Guff's Stuff

Black Bread

2012-02-01T12:29:00.000-05:00

In my last post I introduced my homey John, who tries to keep me in line. He has given up trying to keep his bride in line. A long time ago. In addition to offering editorial input, he also offers other tidbits. Recently he sent me a link to a recipe for Black Bread from 101 Cookbooks. Since John had made all that effort I thought I would give it a try. I became a little concerned, however, because when I asked him if he wanted to be a taster, he declined, claiming that he was going to be out of town, out of state, even, for the foreseeable future and would not be available to taste the bread. HMMMMM.

Well, the recipe seemed safe enough, so off I went. The flavorings are similar to the AB/HB in 5 pumpernickels, with espresso (I used instant), cocoa (I used Dutch), molasses, and rye flour. It does not use the caramel color, so just common ingredients. But it does call for 2 cups of shredded carrots!

I mixed up the dough in my Kitchen-aid, and kneaded it there as well. I had to add a fair amount of extra flour to get the "soft, tacky, cohesive dough" the recipe called for, but then my measurements could have been off a bit. I then put it to rise, and boy did it!

The recipe then suggested forming it into a ball and placing it on a cookie sheet for the second rise, but the dough was soft, so I put in in a 10" oven-proof skillet lined with parchment paper. The sides of the skillet helped contain the dough. Then I covered the whole thing with a bowl.

Here it is after the second (substantial) rise.

I slashed the top, sprinkled with caraway seeds, and into the oven it went, pan and all.

Voila!

The recipe notes that it makes "one extra-large loaf." And it was not lying.

But it was very good, soft, tender and flecked with carrots.

Since the dough was fairly well hydrated, I wonder it it could be adapted to the 5 Minutes a Day method. It would easily make 2 loaves. Maybe I will play with that, because we really liked this bread.

For another adaptation, I was watching French Food at Home on the Cooking Channel and she made an Onion Tart. She called for a pre-baked pastry round, but I thought "why not some bread dough?" So I rolled some of my HB in 5 dough (a Broa I had in the fridge) into a thin rustic shape, pre-baked it, then topped it with some light sour cream, thinly sliced onions, and turkey bacon, and baked it until lightly browned.

Pretty darned good.

And now for a gardening tip. If you force paperwhite narcissi you know that they can get leggy. To accomodate that I start them at the bottom of a deep vase.

But according to Master Gardener Sam, once you get about an inch of growth, replace the water with a mixture of water and alcohol--5 parts water to 1 part rubbing alcohol. (You could use booze, but why would you?) This mixture affects the growth, and the narcissi stay short! I am trying it now, and will let you know.

So that is it for this time, see you next time for our monthly challenge.

Sandwiches

2012-01-15T13:57:00.000-05:00

This month's Challenge from Michelle was to make a sandwich. Before getting to that, however, I apparently have some unfinished business from my last post. In that one I made some sourdough waffles with the new Professional Double Waffle Maker Santa brought me. One of my fan excoriated me for not addressing what I put on top of the waffles! Now, a purist would observe that putting anything on a freshly (and Professionally) made wild-caught-sourdough waffle is gilding the lily. And as Heraclitus said, you can't put your foot in the same river twice, or was it Thomas Wolfe who said you can never go home again. Whatever--the waffle ship has sailed. But to fill the hole that my homey John felt my last post left in his soul, or his stomach, here are some sourdough English Muffins I made

and here they are topped with some Wild Blueberry Jam

from the Maine Diner.

Which you can check out here.

Happy John?

Now for the sandwich. So many choices, so little time.

I decided to make a Mexican Torta. According to

A Torta is a Mexican sandwich, served on an oblong 6-8 inchtoasted sandwich roll, called telera. Tortas are served hot. Common ingredientsmay include, but are not limited to:
Steak
Chicken
Pork Carnitas
Milanesa
Chicken Milanesa
Pork Loin
Pork Chops
Smoked Ham
Chorizo
Hotdogs
Fried Eggs
Beef Barbacoa

For mine I started with the bread. I used some HB in 5 master dough to make a batard, or what Lucky Jack Aubrey would call a "French short bastard." (The Mautitius Command, 97-98). Since we were in the midst of some unseasonably nice weather, I baked it on the grill.

Once it had cooled, I sliced it in half and scooped out most of the the interior.

I wanted to make a meatless torta, so for the filling I mixed some pinto beans with some salsa and some pickled hot peppers and some cumin until the beans were slightly mashed. I piled this on the bottom of the loaf, and topped it with some shredded cheese. Then I broiled it to brown the cheese. I put some cole slaw mix on the top half of the bread,

mooshed the top and bottom together, and cut it in half.

And we ate the whole thing.

In closing, I was reading an article in Audubon Magazine on feathers, and the author offered an observation from his mother-in-law. On reflection, and I gave it some fair amount of reflection, it seemed to me to be an essential and fundamental truth, so I offer it to you here:

You are never more than 3 feet from a spider.

To those of my gentle readers for whom this might be disturbing, I can only offer the following from James Thurber:

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has and exception.

New Year's Day Sourdough Waffles

2012-01-01T14:11:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year to all.

Now I realize that some of you are perhaps not feeling up to a good breakfast this morning. I hope that what you did last night was at least worth how you feel now. I, on the other hand, had a nice dinner, read a bit, then went to bed at a decent hour. My Mother always said that an hour of sleep before midnight was worth two after, and apparently Dr. Oz Himself agrees! (Actually, he says that the best sleep comes between 10 pm and 2 am.) So I was ready for a hearty breakfast to sustain me for the football games ahead.

We had a very nice Christmas, and Santa was particularly good to me. I must have been very good last year because I got a new waffle maker. And not just any waffle maker, a Professional Double Belgian Waffle Maker!

No more amateur waffles for us!

If you have stayed at some of the finer hotels, Sleep Inn, for example, you may be familiar with the waffle makers on a stand that you rotate, or flip, after pouring in the batter. Using gravity as your friend, this makes for a more even waffle. Well, the waffle maker Santa brought me goes one better, because not only does it rotate, it has two, count 'em, two irons! So you can make two waffles at the same time. This helps ameliorate, though it does not entirely eliminate, the dreaded waffle bottleneck. (With only one iron there is a production bottleneck while each waffle cooks which causes demand to vastly exceed supply. While you can keep waffles warm in a 200 degree oven, they are best fresh from the waffle iron.)

And although my Professional Double Belgian Waffle Maker does not come with bells or whistles it does come with beeps and lights to tell when the waffles are done.

It even comes with a dedicated batter dispenser!

To make the waffles I used my locally caught wild sourdough, and made sourdough whole wheat waffles. They are not 100% whole wheat, but are 60/40 whole wheat/AP flour, to keep them light. I am currently using 100% hydrated sourdough.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Waffles (or Pancakes)
The night before, mix 200g of your sourdough starter with 80gof AP flour, 120g WW flour and 200g water. Leave at warm room temperature overnight, covered with plastic wrap or a plate.
(For Buckwheat waffles use 120g buckwheat flour in place of WW flour.)

Next morning remove 200g of starter to save for next time and to the rest add 1egg (or 1/4 cup eggbeaters), 3 Tbs milk, and 2 tsp canola oil. Mix 1tsp sugar with 1/2 tsp baking soda and sprinkle on top. Stir gently toincorporate and until the batter begins to get foamy.

Makes about3 waffles using 2/3 cup batter for each, may be doubled.

Here is the batter, ready to go. Note that the dedicated batter measure has a dedicated bowl hanger.

And here is a close-up of the batter.

All those bubbles make for some really light waffles

which were wonderful.

And even though there were 4 of us, the Professional Double Belgian Waffle Maker made them as fast as we could eat them.

As a final note, I wrote in my last post about our holiday tradition of making my Grandma's Coffee Cake. Since we make it for Christmas, and it was not yet Christmas, I did not have a picture. But Katie came through, and we had it for Christmas Brunch, and this is what it looked like (after we had been at it a while).

So for 2012 keep your resolutions and your expectation modest, you will be happier for it. For example, our resolution is to not lick the floor.

Holiday Traditions

2011-12-15T07:03:00.000-05:00

The challenge this month is Holiday traditions.

We have always opened our gifts on Christmas Morning. We take our time, one person opening at a time, and no feeding frenzy--at least not until brunch.

We usually open some presents, then break for brunch, then finish opening. For brunch we must have "The Breakfast Casserole Katie Likes." That is the name of it--it is what it says on the recipe card! Katie is our oldest daughter. She is not only perfect, she has red hair. She also knows how things ought to be done, and woe to any who deviate from her expectations. (Trust us on this.)

In addition to "Katie's Casserole" we have also had a coffee cake. For years my mother made the coffee cake, then my sister took over the task when my mother was no longer able to do it. I made it a few times, then the torch passed to Katie. We know it as Grandma's Coffee Cake.

The Grandma in question was father's mother, born Olive Pearl Bundy on November 4, 1891, in Washington County Indiana.

Grandpa & Grandma

My father was the only son, and could do no wrong in their eyes, which was known to annoy his three sisters on occasion. (I thought my father was pretty great, too, except on the rare occasions I REALLY managed to piss him off.)

Grandma grew up on a farm, and cooked like it. We lived in the same town, and often went to Grandma & Grandpa's for Sunday dinner. It may be my mind burnishing memories, but and I swear Grandma would usually have at least 2, maybe 3 proteins--chicken, beef and/or pork, and several different vegetables and sides and a couple of desserts. And that was when it was just us. When my aunts and uncles and cousins were in town she really pulled out all the stops.

Aunt Polly & Aunt Mart

That was also when Grandpa would make his home-made ice cream. I say that Grandpa would make the ice cream, but on reflection, it seemed that he usually delegated all the work and reserved for himself only the supervisory and quality-control duties.

Grandpa took his quality-control duties very seriously!

Back to the Coffee Cake, my mother got the recipe from her mother-in-law, my Grandma. Which it's why why we call it Grandma's Coffee Cake, and have for over 50 years. (My mother sometimes suspected that Grandma would leave a little something out whenever she gave her a recipe she, so it would not taste quite the same as hers.)

But I was talking to my cousin Rob this fall, and the topic of eating at Grandma's came up. (Rob was one of the "out of town cousins for whom ALL the stops were pulled out.) I mentioned the coffee cake. His mother (Aunt Mart, above) also had a family coffee cake recipe, but to them it was known as Aunt Hazel's Coffee Cake. Aunt Hazel was one of Grandma's younger sisters. Rob sent me a copy of the recipe, and they are almost identical, except that Grandma's has sugar in the batter which Aunt Hazel's does not. Twin recipes separated at birth? Anyway, however denominated, it is an old Bundy family recipe.

Since this is the one we have made, here is the recipe for

Grandma’sCoffee Cake
Preheat oven to 350. Grease andflour a 9 x 13 pan.

For the Filling and Topping

Mix together:

1 csugar

1/3c brown sugar

1 tcinnamon
Set aside

For the Cake

Cream:

1 stickmargarine

1 cup sugar

then add
2eggs and

1 cup sourcream

In a separate bowl combine:

2 cups flour

1 t bakingpowder

1 t bakingsoda

1 t salt

Mix dry ingredients into the wet ingredients

Spread half of the batter in the pan, then sprinkle on half the filling/topping evenly over it. Repeat. This is harder than it sounds because the second layer of batter sticks to the dry topping layer and does not want to spread out. Drop spoonfuls all over the topping and spread it our the bestyou can.
Bake at 350 until brown andtoothpick comes out clean, 1 hour or more (sometimes it seems to take longer than others).

My sister died in 2007, and I think that was the last year we made the coffee cake. We have been going for something a bit lighter in recent years. But after writing about it I think maybe we need to make it again, just for the tradition. Damn the calories and full speed ahead.

Katie??

Gobble-y Gobble-y

2011-12-01T13:07:00.000-05:00

Well, Thanksgiving has passed, and it is time for stores to start putting out the Christmas stuff and playing Christmas music--oh wait, that started right after Halloween.

We have an old Muppet Christmas show we watch every year (watch out for the icy patch) in which the turkey persuades the Swedish Chef that Big Bird is a turkey. The show is old enough that Jim Henson is in it, and my bride tears up each year when we watch it. She has never gotten over his tragic death.

Anyway, more often than not we host Thanksgiving, and I have always found it easier to make two modest sized turkeys than one huge one. But for years was dissatisfied with the method of cooking the second turkey. We only had one oven, so one when there, but whither the second? Cooking on the grill here on the North Coast can be chancy in November. I used an electric roaster, which cooked the turkey but retained so much moisture that it was more steamed than roasted.

When we redid our kitchen 2 years ago we considered a second oven, but decided that was a pretty steep price for something we would only use one day a year, and we had other places that money could be better spent.

Many people deep fry their turkeys, but some also burn down their houses doing it.

Then I heard about an oil-less turkey fryer. That sounded safer, so I ordered one. I got the Big Easy Oil-less Infared Turkey Fryer.

It was a lot less than a second built-in oven. And it works great, it uses propane from a tank, like a gas grill. I don't understand how it works, but it does.

Now I have not had a real deep-fried turkey, and I do not claim that this is really the same, but it cooked my second turkey, 14 pounds, in just about 2 hours, and gave it crispy skin and moist meat. The only trick is that you really need to watch it. It can cook faster than you expect.

I would like to be able to show you a photo of my turkey, but with 2 turkeys to carve, and the other stuff to orchestrate, photography just was not in the picture, but this should give you the idea

And the Big Easy is not just for turkeys. It does a great job on chickens (I usually cook 2 since I am cranking it up) and I have also cooked pork loin and beef in it. For further inspiration there are online forums where people cook almost anything in their Big Easys.

So, for you Thanksgiving turkey next year, or maybe for your Solstice turkey this year, the Big Easy might be something you want to consider.

Dog's Body

2011-11-15T07:11:00.000-05:00

Since we have all completed our first challenge, baking our way through every recipe in HB in 5, Michelle has graciously offered to give us monthly challenges, to keep us off the streets. The challenge this month was to make something historical. For inspiration I looked to historical fiction: the Aubrey–Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. These novels, 20 of them in all (plus part of an unfinished 21st), cover the period of the Napoleonic wars. The series begins in 1800 and ends about 1815. Jack Aubrey is a captain in the royal navy, and Stephen Maturin is his particular friend, a ship's surgeon, and a spy. The movie Master and Commander, with Russel Crowe, is drawn from several of the books. I have read all 20 books, and am gradually working my way through them a second time. Needless to say I like these books very much, and heartily recommend them. You should start your voyage of discovery with the first book, Master and Commander.

The series has spawned several related works: an atlas, an "illustrated companion," and a compilation of music. Most importantly for our purposes it prompted Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels (Patrick O'Brian) by Anne Chotzinoff Grossman, Lisa Grossman Thomas and Patrick O'Brian. (The "which it's" construction is drawn from a speech convention used by Killick, Aubrey's steward, homage to which I have paid in my own subtitles.) Lucky Jack Aubrey loves women, he loves sailing, he loves prize money, and he loves food. The novels lavish significant attention on this last topic, hence the Gastronomic Companion, which recreates recipes for the meals in the books. For a sense of what these meals were like I strongly suggest you visit Blog d' Ellison, for pictures and a description of a dinner prepared 'a la Aubrey.

On a sea voyage at the beginning of the 19th century the key to provisions was durability. Right after leaving a port the food could be pretty good, but voyages lasted years, and the fresh stuff soon ran out. (When the pickings got particularly slim, they caught the rats and cooked them up. These they called 'millers,' according to Jack Aubrey "to make 'em eat better; and perhaps because they are dusty, too, from getting into the flour and peas.") For these long voyages stuff had to last, and there was no refrigeration. It was hardtack, salt beef and pork, dried peas.

I thought about making hardtack, more properly ship's biscuit, but the recipe requires that the finished biscuits be stored in barrels for many years, preferably at sea and somewhere that they would develop a good crop of weevils. Looking for something a bit quicker to prepare I opted for Dog's Body, or Pease Pudding. This is somewhat different than the pease porridge of the nursery rhyme, although it too can be enjoyed hot, or cold, or presumably, nine days old.

At least according to the New York Times pease porridge is more of a soup. Pease Pudding is much sterner stuff. The Old Foodie observed that

Some sort of porridge/pottage has been the staple meal of peasants in many countries for many centuries. In its simplest form it is a sort of soup with a starchy base, with other additions depending on the circumstances of the time. On feast days, ale or wine and spices, sugar and dried fruit could be added to make this one-pot meal special, and Sam [Pepys] mentions ‘brave plum porridge’ with apparent relish, in another diary entry. All that was needed was the development of pudding cloths in the seventeenth century to enable Christmas (plum) porridge to evolve into Christmas (plum) pudding, and Pease porridge to Pease pudding.

One might wonder why it took mankind until the seventeenth century to develop the pudding cloth, but then again, one might wonder why it was developed at all. Apparently, puddings started out like sausages--being stuffed into animal entrails. Some were stuffed into stomachs, like haggis, others into intestines like black or blood pudding. In fact, according to my New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary one of the early meanings of 'pudding' is the bowels, entrails and guts. As Humankind progressed the entrails were abandoned in favor of basins and cloths. Broadly speaking, a basin is used for steamed puddings and a cloth for those that are boiled. Puddings are usually cooked for quite a while.

My recipe for Pease Pudding is boiled in a pudding cloth. To be accurate I should have used a piece of sailcloth for my pudding cloth, but alas I had none. Cotton towels will work, but I had some unbleached muslin that I used.

The recipe itself is pretty easy, and since this was just for the two of us I halved it. I took 1/2 pound of dried split peas(e) and tied them loosely (so that they have room to expand) in my pudding cloth. I placed this in a pot of boiling water and boiled it for 1 1/2 hours. Then I drained it and let it cool enough to handle. At that point I squeezed out as much moisture as I could and put the resulting lump of pease in a bowl. The recipe then calls for mixing the pease with some butter and flour and salt and pepper.

As a note the recipe observes that a more seamanlike version can be made using salt-pork instead of butter. I confess to being even more lubberly (this challenge did start out as HEALTHY bread in 5 minutes a day), and using light butter. This mixture is then returned to the pudding cloth and this time it is tightly tied. The tightness of the tie determines the texture of the pudding. Then it is back into a pot of (fresh) boiling water for an hour.

That is it. It is then carefully unmolded onto the serving plate.

At first I was concerned that my pudding was too loose. In The Far Side of the World, Captain Aubrey is on deck "eating a piece of cold or at least luke-warm pease pudding with one hand and holding on to the aftermost maintopgallant standing backstay with the other, ..." My pudding had the consistency when unmolded of a semi-firm polenta, certainly not firm enough to eat out of hand. But like polenta it firmed up as it sat.

So how was it? Surprisingly good!! Pease, butter, salt and pepper, how bad could it be? We did in fact eat it hot, and we later ate it cold. Thinking to be clever, I also sliced it and browned it in a bit of olive oil, like a polenta.

I subsequently discovered from Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, however, that this was a traditional treatment for leftover pudding. There is in fact nothing new under the sun. Our Dog's Body did not last nine days, so we did not eat it nine days old. One of the recipes I consulted, posted by Molly at Food.com noted that it is "[a]lso lovely served cold, spread on a chunk of bread and topped with a thin slice of ham." That does sound good.

Now, as for Dog's Body. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, this was sailors' slang for pease pudding. It then became slang for a junior naval officer, and then evolved, as dogsbody, into a term for anyone doing menial work--a drudge. In usage then it would be "I am my wife's dogsbody." (And her arm candy.)

So, having baked Dog's Body 'a la Aubrey, I think I will read the next volume on my re-read of the series.

Till next time I wish you all fair winds and a following sea.

Hunting Me Some Wild Sourdough

2011-11-01T07:47:00.000-04:00

A post on our Discussion Board (from Renee) prompted me to try to catch some wild sourdough. I have a strain that supposedly went west on the Oregon trail, but we are supposed to eat more locally, and you don't get much more local than wild beasts captured in your own backyard. (OK, I know yeasts are fungi, but I am using my poetic license.) For my trap I mixed 1/2 cup of unbleached flour with 1/2 cup bottled water and 1/8 teaspoon of lemon juice in a non-metalic (I used plastic) bowl. I set a coarse strainer on top to keep out big chunks and leaves and set it in the garden for about an hour or so--as long as it took to mow the lawn. Then I brought it inside, set a plate on top as a cover, put it on the kitchen counter, and waited.

After about 24 hours I had some liquid on top, although maybe that was just the stuff settling, and perhaps some bubbles, so I fed it with 1/4 cup each of water and flour. Once it is going you are supposed to feed it twice a day, and when I checked at 36 hours I had lots of bubbles.

IT LIVES!

From there on I just kept the bowl on the counter, covered, and fed it some flour and water twice a day.

In the past when I used sourdough I usually measured by volume. Harder core bakers measure by weight, which is what I now do for AB/HB in 5 baking. So although I began by feeding my starter equal parts of water and flour by volume, I switched and started feeding it by weight, which is not the same thing since equal volumes of flour and water have different weights. For people who care about the hydration of their sourdough and their dough, weight is the way to go since that is how hydration is calculated. For a discussion of hydration, or the Bakers' Percentage, you can go to Northwest Sourdough for a bunch of helpful info, including a hydration calculator. Basically, the flour percentage is always 100%, and it is ignored. The percentage of hydration then is in terms of the water, or other liquid, related to the flour. Since in my starter the water is the same as the flour, the hydration is 100%.

Each time you feed your starter you get more of it, since you are adding more flour and water. Once it really gets going you remove what you added to use in whatever you are making. But at this stage, I just kept feeding it, and getting more starter. Usually, you discard some starter and add more flour and water. These were my babies, however, so when my bowl got full I divided the starter and kept going. An heir and a spare.

At about a week I had two bowls full, so instead of discarding some of the starter I used some to make a loaf of bread. I got up early, since it was an all day project, and formed my dough using a recipe I got from one of my blogging buddies. I then went to check my email. and right after starting my bread saw a post in our Discussion Board from Daniellestating that you should wait to use a new starter for a full 2 weeks. OOOPS. I am not sure if waiting is to get the starter going well or to develop the sour flavor. Anyway, since I had the dough formed I went ahead. I got bread, but is was a little heavy.

It had lots of air pockets, so I think the starter did its job. But the dough seemed dry to me as I formed it, thought I am used to AB/HB dough, and perhaps it may have been a hydration issue.

It did not take long for me to build up more starter, and this time instead of discarding any I used some to make waffles. This is my go-to use for sourdough.

You can get my recipe in an earlier post.

Next, I decided to give bread another try, this time using the Peasant Bread from AB in 5. I chose this bread because it has some rye flour in it, and I had read that using rye can enhance the sour tang in the bread. I did not use one of the breads with more whole grain since that seems to mute other flavors. Jeff and Zoë add a little commercial yeast when they use sourdough, but here I did not, relying entirely on my yeast peeps.

They did a great job.

To limber up for Thanksgiving I had done a turkey in my Oil-less Turkey Fryer, and had leftovers. So I decided to make some sourdough biscuits to go under some turkey and gravy. I used the Sourdough Biscuits in a HURRY recipe from Discovering Sourdough, and they came out great.

And finally, I used the rest of the Peasant Bread dough to make some oval loaves. They, too, turned out well.

I am getting good bread, but not much sour tang. From what I have read this seems to be a fairly common issue. But now that I have my own yeast strain I plan to continue to bake more than waffles with my sourdough, and see what happens.

Visitors During the Last Year

2011-10-29T07:27:00.000-04:00

United States 1,611	Ohio 440
California 156	Oregon 89
Pennsylvania 86	Kentucky 54
New York 53	Illinois 48
North Carolina 45	Georgia 45
Tennessee 44	Florida 43
Washington 40	Iowa 35
Texas 35	Michigan 32
Minnesota 28	Arizona 26
Maine 22	Massachusetts 22
Utah 21	Virginia 18
New Jersey 16	Colorado 15
Connecticut 14	South Carolina 11
Alabama 11	Oklahoma 11
Maryland 11	Missouri 11
Nevada 10	Indiana 9
Wisconsin 9	Kansas 8
Louisiana 8	Idaho 8
Vermont 6	West Virginia 5
New Mexico 4	North Dakota 4
Delaware 3	Hawaii 3
District of Columbia 3	Arkansas 2
Montana 2	New Hampshire 2
Alaska 2	Nebraska 2
Mississippi 1	South Dakota 1
Rhode Island 1	N/A 36

Canada 120	United Kingdom 58
Australia 40	India 15
Germany 13	Singapore 12
South Africa 9	Russian Federation 9
Netherlands 9	Taiwan 8
New Zealand 7	Italy 6
Ireland 5	Philippines 5
Hungary 4	Brazil 4
France 4	Finland 4
Bulgaria 4	Korea, Republic of 3
Romania 3	Bangladesh 3
Portugal 3	Trinidad and Tobago 3
Israel 3	Norway 3
Spain 3	Turkey 3
Japan 2	Serbia 2
Indonesia 2	Greece 2
Ukraine 2	Malaysia2
Thailand 2	Hong Kong 2
Belgium 2	Saudi Arabia 2
Poland 2	Lebanon 2
Macedonia 1	Mongolia 1
Estonia 1	Iceland 1
Sweden 1	Belarus 1
Slovakia 1	Croatia 1
Austria 1	Bosnia and Herzegovina 1
United Arab Emirates 1	Venezuela 1
Nigeria 1	Vietnam 1
Cambodia 1	Nicaragua 1
Ethiopia 1	Ghana 1
Argentina 1	Uruguay 1
Chile 1	Uganda 1
Colombia 1	Sudan 1
Antigua and Barbuda 1	Bahamas 1
Pakistan 1	Qatar 1
Egypt 1	Mexico 1
Oman 1	Cayman Islands 1
Virgin Islands, US 1	Jamaica 1
Netherlands Antilles 1	Dominican Republic 1
Malta 1

Appendix

2011-10-27T14:38:00.000-04:00

Revised Baking Schedule for HBinFive With Necessary Ingredients and Ratings
Does not include AP or WW flours or ingredients like pizza toppings and basic seasonings.

1. January 15th Bread Braid
1 full Master Recipe The Master!!
Pgs 53-59 - 1 Loaf of Bread
Pgs 71-73 – Epi or Wreath shaped bread
Pgs 233-234 - Spicy Whole Grain Snack Crackers (Chili Powder)

2. Feb 1st Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Soft Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread Katie Really Likes This
Pgs 92-93 – 1 Loaf of Soft Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread
Pgs 94-95 – Hamburger or Hotdog Buns Very Good
Pgs 277-278 – 1 loaf of Apple Strudel Bread (Apples, Raisins, Walnuts) Katie Loved This

3. Feb 15th Bread Braid (Celebrating Valentine’s Day)
½ recipe Red Beet Buns (Spelt Flour, Raw Beets)
Pgs 180-181 – Red Beet Buns Good
½ recipe Chocolate Espresso WW Bread (Bittersweet Chocolate)
Pgs 304-305 – Chocolate Tangerine Bars (Craisins, Tangerine) Just OK

4. March 1st Bread Braid
1 full recipe of 100% Whole Wheat Bread w/Olive Oil OK
Pgs 81-82 – 1 loaf of 100% Whole Wheat Bread w/Olive Oil
Pgs 225-226 – 1 loaf of Aloo Paratha (Peas, Potatoes, Curry Powder, Ghee)
Pgs 220-222 – 1 loaf of Southwestern Focaccia w Roasted Corn and Goat Cheese (Corn, Dried Chili Pepper or Chili Powder, Pablano Pepper, Diced Tomatoes, Cumin, Goat cheese, Chicken, Cilaintro)

5. March 15th Bread Braid (St. Patrick’s Day Celebration)
½ recipe Avocado-Guacamole Bread (Avocado, Tomato) Good
Pgs 160-161 - 1 loaf of Avocado-Guacamole Bread
½ recipe of Pesto Pine Nut Bread (Spelt Flour, Pesto, Pine Nuts)
Pgs 98-99 - 1 loaf of Pesto Pine Nut Bread Very Good--Use Other Stuff

6. Apr 1st Bread Braid (Celebrating Spring)
½ recipe of Carrot Bread (Wheat Germ, Coconut, Carrots, Dried Fruit, Walnuts)
Pgs 157-159 - 1 loaf of Carrot Bread Pat Loves This
½ recipe of Olive Spelt Bread (Spelt Flour, Yogurt, Pitted Green Olives)
Pg 96-97 - 1 loaf of Olive Spelt Bread or you can make a flat bread, rolls or buns Greta Liked This a Lot

7. Apr 15th Bread Braid Interesting--but not worth making again.

1 full recipe of Gluten-Free Olive Oil Bread (Brown Rice Flour, Soy Flour, Tapioca Flour, Xanthum Gum)
Pgs 238-239 - 1 loaf of Gluten-free Olive Oil Bread
Pgs 240-241 - Gluten-free Pizza w fresh Mozzarella, Olives, Basil and Anaheim Peppers
Pgs 242-243 - Gluten-free Sesame Baguette (Sesame Seeds)

8. May 1st Bread Braid (May Day)
½ recipe Chocolate Espresso Whole Wheat Brioche (Bittersweet Chocolate)
Pgs 294-296 – Cinnamon Crescent Rolls with Cream Cheese Icing OK
½ recipe Milk and Honey Raisin Bread (Raisins)
Pgs 270- 271 – 1 loaf of Milk and Honey Raisin Bread Good

9. May 15th Bread Braid
1 full Master Recipe
Pgs 62-63 - 1 loaf of Hearty Whole Wheat Sandwich Loaf Good
Pgs 66-67 – Turkish-Style Pita Bread with Black Sesame Seeds (Black Sesame Seeds)
Pgs 64-65 – Whole Grain Garlic Knots (Parsley, Parmesan)

10. Jun 1st Bread Braid
1 full Master Recipe
Pgs 218-219 – Cherry Black Pepper Focaccia (Dried Cherries, Shallots)
Pgs 74-75 – Cinnamon Raison Whole Wheat Bagels (Raisins) Hard and messy to make
Pgs 60-61 - Moon and Stars Bread (Sesame Seeds)

11. Jun 15th Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Whole Wheat Bread w Olive Oil Good for pizzas, but so is Master
Pgs 213-215 - Pesto Pizza w Grilled Chicken on the Gas Grill
Pgs 223-224 – 1 loaf of Seed Encrusted Pita Bread (Mixed Seeds)
Pgs 205-207 – Oven-Baked Whole Grain Pizza w Roasted Red Peppers and Fontina

12. Jul 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe of Mixed Berry Bread (Frozen Mixed Berries) Not as berry-y as you would think
Pgs 197-199 – 1 loaf of Whole Wheat Mixed Berry Bread or Muffins
½ recipe of WW Banana Bread (Bananas, Walnuts) Not very banana-y
Pgs 200-201 – 1 loaf Whole Wheat Banana Bread

13. Jul 15th Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Gluten-free Cheddar and Sesame Bread (Sorghum Flour, Soy Flour, Xanthum Gum, Cheddar Cheese, Sesame Seeds) Great taste--adapt to Master
Pgs 244-245 – 1 loaf of Gluten-free Cheddar and Sesame Bread
Pg 247 – Gluten-free Parmesan Bread Sticks (Parmesan)

14. Aug 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe of Four-leaf Clover Broccoli and Cheddar Buns (Broccoli, Cheddar Cheese)
Pgs 174- 176 - Four-leaf Clover Broccoli and Cheddar Buns OK
½ recipe of Mesquite Bread (Mesquite Flour, Masa, Agave Syrup, Serrano or Jalapeno Peppers, Cilantro)
Pgs 171-173 – 1 loaf of Mesquite Bread Great Aroma, Good Flavor

15. Aug 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe of Vollkornbrot: 100% Whole Grain (Wheat Berries, Rye Flakes, Molasses)
Pgs 83-85 – 1 loaf Vollkornbrot: 100% Whole Grain Good
½ recipe of Rosemary Flax Baguette (Ground Flax Seed, Wheat Germ, Rosemary)
Pgs 89-91 – 3-4 loaves of Rosemary Flax Baguette Good

16. Sep 1st Bread Braid
1 full recipe of 100% Whole Wheat Bread, Plain and Simple Very Good
Pgs 79-80 – 1 loaf of 100% WW Bread, Plain and Simple
Pgs 208-209 – 1 loaf of Zucchini Flatbread (Parsley, Zucchini, Parmesan, Pine Nuts)
Pgs 228-230 – 1 loaf of Msemmen (Algerian Flatbread) (Cumin, Paprika, Turmeric, Cayenne Pepper) Interesting

17. Sep 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe Maple Oatmeal Bread (Rolled Oats, Wheat Germ, Buttermilk, Maple Syrup)
Pgs 145-146 – 1 loaf of 100% Whole Grain Maple Oatmeal Bread Disappointing
½ recipe Quinoa Bread (Quinoa)
Pgs 132-133 – 1 loaf of Quinoa Bread Very Good

18. Oct 1st Bread Braid
1 full recipe of WW Brioche (Great) or Pumpkin Pie Broiche (Pumpkin) (Great)
Pgs 292-293 -- Honey Caramel Sticky Nut Buns (Orange Zest, Nuts, Raisins) Excellent
Pgs 287-289 – Indian Spiced Whole Grain Doughnuts (Cardamom) Terrific
Pgs 290-291 – Pear Tarte Tatin w Brioche (Pears, Star Anise, Fresh Ginger, Cardamom)

19. Oct 15th Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Whole Wheat Bread
Pgs 210-212 – Whole Grain Pizza on the Gas Grill (right on the grates)
Pgs 231-232 - Grissini (Olive Oil Bread Sticks) (Rosemary)
Pgs 155-156 – 2 small loaves of Garlic Studded Baguette

20. Nov 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe Pear Coffee Bread (Pears, Yogurt)
Pgs 185-186 – 1 loaf of Pear Coffee Bread OK
½ recipe Tabbouleh Bread w Parsley, Garlic and Bulgar (Bulgar, Parsley)
Pgs 152-154 – 1 loaf of Tabbouleh Bread w Parsley, Garlic and Bulgar Excellent

21. Nov 15th Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Pumpkin Pie Brioche (Pumpkin)
Pgs 297-298 - Pistachio Twist (Pistachios, Orange or Rose Water) Hard to make, but very good filing
Pgs 299-300 – Fruit-filled Pinwheels (Fruit Preserves)

22. Dec 1st Bread Braid
1 full recipe of 100% Whole Wheat Christmas Stollen (Dried Fruit, Marzipan or Almond Paste or Almonds)
Pgs 279-281 – 1 loaf of 100% Whole Wheat Christmas Stollen Good
Pg 199 – Muffins

2011 (Are you still with me?)
24. Jan 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe Whole Wheat and Flaxseed Bread (Ground Flax Seed)
Pgs 86-88 – 1 loaf 100% Whole Wheat and Flaxseed Bread Good, nice flavor
½ recipe Roasted Garlic Bread (Ground Flax Seed, Spelt Flour)
Pgs 100-102 – 1 loaf of Roasted Garlic Bread Good

25. Jan 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe Dilled Rye w White Whole Wheat (Rye Flour, Dill)
Pgs 123-124 1 loaf of Dilled Rye with White Whole Wheat Not much dill flavor
½ recipe 100% Whole Grain Rosemary Potato Dinner Rolls w a Salt Crust (Rye Flour, Soy Flour, Rosemary, Potatoes) OK--different
Pgs 125-126 - Whole Grain Rosemary Potato Dinner Rolls w a Salt Crust

26. Feb 1st Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Gluten-free Crusty Boule (Brown Rice Flour, Sorghum Flour, Tapioca Flour, Xanthum Gum)
Pgs 236-237 - 1 loaf of Gluten-free Crusty Boule
Pg 246 – Gluten-free Cheddar and Sesame Crackers (Sesame Seeds)

27. Feb 15th Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Whole Grain Rye (Rye Flour, Caraway Seeds)
Pgs 113-114 – 1 loaf of Whole Grain Rye Very Good
Pgs 182-184 – Stuffed “Sandwich” Loaf
Save some dough for the next recipe

28. Mar 1st Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Bavarian-style Whole Grain Pumpernickel Bread (Rye Flour, Caramel Color Powder, Caraway Seeds, Molasses)
Pgs 115-117 – 1 loaf of Bavarian-style Whole Grain Pumpernickel Good
Pgs 118-119 – Black-and-White Braided Pumpernickel and Rye Loaf

29. Mar 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe of Apple Barley Bread (Barley Flour, Rye Flour, Apple Cider, Apples, Dried Apples, Barley Malt Syrup)
Pgs 194-196 – 1 loaf of Apple Barley Bread Not as good as expected
½ recipe of 100% Whole Grain Butterfat-and-Yolk-free Brioche
Pgs 282-283 – 1 loaf of Whole Grain Butterfat-and-Yolk-free Brioche OK--not great

30. Apr 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe Focaccia w Garlic Shards, Artichokes and Rosemary (Garlic, Artichokes, Rosemary)
Pgs 216-217 – 1 loaf of Focaccia w Garlic Shards, Artichokes and Rosemary
½ recipe Emmer Bread (Emmer Flour, Sesame Seeds, Beer)
Pgs 106- 108 – 1 loaf of Emmer Bread OK--not great

31. Apr 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe of Cracked Wheat Bread (Cracked Whole Wheat)
Pgs 109-110 – 1 loaf of Cracked Wheat Bread Pretty Good
½ recipe of Bradley Benn’s Beer Bread (Rye Flour, Beer)
Pgs 120-122 – 1 loaf of Bradley Benn’s Beer Bread Not worth the trouble

32. May 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe of 10-Grain Bread (10 Grain cereal, Mixed Seeds)
Pgs 111-112 – 1 loaf of 10-Grain Bread Too Dense--needs more liquid??
½ recipe of Buckwheat Bread (Buckwheat flour, Buckwheat Groats)
Pgs 127-128 – 1 loaf of Buckwheat Bread Very Good

33. May 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe of Anadama Corn Bread (Corn Meal, Wheat Germ, Molasses)
Pgs 129-131 – 1 loaf of Anadama Corn Bread Too Molasses-y
½ recipe of Whole Grain Brown Rice Bread (Brown Rice, Ground Flax Seed)
Pgs 140-141 – 1 loaf of Whole Grain Brown Rice Bread Good if you have extra rice

34. Jun 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe of Seeded Oat Bread (rolled Oats, Ground Flax Seed, Pumpkin seeds, Sunflower Seeds, Sesame Seeds, Barley Malt Syrup)
Pgs 147-149 – 1 loaf of Seeded Oat Bread Great
½ recipe of Provencal Fisherman’s Bread (Pain Bouillabaisse) (Herbs de Provence, Saffron Powder, Bulb Fennel)
Pgs 165-167 – 1 loaf of Provencal Fisherman’s Bread (Pain Bouillabaisse) Surprisingly good--but who has fennel?

35. Jun 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe of Not Rye (but so very close), and Gluten-free (Brown Rice Flour, Teff Flour, Tapioca Flour, Xanthum Gum, Molasses)
Pgs 249-251 – 1 loaf of Not Rye (but so very close), and Gluten-free
½ recipe of Honey Graham Bread (Graham Flour)
Pgs 268-269 – 1 loaf of Honey Graham Bread Pretty Good

36. Jul 1st Bread Braid
1 full recipe of Gluten-free Brioche (Brown Rice Flour, Tapioca Flour, Xanthum Gum)
Pgs 252-253 – 1 loaf of Gluten-free Brioche
Pgs 254-255 – “Super Sam” Gluten-free Cinnamon Buns

37. Jul 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe of Herbed Potato and Roasted Garlic Bread (Spelt Flour, Ground Flax Seed, Herbs de Provence, Potato
Pgs 103- 105 – 1 loaf of Herbed Potato and Garlic Bread Good
½ recipe of Red Wine and Cheese Bread (Rye Flour, Red Wine, Sharp Cheddar)
Pgs 137-139 – 1 loaf of Red Wine and Cheese Bread Good

38. Aug 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe of Bran Muffin Bread (Wheat Bran, Maple Syrup, Molasses, Raisins)
Pgs 272-274 - 1 loaf of Bran Muffin Bread Good
½ recipe of Oatmeal Date Bread (Steel Cut Oats, Maple Syrup, Dates, Walnuts)
Pgs 191-183 – 1 loaf of Oatmeal Date Bread Excellent

39. Aug 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe of Brown Rice Prune Bread (Brown Rice, Prunes, Prune Juice)
Pgs 188-190 – 1 loaf of Brown Rice Prune Bread OK
½ recipe of Toasted Millet and Fruit Bread (Millet, Mixed Dried Fruit)
Pgs 134- 136 – 1 loaf of Toasted Millet and Fruit Bread OK

40. Sep 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe of Wild Rice Pilaf Bread (Wild rice, Onions, Mushrooms)
Pgs 142- 144 – 1 loaf of Wild Rice Pilaf Bread Very Good
½ recipe of Lentil Curry Bread (Lentils, Curry Powder)
Pgs 168-170 – 1 loaf of Lentil Curry Bread OK

41. Sep 15th Bread Braid
½ recipe of Sweet Potato and Spelt Bread (Spelt Flour, Sweet Potato)
Pgs 177-179 – 1 loaf of Sweet Potato and Spelt Bread OK
½ recipe of Apple and Honey Whole Grain Challah (Wheat Germ, Apples)
Pgs 262-264 – 1 loaf of Apple and Honey Whole Grain Challah Good

42. Oct 1st Bread Braid
½ recipe of Il Bollo (Italian Yom Kippur Challah with Anise and Olive Oil) (Anise, Lemon Zest)
Pgs 265-267 – 1 loaf of Il Bollo Excellent
½ recipe of Pain au Potiron (Peppery Pumpkin and Olive Oil Loaf) (Pumpkin or squash or Sweet Potato)
Pgs 162- 164 – 1 loaf of Pain au Potiron OK

Done!

REMINDERS:

1. Bread can be baked on a stone, on a grill or open fire, in a bread pan or cloche.

2. You can make a loaf, buns, rolls, flatbread or whatever you want.

3. Use whatever fruit you want.

4. Toppings and fillings are your choice.

5. If you want to bake something else, other then what is on the schedule, feel free.

6. Any and all substitutions are welcome.

Epilogue (43 of 42)

2011-10-15T07:34:00.000-04:00

As all of you know by now, from all the press coverage, I baked my way through the whole Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day book. Every assignment. And then some.

In addition to the adoration of my fan I also got a more tangible reward from my niece Cathy:

A Trophy!
To go with my Trophy Wife!

And Cathy gave me a congratulatory card, too!

Cathy has definitely raised the bar for her niblings. (Niblings is a collective, gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews, based on siblings. There is a movement afoot by a group of school children in England to have it included in the Oxford English Dictionary. See Kids want 'nibling' in dictionary. By using it here, I am doing my part.)

Having baked the book, I thought I would share a Baker's Dozen of our favorites. This is a purely personal list and is colored by our likes and dislikes.   Thus, although I baked all the gluten-free assignments, and we enjoyed several of the results, none of those are included here. The gluten-free recipes are great if you need them, but we do not, and I just do not enjoy working with the gluten-free dough. The tactile aspect of working with the dough is part of baking too, even when using the no-knead method.

Also, I am focusing here on doughs more than products. Thus, I am not including pizzas and flatbreads and rolls and such, which are ways of forming or embellishing one or more of the doughs.

With regard to the AB and HB in 5 method, I have a confession to make. They say that the first step in recovery is to admit you have a problem. I admit I am addicted to this method. Many of my baking cohorts easily switch between AB/HB breads and a variety of more traditional loaves. I have a hard time doing that. It feels like I am cheating on Jeff and Zoë. Before discovering AB in 5 I was trying to bake a lot of our bread, and was unhappy with the results. The AB in 5 method was such a revelation, particularly if you are trying to bake most of the bread you eat, that I feel I owe them. I feel kind of disloyal baking anyone else's bread.   I am trying, however. I am hunting wild yeast with Renée over at Flamingo Musings. I have tried sourdough in AB/HB loaves, and although the bread turned out fine, I did not get a very sour flavor. Now that I am not baking the book, I have been planning to work on my sourdough.   And using wild yeast seems like an interesting experiment. I will keep you posted.

As a starting point for our favorites, I have a "Cheat Sheet" posted on the refrigerator. It is just a list of AB and HB in 5 bread recipes I bake frequently, in summary form--ingredients, cook time, and storage time. Since that is my go-to list it seems a pretty good place to start. You can click on the links for each entry to see my original posts for these.

First on the Cheat Sheet is:

1. The Master Recipe. The name pretty much says it all. It is versatile. It can be used not only for boules but for baguettes, batards, pitas, naan, pizza, rolls, sweet rolls, you name it. And it is easy to make--flour, water salt, yeast and vital gluten.

The Cheat Sheet also includes:

2. 100% Whole Wheat. The title of this recipe is really 100% Whole Wheat, Plain and Simple. And that is what it is. If you want to go all the way (Whole Wheat wise), this is it.

3. Soft Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread. This is an enriched bread, with honey, oil and eggs, and it makes a nice, softer loaf.

4. Whole Grain Rye. Just a nice hearty rye. I use ground caraway seed in the dough for a more uniform flavor, and top it with whole seeds. To coat the loaves I sprinkle seeds on the counter and roll the loaves in them. For me this works better than egg or water wash, especially since the dough is more hydrated.

5. Quinoa Bread. I really like to make this bread using red quinoa from Trader Joe's. The red grains really show up nicely in the slices, and quinoa is really good for you.

The Cheat Sheet breads are not only those that I bake a lot, they also tend to be those that are easy to make and that do not require extra ingredients. Going beyond the Cheat Sheet with some fairly simple loaves there is:

6. Whole Wheat Brioche. A really good enriched whole wheat. bread.

7. Buckwheat Bread. I do not know why, exactly, but I am partial to buckwheat. I love sourdough buckwheat waffles. And this bread has buckwheat groats to boot!

And for breads with more "stuff" in them:

8. Tabbouleh Bread. The full name for this one is Tabbouleh Bread with Parsley, Garlic and Bulgar, which is what is in tabbouleh. It also has lemon, which really gives it that something extra.

9. Pumpkin Pie Brioche. This was a good and fun bread, great for fall. It was especially good for Honey Caramel Sticky Nut Buns and Indian Spiced Doughnuts. I have already gotten requests, OK, request, for this one.

10. Betsy's Seeded Oat Bread. If you like lots of seeds and nuts in your bread, this one is for you.

11. Oatmeal Date Bread. Dates and steel cut oats. And nuts. It just doesn't get any better than that.

12. Il Bollo. Michelle saved one of the best for the very last assignment on our schedule. A challah with anise, honey and vanilla.

13. Apple Strudel Bread. This is the exception that proves the rule (about focusing on dough rather than on breads), since it is really the Soft Whole Wheat fancied up. But Katie loves it, so here it is.

Those are our favorites, but we like several of the others too. Post some of your faves in the comment section.

On a baking note, since I have finished the HB in 5 assignments, I decided to bake something from the first book, the English Granary Bread from AB in 5. I used Maltex cereal as a substitute for the malted wheat flakes. When I first baked this bread the malted wheat flakes were unavailable, but King Arthur now carries them again.

The cereal makes for kind of a moister loaf, but we like this hearty bread.

So that is it for the HB in 5 Challenge. I am finished. Really. For sure.

But I may keep posting about baking and such, especially about my clay oven, which is not drying in all the rain, or my wild (and sustainably) caught sourdough, which is bubbling along nicely, thank you very much. Or maybe about other stuff. You will just have to wait and see.

Il Bollo and Pain au Potiron (42 of 42)

2011-10-01T06:54:00.000-04:00

Here they are. The last two breads from HB in 5. And a good thing too, since Jeff and Zoë's new book, Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day is scheduled to be released on the 25th of this month.

We finish up with a continental flourish: Il Bollo, which its Italian for The Ball, and Pain au Potiron, which is French for Pumpkin Bread.

I got a pie ~~pumpkin~~ potiron for the Pain au Potiron. It is, after all, the last assignment, so I went all out. According to our friends at Wikipedia, pumpkins are thought to have originated in North America, although that is not entirely certain. But the oldest seeds found so far, dating back to 7000-5500 BCE, were found in Mexico. Pumpkins are monoecious, which I now know, thanks to my new sensei Denise with the Ohio Master Gardener Program, means having separate male and female flowers with both types of flowers on the same plant.

Over 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkins are produced each year in the United States. 95% of the pumpkins which are grown for processing are grown in Illinois, and Nestle produces about 85% of the processed pumpkin. As goes the weather in Illinois, so goes the availability of canned pumpkin! Growing giant pumpkins is a passion for some. There was a neat PBS special, Lords of the Gourd: The Pursuit of Excellence, about growing giant pumpkins for the annual Cooperstown Weigh Off. The DVD is available from Netflix, or it may be on your local PBS station this Fall. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he current world record holder is Chris Stevens's 1,810-pound Atlantic Giant pumpkin, which in October 2010 surpassed Christy Harp's previous 2009 record of 1,725 pounds."

My pie pumpkin was more in the 3 1/2 pound range.

The pumpkin in the Pain au Potiron is peeled and diced and added raw as the dough is mixed. In addition the pumpkin is seasoned with pepper and the dough is enriched with some olive oil. I baked the loaf in my French Bread Pan, it being a French ~~Bread~~ Pain.

It baked up nicely, with the pieces of pumpkin throughout.

I thought I had "generously" seasoned the pumpkin with pepper, as the recipe directed, but I did not detect any peppery flavor in the finished product. I guess "generously" is in the hand of the grinder. Anyway, while the pumpkin may have been generously seasoned, the bread was not. As a result, it was pretty similar to the Sweet Potato and Spelt Bread from last time. So, for the second loaf I worked more pepper into the dough and then put it back in the fridge to rest and recover. Then, as I formed the loaf I also rolled it in some pepper, which I had sprinkled on the counter, to coat the outside. (I have found that this is, for me, a more effective way of adding accretions such as seeds to the surface of loaves and getting them to stick than using an egg or water wash.)

I again baked it in my French Pain Pan.

Instead of slashing the dough with a serrated knife I have taken to snipping it with kitchen shears.

This loaf was definitely "spiked" with pepper, which gave it a nice warm kick, but not too much. Just right.

It seems that growing giant pumpkins is not the only pumpkin related competition. The Wikipedia article notes that

Pumpkin chucking is a competitive activity in which teams build various mechanical devices designed to throw a pumpkin as far as possible. Catapults, trebuchets, ballistas and air cannons are the most common mechanisms. Some pumpkin chuckers breed and grow special varieties of pumpkin under specialized conditions to improve the pumpkin's chances of surviving a throw.

Since I only used some of my pie pumpkin for the Pain au Potiron, I could have chucked the rest, but lacking a trebuchet au potiron I just roasted it and used some of it to make an
Easy Low Fat Pumpkin Cake.

This is one of our favorite fall recipes, and I really recommend that you click on the link and try it (the recipe calls for canned pumpkin, so you need not roast your own).

With the Pumpkin Bread behind us it was on to Il Bollo. According to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food the Bollo originated in Portugal and Spain as an enriched, anise flavored bread. When the Sephardic Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 they took their Bollo with them to other countries (they could take their dough, but were not permitted to take gold or silver or money). The version which evolved in Italy, Il Bollo, is richer, characterized by larger amounts of eggs, oil, and honey. Il Bollo is served throughout Sukkot, and to break the fast of Yom Kippur.

The HB in 5 version of Il Bollo is also enriched with oil, eggs (I used egg substitute) and honey and flavored with anise (and vanilla). It has less whole wheat flour than most loaves we have baked, making it less dense than some. (In the notes to the recipe Jeff offers that you can boost the whole grains by making a version based on the Whole Wheat and Wheat Germ dough.) I baked the first loaf as a Bollo, though I skipped the egg wash and extra anise seeds.

It baked up beautifully (a discerning eye might note that I got ahead of myself and cut the loaf before I took a picture, so some reassembly was required.)

This bread smelled wonderful baking and tasted just as good. It was definitely one of our favorites. It makes great toast, too.

For my second loaf I went for a braid, and rolled the strands in anise seeds sprinkled on the counter before braiding. It was just as good.

So that is it.
Done and Done.

I have baked my way through every recipe in Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Zoë François and Jeff Hertzberg. (In the interest of full disclosure, did not bake every combination or permutation of every recipe--Zoë and Jeff often provide several dough options that can be used in a recipe.) That is 42 "official" assignments, plus 1 recipe inadvertently omitted from the schedule, plus 2 warm-up assignments, plus a few bonus posts.

We owe this whole adventure to Michelle, who started this all off on October 19, 2009, when she first posted about a group to bake its way through HB in 5. She is really great and I wish her all the best. I miss her posts. Zoë and Jeff (to whom we also owe this adventure) posted about the group on their website on October 20, 2009, which is how I found out about it. And my first (ever) post was on November 10, 2009--I was much more pithy then.

Although most of the folks who started this journey have been pulled away over the 23 months by other demands, the discussion board has stayed pretty lively. With apologies to Shakespeare, the few of us that are left are but bakers for the working day. Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch’d with dusty flour and the sticky dough. And time hath worn us into slovenry. But, by the mass, our loaves are (more or less--see my "turban" of last time) in the trim. (According to 51 Random Facts about William Shakespeare "[Fact 2] More than 80 spelling variations are recorded for Shakespeare's name, from “Shappere” to “Shaxberd”; and [Fact 3] In the few signatures that have survived, Shakespeare spelled his name “Willm Shaksp,” “William Shakespe,” “Wm Shakspe,” “William Shakspere,” ”Willm Shakspere,” and “William Shakspeare”--but never “William Shakespeare.”)

Through the process we have forged some new friendships, learned from each other, gotten lots of good tips, and had some fun. And here at least, we have eaten pretty well. And now, we are done.

So, be sure to tune in next time (say what??) for a review of our favorite loaves from HB in 5.

Apple and Honey Whole Grain Challah and Sweet Potato and Spelt Bread (41 of 42)

2011-09-15T13:22:00.002-04:00

The Color Purple: Royal Burgundy Beans and Cosmic Purple Carrot

This time out we are doing Apple and Honey Whole Grain Challah and Sweet Potato and Spelt Bread. The recipe for the Apple and Honey Whole Grain Challah includes, not surprisingly, diced apples and honey. The dough is also enriched with oil and eggs (I used egg substitute).   The recipe suggested Braeburn apples, which we like a lot, but those are not in season here yet, so we made do with what was available at the farm stand. The recipe directs us to shape the challah as a turban, but at least for my skill level the directions in the recipe were a bit sketchy. Fortunately, Jeff had posted some pictures of the process at Challah done two ways from the same dough and these helped immensely--at least as to the theory if not as to the execution.

My loaf started looking somewhat turbanesque

But as it rose, and spread, it became decidedly more beret-like

It baked up fine, however.

As an enriched bread the loaf was nice and tender and it tasted very good. We would definitely recommend this bread, Judy.

As you can see, I may not have diced the apples finely enough, but the chunks were nice in the finished product.

Next we moved from apples to sweet potatoes. And spelt. From previous posts (Olive Spelt Bread and Roasted Garlic Bread) we know that spelt is basically an heirloom wheat grown mostly in Europe for livestock feed.   Like many of the other less common grains we have used, spelt is hardy and can be grown in difficult conditions.

As for Sweet Potatoes, they seem to suffer from a bit of an identity crisis. Sometimes they are called sweet potatoes and sometimes they are called yams. There also appears to be somewhat of a regional convention. Our daughter Ellen is a graduate of Clemson in South Carolina. She observed that when you simply asked for a "potato" there, you got a sweet potato. To get what she considered to be the "default potato" she needed to specify an Irish Potato.

Wikipedia offers that "[t]he softer, orange variety is often called a yam in parts of North America, a practice intended to differentiate it from the firmer and more nutritious variety of sweet potato that is beige on the outside and yellow on the inside." But, as Wikipedia notes, "yam" is also a tuber "which is native to Africa and Asia and belongs to the monocot family Dioscoreaceae." (This is as opposed to the sweet potato which the article notes "is a dicotyledonous plant that belongs to the family Convolvulaceae.") The African/Asian yams "can grow up to 1.5 m (4.9 ft) in length and weigh up to 70 kg (154 lb)." Good thing the recipe specified one large sweet potato rather than one large yam!   According to Wikipedia, "[t]o prevent confusion, the United States Department of Agriculture requires sweet potatoes labeled as 'yams' to be labeled also as 'sweet potatoes'."   Well, as usual, the government has fixed everything.

This bread was pretty straight forward--just a basic dough using spelt and AP flour. The only addition was a shredded sweet potato. My sweet potato was orange on the inside, (it should have had a sign stating "I yam what I yam") and I shredded it with the skin on to preserve nutrients.

Instead of forming an oval loaf as the recipe suggested I baked it as a boule. I formed it into a ball and placed it in my frozen whipped topping container couche lined with parchment paper. Then I covered it with a recycled hotel shower cap and let it rise.

We spare no expense in pursuit of HB in 5 excellence.

(Actually, that is not true. Judy over at Judy's Bakery of Johnson City did a test, comparing King Arthur Flour to Sam's Club Flour. She felt that KA flour gave noticeably better results, though that opinion was not shared by all her tasters. Also, Sam's is bleached (KA is not), and Jeff and Zoe have specified that it is important to use unbleached flour in their breads. I use Gold Medal Unbleached and get it when it goes on sale. My suspicion, which is shared by some of Judy's testers, is that the KA difference would be much less significant in the whole grain breads I bake, where the AP flour is just a fraction of the flour in the recipe, than it appears to be in an all AP flour bread. So I do spare the expense of KA flour.)

I baked the Sweet Potato Bread in my Flame Orange Le Creuset covered pot, uncovering it about 2/3 of the way through.

The sweet potato in the dough kept the bread very moist. In fact, the first attempt looked done at the time specified in the recipe, so I took it out. It fell! So I baked the other loaf about half again as long, and took its temperature before I pulled it out. It was still pretty moist, but at least firm enough to stand.

The bread was just OK, quite soft and tender, and a little too moist. It is possible that I added too much sweet potato, and that is why it seemed to moist. I did not notice a particular sweet potato flavor, however. We liked it much better toasted.

So that is it for this, the penultimate assignment. Only one more to go. Tune in again next time for the big finish!

Wild Rice Pilaf Bread and Lentil Curry Bread (40 of 42)

2011-09-01T08:05:00.001-04:00

The first bread for this assignment was the Wild Rice Pilaf Bread. According to our friends at Wikipedia, wild rice is four species of grasses that grow in shallow lakes and streams. Included in the group is an Asian variety and a Texas variety. Texas Wild Rice is a perennial, and is threatened with extinction due to its limited range and loss of habitat. The article notes that "often, only the flowering head of wild rice rises above the water" and that "[t]he grain is eaten by dabbling ducks and other aquatic wildlife, as well as humans." The article offers

The species most commonly harvested as grain is the annual species Zizania palustris. Native Americans and non-Indians harvest wild rice by canoeing into a stand of plants, and bending the ripe grain heads with wooden sticks called knockers, so as to thresh the seeds into the canoe.

The size of the knockers, as well as other details, are prescribed in state and tribal law. By Minnesota statute, knockers must be at most 1 inch in diameter, 30 inches long, and one pound in weight. The plants are not beaten with the knockers but require only a gentle brushing to dislodge the mature grain.

They are not making this up. Minnesota Statute 84.111 provides

It shall be unlawful to use, in harvesting wild rice in any public waters in this state, any watercraft other than a boat, skiff, or canoe propelled by hand, which boat, skiff, or canoe may have a top width of not more than 36 inches and a length of not more than 18 feet, or any machine or mechanical device for gathering or harvesting the grain other than with flails not over 30 inches in length nor over one pound in weight, which flails must be held and operated by hand.

According to the 2010 MINNESOTA HUNTING REGULATIONS "Any person violating any of the laws or rules pertaining to wild rice is subject to a fine up to $1000 and/or 90 days in jail."

From a Healthy Bread standpoint, the Wikipedia article notes that "wild rice is high in protein, the amino acid lysine and dietary fiber, and low in fat. Like true rice, it does not contain gluten. It is also a good source of the minerals potassium and phosphorus, and the vitamins thiamine, riboflavin and niacin." Of some interest, at least to me, is the fact that, according to the USDA database, one cup of cooked wild rice has 166 calories, compared to 216 calories for a cup of cooked long grain brown rice.

Wild rice can take a long time to cook, which is where my rice cooker comes in handy. I just threw 3/4 cup of wild rice and 2 cups of water into the cooker and set it on the brown rice cycle. I went about my business and it beeped at me when it was done.

As I recall, which is getting to be an iffier proposition each year, my first exposure to wild rice was in college (I went to one of the many "Harvard[s] of the Midwest"--Lawrence University in Appleton Wisconsin). My good friend Court was from a farm in Iowa, and he would bring back all sorts of good food from the farm--fish, duck, pheasant, and homemade wine. To take advantage of this bounty we commenced to having the Sunday Night Epicurean Society™. We hosted not only young ladies we were hoping to impress but also friends and favorite professors. Court's Mom & Dad supplied several recipes, including one for a Wild Rice Casserole. It had ground beef, onions, green peppers, mushrooms, almonds, wild rice and several cans of cream of something soups. It was very rich. And wonderful.

Being older, if not wiser, I went a little lighter direction with the extra wild rice I had after making the Wild Rice Pilaf dough. I made a Wild Rice Salad.

I took some lightly cooked beans from the garden, some cherry tomatoes, a diced apple, half a red onion, diced, and some pecan pieces and tossed them with the cooked and cooled rice and some light vinaigrette. Not as rich, but still plenty tasty.

The bread was pretty tasty, too. In addition to the wild rice it had sautéed onion and mushrooms--the "pilaf" part. I made the first loaf using my 1x2 couche. I set the 1x2s on some drawer liner to keep them from sliding apart as the dough rose.

The bread baked up beautifully, if I do say so myself.

I used my perforated Italian bread pan to bake the rest of the dough, making 2 loaves.

Next up was the Lentil Curry Bread. This bread was in the chapter Breads with Hidden Fruits and Vegetables, and the lentils were certainly hidden. You cooked them until soft and then pureed them in their cooking liquid. As the recipe notes, lentils are high in fiber, protein, folic acid and B vitamins. In fact, according to Healthy Eating: All About Lentils "one serving [of lentils] will give you 37 percent of your daily iron and more than half your daily fiber." They are also one of the quickest cooking legumes--no soaking. According to the All About Lentils article "dating as far back at 7000 B.C., lentils are one of the oldest cultivated crops." The article notes that "[l]entils come in a variety of colors, including green, brown, red, yellow and black" and that "[l]entils have a sturdier texture and more peppery flavor than beans, peas or other legumes." Also, "[w]hen you eat a combination of grains and legumes (such as rice and beans or bulgur and lentils), you create what's called a 'complete protein.' These power combos contain the same protein building blocks as meat, which makes them a great way for vegans and vegetarians to get protein." To that end, here is a recipe for a good and healthy soup using lentils and brown rice, but I do not remember where I got it

Lentil Brown Rice Soup

1 T olive oil
3/4 c celery ,chopped
3/4 c onion, chopped
6 c water (+ 1 can chicken broth to make it "soupy"? Add toward end of cooking)
3/4 c lentils
2 cans no salt added diced tomatoes
1/2 t garlic powder
1/4 t pepper
3/4 c brown rice
1/2 t rosemary
1 T Worcestershire
1/2 c carrots, shredded
Sauté celery and onion in oil in a Dutch oven. Add water and lentils. Cook 20 minutes. Add remaining ingredients except carrots. Simmer 45-60 minutes. Add carrots. Cook 5 minutes more.

Although I made a half batch of the Lentil Curry dough I used a full dose of (sweet) curry powder. As my trophy wife said, "if you are going to use it, you might as well taste it." She is pretty nice and she is pretty smart. And pretty pretty, too.

I posted a tip from Cooks Illustrated on the Discussion Board which suggesting using a pan a lava rocks (like those for a gas grill) to create steam. My home improvement store did not have lava rocks, but had ceramic briquettes, which I got.

I put them on the bottom rack while preheating, then put about a half a cup of water in, closed the door for a minute, then put the bread in and added another half cup of water. Seemed to work well, lots of steam, but I do not know how to determine if there was a measurable difference in outcome.

I also baked this bread in my perforated Italian bread pan, and it baked up beautifully.

As you can see, the combination of the curry powder and the lentils lent it an interesting color. The crumb was good too.

So that is 40 done, just 2 to go. Tune in next time for the penultimate post (absent a green-white-checker finish).

Dried Plum Bread Redux (39.1 of 42)

2011-08-22T10:10:00.000-04:00

I still had some dried plums and the better part of a bottle of dried plum juice left from making the Brown Rice ~~Prune~~ Dried Plum Bread for the last assignment. I hate to waste anything, so I suggested to my Trophy Wife that, at her age, she might benefit from eating the prunes and drinking the prune juice. But that suggestion was not at all well received. I was just trying to look out for her welfare....
Anyway, my second thought was to make more of the Brown Rice ~~Prune~~ Dried Plum Bread. The only problem was that I was not planning to make brown rice for anything.
So my third thought was to make a batch of the Master WW recipe, but use 3 cups of dried plum juice and 1 cup of water for the liquid, just as in the Brown Rice ~~Prune~~ Dried Plum Bread. I also decided to add the chopped dried plums.
When I made the Brown Rice ~~Prune~~ Dried Plum Bread I had felt that I had not gotten the dried plums chopped finely enough. The dried plums are sticky, and not easy to chop finely. So I measured my flour, then put some of it in my food processor. I added the dried plums and tossed them to coat with the flour. Then I pulsed the dried plum/flour mixture until I got nice small pieces. It worked great--the flour kept the dried plums from sticking and clumping. Then I dumped it all back into the bowl and proceeded with the recipe.
First, I made a batch in a loaf pan. It worked out really well. I sliced the whole thing and froze some to use for toast.

Then I made English muffins. I formed them then put them on parchment paper to rise. Then I used the parchment paper to get them onto the griddle.

They turned out well, too. And again, we ate some and froze some.

So if you have some leftover dried plum juice, you might want to give this a try.

Brown Rice Prune Bread and Toasted Millet and Fruit Bread (39 0f 42)

2011-08-15T08:18:00.002-04:00

Still Life with Dragon Tongue Beans

Like the last assignment, both breads this time have fruit in them, and this time both have whole grains as well. I baked the Brown Rice Prune Bread first. If you suffer from Beriberi or constipation, or both, this is the bread for you! But from a marketing standpoint Jeff and Zoë should perhaps have eschewd the "prune" moniker. Wikipedia notes that

Dried prune marketers in the United States have, in recent years, begun marketing their product as "dried plums". This is due to "prune" having negative connotations connected with elderly people suffering from constipation.

So, since I am neither elderly nor costive (too much information??), I baked Brown Rice ~~Prune~~ Dried Plum Bread.

In addition to the diced dried plums the majority of the liquid in the dough (three-fourths of it) was dried plum juice (which sounds like an oxymoron). Thus, while whole wheat flour often mutes the flavorings in some of our bread, I thought that the dried plum flavor was fairly pronounced in this bread. It is a matter of person taste whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
My first loaf was a batard, and it baked up nicely.

If you look closely, you can see the grains of brown rice (which was cooked before being incorporated into the dough) in the slices.

I baked the rest of the (half) batch as a loaf, using a new smaller loaf pan I got. It is 7 1/2" by 3 3/4". I got it to better fit a half of a half batch (or a quarter of a full batch). It is not non-stick, but I sprayed it liberally and had no problem.

The first bread had whole brown rice in it, the second one has whole toasted millet. Millet is usually used in this country as bird food or animal forage, but in other parts of the world it is a staple food grain. According to Wikipedia, millet has been cultivated for over 10,000 years and, like several other grains we have used, is an important food crop in many areas of the world due to the fact that is can be grown in difficult conditions, especially drought. According to the article, "palaeoethnobotanists hypothesize that the cultivation of millets was of greater prevalence in prehistory than rice, especially in northern China and Korea." The article observes that

some of the earliest evidence of millet cultivation in China was found at Cishan (north) and Hemudu (south). Cishan dates for common millet husk phytoliths and biomolecular components have been identified around 8300–6700 BC in storage pits along with remains of pit-houses, pottery, and stone tools related to millet cultivation. Evidence at Cishan for foxtail millet dates back to around 6500 BC. A 4,000-year-old well-preserved bowl containing well-preserved noodles made from foxtail millet and broomcorn millet was found at the Lajia archaeological site in China.

Millet has the same amount of protein as wheat, but no gluten. It can be ground into flour but the Wikipedia article notes it is also often eaten as a porridge, especially in Russian, German and Chinese cuisines. Millet can also be made into beer! Speaking of beer, I heartily recommend A History of the World in 6 Glasses which traces the historical impact of beer, wine, tea, coffee, distilled spirits and Coke. The book is fascinating, and includes this tidbit from the 1996 annual report of The Coca Cola Company:

A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth.
A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged.
A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music forever.
A billion Coca-Colas ago, was yesterday morning.

This is no longer true of course. According to a company fact sheet, Coke now sells 1.7 billion servings a day.

Back to millet, to make millet porridge you toast it and then cook it in liquid until it is soft. Mother Earth News had an article about Millet, Tap the Culinary Wisdom of our Ancestors: Discover Millet, with several recipes, including one for Sunshine Millet Porridge with Apricots and Carrots. Millet is also great as a side dish.

I have many loves in my life. I love my Saintly Wife. I love my beautiful and brilliant daughters. And I love my Rice Cooker. In The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook: 250 No-Fail Recipes for Pilafs, Risottos, Polenta, Chilis, Soups, Porridges, Puddings, and More, from Start to Finish in Your Rice Cooker the authors suggest first toasting a cup of millet in a dry skillet until it starts to darken a bit and the grains begin to pop, 4-5 minutes, just as we did for this bread recipe. Then dump the millet into cold water, swirl it about and drain it. From there it is into your rice cooker set on the regular cycle with 1 3/4 cups of water and a pat of butter. I have made this, and it is really very good. If you do not have a rice cooker--get one! And the above cookbook to go with it. But you should be able to do the same thing stovetop, and since you already have the millet for making this bread, give it a try.

In addition to the toasted millet this bread calls for mixed dried fruit, and the recipe suggests small whole fruit--raisins, craisins, and dried cherries. So that is what I used. When I mixed the dough it seemed pretty wet, but the dried fruit absorbed some of the liquid and it was a good consistency on Baking Day. I baked both loaves of this bread at the same time, one free-form and one in my new loaf pan.

Both came out nicely. The millet was a bit crunchy and the fruit mix was nice. And as you can see, there was a lot of fruit. We deemed this bread a success.

So that is it for this time. 39 down, only 3 to go. I know you are having a hard time waiting for the big finish, but you will just have to do as Miss Carrot--sit quietly with your legs crossed. And no fidgeting.

Bran Muffin Bread and Oatmeal Date Bread (38 of 42)

2011-08-01T08:57:00.001-04:00

(This is a photo of one of my glads--after a bout with Photoshop)

A friend of mine, John, who was in China at the time, tipped me off to a really neat talk on TED by Nathan Myhrvold. It is about his new cookbook, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Myhrvold is a former Microsoft chief technology officer. His twist is that he likes to cut stuff in half, to show how things work. Unlike my glads, above, he actually cuts everything in half, no Photoshop!

Before you run out to pick up a copy of Modernist Cuisine, you might want to take along a wheelbarrow. The book is in hardcover, six volumes, 2,438 pages, weighs 40 pounds and has a list price of $625. So you would need the wheelbarrow both to carry your cash to the store and to carry the book home. (You can get it from Amazon for about $475, which not only saves you $150, but it qualifies for Free Super Saver Shipping!)

But talk, as they say, is cheap, and in this case the TED talk is free, and is worth watching for the cool pictures, especially the popcorn and the ballistic gel.

Included in the book is a recipe for a 30-hour hamburger.

The Wall Street Journal has a cool Interactive Guide to the burger.

I would observe, however, that 30 hours to make a burger makes 5 Minutes a Day for Healthy Artisan bread a real time-saver, and a pretty great deal since the HB in 5 book lists for about $600 less than Modernist Cuisine.

Now on to the baking. Both breads this time are more like quick breads or nut breads, but healthier. And we thought both breads were excellent!

The first bread I baked was the Oatmeal Date Bread. In addition to the dates I also added the optional nuts, so this really was a nut bread, and it was very, very good. The first choice in the recipe for the Oatmeal was Steel-Cut Oats, which we just love. According to Wikipedia, "Steel-cut oats are whole grain groats (the inner portion of the oat kernel) which have been cut into only two or three pieces by steel rather than being rolled. They are golden in color and resemble small rice pieces." I use Steel-Cut Oats to make oatmeal in my rice cooker--1 1/4 cups oats, 3 cups of water in the cooker the night before, then cook on the porridge cycle. My rice cooker has a timer, so it is ready when we are. (As a side note, I have noticed that adding some dried fruit, dates are good, or a bit of oil seems to help control the foaming and potential overflow in the rice cooker.) Steel-Cut Oatmeal is easy to make stove-top too, however, they just take some time to cook. Putting them to soak the night before can help. See, for example Steel-Cut Oatmeal. The Wikipedia article notes that "[t]he flavor of the cooked oats is described as being nuttier than other types of oats, and they are also chewier." We concur.

This bread is baked in a loaf pan, and in the spirit of Modernist Cuisine, here is my cut-in-half loaf pan.

And here is the finished product.

The second loaf was the Bran Muffin Bread. As is our wont, although I cut the recipe in half, I kept the spices, in this case cinnamon and nutmeg, at full throttle, maybe even a bit more, since the whole grain can mute the flavors. In addition to the spices the recipe called for raisins, but I think other dried fruit would work well too. This recipe used a higher proportion of AP flour to WW flour, and was enriched with eggs and oil and sweetened with maple syrup and molasses. The resulting loaf, which was baked freeform but at 350 rather than 450, was very tender.

Since I had so far only used half of each batch of bread, I used the balance to make mini loaves.

I had formed the dough for the first loaf of the Oatmeal Date Bread right after it was finished rising, and put it in the fridge overnight so I could make it first thing in the morning. When I went to use the second half it had gotten much more dry and stiff. I think that the whole wheat and the oats must have absorbed more moisture as it sat. I worked in some more water to loosen it up a bit and help it rise, but you can see that the two Oatmeal Date loaves of the right still did not rise quite as much as the Bran Muffin dough.

They all tasted good, however.

In addition to the baking for this assignment, I also baked a loaf in my mini-wood-fired-earth-oven (Beta), which you can see at Baking 5 Minute a Day Bread in a Wood-fired Earth Oven. In addition, I baked a baguette on my gas grill! Jeff has a video on the AB in 5 site,
New Video: Barbecued Baguette on the Gas Grill for the DogDays of Summer, and I followed his directions. I really recommend that you give this a try. The bread turned out great, and was quick since there was no rising time and it ~~baked~~ grilled in less than 20 minutes (I grilled mine for 16 minutes: 6 on the first side, then I turned it over and grilled it for 10 more).

So that is what I have been doing on my summer vacation. And now we have just 4 assignments to go, so those of you who have some catching up to do, you know who you are, you better get busy.

Baking 5 Minute a Day Bread in a Wood-fired Earth Oven

2011-07-28T11:23:00.001-04:00

There is a classic Tartar Sauce recipe, ostensibly from New Orleans in in 1879, the first step of which is to "Catch a young Tartar: for the old ones are very tough and devoid of juice." So too, the first step in baking HB in 5 Bread in a Wood-fired Earth Oven is to build a Wood-fired Earth Oven

Some time ago I saw an article in Mother Earth News about making an Earth Oven. The bit I saw referred to an earlier article, Build Your Own Wood-fired Earth Oven as well as a book, Build Your Own Earth Oven, 3rd Edition: A Low-Cost Wood-Fired Mud Oven; Simple Sourdough Bread; Perfect Loaves by Kiko Denzer and Hannah Field. I got the book, and after cogitating for awhile, I decided to give it a try.

The book suggests building some trial, or experimental, ovens before setting out to make something more ambitious. And the Mother Earth article is based on an earlier, less elaborate version. The full-blown final version in the book is much better insulated, and more suited to frequent use for a wide range of cooking. Since the full-blown version is relatively permanent, and sits on a waist-high platform, it needs a good foundation, which means digging down to the frost line, about 31/2 feet here. That did not seem like too much fun, especially since it is in the 90's right now. So I decided to begin with baby steps. In this case that means first making a small version, with an inside diameter of about 9 inches and an outside diameter of about 12 inches. By comparison, the "standard" size oven in the book has an inside diameter of 22 inches.

The earth for the earth oven is clayey subsoil, which we have in superabundance. This is then mixed with sand, which makes a sort of concrete.

The base of the oven is bricks laid on a bed of sand.

We (my Saintly Wife and I) then built a mound of wet sand, like a simple sand castle, on the bricks

Here you can see we added another brick at the back, for support.

The final dome was almost as wide as the base, and a little taller than it was wide.

We then covered the dome with
wet newspaper, to form a separation from the walls of the oven.

Next, we started building, packing the sand/clay mix around the form. It is important to press the clay firmly against itself, and not against the form, which might distort it.

TA-DA.

After it had dried for a day I cut a door, which should be about 2/3 of the oven height.

Then, after another day of drying I removed the sand until I got to the newspaper.

I then built a fire to dry it completely. I had a little trouble keeping the fire burning, so I made the opening a bit taller. This helped a lot, but I did get a bit of tear-out at the top of the door.

Here you can see the width of the walls.

Once the oven was dry, it was time to try baking. The book makes it clear that this is not really a functional oven--it is too small and thus lacks the necessary thermal mass. The point of making it is to get a feel for the construction technique and the materials before trying a larger oven. Still, I decided to give baking a try.

I had about a half pound of Quinoa Bread dough left over, so I formed it into a boule and set it to rise. Then I started a fire in my oven.

The way this oven works is that the fire gets both the bricks and the oven hot. Once the oven is hot the coals are removed and the bread or pizza (or other food) is cooked on the bricks using the residual heat. That is why thermal mass is so important. I kept my fire going for about an hour, then let it burn down for about 15 minutes and pulled the coals out. Here you can see my high-tech coal-puller, a strip of sheet metal, and my mini-peel, a spatula (it has to fit through the door, you know).

Then I let the oven rest for another 15 minutes to let the heat equalize, and popped in my risen loaf. Since there was sand and ash on the oven floor I placed the loaf on a piece of foil. I am not sure what the inside temperature of the oven was at this point, but the outside of the oven was too hot to touch (trust me). My door is another piece of sheet metal, held in place by some urbanite.

I was a little concerned that the bread might cook too fast, since the book notes that a pizza placed in a freshly fired full sized oven can cook in 3-4 minutes, but I needn't have worried. My oven just did not have the thermal mass. I checked it a 15 minutes, and it was baking, but slowly. So I left it in for another 40 minutes, by which time it was done!

The crust was not crispy by any means, the oven did not stay hot enough for long enough for that, but is was cooked and we had it for dinner.

So, since this was a learning experiment, what did I learn?

First that once we got to it the oven was pretty easy to make. And fun. I think I had too much sand in my mix, at least the finished building material seemed sandy to me, but it worked, and got hard once it was fired, and I got a bit of a feel for the material.

And I learned the importance of door height to getting a good fire.

So that is HB in 5 Bread Baked in a Wood-fired Earth Oven--Part 1.

You will just have to wait and see whether there is a Part 2, which would involve making a full-sized oven, albeit one at ground level on a sand base rather than waist height on a foundation.

But I already have the bricks * * * .

Herbed Potato and Roasted Garlic Bread and Red Wine and Cheese Bread (37 of 42)

2011-07-15T07:28:00.003-04:00

Summertime.....and the living is easy. Fish are jumping (in this case the invasive Asian Carp which are threatening the Great Lakes)

and the cotton is (or in my case, weeds are) high.

Summertime is also the time for farmers' markets, where you can get your organic veggies and heirloom tomatoes. While heirloom tomatoes are a Big Thing right now, it is important to preserve the diversity of varieties in other vegetables.

While I was looking for directions on how to make a self-watering planter from 5 gallon buckets I came across this chart from National Geographic Food Ark, which demonstrates that there has been a precipitous decline in the number of vegetable varieties that are available.

The site notes that of the 66 crops surveyed about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct between 1903 and 1983. "So what?" you ask. Remember the potato famine? One variety of potato, one fungus (phytophthora infestans). Or the Great French Wine Blight which was caused by aphids. And don't forget the current plight of the banana (see, for example, Yes, We Will Have No Bananas), of which there is only one variety commercially available--and it is currently being decimated by a blight. More varieties means more genetic diversity and a greater possibility of resistant varieties. If you are interested in growing some heirloom varieties of you own, check out the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange or the Seed Savers Exchange. And the great thing is that by buying and growing a wider range of fruit and vegetable varieties you not only help preserve diversity, you get some good eats, too.

Speaking of good eats, both breads for this assignment ate pretty good.

The Red Wine and Cheese Bread did not have much whole wheat in it only a 1/2 cup in the half recipe I made (and 1/4 cup of rye--much less than a pocket full). It did have 3/4 of a cup a red wine, which gave it a kind of rosy tint, and 1/2 cup of shredded sharp cheddar (I used a light sharp cheddar from Trader Joe's). None of my tasters, including my Special Guest Taster, Hildy, really noticed the flavor of either the red wine or the cheese, but everyone thought the bread was pretty good. When I told them that there was red wine and cheese in the bread, they all decided that they could taste a subtle flavor of both--but then my group can be kind of suggestible--whenever they watch a medical program they are sure they have whatever disease or condition is featured on the show.

I baked my Red Wine and cheese Bread as a boule

and I think it came out right purty.

I used some of the remaining dough to make a Swiss chard and mushroom pizza on the grill, cooked directly on the grates. We ate it before I thought to take its picture. It seems we must add Pizza to Time and Tide.

The second bread for this assignment was the Herbed Potato and Roasted Garlic Bread, which not surprisingly has herb[e]s (de Provence), potato, and roasted garlic. It also has ground flaxseed. The potatoes, interestingly, were not cooked, just diced and mixed into the dough. Although I was making a half batch I used the full complement of garlic and herb[e]s. I still did not get much, if any, flavor from the herb[e]s, but did get a nice roasted garlic hit.

I decided to use the dough to make baguettes, using my perforated baguette pan.

With the chunks of potato, I thought this was a very interesting, and pretty tasty, bread.

And finally, since I still had some of each dough, I mooshed them together and made a hybrid Herbed Red Wine with Cheese, Potato, and Roasted Garlic Bread.

So that was about all I could do with the Herbed Potato and Roasted Garlic Bread and Red Wine and Cheese Bread. We now have just 5 assignments to go. Enjoy the summertime, and hope to see you next time.

Gluten-free Brioche and “Super Sam” Gluten-free Cinnamon Buns (36 of 42)

2011-07-01T11:32:00.000-04:00

It is July already. And this July is kind of special. This year, July has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. This happens once every 823 years, so it is probably the only time most of us will get to enjoy 5 TGIFs in July. Similarly, October this year, which will be the month we complete our HB in 5 Baking Sojourn, will have 5 Saturdays, 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays. This also happens every 823 years. Concluding our date topic, this year has four unusual dates: 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11, 11/11/11; and that's not all... take the last two digits of the year in which you were born - now add the age you will be this year. The results will be 111 for everyone in whole world. (Thanks to Jenny Archer for this information.)

This post is also the second annual installment of Destination Baking--once again we are in beautiful Bailey Island, Maine (our 10th year coming here). We are having a wonderful time, but miss Marissa.

We have enjoyed seeing wild turkeys and eating free-range lobsters.

And if you are ever in the Mid-Coast Maine area, be sure to visit the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden in Boothbay. It is absolutely wonderful.

Now on to the baking. In the interest of full disclosure, I baked the breads for this assignment at home before we left because it was easier to make the gluten-free dough there rather than schlep all the special ingredients to Maine. But I did bake here. I mixed up the dry ingredients for the Whole Wheat Master and the Quinoa Bread and brought them along in zip-lock bags. Then when we got here I just needed to add water, mix, and let them rise. I used them to make boules, English muffins, focaccia, and sweet rolls.

In the Quinoa Bread I used red quinoa from Trader Joe's, which showed up nicely both in the dough and in the finished bread.

As for this assignment, it is our last assignment involving gluten free bread. I made a half batch, since we were only making two breads. While I sympathize with those who are gluten intolerant, I am glad I do not have to bake this way all the time. I just never seem to be able to get the amount of ingredients quite right, whether I use volume or weight, although to some extent it may be that I am expecting the dough to feel more like dough with gluten. "Not quite right" was certainly not the case with this dough, however. I am not sure where I went wrong, but I must have been way off in my measurements. I weighed the ingredients, and I wonder if one of my conversion factors was incorrect. Judy over at Judy's Bakery and Test Kitchen posted on the discussion board that Jeff and Zoe had revised their weights for some of the ingredients, but I have not had the chance to check those against the weights I used. Or maybe I just screwed up. Whatever the cause, I ended up with a batter. And a pretty thin one at that. I worked extra flour into the dough (I used soy flour because I was low on the flours used in the recipe) until I thought it was about right, but it was purely by guess and by gosh.

First up was a loaf of Gluten-free Brioche. I used my brioche pan, and although the dough was sticky, much like a soft cookie dough, it was not hard to plop it into the pan. It baked up pretty well, and tasted good, especially toasted. I have been trying to come up with a description of the texture. It was sort of like a cross between a corn bread and a pound cake.

The second part of the assignment was “Super Sam” Gluten-free Cinnamon Buns. The buns were, as my peeps would say, a hot mess (especially right out of the oven).
I knew I was in for trouble when the directions called for rolling the dough out on a silicone mat so that the mat could be used to help roll up the dough. But at first things went pretty well. I rolled the dough out using the silicone mat on the bottom and plastic wrap on the top--to prevent sticking. Then I topped it with brown sugar mixed with cinnamon and pecans.

I even managed to roll it up pretty well. Then the hot mess. The dough was very soft, perhaps because of my measuring issues. And all that filling only made it worse. It would not hold its shape as I tried to cut the rolled dough into slices. So instead of nicely swirled buns, I ended up with amorphous blobs. I kept waiting for Steve McQueen to show up. ("It crawls.... It creeps.... It eats you alive!")

As you can see from the picture, my "buns" are even about the same color as The Blob--and they GREW too!!

The two on the top, the last two I made, ALMOST look like buns, especially in the dark, without your glasses, if you squint, and have the light behind them. (But then I look my best in those circumstances, too.)

So, instead of buns, I guess I made “Super Sam” Gluten-free Cinnamon Monkey Bread.

I topped it with the glaze and cut it into wedges to serve, having abandoned all pretense of buns.

I must say it was wonderful, but then with all that sugar, cinnamon, pecans and glaze on top an old flip-flop would have tasted pretty good.

So that is it from Bailey Island, Maine. We only have 6 episodes to go, so be sure to check in next time.

Not Rye (but so very close), and Gluten-free and Honey Graham Bread (35 of 42)

2011-06-15T08:11:00.000-04:00

As our countdown continues, we bake a a honey graham bread and a gluten-free rye.

When it was first mixed the dough for the gluten-free rye seemed pretty firm and when I used it the following day it was pretty easy to work with, especially for a gluten-free dough, which I can have trouble with. I made a boule with half of it, and it was really very good--Not Rye (but so very close), and Gluten-free!

I used it to make a Ham and Swiss on on Not Rye (but so very close) Panino.

In fact, the only catch is that the recipe calls for Teff flour.

Teff, properly Eragrostis tef, is, according to Wikipedia, "an annual grass, a species of lovegrass native to the northern Ethiopian Highlands of Northeast Africa." The article notes that

Common names include teff, lovegrass, annual bunch grass (English); Ṭeff/Ṭéff (Amharic, both representing the same sound, an ejective consonant); Ṭaffi/xaffi (Oromo, both representing the same sound); Ṭaff (Tigrinya); and mil éthiopien (French). It is also written as ttheff, tteff, thaff, tcheff, and thaft. The word "tef" is connected by folk etymology to the Ethio-Semitic root "ṭff", which means "lost" (because of the small size of the grain).

The Wikipedia article notes that "Teff accounts for about a quarter of total cereal production in Ethiopia," and that "[i]n 1996, the US National Research Council characterized Teff as having the 'potential to improve nutrition, boost food security, foster rural development and support sustainable landcare.'" This may in part be because Teff "is adapted to environments ranging from drought stress to waterlogged soil conditions." Id.

The Wikipedia article also notes that "Teff is high in protein" and "is considered to have an excellent amino acid composition (including all 8 essential amino acids for humans) and has lysine levels higher than wheat or barley." Bob, of Red Mill fame, notes on the package that Teff is "a Nutritional Powerhouse!" The website for The Teff Company, which grows Teff in Idaho, observes that "[o]f the 56 medals available in major athletics championships from 2000 to 2003 (Olympic Games and IAAF World Championships) at marathon, 10,000 meter and 5,000 meter distances, 26 were won by athletes from Ethiopia" and posits that "[i]t is not a coincidence that these athletes ... come from Ethiopia, the land where teff is a significant portion of the daily diet."

Bob also notes that "[d]ue to Teff's size, it is almost impossible to grind in your home mill," but observes that "[w]e are glad to do the work for you." As to size, Wikipedia notes that "[b]ecause of its small seeds (less than 1 mm diameter), one can hold enough in one hand to sow a large area" and that "[t]his property makes teff particularly suited to a seminomadic lifestyle." The website for The Teff Company notes that "[o]ne pound of teff can produce up to one ton of grain in only 12 weeks," and that "[t]hree thousand grains of teff weigh one gram."

Jeff and Zoe indicate in the recipe that Teff is gluten-free, but I noticed that the package I got from Bob's Red Mill did not list it as gluten-free. I suspect that may be because strictly speaking it is not! But, according to Wikipedia, "the gluten in teff does not contain the a-gliadin-fraction that causes celiac disease," so it can be used by people who cannot eat wheat gluten.

So with all this going for it, why is the fact that this recipe calls for Teff a "catch?" The price. Around here Bob's 24 ounce bag goes for about $7. If you want to get serious about it, you can get 5 pounds from The Teff Company for $20, which includes shipping. On the bright side, based on the info on Bob's package, it appears that I can incorporate the Teff I have left into my regular baking.

After making the boule I used the other half of the dough to make an oblong loaf. By the time I got to it, the dough was at the end of its useful life, and had gotten very wet. Unlike the first loaf, this one was too wet to work with, and really sticky. Kind of like working with peanut butter, but not as tasty to lick off your fingers. I had to work in more flour to be able to use it at all (I plead the 5th on what kind of flour I used, but it sure was not Teff).

Once I got the loaf formed, I wanted to control the lengthwise spread, to keep a bigger cross section. Since I was using my Italian bread pan, I used onions as stops.

But the yeasties were not to be denied, and they pushed my onions right out of the way!

Despite, or perhaps because of, the wetness, the dough baked up with a good crumb,

and worked great for a pattie melt with a quinoa salad.

The price of Teff notwithstanding, this was certainly one of my better efforts at gluten-free bread.

The second bread for this assignment was Honey Graham Bread, made, not surprisingly, with honey and graham flour. There was also some cinnamon, which I boosted a bit. I made a full batch instead of the half called for in the assignment, hoping for the best. Once again turning to Wikipedia,

Graham flour is a type of whole wheat flour named after the American Presbyterian minister Rev. Sylvester Graham (1794-1851), an early advocate for dietary reform. According to the Larousse Gastronomique, Graham despised processed white flour and believed that bran was the cure-all for the bad eating habits of his compatriots.

Generally, graham flour is more coarsely ground whole wheat flour. The Wikipedia article offers that

Rather than simply grinding the whole grain wheat kernel (bran, germ, and endosperm), in roller-milled graham flour the components are ground separately. The endosperm is ground finely, initially creating white flour. The bran and germ are ground coarsely. The two parts are then mixed back together, creating a coarse-textured flour that bakes and keeps well.

Red Mill Bob characterizes his Graham Flour as "coarsely stone ground whole wheat flour made from U.S. #1 dark northern spring wheat."

The recipe called for baking this bread in a loaf pan.

It baked up fine, and was very good, especially toasted.

I also baked two loaves in my Italian bread pan, at 450 using steam. This worked out well too.

Finally, since I had Honey Graham dough, I could not resist making Honey Graham Crackers.

I rolled the dough using my Joseph Joseph ROLL0100CB Adjustable Rolling Pin with 6 Removable Discs.
I really like this rolling pin for getting a uniform thickness of dough, which is especially important for things like crackers. The only problem is that the discs jump from 1/16" to 1/4". But I use a 1/8" thickness a lot for pizza and calzones and such. So I made a set of after market discs.

I used a cheap poly cutting board and a 2 1/4" hole saw. I drilled a 3/4" hole for the center, which is just a skosh big, but better that than too small. The resulting gap measures about 9/64", which is close enough for to 1/8" for my baking skills.

I rolled the crackers directly on parchment paper using the 1/16" discs, and docked them. Then I slid the whole thing in the oven (400 degrees) for about 8 minutes to get them to start to firm up. THEN I used a pizza cutter to cut them apart.

And back in the oven until they were golden brown.

I took some of the edges out a bit earlier than the ones in the middle because they were browning a bit faster.

Now, I am not going to put Nabisco out of business, but the Honey Graham Crackers were pretty good too.

So that is is for this time.
The countdown continues, with 7 to go!

Betsy's Seeded Oat Bread and Provençal Fisherman’s Bread (Pain Bouillabaisse) (34 of 42)

2011-06-01T08:37:00.001-04:00

June!
It's bustin' out all over. The rains continue, and it appears that the ducks--Fred and Ethel--are here to stay.

I thought I would start with an observation on fashion, being a 21st century metrosexual male and therefore fully qualified to opine on the subject. Not all progress is good, but with regard to some things, it clearly is. In the category of the latter, we all should be glad that the attire in this video has gone out of style, especially, I am led to understand by the star of the film (who is an interpreter at an historical site and one of my peeps), when it comes to going to the bathroom:

Now, on to the baking.

I don't know Betsy, who apparently asked Jeff and Zoë to develop a loaf "full of tasty and nutritious seeds," but the eponymous Seeded Oat Bread they developed for her is terrific. At Michelle's suggestion I had made it before, and was happy to have an excuse to make it again. This bread has rolled oats, whole pumpkin, sunflower and sesame seeds, and ground flaxseed. It is lightly sweetened (I used honey, but you can use barley malt or agave syrup) and enriched with a bit of oil.

I made a full batch, and used half to make two loaves. Instead of sprinkling seeds on top, I sprinkled them on the counter and rolled the loaves in them as I formed them. I think this works much better because the seeds adhere more securely and reliably.

I used the rest of the dough to make English Muffins.

In previous posts (e.g. Muffin Mania) I have described my English Muffin Method--using parchment paper to get the muffins onto my electric griddle after they have rested and risen. In sum, I roll out the dough, cut it with a biscuit cutter, and place the muffins on parchment paper dusted with cornmeal. I then dust the tops with more cornmeal and let them rise. Then I cut the paper around each muffin and use a spatula to move paper and muffin to the griddle. I cook the muffins about 7 minutes on each side, and after about 4-5 minutes on the parchment paper I slide the muffins off (or the parchment paper out) for better browning. This method has worked for me--it avoids mangling risen muffins which have gotten stuck to the peel or counter--but cutting the paper was a bit fussy. So, I decided to try a more global approach.

I cut a piece of parchment paper to the size of my griddle (trust me, this is less painful if you do it before you preheat the griddle), put it on a cookie sheet that had no rim on one side (or use the bottom of a rimmed sheet) dusted it with cornmeal, made my muffins, placed them on the parchment paper, dusted the tops with cornmeal, and let them rise just as usual.

But instead of cutting the parchment paper I slid the whole shebang right onto the griddle.

Then, after 5 minutes, I picked up one end of the paper and slid the muffins off the other end.

It worked pretty well, certainly well enough to supplant my old method. The only problem was that the paper was kind of long and awkward to pull out. Next time, especially if I am not making quite so many muffins, I would leave a bit of space through the middle, cross-wise, and once it was on the griddle cut the paper in half. Then I could work from each end to the middle to get the muffins off, which might be a bit easier.

As for the muffins, they were terrific. By way of experiment, I worked craisins into some of the muffins, this too was a great success--I wish I had added craisins to more of them.

The next assignment was for Pain Bouillabaisse, a Provençal Fisherman’s Bread. I was a bit leery of this bread, largely because it had sliced fennel bulb in it, and I am not a big fan of licorice. As is often the case when expectations are modest, I was pleasantly surprised. (As the saying goes, expect less and you (usually) won't be disappointed. A related concept holds that you should borrow money from a pessimist (or in the case of my children, your parents), because they don't expect to get it back. There is also a corollary approach to happiness which posits that you should live simply, give more and expect less (good luck with that, let me know how it works for you).)

In addition to the fennel this bread had garlic, herbes de Provençe, and saffron--traditional flavorings for a Bouillabaisse. No fish, however. For the saffron I used threads rather than powder, and steeped them in the water I used to make the bread. They imparted a lovely color.

I baked the loaf in my perforated bread pan, and it turned out great. The crust was soft, but I am not sure if that was due to the oil in the dough or if I slightly undercooked it.

Either way, the bread was very nice. I could not identify any particular flavor, certainly not licorice. But the combination of herb[e]s with the garlic and the fennel was very very pleasant. The only down side to making this bread is that bulb of fennel, which I do not usually have in the crisper pan. That makes this pretty much a "special occasion" bread.

Finally, another experiment. I had seen a Food Network recipe for Chicken Pot Pie Turnovers. The recipe used frozen puff pastry. Now I love chicken pot pies, but they are not the most healthy of entrees. So I thought, what about Chicken Pot Pie Calzones? I mixed some left over chicken with some defrosted frozen mixed vegetables and some chicken gravy. I used about a cup of each. My goal was to not get it too saucy, so I kept the gravy fairly thick. Then I rolled some Whole Wheat Master dough out thin into circles, spooned on some filling, folded them, sealed the edges, cut some slits in the top, and baked them at 375 for about 30 minutes. Then the hard part, I let them rest about 10 minutes.

They worked out pretty well.

So that is it for this time. The countdown continues with 8 to go.

Anadama Corn Bread and Whole Grain Brown Rice Bread (33 of 42)

2011-05-15T11:11:00.001-04:00

First things first. Congratulations to Becca, who is now a college graduate--with Honors!

That is three and out for us, which in the context of college educations, as opposed to football, is a good thing.

Next, some unfinished business. When I baked the 10-Grain Bread for the last assignment I thought it was too dense, but vowed to try it again. So I did, paying more attention to the dough. It seemed fine when I mixed it, but after sitting in the fridge for a day or two it was VERY dry. So dry and heavy that it seemed unlikely the little yeasties could get it to rise. I had made a half recipe, which I cut in half to make two loaves. I baked one loaf as was, as a control, and got the same dense result.
I worked some extra water into the second half of the dough and put it back in the fridge to rest. When I got back to it it was much more supple, and it rose much better. As a result, the loaf was much lighter.

I am not sure the extent to which the hydration issue was the result of using freshly milled flour, or just the cereal. Clarice at Hearth Arts had the same problem with this bread, but I am not sure what type of flour she used. With the right hydration this bread is definitely worth making, so maybe you just need to see how the dough feels after it has rested, and adjust accordingly.

Now, on to this assignment. First up is Anadama Corn Bread. According to the source of all truth and wisdom, Wikipedia (The Long Tail; Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, a fascinating book which I highly recommend, has an interesting discussion on the relative merits of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia), "Anadama bread is a traditional bread of New England made with white flour, cornmeal, molasses and sometimes rye flour." The article notes that

It is also not readily agreed exactly when or where the bread originated, except that it exists before 1850 in Rockport, MA. It is thought it came from the local fishing community but it may have come through the Finnish Community of local stonecutters. During the turn of the century around 1900 it was baked by a man named Baker Knowlton on King Street in Rockport, MA and delivered in a horse-drawn cart to households in Rockport by men in blue smocks. In the 1940s a Rockport restaurant owned by Bill and Melissa Smith called The Blacksmith Shop on Mt. Pleasant St. started baking the bread for their restaurant in a small bakery on Main St. They baked about 80 loaves a day until 1956 when they built a modern $250,000 bakery on Pooles Lane. They had 70 employees and 40 trucks which delivered Anadama Bread all over New England. * * * the Anadama Bread Bakery on Pooles Lane in Rockport, MA closed [in 1970] due to Bill Smith's death.

As for the name, Wikipedia offers

There are several popular myths about the origin of the name, which mostly take this form:"A fisherman, angry with his wife, Anna, for serving him nothing but cornmeal and molasses, one day adds flour and yeast to his porridge and eats the resultant bread, while cursing, "Anna, damn her." The neighbors baked it because it was so delicious and coined it Anadama or Anadamy.

The loaves baked up nicely.

As a matter of purely personal taste, however, I was not a big fan of the molasses flavor. It was a bit too strong for me, though toasting seemed to mellow it out. Personally, I prefer the Broa from AB in 5. I adapted the AB in 5 recipe to make a version using more corn meal:

Cornier 5 Minute Broa

Keeps for 10 days
Full Recipe         Half Recipe
375g      2.5 cup Corn meal             188g
560g                4 cups flour    280g
675g              3 cups water      338g
15g       1 1/2 TBS instant yeast 8g
15g            1 TBS salt 8g
20g                2 TBS gluten    10g
Mix, let rise and refrigerate as for any AB in 5 dough
Remove a 1 pound portion, form into a ball, flatten slightly, let rest to rise for 40 min.
Bake at 450 for 30 min.

The second assignment this time was Whole Grain Brown Rice Bread. The dough was pretty wet, and I baked it in my covered pot. It rose well, due to the hydration, but the resulting loaf was still pretty "damp." It may be I did not cook it long enough, or maybe baking it in the covered pot for the first 2/3 of the time kept in too much moisture.

So I tried a second loaf. As I formed it I worked in a bit more flour, and I baked it in my perforated loaf pan and I used the convection bake on my oven. This loaf baked up better, or at least drier.

Both loaves tasted good, however, so next time you have leftover brown rice you might give this a try.

And so with this assignment we are in our final countdown. This was 10, and we now only have 9 to go--unless of course we have a green-white-checker.

Braided Challah with Whole Wheat and Wheat Germ

2011-05-03T12:29:00.000-04:00

I wanted to make a Challah to take to some friends, and in looking through the HB in 5 index I found this one. I had not made it before, so I looked on our baking schedule to see when it was on the docket, so I could save my notes for that post. I did not find it on the schedule, though I could have missed it. Either way, in the interest of fully completing our appointed rounds, here it is.

As is my wont, I used egg substitute and canola oil. In addition to the usual suspects this dough also called for a teaspoon of vanilla. The dough mixed up nicely, and rose well. After its STINT in the fridge, I braided using a two strand braid. The dough was easy to work with. As I rolled the strands I sprinkled some poppy seeds on the counter so that they got rolled into each strand. I find this more satisfactory that sprinkling them on top at the end of the rise. After a 90 minute rise I brushed the loaf with an egg substitute wash, and into the oven it went, at 350 for 35 minutes.

At that point I thought it could use a few minutes more, so I slid it off the cookie sheet and directly onto the baking stone for 5 more minutes. And Viola!

We both thought this Challah was very good, and would recommend it.

Since I have four (counting Marissa) wonderful, brilliant and beautiful daughters I have on occasion meditated in these posting on variations of the theme that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Here is yet another variation on that theme from DR. MARDY'S QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "That which doesn't kill us may make us stronger, but never forget that it also leaves a scar."

Or if not a scar, at least a mark.

Buckwheat Bread and 10-Grain Bread

2011-05-01T12:20:00.000-04:00

Hooray hooray, it's the First of May--and we ALL know what that means. LAW DAY!!!!!! Brought to you by the people who brought you the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I for one am glad to see the back of April. I know April Showers bring May Flowers, which in turn bring Pilgrims, but--DAMN! Enough rain already. I have DUCKS in the garden.

The first assignment this time was for Buckwheat Bread. Despite its name, buckwheat is not a wheat. And buckwheat contains no gluten. According to Wikipedia,"[t]he name 'buckwheat' or 'beech wheat' comes from its triangular seeds, which resemble the much larger seeds of the beech nut from the beech tree, and the fact that it is used like wheat." Common buckwheat is the usual crop variety, but there are a couple of relatives as well.
It is well known that the companion planting of buckwheat and radishes has the salutatory effect of keeping wolverines off your land, as the following clip demonstrates

We planted radishes in our first garden. In our enthusiasm we planted a 20 foot row. That is a lot of radishes. We would put them into paper grocery bags, paper was the only kind back in the olden days, leave them on neighbors' doorsteps, ring the bell, and run. We also discovered that radishes are good cooked. They can be sauteed, and they are good roasted with carrots.

The Buckwheat Bread recipe uses not only buckwheat flour, but also buckwheat groats. According to Wikipedia, "[g]roats are the hulled grains of various cereals." Wheat groats are also known as bulgur, and buckwheat groats are also known as kasha or kashi. Because groats are usually hard to chew buckwheat groats are typically eaten as a porridge. According to Wikipedia, "Groats were the most widely used form of buckwheat worldwide during the 20th century, eaten primarily in Russia, Ukraine and Poland," and they are "often considered the definitive peasant dish."
I have made this bread before, and was looking forward to making it again. I like it a lot. The dough this time seemed a bit wet, but it turned out pretty well. I used my perforated bread pan, and the wet dough oozed through the perforations. When I pried the loaf out of the pan it left behind all these little bread granules.

Not to waste them I sprinkled them on our salads. This did three important things: (1) it made use of the granules; (2) it added a bit of crunch to the salad; and (3) since I was using lettuce fresh from our garden (overwintered in cold frames), it camouflaged any bits of grit that might have escaped my rinsing.
The bread was great, although of a somewhat funky shape due to its wetness. But as a result of the wetness it also had a nice crumb.

I also used some of the dough to make a pita. It did not puff, which did not surprise me given the groats, but it was easy to open up and made a very serviceable vehicle for some ham salad made with leftover Easter ham.

Since I was on a buckwheat roll (technically a buckwheat pita, but that does not have the same ring to it) I decided to make sourdough buckwheat waffles. I came up with a whole wheat sourdough waffle recipe that I think is pretty great. It is patterned after a recipe from SOURDOUGH JACK'S COOKERY And Other Things by Sourdough Jack Mabee. (I have the 1972 version.)

To 1 cup of starter add 70g of AP flour, 100g WW flour and 190g water (1/2 c AP flour, 3/4 c WW flour, and 7oz water). Next morning take out your cup of starter to save and add 3 TBS eggbeaters (1 egg), 2 tsp canola, and 1 Tbs skim milk. Mix 1 tsp sugar with 1/2 tsp baking soda and sprinkle on top of the batter, then stir in gently. This makes 3 waffles, which is good for the two of us, and of course the batter can also be used for pancakes. (I have a scaled up version of this recipe if anyone is interested.) For waffles in my iron, I use a 7 inch Belgian Waffle iron, I use 2/3 cup batter and for cook for 6 minutes.
You may have noticed that many of your finer hotels, Sleep Inn, for example, have do-it-yourself waffles for breakfast. They use waffle irons that rotate, so you fill the iron then flip it over, which makes for a more even distribution of the batter. To accomplish the same thing I put my heated waffle iron top down on a cutting board, open it, pour the batter onto the top, close it, and flip it over.

For buckwheat waffles I subbed buckwheat flour for the whole wheat flour (90 grams of buckwheat flour, it being 120 grams to the cup). I expanded my starter the day before, so I could have a separate batch of starter to use with the buckwheat flour.
Not to brag (which is of course exactly what I am doing), but the waffles were so light you could see through them when you held them up to the light.

Next up--10 Grain Bread. The Neat Cheat here is to use Bob's Red Mill 10 Grain Hot Cereal. Bob makes his 10 Grain Cereal from "stone ground high protein hard red wheat, rye, triticale, oat bran, oats, corn, barley, soy beans, brown rice, millet, and flaxseed."

I confess I am not quite sure what I thought about this bread. I had high hopes, which can be the kiss of death. In contrast to the Buckwheat Bread this dough was on the drier, and heavier, side, and did not get as good a rise. As a result, the loaf looked good, but it was pretty dense. Also, at first bite it had a distinctive flavor that I was not sure I liked, but that grew on me.

All in all, I think I need to try this bread again.

So that is that. We are into May. And we all know the adage about May nights: "many are cold, but few are frozen."

Bradley Benn’s Beer Bread and Cracked Wheat Bread (31 0f 42)

2011-04-15T08:13:00.000-04:00

Spring is coming to the North Coast. Slowly perhaps, but it is coming.

Here is my first harvest of the year (or the last of last year), overwintered parsnips.

I recently made a recipe for a breakfast charlotte which called for using Soft White Bread pressed into a springform pan to make the crust. Soft White Bread was necessary since it will smoosh together well. So, for the first time in over 2 years I bought some Soft White Bread (which had been our bread of choice for more decades than we would like to admit to). As I was making the crust I tried a bite of the bread. Julia Child was right (as I should have known). It does taste like Kleenex!

When I saw that this assignment included Bradley Benn’s Beer Bread I got really excited. We used beer in the Emmer Bread last time, and that worked out GREAT. The Bradley Benn’s Beer Bread recipe was, however, a total disappointment. The Emmer Bread only used 1/4 cup of beer, 2 ounces, leaving 10 ounces for the Baker. The full recipe of Bradley Benn’s Beer Bread I made used 1 1/2 cups of beer--12 frickin' ounces--THE WHOLE BOTTLE! So while the bread got leavened, the Baker did not.

The actual bread turned out pretty well. It has some rye in it, in addition to the beer, and it is stuffed with a mixture of sautéed onions and walnuts. (What I thought were walnuts in the fridge turned out to be pecans, so I used those.) It was also good toasted.

Since I had made a full batch, I also baked some without the filling. It was a little dense, but tasty, and you could actually make it in 5 Minutes a Day, which is kind of a stretch if you have to sauté the onions first.

I also used some of the dough to make Pigs in a Blanket. For the Pigs I used some chicken sausage. On the basis that turnabout is fair play, it seems to me that if pork chunks on a stick are called City Chicken, then chicken sausage wrapped in dough can be called Pigs in a Blanket. I rolled some dough out to about a 1/8 inch thickness, cut it into rectangles appropriate to the size of my Pigs, sprinkled on a little shredded cheese, rolled up the Pigs, set them on parchment paper and slid them into a pre-heated 425 degree oven.

I baked them for about 20 minutes. (Since the sausages were fully cooked, I did not have to worry about that, thought I think they would have cooked through anyway.)

I served them with some marinara sauce. " That'll do, Pig[s]."

The second assignment was Cracked Wheat Bread. My first thought was that Cracked Wheat meant Bulgur. But apparently they are not the same thing. According to Wikipedia, "Bulgur for human consumption is usually sold parboiled and dried, with the bran partially removed. Bulgur is sometimes confused with cracked wheat [see?], which is crushed wheat grain that has not been parboiled." Since I have buckets of wheat berries, I decided to try to "crack" my own. After a quick search on the web, I got the impression this was easy to do in a food processor, so I dumped a cup of wheat berries into my food processor, with the steel blade, and let 'er rip. For a long time. And not much happened to the wheat berries.

I wondered it the bowl of the processor was too big. It seemed that the berries just rode around without making significant contact with the blades. So I dumped them into my mini food processor and tried again. That did the trick! In addition to the cracked wheat I also got some wheat dust. I sifted this out, using a fairly coarse strainer.

Since this "dust" seemed to me to basically be flour, I used it as part of the flour in this recipe.

The dough was wet when first mixed, which I expected since the cracked wheat was not soaked, but it firmed up in the fridge. I formed two baguettes, and as I was forming I rolled one in some of the leftover cracked wheat, as an experiment. We thought that the added crunch was a nice touch.

These loaves baked up nicely, with a good crumb. We both enjoyed them very much.

So that concludes another episode of The Dough Also Rises.

Be sure to tune in next time for 10-Grain Bread and Buckwheat Bread (I don't know about you, but I am excited).

Pastrami

2011-04-11T10:56:00.001-04:00

I was browsing the web for woodworking tools (I got myself a lathe recently--not only did I turn this little vase, but the sawdust adds fiber to my bread)

and came across a tool blog about making pastrami. Pastrami is smoked corned beef. And this particular blog was about making pastrami starting with store bought corned beef. Corned beef goes on sale around St. Paddy's Day, so I stock up, and having some corned beef on hand, I thought I would give pastrami a try.

There are two approaches here, depending on whether or not you have a smoker. The blog that got me started, Cheater Pastrami and Getting Stuff Done is for those with no smoker, hence the "cheater" part. You can also check out Cheater Pastrami at Cheater Chef for another version.

I do have a smoker, an Old Smokey Electric Smoker, which I just love.

It is electric, so no fussing with adding charcoal to keep it going, and does not use a water tray since the smoker is basically a sealed drum. It is easy to use and I have used it to smoke brisket, chicken, salmon, pork tenderloin, catfish, and even cheese.

So I started looking for a recipe using a smoker, and found one for Making Pastrami at About.com. I pretty much folowed it to the letter.

You start by soaking the corned beef, to remove some of the salt.

Then you make a rub, and coat the meat well,

and put it in the smoker for about an hour per pound. I used apple chips made from prunings from my apple trees. To quote Ina Garten (who actually referred to The Hamptons as "The 'Hood"), how easy is that?

To make slicing easier, I put it in the fridge over night.

Meanwhile, I baked a loaf of HB in 5 Whole Grain Rye. I revisited my Pullman Pan technique, and used about 3/4 of a full batch of dough.

I put my foil wrapped cardboard lid on, and weighed it with pie weights. Given the size, I baked it at 375 for an hour covered, then 15 minutes uncovered.

My goal was a sandwich, though I am not sure what kind I made. According to Wikipedia, a Reuben "is a hot sandwich of layered meat, sauerkraut and Swiss cheese, with a dressing. These are grilled between slices of rye bread. The meat is either corned beef or pastrami, and the dressing is either Russian or Thousand Island dressing." A Rachel "is a variation on the standard Reuben sandwich that substitutes pastrami for the corned beef and coleslaw for the sauerkraut." Well, I used pastrami, and a homemade Quick Sauerkraut that was more like a slaw, and a remoulade type sauce I cobbled together. I also used my panini press. A rose by any other name ....

I sliced the pastrami thinly and steamed it;

added the Quick Sauerkraut (which is milder and, since it does not taste so much like old socks, is more to my liking than regular sauerkraut);

topped it with Swiss cheese and Dad's Remoulade;

and grilled it in the panini press.

It was a resounding success!

So, if you have any corned beef hanging around, or even if you don't, you might give this a try.

Dad’s

Dad’s Remoulade

1/3 cup light Mayo

1/3 cup light Sour Cream

1 tsp Sweet Relish or Hot Dog Relish

1 tsp Horseradish

1 tsp Ketchup

1 tsp Spicy Brown mustard or Dijon Mustard

Several dashes of Hot Sauce

Mix and let meld.

"Medical" Marijuana Laced Brownies!! (30 of 42)

2011-04-01T08:11:00.001-04:00

April Fool!

We are really baking Emmer Bread and Focaccia with Garlic Shards, Artichokes and Rosemary.

According to Wikipedia, Emmer is "a low yielding, awned wheat" (an awn is "either a hair- or bristle-like appendage on a larger structure," so the heads of grain are hairy or spikey.

The article notes that Emmer "was one of the first crops domesticated in the Near East" and that "[i]t was widely cultivated in the ancient world, but is now a relict crop in mountainous regions of Europe and Asia." That being said, the article notes that while "[t]oday emmer is primarily a relict crop in mountainous areas" and that "[i]ts value lies in its ability to give good yields on poor soils, and its resistance to fungal diseases," "[i]n Italy, uniquely, emmer cultivation is well established and even expanding."

The recipe in HB in 5 gives a source for Emmer flour, but with shipping it was kind of expensive for one loaf of bread. While searching for other sources online I noted that the Italian variety is called Farro. And Farro, as a cereal, was available locally. So I got some Farro and ground that to use in my Emmer Bread.

You know, sometimes a recipe just resonates with you, and the Emmer Bread was one of those recipes. The recipe calls for beer. I made a half recipe, which calls for 1/4 cup of beer. Now I hate wasting any ingredients, so I had no choice but to drink the rest of the beer. Also, many times recipes will call for different kinds of the same ingredient to enhance flavor--several kind of apples for a pie or applesauce, for example. So I thought it might be good to use different beers, which meant I had to finish TWO bottles. Baking can be nasty work, but someone has to do it. I am not sure what the beer did for the bread, but it enhanced the mood of the baker.

I baked the Emmer Bread in my perforated bread pan.

And the result was really very good.

Perhaps it was because we had been away on Spring Break (see YouTube for my wet T-Shirt performance) and this was the first homemade bread we had had for awhile, but we both really liked this bread. In addition to the beer there was also a bit of vinegar. Cooks Illustrated uses beer and vinegar in its no-knead bread recipe to enhance the flavor. Since Emmer is just an heirloom wheat, I do not see why you could not make this recipe substituting whole wheat flour for the Emmer. Seems to me to be worth a try.

For the Focaccia I used the 100% Whole Wheat with Olive Oil. Focacce (the plural of Focaccia, Ellen) are some of my favorite breads to bake. They are fairly quick, and unlike most loaves, you get to eat them warm. For this loaf I gently sautéed some thinly sliced garlic in olive oil. I used the garlic for the "shards" and drizzled the garlic infused oil on the bread. I used canned, not marinated, artichokes, which I patted dry with a paper towel so they would not make the whole thing too wet. I flattened the dough on some parchment paper (to make getting it into the oven easier) dimpled it with my fingers, topped it with the garlic shards and thinly sliced artichokes, and let it rise.

After about 20 minutes I slid it (easily) onto the pre-heated baking stone. After 15 minutes I pulled it out to take it off the parchment paper. I took this opportunity to do two other things. First, I sprinkled on the rosemary, which I had forgotten, and second, I did some re-dimpling. The oven spring usually un-dimples (de-dimples?) my Focacce, so I while the dough was somewhat set, but not fully baked (read half-baked), I judiciously re-dimpled. I was a little worried that the dimples would be doughy, but I did not notice that, and the finished product was more Focaccia-looking.

To go with, I made a modified version of Rachel Ray's Broccoli Rabe and Salami Pasta. (When doing what Winnie the Pooh would call my Stoutness Exercises I watch the Food Network.) I cooked some broccoli in the nuker, then sautéed it in some olive oil with some garlic and red pepper flakes. While the pasta (whole wheat) was cooking I cut up some capicola I had and mixed it with half of a 16 ounce carton of low fat ricotta and some Parmigiano-Reggiano in a large bowl. When the pasta was done, I added a cup of cooking water to the cheese mixture, to make a sauce. Then, I added the broccoli and drained pasta, and Bob, as they was, was my uncle. (I actually had an Uncle Bob.)

It went great with the bread.

So that's all he wrote for this time, be sure to tune in next time.

And watch out for those April Fools!

Apple Barley Bread and Whole Grain Butterfat-and-Yolk-free Brioche (29 of 42)

2011-03-15T11:34:00.000-04:00

Barley Malt Syrup is nasty stuff! (Barley malt syrup is a natural sweetener produced from sprouted barley that is roasted, and slowly cooked into a thick, dark brown syrup. It is half as sweet as refined sugar and Eden Organic's is 76.13 percent maltose, 15.81 percent glucose, 6.3 percent sucrose, 2.04 percent fructose and the remainder is lactose, for those who care about such things.) It is thick and gooey and sticky. And it must be "refrigerate[d] after opening," so it pours even slower than molasses in January. And when you try to stop pouring, it NEVER STOPS. It just forms these sticky threads like spider webs that go all over everything. We used Barley Malt Syrup in the Apple Barley Bread. We also used barley flour. I ground some pearled barley and used that.

For the Apple part, we used apple cider, raw grated apples, and dried apples. That is a lot of apple stuff. And the raw dough tasted pretty apple-y. The baked loaf--not so much. It was not bad. It was just kind of blah. In my opinion it was just not worth the extra work and all the special ingredients.

My dough was pretty wet when I made it, but it firmed up quite a bit in the fridge, in part no doubt due to the dried fruit absorbing some of the liquid. It was still pretty sticky, and I smooshed more than formed it into the pan. I made a whole batch, having gotten the ingredients, and used half of it for this loaf. My pan was a bit small for the loaf. It came out of the pan well, though.

I was going to use a slightly larger loaf pan for the second batch, but then I remembered a long narrow pan I have, and decided to try a Pullman style loaf without the Pullman pan. The Pullman Loaf is made in a long, narrow, lidded pan. The lid makes the top of the loaf flat, if you do it right. The French term for this style of loaf is pain de mie. One theory of the origin of the name, "Pullman," is that the word was derived from a resemblance between the loaf (or its pan) and the Pullman railway car.

I smooshed the dough into the pan (now the pan was too big) and let it rise, just covered with plastic wrap. Then I made a "lid" out of cardboard and wrapped it in foil. (The loaf bakes at 375, the ignition point of paper is 451 (hence the title of the book Fahrenheit 451) so I figured (hoped) I was good. (There is a difference between the flash point of paper, which is 350 and the ignition point. The flash point is the lowest temperature at which it is ignitable by an external burning source. The ignition temperature is the minimum temperature at which the fuel will automatically get ignited in the atmosphere without even an external source of burning.)

I sprayed the lid and the top of the loaf with cooking spray, and weighted the lid with pie weights in mini loaf pans. I baked it for 45 minutes. When I checked it I decided it could use a few more minutes, and since I had removed the lid to check its temperature (speaking of thermometers, do you know how to tell the difference between an oral and a rectal thermometer? The taste.) I finished baking uncovered.

When I put my level on top it was maybe 1/4 of a bubble off (then who of us isn't),

but I thought it worked pretty darned well for a first attempt! (In my experience with such things, it is often best to quit while you are ahead.)

Our second assignment was the Whole Grain Butterfat-and-Yolk-free Brioche. I used pasteurized egg whites and I bumped up the vital gluten since I was using freshly ground white whole wheat flour. The recipe said the dough would be "loose," and it certainly was, but it firmed up some in the fridge.

The dough rose well but I did not get any "oven spring"--the top stayed flat. The bread was pretty good, and 100% whole wheat. It made very good toast.

As you can see, I used my brioche pan, but I still have not figured out the best way to slice it.

And finally, my Blue Bird of Happiness (and his Missus) arrived

though on last Friday they might have wished they had waited a bit.

That is it for this time, check back next time.

Bavarian-Style Whole Grain Pumpernickel Bread (28 of 42)

2011-03-01T08:22:00.000-05:00

Before getting to the assignment, I thought I would share a tip I saw in the most recent Cooks Illustrated. It is not particularly pertinent to this assignment, but I was afraid I would forget to mention it if I waited. It is a method of getting seed, grains and such onto your loaves, and works best for baguettes and other longer or oval loaves, though you might try it with a boule.

You sprinkle your topping onto a rimmed baking sheet (I just put some on the counter), and after you loaf is formed but before rising you roll the loaf in the seeds. DUH!

Cooks suggests rolling the loaf on a dampened towel first, to moisten it, but I found that not to be necessary with our HB in 5 dough, though it may depend on the moisture in your dough that day. To save a towel, you might just use wet hands to form the loaf. Anyway, when I tried it it worked really well, so I thought I would share. I rolled one loaf all around, and so covered the whole thing, and then tried only rolling half the loaf. (The top one is the HB in 5 seeded oat bread and the bottom one is the AB in 5 semolina bread with sesame seeds.) So that is my mitzvah du jour.

This fortnight is (almost) all about pumpernickel. According to About.com "There is also a popular rye bread called pumpernickel, which was a West Phalian specialty (Osnabruck and surrounding area). It consists of cracked and whole rye berries which are soaked overnight in hot water, then packed into a closed mold and steamed for 16 - 24 hours. Modern production has reduced this time to 12 hours by adding yeast or sourdough to the mixture to help the heat penetrate through the dense dough through rising. Beet syrup is often also added, but the taste and aroma comes from caramelization and the Maillard reaction during baking. It can be stored for several month to several years and was used in the Middle Ages as emergency rations."

Our pumpernickel was baked, not steamed; for 30-35 minutes, not 12-24 hours; and we ate it all in a day, rather than keeping it for several months; so I cannot say if it would have stored for years or not, but I doubt it.

Our bread gets its dark color not so much from the Maillard reaction (a chemical reaction between an amino acid and a reducing sugar, usually requiring heat) as from caramel coloring and molasses, both of which contribute to the flavor profile. The AB in 5 pumpernickel also uses espresso powder and cocoa powder. I have used both of those in this dough when I made Date Nut Pumpernickel, but with the added whole grain and dark rye I am not sure how noticeable they really are.

We were supposed to use a brotform to shape this loaf as it rises, but the wetter HB in 5 dough can stick, which only leads tears, so I baked mine in my perforated bread pan. It baked up nicely

and had a good crumb and flavor.

The other loaf we were to bake was a rye/pumpernickel braid. I did a two strand braid, because that is one I can do.

It baked up nicely, although the color difference is not particularly noticeable from the outside, (except on the bottom).

After making these breads I still had a little pumpernickel dough left over, and I baked (cooked) it as I would for Naan. AB in 5 suggests using a cast iron skillet to make naan, which I have done, but it holds heat so well that it can overcook quickly, so this time I just used a 10 inch non-stick skillet, heated some oil in it, rolled out the dough and threw it in the pan. I covered the pan, and after a few minutes, flipped the dough, covered the pan and cooked for a few more minutes. It is the quickest bread you can make, and it turned out beautifully, soft and chewy and delicious.

Instead of saving some rye dough from the previous exercise for the braid, as instructed by our Fearless Leader (I never have followed directions well) I made two half batches, one for last time and one for this time. As a result, I had extra rye, and was suffering some baker's remorse for not having "manned up" and used my brotform for the pumpernickel. So I used it to make a loaf of rye. I used plenty of flour, and the dough was not too wet, so it worked pretty well. No tears.

I also used some of the extra rye to make the ham, cheese and sauteed cabbage variation of the Stuffed Sandwich loaf. Similar to Danielle's Stuffed Reuben, it was really good, especially with the rye bread.

Well that is it for now. Check back next time for Apple Barley Bread and Whole Grain Butterfat-and-Yolk-free Brioche.

Whole Grain Rye (27 of 42)

2011-02-15T08:04:00.000-05:00

First, a plug. The great Backyard Bird Count starts this Friday, February 18th, and runs through the 21st. It is fun and easy. You can do as much or as little as you want. All you need to do is count birds at one location, your backyard feeder for example, for a minimum of 15 minutes on one of the days of the count and submit your information. Check out the GBBC website for details.

With this assignment we are back to rye. In 2010, researchers in Lund, Sweden published research that shows that even light rye flour (without the bran) is good for your blood sugar levels. The bran also contains important minerals and vitamins.

As I discovered in my earlier post on rye, rye grows in conditions where wheat does not do well. (According to About.com "It grows in poor, sandy soil and under mixed weather conditions, while wheat grows best in a warm dry climate, so despite poorer yields than wheat, it was grain of choice in colder areas.") In such areas 100% rye bread was common, but now most rye is "lightened" with wheat flour, in part because rye has a distinctive taste that can be too strong. Well, since we were baking rye I decided to bake a 100% rye loaf to check it out. I used the 100% Whole Wheat Plain and Simple recipe from HB in 5, but substituted rye flour that I ground myself. That was it. I did not even add caraway, so we could see what the rye tasted like unadulterated. I only made a quarter batch, enough for 1 loaf.

The loaf was a bit dense, and certainly had a distinctive taste, but we enjoyed it. We tried to come up with a description of the taste, (impudent, with a musty, earthy insouciance) but failed. Practically Edible describes it as a "heady, slightly sour taste." World's Healthiest Foods notes "Rye has a very hardy, deep, nourishing taste." (The site also notes that "Rye Can Ease Your Ride Through Menopause While Helping Prevent Breast Cancer.")

In doing some follow-up research I found at About.com that "Rye flour can be tricky to work with because sugars (carbohydrates) called pentoses (xylose, arabinose) reduce the ability of the gluten proteins to form stretchy, hollow areas which help trap the gas in bread, but are themselves responsible for trapping water and building the crumb "scaffold". Starches in the flour help this scaffolding hold together and create a bread that does not crumble. However, since these starches can be cut into many smaller pieces by alpha amylases (a type of enzyme) which would reduce their ability to interact with the pentoses, a low pH is used (sourdough) to inhibit the amylase. All these interactions make the crumb of rye bread denser than that of wheat bread. Often, rye is used together with wheat flour to make what the Germans call 'Mischbrot'." The article summarized "As the amount of rye flour in a bread increases, the longer the bread stays fresh and the stronger it tastes of rye. The more wheat flour, the higher the bread rises and the 'milder' it tastes." Well, there you go.

The Whole Grain Rye used for this assignment includes roughly equal parts of rye flour, whole wheat flour, and AP flour. As a result, it makes a lighter loaf, though with the whole grain rye and the whole wheat flour it is still plenty sturdy.

The first part of this assignment was to bake a regular loaf of rye. My loaf baked up nicely, with a good crumb. We liked this bread a lot. And it also makes great toast.

The recipe called for adding caraway seeds to the dough, as well as sprinkling some on top before baking. On an episode of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives one of the eateries baked their own rye bread and used ground caraway seed. I got some at Penzeys, and used it here. I think it gives a fuller, more uniform caraway flavor, but that could just be me.

The other iteration of this assignment was to use the same dough to make a Stuffed “Sandwich” Loaf. I followed the first of the several variations, using roasted red pepper, sauteed mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and goat cheese. Since the peppers and the artichoke hearts were both kind of wet, I chopped them up and spun them in my salad spinner. Then I rolled the dough to 1/4 inch, topped it with the vegetables and the goat cheese,

rolled it up jelly-roll style, and put it in a loaf pan to rise.

Perhaps as an homage to Super Bowl XXXVIII, during baking my loaf suffered a "wardrobe malfunction" (they do call it a gluten cloak).

Although this made slicing a bit of a challenge, it was otherwise not a problem.

This bread got mixed reviews. My saintly wife and I liked it a lot. The best one of our testers could manage, however, was "interesting." I think that is a Chinese curse: may you eat interesting bread. (Or maybe it is "may you live in interesting times.")

One of the main reasons I made this version was that I had all the stuffing stuff on hand, but since this was a rye bread, the version with ham, cheese and cabbage sounded like it would be awesome. I may give it a try and report next time. But for this time, that is all. Next time we are on to pumpernickel.

Gluten-free Crusty Boule and Gluten-free Cheddar and Sesame Crackers (26 of 42)

2011-02-01T08:06:00.001-05:00

Well, not to drop names or anything, but one of the highpoints of this fortnight was when da Girlz and I had lunch with Iron Chef Michael Symon. We met up at Lucky's Cafe in the Tremont area of Cleveland. Lucky's is a great place with great food. It has been featured on Diner's Drive-ins, and Dives. Their Reuben is particularly special--they corn their own beef, make their own sauerkraut and sauce, and bake their own rye bread. My saintly wife and I split a Reuben, and also split a Cuban sandwich, which was wonderful as well. Our peeps split the Mac and Cheese, still being young enough to think their arteries are immortal.

And what can I say about Michael! Well, actually, not much. We did not exactly sit together. Or talk. But he was definitely THERE when we walked in. He did leave right after we got there, but I am pretty sure he did not leave only because we came in. Anyway, his aura certainly lingered with us during our lunch. And really, that whole space/time continuum thing is just a human construct to help us understand our place in the universe. So, as I said, da Girlz and I had lunch with Iron Chef Michael Symon.

As for the assignment, we are back to baking gluten-free again. It is not that we do not use flour, it is that we do not use wheat flour. Instead, these breads use brown rice flour, sorghum flour, and tapioca flour. As a stand-in for the gluten, we use a "gum," in my case guar gum because it was cheaper than the xanthan gum called for in the recipe. Rather than making a whole batch, since we only had to make one loaf and some crackers, I made a half batch. That is one of the (many) nice aspects of the AB/HB in 5 method, you can easily adjust the size of your batch to suit your needs.

When I made gluten-free dough for previous assignments the dough was very wet, almost like a batter. This dough was better, though still soft and sticky. I mixed it, let it rise, and then refrigerated it overnight. Next day, I formed the loaf, using wet hands instead of flour, and let it rise in my duct-tape couche. I baked it in my cast iron pot, covered for 2/3 of the time, then uncovered.

I think it baked up pretty nicely. There was a good crust, and a nice crumb. As before, I noticed a sheen to the inside of the holes in the bread, perhaps due to the gum?

The overall texture was different than wheat bread, softer or more tender, but not in a "Wonder Bread" kind of way, more dry rather than doughy. Obviously, this texture difference was due to the lack of gluten.

All and all, this was one of my better efforts at baking gluten-free bread.

As for the crackers, not so much.

The recipe called for rolling the dough out on a silicone mat to a thickness of 1/16 of an inch after covering the dough with plastic wrap to prevent sticking. Did that. Then we were to CAREFULLY score the dough with a pizza cutter (carefully so as to not cut the mat). Did that.

Then, we brushed it with water (I spritzed), sprinkled with sesame seeds (I used black sesame seeds), and baked it at 400 for 15 minutes. Did that.

Well, rolling to an even 1/16th of an inch is easier said than done, as the picture attests. I got a thinner area in the middle, which over-browned (burned) well before the rest was done. And the score lines vanished. Disappeared without a trace. Without the scoring I just broke the sheet into free-form crackers, took off the overdone parts, and finished baking the rest.

Though my peeps ate all the free-form crackers, their free form lending a nice casual flair to the occasion, was not happy with the results.

Now 1/16th of an inch is not very thick. I wandered the house with my trusty caliper, measuring things.

A thin bamboo skewer is twice that thick, about 1/8th of an inch. So is the cardboard on a box from Amazon. A compact disc is about 1/16th of an inch. And so, too, are two of those big rubber bands you get around celery and asparagus and broccoli. So I put some of those rubber bands on the ends of my rolling pin. (Because I had to stretch them a bit to get them on, I used 3 on each side.)

Then I rolled away. I used less dough, about half what was called for, to make it easier to work with. The dough had gotten wetter as it sat, and that combined with the absence of gluten made it very easy to roll out. I spread the dough on my silicone mat, covered it with plastic wrap, and rolled away. It was slicker 'n snot! It rolled out very evenly.

I did not score the dough right then, I just sprinkled it with seeds and popped it into the oven for 5 minutes. THEN I quickly ran my pizza cutter lightly over the dough to score it. Then back in the oven to finish baking. This worked much better--the scoring did not disappear since the dough had set a bit.

The crackers baked very evenly, and turned out well. The only change I would make would be to perhaps bake them a bit longer than I did, but I was a little gun-shy after the over-baked (burned) fiasco of my first effort.

Dilled Rye with White Whole Wheat and Whole Grain Rosemary Potato Dinner Rolls with a Salt Crust (25 fo 42)

2011-01-15T14:18:00.001-05:00

Both the Dilled Rye with White Whole Wheat and the Whole Grain Rosemary Potato Dinner Rolls with a Salt Crust use rye flour. Wikipedia notes that "Rye (Secale cereale) is a grass grown extensively as a grain and as a forage crop. It is a member of the wheat tribe (Triticeae) and is closely related to barley and wheat. Rye grain is used for flour, rye bread, rye beer, some whiskies, some vodkas, and animal fodder. It can also be eaten whole, either as boiled rye berries, or by being rolled, similar to rolled oats." Pretty useful stuff! (The Wikipedia article does caution that "[r]ye is a cereal grain and should not be confused with ryegrass, which is used for lawns, pasture, and hay for livestock.")

According to WiseGeek rye has been cultivated for more than 4,000 years. The article notes that"[r]ye is far more tolerant to poor growing conditions than wheat, and it grows in soil of low quality where other grains will not. In addition, rye is able to withstand prolonged submersion in water as well as drought." Sounds pretty great. But rye has a dark side.

Rye is highly susceptible to the ergot fungus. And when ergot infected rye is consumed it can lead to a variety of ailments, including "convulsions, miscarriage, necrosis of digits, and hallucinations." Wikipedia notes that "[h]istorically, damp northern countries that have depended on rye as a staple crop were subject to periodic epidemics of this condition." Ergotism was more common historically, but it has also occurred more recently. According to a lecture given by Dr. George J. Wong, Associate Professor of Botany at the University of Hawai'i, "Ergotism occurred in 1926-27 in Russia, with 10,000 reported cases, in England in 1927, with 200 cases, among central European Jewish immigrants," and there was an outbreak in France in 1951.

There is a theory that consuming ergot infected rye was a factor in the Salem Witch Hysteria, see, for example, Bad Rye and the Salem Witches. Though this theory sounds far-fetched, has been hotly disputed, and cannot be proven, the outbreak of ergot poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France in 1951 is interesting in that regard.

Time Magazine wrote on Monday, September 10, 1951 in an article on the French outbreak titled St. Anthony's Fire that "Pont-Saint-Esprit speculated that the village idiot had hexed [the baker's] flour." Sounds like the work of witches--or warlocks.

In fact, tests determined that it was ergot poisoning. The Time article concluded "Pont-Saint-Esprit had been stricken by ergot poisoning, a medieval disease as old as its proud bridge, so old that it had almost been forgotten." Despite the conclusion of the medical experts of the time, as reported by Time, there is a counter view to the diagnosis of ergot poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit. The CIA did it! See Was idyllic French village driven crazy by LSD in a secret American mind experiment? CIA. Witches. To-mā-tō. To-mah-tō.

Anyway, as all who know me can attest, I laugh in the face of danger (or at least giggle nervously), so risk of ergot poisoning or no, I forged ahead. OK. Actually, according to Dr. Wong, the outbreak in Pont-St. Esprit in 1951 was the last known example of ergotism. Dr. Wong notes that "[t]hrough careful screening out of the ergot stage, ergotism is now rare. To clean Rye seeds, a floatation method has been devised. A solution of approximately 30% potassium chloride is poured over the Rye seeds and stirred. The ergot stage is buoyant and will float to the top and can be skimmed off." But I still laugh in the face of danger.

I first baked the Whole Grain Rosemary Potato Dinner Rolls with a Salt Crust. They contain chunks of raw potato, which made them look a bit funny. On first glance some of my testers thought they were cookies (though perhaps that was just wishful thinking). For the salt crust I blitzed the rosemary and the salt together in a mini-food processor, stealing an idea from an episode of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. I was careful with the amount of rosemary, since it can be strong, but I needn't have worried, it was very muted, which is typical when using whole grain flour, as we have often noted. I thought the rolls were OK, but nothing that knocked my socks off. And I am still not sure about the chunks of potato.

Since I had a half batch left, I used it to make a type of foccacia. I let it rise about 20 minutes, spritzed it with olive oil before sprinkling with my rosemary salt, and baked it at 425. They did not rise much, but were tasty used for blackened tilapia sandwiches. (The orange and yellow strips on the plate are peppers which I picked, and packed and pickled.)

For the Dilled Rye with White Whole Wheat I used dried dill from the garden, and doubled the amount. I still did not get much, if any, dill flavor. The bread was good, however, though without caraway it just did not seem to me like a rye. WiseGeek notes that "[r]ye has a very strong flavor, which some people find offensive to the taste." Although breads used to be made from 100% rye flour, because of its strong flavor it is now usually mixed with wheat flour. I did not notice a strong flavor, "rye" or otherwise, in this bread. Maybe I will try HB in 5's 100% Whole Wheat, Plain and Simple with all rye some time.

Since, as you can see from the pictures, my first loaf spread quite a bit, even though I used my 2x2 couche to keep it in check while rising, I baked the second loaf in my new perforated french bread pan. I also patted the dough out, sprinkled on another dose of dill, and rolled it into a log to rise.

It came out nicely, and tasted good, but I still did not taste dill. Maybe fresh dill would have done better, but my dill is under 1 1/2 feet of snow right now....

Well, that is it for this time. We go gluten-free next time, so be sure to check back on February 1st.

You Can Publish Your Blog as a Book

2011-01-05T11:31:00.000-05:00

nar·cis·sism (nahr-suh-siz-em)
noun

inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity.

van·i·ty (van-i-tee)

noun

excessive pride in one's appearance, qualities, abilities, achievements, etc.; character or quality of being vain.
vanity press or vanity publisher
a publishing house that publishes books at the author's expense.

I became aware that you could have your blog published as a book. So I did it. I published my HB in 5 blog up to the half-way point of the Schedule (Volume 1). I did not do it for myself, of course, but for my fan. I gave her the hard-cover edition for Christmas. The reception was so overwhelming and the demand so great that my blog is now out in a paperback edition!

The catch is that you have to, or at least I had to, pay to have the blog published. But that is not a new concept. Wikipedia notes that "[i]n the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was common for legitimate authors to, if they could afford it, pay the costs of publishing their books. Such writers could expect more control of their work, greater profits, or both. Self-publishing was not judged negatively as it has been more recently. Among the authors taking this route were Lewis Carroll, who paid the expenses of publishing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and most of his subsequent work. Mark Twain, E. Lynn Harris, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Anaïs Nin also self-published some or all of their works." So there!

Several outfits will do this for you. I used Blog2Print as my Vanity Press. I looked at some others, but this one seemed pretty easy, and I was very pleased with the results.

The program uploads your blog and gives you a complete preview to review. You can choose to include or omit comments, or you can select which comments to include, which can save quite a few pages, and pages are money. You can also select the entire blog or only those posts within a particular date range.

There are things it does not do, however. It is not very customizable. It does not pick up the blog design--the headers and sidebars--just the posts themselves. And within the posts, if you embed a video it does not show a screenshot or thumbnail. Most of my posts are in Blogger, but I had used LiveWriter for some of my posts, and I had to redo the pictures in Blogger to make them appear in my book. You can include some pictures at the back, and I printed and scanned some screenshots of my blog design and included them there, but the quality was not very good. (Anybody have an easy way to capture high resolution screen images and save them?)

There are several versions of your book available to choose from, including a digital version which is pretty reasonable (about 8 bucks). The site notes "[t]he Digital File Download is provided to you as a PDF file. With your purchase you'll receive a download of your completed book. The file is yours to read, print, and save on your computer for reference whenever you like (in case you lose track of it - we'll keep a copy for you for 30 days)!" This might be the way to go if you are looking to publish for archival, as opposed to presentation, purposes. Those of you with blogs of recipes, particularly family recipes, might find this a good way to preserve them.

So, if you are interested in joining the ranks of Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, E. Lynn Harris, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Anaïs Nin--and me, check this out.

100% Whole Wheat and Flaxseed Bread and Roasted Garlic Bread (24 of 42)

2011-01-01T09:50:00.003-05:00

Both of these breads include flaxseed. It is kind of like a theme. Canada is the largest producer of flax in the world. I did not know that until I started looking for conversion tables to convert dry measures of flaxseed into grams. I came across the website of the Flax Council of Canada, which asserts that Canada is the largest producer of flax in the world. This seemed to be one of those "trust but verify" things. To verify, I Googled "largest producer of flax in the world" which took me back to the website of the Flax Council of Canada again, which still said that Canada is the largest producer of flax in the world, so it must be true.

Anyway, the Flax Council's Nutrition page has a useful table of weights to volumes. The Council also notes that whole flaxseed passes through you undigested, so it should be ground to release its nutritional benefits. The Council notes that "[a]bout 42% of flax seed is oil, and more than 70% of that oil is polyunsaturated fat, a healthy fat. Flax also contains 57% of the important omega-3 fatty acid, ALA." In addition, the Council notes that "Flax seed contains soluble and insoluble fibre" (we won't go into all the benefits the Council lists for that) and that "Flax seed is also one of the richest plant sources of lignans, providing up to 800 times more lignans than most other foods in a vegetarian diet." So what are lignans? The Council tells us that, too: "Lignans are phytoestrogens – compounds that have been shown in laboratory studies of animals to help protect against certain kinds of cancer, particularly cancers of the breast and colon, by blocking tumour formation." Seems to me, based on what we learned baking the Quinoa Bread that if you only eat quinoa and flaxseed you might live forever--or at least it might seem that way.

The Council notes that whole flaxseed will keep for a year kept dry at room temperature. Once ground, however, it must be refrigerated and will only keep for 30 days. The Council suggests grinding it as you need it. You can use a coffee grinder or blender or food processor. That is where the conversion table comes in handy, since you can weigh the amount you need and not grind too much. For our purposes, 1 cup of ground seed weighs 130 grams, and a tablespoon 8 grams. I made both loaves at the same time, and weighted out the amount I needed, plus just a little extra figuring there would be a bit of a loss in the grinder.

Since I made them at the same time it was interesting to see how the two different doughs rose. The 100% whole wheat did not rise nearly as much as the Roasted Garlic, which has a fair amount of AP flour (slightly more than 50%) and is thus much lighter. The same held true with the baked loaves.

I baked the 100% Whole Wheat and Flaxseed first. I made a boule, and baked it in my flame orange cast iron Le Creuset pot.

(We watched Julie and Julia again over the holidays, for inspiration, and noted that Julia had a Le Creuset dutch oven of the same color.)

As already noted, the loaf was dense. No doubt the oil in the flaxseed contributed to the denseness, compounding the whole wheat flour's tendency toward denseness. Also, one of the other bloggers noted that she increases the amount of vital gluten when using freshly ground flour. I did add a bit extra, but perhaps more would have helped, though at some point you would need to adjust the water as well.

Notwithstanding the denseness of the loaf, we enjoyed it very much. The flaxseed contributed a nice nuttiness to the whole wheat, and this was particularly noticeable when it was toasted. As this sojourn has progressed I have gotten more and more fond of whole grain breads. And, as the old adage goes, "the whiter your bread the sooner you're dead." Now, living on quinoa, flaxseed AND whole wheat bread seems a bit more doable, especially if a jug of wine and my groupie (a "thou") are included in the mix.

I baked the Roasted Garlic Loaf for New Year's Eve dinner. In addition to the roasted garlic, AP flour, and flaxseed this bread uses spelt flour, which I also ground fresh. Spelt is basically an heirloom wheat. Wikipedia notes that it is "[a] hardy wheat grown mostly in Europe for livestock feed."

My friend Chris, who bakes the most spectacular cakes on the North Coast (she has a cake business and if you are interested check her out at Martines of Ohio)

gave me a perforated French Bread pan for Christmas, so I tried it out on this loaf.

I used the entire half batch, since the pan looked like it needed more than a quarter batch, and let it rise in the pan, which I sprayed with canola spray even though it is non-stick (belt and suspenders). But that turned out to be a bit too much dough--the dough kept trying to escape. I corralled it before putting it in the oven, but it make a break for it again as it baked.

Still, the loaf baked up beautifully, with a terrific crust (in part due to the relative dearth of whole wheat flour, which gives a softer crust due to the natural oils).

Because the dough was wet, it oozed a bit through the holes in the pan as it rose, which made it stick a bit, but I used a flexible spatula and it popped right out.

In addition to the nice crust this loaf has a really good crumb. Those features coupled with the roasted garlic gave us a loaf we all liked very much.

So that completes the baking for 2010. In response to Michelle's question for this assignment: "Are you still with me?" I am.

Hope all have a safe, healthy, happy and propserous new year.

The Lost Assignment (23 of 42??)

2010-12-15T06:30:00.000-05:00

About a year ago our fearless leader Michelle set up a Schedule for baking our way through Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. She gave us a different assignment for the first and fifteenth of each month for 42 assignments. But she gave us today December 15, 2010, off. Or did she?

A careful perusal of The Schedule reveals that the assignment for last time, December 1st, was Number 22. But the next assignment, for January 1st is Number 24! And in between she has written "ARE YOU STILL WITH ME?" So, do we really have an episode off, or is she testing us to see if we are paying attention?

Well, I have not missed an assignment yet, tfu, tfu, tfu, (that is me spitting to ward off evil spirits and/or to avoid tempting fate). And just in case this is a test I do not plan to start missing assignments now. Besides, have to keep posting because I have my Groupies to think of.

OK. My Groupie.

OK. She is my wife.

But she is a hottie.

And she seems to really like my bread.

Anyway, about a year ago, during a similar hiatus, I posted about the Pumpernickel Date Walnut Bread from AB in 5. This year I decided to reprise that loaf, but using the Bavarian-Style Whole Grain Pumpernickel Bread from HB in 5. I weighed out the proper amount of wheat and rye berries, plus a few grams for the "Miller's Measure" (in this case the bit that stays in the mill), mixed them up and milled them in my Nutramill. It doesn't get much fresher than that. The only changes I made to the recipe were to include some instant espresso powder and some dutch cocoa powder as in the AB in 5 recipe and I omitted the caraway seeds called for in the HB version because I thought they might overpower the date/nut effect.

All you do to make this bread is take a pound of pumpernickel dough, roll it out to about 3/8 inches thick, spread about 1/3 cup each of chopped dates and chopped nuts on the dough, and roll it up into an oblong loaf. Then let it rise and bake it.

It turned out great, and is particularly good toasted.

Since I still had some pumpernickel dough left, and because I also had some of the WW Master recipe in the fridge, I also made a brown and white braid. I did a two strand braid using the technique demonstrated in this slightly unusual YouTube video Michelle tipped us off to in one of the early discussion posts.

It baked up beautifully, if I do say so myself.

So, whether Michelle was testing us or not, here is my submission for The Lost Assignment. I hope everyone has or had a great holiday of their choice and a has healthy, happy, prosperous and yeast filled new year.