There are few virtues a man can possess more erotic than culinary skill.
Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende


Starting in November of 2009 Michelle at the Big Black Dog formed a group to bake its way through Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Zoë François and Jeff Hertzberg. I loved Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, so I signed up with the group. Michelle first had us do a couple of warm-up assignments, which were my first attempt at blogging. The first "Official" post was on January 15, 2010, and it was followed by 41 more, on the 1st and 15th of each month. When I signed on I said I would bake the whole book, and like Horton (the elephant) I meant what I said and I said what I meant. I finished baking the book on October 1, 2011. Having completed that challenge, now I am just going to do some stuff, and post about it. As part of that stuff Michelle is posing a new, and different, challenge for us each month.

But I am still baking bread, mostly the Five Minutes a Day kind, and if you would like to try the Five Minutes a Day bread method there are some links, with recipes, in the right hand column to get you started. Please give it a try.

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This day be bread and peace my lot.
Alexander Pope

How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?
Julia Child

Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven.
Yiddish proverb
(And some are only half baked.)

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw, via Sharon

Of all smells, bread; of all tastes, salt.
George Herbert

Thursday, February 25, 2010

English Granary-Style Bread

Posted by Guff
Although I am baking my way through the new HB in 5 book, there are still a lot of recipes from the original AB in 5 that I enjoy.  Since a had a bit of a breather between assignments in the Challenge, I decided to make a batch of the English Granary Bread. 
The recipe calls for wheat flakes, which the book indicated were available through King Arthur Flour.  But the wheat flakes were no longer available, at least when I tried to order them.  I posed the question of a substitute to King Arthur, and they suggested Maltex cereal, which I ordered online. 
I used the dough to make a free form loaf.  It seems to me that the loaf takes longer to bake than the recipe indicates.  I used an instant read thermometer to check for doneness, shooting for 200-205 degrees. 

The cereal in the dough makes for a kind of craggy crust and yields a somewhat damper crumb.  It has a nice, nutty flavor and produces a bread we enjoy very much.