BB: Cranberry Walnut Christmas Bread, but Pecan

Here's a very belated writeup of baking the Cranberry Walnut Christmas Bread from Beranbaum's The Baking Bible, which was on the group's baking list for (surprise) the week of Christmas. I subbed toasted pecans from a local not-really-a-farmer's-market place, saving both the toasting step and the rubbing of walnut skins...and I like pecans better. I grabbed an opaque bag of store brand cranberries which turned out to be chopped cranberries and not the whole ones called for.

This bread starts out with a biga, with a recommendation that it get 3 days to develop the best flavor. Mine rested overnight--better than the 6-hour minimum, anyway. Meanwhile the cranberries got a soak to soften them, then were drained and the soaking liquid became the liquid for the bread dough.

I used my KitchenAid mixer for the dough, as I do with almost all breads these days. The biga was cut into pieces into the cranberry water, then in goes the flour and other dry ingredients, including some diastatic malt powder that I'd cooked into non-diastatic state per Internet instructions. It got an autolyse pause then machine kneading, then in went the oil and the chopped nuts...gosh, that's a lot of nuts. It took a long time to get most of the nuts incorporated, and there were periodic escapees from the dough. Next was to add the soaked cranberry fragments--in the mixer for me, hoping it wouldn't stain the dough too much...but then with the fruit already cut, that was pretty much of a lost cause. I let the mixer go a bit longer to get the cranberries fairly distributed. If I'd thought this dough had a lot of mix-ins before, I was wrong.

Once I had the dough completed, brimming with all its nuts and fruit, I dumped it into greased bowl, pulled it back out to shape a bit, and let it rise twice. On shaping after the second rise, I moved all the pecans that were very close to the top and tucked them into better covered locations, trying to avoid burned pecans. The recipe called for a torpedo shape, but I opted for using my big loaf pan...which might be a touch too big, as I'd have preferred a slightly taller loaf. The dough rose well, was slashed with lame, spritzed with water, and baked using the ice cubes in a hot pan to add steam. Despite being pretty careful to not overproof, I still didn't get much oven spring.

Results: Excellent bread. This was a hit with everyone, even those not all that fond of cranberries. (Maybe the smaller cranberry pieces helped there.) It's got a nice chewy texture, and as noted above, a high ratio of "good stuff" to bread. I'm planning on baking this one again.