayonnaise

I must confess the egg is not from my chickens. It is from my neighbor’s free-range chickens. We are in a sort of breakfast club; I trade him homemade bacon for fresh eggs. Someday soon I hope to have my own chickens. I never seem to remember to ask for some until I want them on Sunday morning when I don’t want to disturb him.

I used Michael Ruhlman’s recipe from Ratio.

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Now that’s an orange yolk.

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The emulsion underway. Such a marvelous thing from simple ingredients.

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You’d almost think I put food coloring in it; it’s so yellow.

BLT Challenge | The Veggies

 

The Tomatoes

Found a tomato the birds missed; no peck marks on this one.

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Looks like the plastic owl bird-scare is sleeping on the job.

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At least I have some ripe cherry tomatoes to use.

 

The Lettuce

It’s nice to be able to grow lettuce inside during a South Louisiana summer.

 

The Basil Pesto

Basil in my garden.

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The mise en place.  Except for the olive oil that was sitting out of view.

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The pesto on toasted, supermarket “French bread”. Sacrilegious, I know, but I think it was near 100 degrees F that day. I wasn’t going to heat up the oven for baking; just a quick broil was the limit.

BLT Challenge | The Second Bread

 

After mixing the biga for The First Bread (previous post), I decided to try a batch of The Master Recipe:  Boule from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Fancois. My husband and I have been going through a lot of baguettes to eat with my pesto. I find most supermarket “French Bread” barely tolerable and wanted to start making my own on a regular basis. The Acme’s Rustic Baguettes from Artisan Baking turned out as I’d hoped, but I wanted to try a less labor-intensive method.

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When The First Bread emerged as a ciapita, I followed the instructions for making ciabatta from The Master Recipe dough I had stored in the refrigerator.

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This is more like what I expected, though I wish I hadn’t been afraid to thin it a bit more before baking.

BLT Challenge | The First Bread

Since I made my bacon with a pancetta cure, I decided to give my BLT an Italian motif. The first bread I chose to make was Craig Ponsford’s ciabatta from Artisan Baking by Maggie Glezer. I had recently purchased the book and wanted to try the technique. It wasn’t until I searched on the internet for help after my seeming disaster (which I’ll show you a bit later), that I found out that it is many baker’s favorite ciabatta recipe.

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The day before you are ready to mix the final dough, you make the biga (pre-ferment of flour, water, and yeast) and let it ferment for 24 hours.

This biga is made from unbleached bread, unbleached all-purpose, whole-wheat, and whole-rye flours with water and a tiny bit of yeast.

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Here’s the dough fermenting under plastic wrap.

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During the beginning of fermentation, the dough is turned every 20 minutes. By this point at the end of fermentation it should be a bit stiffer. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm came up in the middle of the fermentation and I didn’t feel confident enough to add much flour at this point.

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I was afraid to proof the loaves in a couche or tea towel, no matter how heavily floured; so I used floured plastic wrap. I had read when forming ciabatta not to make it less that 3/4” thick or it might puff like a pita. This dough was so very slack, I didn’t flatten it at all. It flowed to this form. Ah well, I’d gone this far; might as well bake it.

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There was no chance the gloppy loaves would slide off a peel. I used a wide spatula and hope to flip them onto parchment paper. I was feeling a bit better…this didn’t look so bad.

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Um, this looks awfully puffy.

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Oh, NO! It’s a ciapita!

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I had a rye Old-Fashioned. I felt a bit better about the whole thing.

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It looks good like this. Maybe people will just think I’m petting the lovely ciabatta, not shoving the ciapita monster's snaggle-toothed jaws shut.

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It was really good dipped in pesto made from the basil in my garden. The holes in the crumb hold nice, big globs of it.

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