My current favorite bread recipe is Pain a l’Ancienne from
Peter Reinhart’s fantastic book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. It’s a primal
bread recipe, using only flour, water, yeast, and salt but it’s all about the
technique. It is made using ice cold water, kept cold for most of the
“fermentation” stage and doesn’t see much heat until it hits the oven for
baking.
According to Brother Peter, this cold mix and ferment
process “delays the activation of the yeast until the amylase enzymes have
begun the work of breaking out sugar from the starch” and provides more sugar
for flavor and caramelization during baking. According to the people who eat
this bread, it’s simply amazing, with this full, deep, slightly sweet, grainy,
nutty taste, a hugely open crumb, and crust to die for. (One of my apprentices
just says, “…is that the special bread?”)
So I decided to make breadsticks with it. The rosemary
blooming in my (tiny new) herb garden was further inspiration, nudging me to
attempt a slightly modified version of Pain a l’Ancienne to create Crusty
Rosemary Bread Sticks.