When Ellen Carney Granda began learning her way around a kitchen a few years ago, she armed herself with two things: a DVR, for recording every cooking show on the air, and a copy of Julia Child’s The Way to Cook. The latter taught her how to roast a chicken well enough, but when she decided to try her hand at baking, the bible let her down. Or so she thought: “Julia Child had a French baguette recipe, and it was really disappointing,” Granda says.
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As she figured out later, that was partially because it called for all-purpose flour, which in the United States often means bleached high-protein flour. The high protein content ensures that the dough will rise consistently well but yields a tougher final product; the bleaching eliminates the flour’s natural yellowish hue but can lend a chemical taste and smell. (“Why people think flour needs to be white, I don’t know,” Granda says.) When baking baguettes a la Child, Granda realized that “the crust was nice, and the interior was nice, but it didn’t have that bread flavor. So I tried different recipes. I failed a bunch of times. I just kept trying. And I just got great.”
Many of Granda’s wares are boules, or round loaves, which she likes to wrap around a chunk of sweet or savory filling. “I needed to offer a variety of breads while mixing only one or two doughs,” she explains. Her boule flavors to date include Plum Crazy, filled with prunes and chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt; Smokin’ Papi, a chorizo-and-manchego combo named in tribute to her Cuban father-in-law; and Stinker Belle, made with garlic paste. Then there are what she calls the “faux-caccias.” “You know how you get a ciabatta that’s too chewy, and a focaccia that’s too greasy?” Granda asks. She’s found a middle ground with loaves such as the Faux Red Jammer, filled with red onion jam.
