This Hamelman recipe, found on page 195 of his book, Bread, was the perfect opportunity to try out my new round banneton, which I got for my birthday in June. I feel so bad that I hadn't tried it out yet, but time just flies and before I knew it, September's here. My little 8 1/2" cane basket,
waited patiently for me though, nestled in its emerald green papasan chair in the living room.
The recipe for this bread was interesting in that it contained 25% whole-rye flour, all of which was acidified in a sourdough prepared the night before, 25% whole-wheat flour, and a bit of commercial instant yeast.
According to Hamelman, the combination of the whole wheat along with the acidified rye is supposed to make a bread with good moisture retention and good keeping qualities. The rye sourdough, the whole-wheat flour, high-gluten flour, water, salt and 1/2 tsp instant yeast were mixed together on baking day to form the dough. My dough seemed quite tacky in the mixer bowl, although I didn't think it needed more flour at that point. However, when I went to take the dough from the mixer bowl and then later when shaping, it was fairly sticky and I had second thoughts.
I floured my new banneton really well with rye flour since the dough was extra sticky. It was so sticky that I had trouble forming my boule and then getting it off my fingers and into the basket for its final fermentation. It kind of flopped off my hands into the basket and was sort of off center, but I didn't want to mess with it, because that's when I start making things worse. I covered it with plastic wrap and a tea towel and left it for an hour and 15 min. When I uncovered the basket the dough ball had poofed up nicely and filled out the basket. Magic!
I placed a piece of parchment on my peel, placed the whole thing upside down on top of the basket and then flipped the whole thing over so that my basket was now upside down on my peel.
Got that? Keep your fingers crossed.
I lifted the basket and it didn't stick! Woohoo!!
My scoring of the loaf even went well this time,
I baked the loaf on my stone until the internal temperature said ~ 204°. I was surprised the loaf wasn't darker, but I took it out anyway.
I didn't cut into it yesterday, but waited til today, so I could make a nice sandwich for my lunch with all the fixin's,
I don't know about peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, but it made me a wonderful turkey sandwich for lunch. I got fancy today and added all the extras. Normally my lunch sandwiches are peanut butter & jelly, and if I do lunch meat, it is only lunch meat and cheese, no veggies cause I'm kind of lazy when it comes to lunch.
Great bread!! Has a slight tang, and interesting flavor from the combo of wheat flour and the rye component. It's more dense than an all white flour bread, but I didn't think it was too dense at all.
Check out what other Mellow Bakers did this month here.
I had already decided that I wanted to make this bread into rolls. Then, as usual, I reasoned that soup would be the best dish to serve my rolls with. Next, I needed some cooler weather to go with the soup and rolls. Last week (or was it the week before) there was a brief cold spell following behind Hurrican Irene, but it was gone before I got a chance to make the rolls.
Then, this week another cold front was supposed to be moving thru last evening. The rain and cold came about 5 hours after dinner, but these rolls and the soup tasted delicious anyway. I only made 1/3 of the recipe, since I didn't want a ton of leftover rolls, and was able to get 7 good size rolls out of this amount of dough. It's amazing that these tasted so good, when the only ingredients were flour (whole wheat & bread), water, salt, yeast, raisins, and pecans.
Since Hamelman said keep the toasting light, I toasted my pecan pieces at 350° for 2-3 minutes, just until they were shiny and started to smell nutty. The raisins were soaked in warm water for 30 minutes before adding to the dough. I dried the raisins off really, really good before adding them in. I didn't even bother using the mixer to try and incorporate the raisins and pecan pieces into the dough. Its just easier to stick my hands into the stand mixer bowl and knead them into the dough right in the bowl. As I kneaded, I has happy to deposit the pecan pieces which kept popping out of the dough, into my mouth, since, as usual, my tummy was growling as I was working.
After a rather long fermentation of two hours, with a fold in between, I portioned the dough into 3 oz pieces, covered them for 10 minutes, then shaped them into round rolls. They had a final fermentation of about 1 hour and baked for ~18 minutes on a parchment lined sheet pan. I tried to score a couple of the rolls for fun and left the others alone. There was already a steam pan on the bottom oven shelf from baking hoagie rolls a few hours earlier, so I went ahead and put some hot water into the steam pan right after I slid the rolls into the oven.
The soup I chose to go with the rolls was from Dara's Cookin' Canuck and it was delicious!! It was Chicken, Corn & Potato Chowder and had just enough spice to warm you, but not any burning heat. It had green chilies, lots of corn, cheese and a pinch of cayenne pepper in it and was topped w/ bacon, more cheese, and chopped green onion.
Hubby didn't come right out and say the rolls were delicious, probably because of the nuts, but when I asked him if he liked it, he heartily shook his head, as his mouth was full of hot, buttered whole wheat roll. I think we both like most of the breads I make, just because they taste so much better than what you can buy at the store.
Here's a picture of just the hoagie rolls that I made earlier in the day. It was my first go at making hoagie rolls and I was really happy with the way they turned out, despite the one roll that kind of resembles a bowling pin shape:) The hoagie rolls are being turned into Greek Turkey Meatball Subs tonight. Mmmmmm!!
Be sure and go see how the whole wheat w/ pecans and golden raisins bread turned out for the other mellow bakers this month!
I acquired a 1.5 lb bag of cracked wheat a few months back from Weisenberger Mills, in order to bake this Whole Wheat bread with Mellow Bakers. I wasn't too worried about using the bag of cracked wheat up, but now when I open my fridge and see that bag, it looks like alot of cracked wheat. I couldn't find cracked wheat as an ingredient in any recipes from the other bread books I own, so I jumped on the internet yesterday peeking at various blogs and other websites. I didn't have to look too far before I found one on allrecipes.com that looked promising. I decided to have a go at it yesterday and it turned out a tender, nutty, slightly sweet little loaf that is perfect for sandwiches, (especially my lunchtime PB&J's), and toast. Hubby's out of town at the moment, but he'll be back tomorrow for me to see how he likes it.
I changed the recipe just a little, corrected the pan size called for, and adapted the directions to how I like to make my loaves, and though I'm no cracked wheat bread expert, I was really happy with the results.
Cracked Wheat Bread adapted from Allrecipes.com
1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp water
1/4 cup cracked wheat
1 1/8 tsp + a pinch of instant yeast
2 Tbsp + 2 tsp warm water
1 Tbsp butter, softened
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp molasses
1 Tbsp honey
1/2 cup milk
2 tsp flax seed, ground
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup bread flour + an additional 1/4-1/2 cup
In a small saucepan, bring water to a boil. Stir in cracked wheat and simmer for 10 minutes; let cool to lukewarm.
Place the cracked wheat mixture in the bowl of your stand mixer, and add the butter, salt, molasses, honey, yeast, ground flax seed, whole wheat flour and 1 cup bread flour.
I put the remaining water, and the milk in a saucepan and heated it to ~ 95° and then poured it over the rest of the ingredients already in the stand mixer bowl. I let all the ingredients sit undisturbed for maybe 10 minutes and then with the paddle attachment I mixed the ingredients for 2 1/2 - 3 minutes on low speed until the dough came together in a shaggy ball. I added ~ 1/4 cup of additional bread flour as the dough was still a little too wet. I stopped the mixer, switched to the dough hook and continued mixing on medium-low for about 7-8 minutes, making minor adjustments of added flour. I turned the dough out onto my lightly floured silicone mat, and kneaded the dough for a couple more minutes until it was soft, supple and no longer sticky. I lightly oiled a large bowl, rolled the dough around just a little to barely coat it with oil, placed it in the bowl and covered with plastic wrap.
Upstairs the dough went to sit on my dryer, while I dried a load of clothes. It was cold in the house, so I figured it couldn't hurt. I let the dough rise until approximately doubled, which took 1 1/2 hours. I shaped the dough into a loaf, placed in a greased 4 1/2 by 8-inch loaf pan (the recipe incorrectly called for a 9 by 5 pan), spritzed the top of the loaf with a bit of cooking spray and loosely covered with plastic wrap.
Let rise until dough domes at least an inch above the rim of the pan. It took my loaf ~ 1 hour and 15 minutes for this to happen. I pressed my finger into the loaf to test to see if it was ready to bake and the indent remained, so into the oven it went. I had preheated my oven to about 360°. I baked 20 minutes and rotated the pan 180°, and then baked another 10 minutes until my thermometer read 188-189°.
I immediately turned the loaf out of its pan and let it cool briefly on its side, then turned it upright and ran a stick of butter over the top.
Finally, after a couple of days of so-so whole-grain recipes, I hit on one that is excellent. I had bookmarked this recipe last fall, but since I didn't have barley flour, I had to wait until my desire for these cookies, supplanted my resistance to stash yet another type of flour in my pantry. When growing up, snickerdoodles were my favorite of all my mom's homemade cookies. I have made whole-wheat snickerdoodles before from this recipe, and they are good, but they do contain some all-purpose flour, and my goal has been to find recipes that use none.
The Multigrain Snickerdoodles recipe I tried yesterday contains no all-purpose flour, but includes barley flour, ground oats, and traditional whole wheat flour. I found barley flour at Whole Foods in the bulk foods section, which I was grateful for so that I didn't have to commit to buying a whole bag. According to the book, Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce, barley flour was the main bread grain in Europe ~ 500 yrs ago, before the great rise of wheat. It also says barley flour works really well in doughs and batters (as a secondary flour) with a scent strangely reminiscent of ripe apricots.
I did not alter the recipe this time, except for cutting in half the ingredients for the cinnamon-sugar coating that the balls of dough are coated with. To coat my dough balls, I followed the procedure my mom taught us as kids, and that was to combine the cinnamon-sugar in a cereal bowl, drop a ball or two in at a time and roll it around before placing on the cookie sheet.
1 1/3 cups (4 5/8 oz) old fashioned rolled oats, ground for 30 seconds in food processor
1 cup (4 oz) whole barley flour
3/4 cup (3 oz) traditional whole wheat flour
Coating
1/3 cup (2 3/8 oz) sugar
1 Tbsp ground cinnamon
(I cut the coating ingredients in half and had just enough to coat all 38 dough balls.)
Cream the butter, sugar, baking powder, salt and vanilla in a large bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer. Beat in the orange juice and eggs, scraping the bowl, then add the oats, barley flour and whole wheat flour, beating until well combined. Refrigerate the dough, covered, overnight.
The next day, preheat the oven to 350°. Lightly grease 2 baking sheets or line with parchment paper. To prepare the coating, combine the sugar and cinnamon in a large plastic bag. Drop the dough by the tablespoonful, 6 pieces or so at a time, into the bag. Gather the bag closed at the top, trapping some air inside. Shake gently to coat the balls with sugar mixture. Place them on prepared baking sheets and flatten to about 1/2 in. thick, using the flat bottom of a measuring cup or drinking glass.
Bake the cookies, reversing the pans midway through (top to bottom, bottom to top), until they're beginning to brown around the edges, 12 to 14 minutes. (I baked only 1 sheet of cookies at a time and all of my batches were closer to the 14 minute mark.)
Remove cookies from pan and cool completely on a wire rack. Store in an air-tight container. The book also says the cookies will stay soft and chewy unless you leave the cookies out over-night to harden and then store them. I prefer mine to stay soft and chewy so mine were stored after cooling.
It's hard for me to convey the deliciousness of the food without alot of photographic talent or eye-catching props, but believe me these cookies are good and well worth the effort if you are searching for whole-grain cookie recipes to try.
Finally, I did a Mellow Bakers April bread yesterday. I had wanted to try the Pain au Levain sourdough first, but I don't think my stiff starter was vigorous enough to raise a 1 1/2 lb piece of dough, but I might try it later.
The hazelnut and fig bread was the April bread that I was really looking forward to. My first task was to decide what kind of figs to use. Well, that shouldn't be hard, given that there are only over 700 varieties of figs. I finally settled on a package of Sun-Maid California Mission figs, since they were on sale, and I thought they might be fresher/moister having been sealed in a bag. The figs at Whole Foods in the bulk bins looked very dry and almost crusty. Early yesterday I gathered my four main ingredients which Hamelman says make this bread 'loaded'. They were fennel seed, rosemary, roasted hazelnuts, and my figs:
Its funny how just the other day I was reading on the mellow bakers site where someone said that the HOME column is prone to error. Well, I think I found one as I was adding all my ingredients (except the hazelnuts and figs) to my stand mixer bowl. The 2 1/4 cups of water given in the HOME column is incorrect. I knew right away, after adding 1 1/8 cups of water for half the recipe, to the other ingredients, that there was not enough water. I adjusted by adding more though and everything was fine, but I will probably double check the HOME column from now on before starting a recipe.
My dough did not exactly seem moderately loose as I did my mixing on first speed. In fact all the way through the kneading, my dough seemed very, very stiff, but I just kept going. I added my figs and hazelnuts after the ~ 3 minutes of kneading. The figs I quartered and the hazelnuts I chopped a bit before adding them in. I turned the mixer to low speed, waiting for these additions to get incorporated, but it just wasn't happening in the mixer. I stopped the mixer, and lifted the dough, along with all the nuts and figs at the bottom of the bowl, out onto my silicone mat. After much difficulty in kneading the dough, I was finally satisfied that everything was OK, even though the occasional nut kept popping out and figs insisted on poking themselves through the surface of the dough. The dough went through its bulk and final fermentations and it was ready to be scored and tossed in the oven. I finally found some razor blades, thanks to Abby at Stir it! Scrape it! Mix it! Bake it!., who told me where to look. I was anxious to try scoring this loaf with the razor blade, as I had done quite a poor job of it on a loaf of Vermont Sourdough a couple weeks back.
Everything worked beautifully!! No problems scoring and I steamed the oven diligently, squirting the walls of the oven at least 4 or 5 times during the first 10-15 minutes of baking. I raised the oven rack up one notch that my stone sits on, since previous breads were baking too quickly and browning a bit much on the bottom. This time my loaf finished in 36 minutes and was beautiful and smelled heavenly. The scoring opened up nicely (I think), and I didn't have any unusual blowouts from the bottom side. The bottom was perfectly flat and not too browned. Oh, so nice:
Hubby and I haven't discussed whether we liked this loaf better than the whole wheat w/ hazelnuts and currants made in February, but I'm guessing it is a close tie. This loaf is definitely loaded with lotsa flavor!!!
Thank you for visiting my blog this time around and stop by Living in the Kitchen with Puppies to see the lovely Fig and Walnut buns that Natashya made from the same recipe!
Monday was a beautiful spring day here, a perfect day for baking bread. It was in the mid-70's, the birds were chirping and all kinds of blooms were bursting forth. I gathered a couple pictures:
The Whole-Wheat Levain that was on the schedule for mellow bakers for March looked to be a very simple bread. No cheese, no raisins, no nuts, nothing. This looked like a good bread though, to try out lucky with. The recipe for whole-wheat levain, found on page 168 of Hamelman's Bread, was for 2 large loaves, and I only wanted to make one, so I cut the recipe in half.
To start this bread, I weighed out 1 oz of lucky on Sunday evening, and mixed him with 2.4 oz of water, and 2.4 oz of whole-wheat flour. This is called the levain build and is the process of building the culture necessary for the production of this particular bread. Jeffrey said to start this process 12-14 hours before mixing the final dough, but also that ripeness is indicated by a mildly acidic aroma and a subtle sweetness, as well as by numerous small bubbles, kinda like soap bubbles, that partially cover the surface. My levain culture did not smell nearly as acidic/sweet as during the day Sunday after I gave lucky a Sunday AM feeding. Also, there weren't very many small bubbles on the surface of my levain after 14 hours, so I waited another hour and just decided to go ahead. I was worried it would be bad to wait past a certain point.
I put 4.8 oz of liquid levain build (2 T went back into my original sourdough seed culture) + 5.6 oz of whole-wheat flour, 8 oz of bread flour, ~ 8 oz of water, and 1 1/2 tsp of salt into the bowl of my stand mixer. I mixed on first speed ~ 3 minutes and then on second speed for ~ 3 to 3 1/2 minutes. This dough seemed very heavy to me and didn't seem to have much extensibility (not sure if that's the right word). I tranferred the dough to a bowl, covered, and let it ferment for 2 1/2 hours, folding twice, at 50-minute intervals. I decided to shape mine into a boule, and then I let it ferment for another 2 1/2 hours at 76 degrees.
After baking for 36 minutes at ~ 450 here's my boule:
I used what I'm calling a "sand-dollar" scoring pattern for this boule. I was reading some articles regarding scoring and how it affects the baking of the loaf, at The Fresh Loaf, when I saw an example of this scoring pattern. It immediately reminded me of sand dollars and so I went and grabbed one of my sand dollars off of my dresser and sure enough it was the same pattern. When I was a teenager I used to love to dive down to the sandy bottom of the ocean along the Florida coast and search in the sand for these critters. They are tricky to catch.
One problem I had with my boule was that it was not level/flat at all on the bottom because the bottom kind of split open :( Has anyone else had this happen or anyone know what caused this? Was it something I did wrong?
My husband is the slicer of bread in our house, because being an engineer and all, he's very precise and articulate and cuts very even slices:
I was disappointed at how the interior of the loaf looked, but at least my first sourdough loaf didn't burn and it tasted pretty good (although it did come very close to sliding off the back of my stone when I slid the parchment and boule into the oven).
My husband said he could taste the tanginess from the sourdough element, but I'm not sure I could, but then my taste buds weren't working perfectly due to my cold.
I think this first test of lucky wasn't too bad and I'm looking forward to learning more about sourdough and hopefully my culture will develop a more distinct taste and get a little more active as the weather warms up.
Thank you for visiting my blog this time around for mellow bakers!
Aloo Paratha is a type of Indian flatbread, which is stuffed with a spicy boiled potato and onion mixture. This was one of the breads that we could choose to make in March for Mellow Bakers, and since I'm still working on my starter for one of the other breads, I chose to try this one first.
First of all was to gather all of my ingredients. I needed some ghee and decided it'd be fun to learn how to make it. After consulting several online videos/articles I made ghee during lunch one day. I melted a stick of unsalted butter over low heat, hovering over it for ~ 45 minutes. After the first 10 minutes, I began skimming off the foamy stuff floating on the surface and did this for about 5 minutes. One article said the process takes ~ 35-45 minutes and one of the videos I watched said the ghee was done when you started to perceive a toffee smell. I turned off the heat when it smelled toffeeish, and poured my ghee into a pint glass jar with a coffee filter affixed on top, to catch any impurities still left in the clear, golden ghee. I left the ghee to sit on the counter a couple days while I gathered everything else.
One of my favorite blogs is Aparna's at My Diverse Kitchen. She is a vegetarian cook living in Northern India so I knew she would surely have something on her blog regarding paratha. Sure enough she had a video, which I'm including here,
and a recipe for her version of aloo paratha. Since the recipe in the video was for making 8 parathas, I went ahead and used their ingredient list for making the dough. However, I neglected to look back at our Bread book to read that the dough should be made w/ 2 parts whole wheat flour to 1 part unbleached bread flour. Oooops!! I made my dough with all whole wheat flour, but it tasted fine and was easy to work with. For my potato filling I kind of looked to Aparna's recipe for the spices and I decided to use a couple Yukon Gold potatoes (a larger potato with yellow skin and golden, waxy flesh) and red onion. The spices I used were:
chili powder (1/8 tsp + pinch)
coriander (1/8 tsp + pinch)
cumin (1/2 tsp)
garam masala (1/4 tsp)-this is one of my favorite spice blends consisting mainly of coriander, black pepper, cumin, cardamom, and cinnamon.
I forgot to add salt to my potato filling and I really wanted to include finely chopped fresh chilies in there too, but it is not the season for them at the farmer's market and local groceries only have tasteless, shriveled orbs that they call hot peppers. Oh, I also included a clove of minced garlic and ~ 1 Tbsp minced cilantro in the filling. After boiling, cooling, and peeling potatoes and sauteing my onions, garlic and spices, I mixed everything together in the skillet, then dumped into a bowl to cool. Here are my formed potato balls ready to go:
and here we are ready to fill our rolled out disks of dough with potato:
I was a little nervous that I wouldn't be able to pull all the dough up over the potato so I cheated and probably used less potato than I should have. I will make bigger balls of potato next time. I had no trouble bringing the dough together around the balls of potato and pinching the tops closed. I then rolled the balls to ~ 1/4 inch thickness and tossed them into my preheated cast-iron skillet, which I had to reseason for this project.
I put a thin coating of olive oil in the skillet just in case I had sticking issues. After cooking 2 minutes on each side, I brushed each side with some ghee I had heated on low, and cooked a minute or so more on each side. They got puffy as they were cooking and the last couple even puffed up like pita breads do when baked in the oven.
We didn't eat until almost 7:30, but the adventure was worth the wait and we had some wonderful, piping hot cream of wild rice soup (thickened w/ potato flour) to go with our aloo paratha.
We definitely want to up the spicyness of these next time, including some fresh, hot chili peppers, from the farmers market, but this was excellent for our first Indian cuisine. I will have to work on learning to make some chutney variations to go with this. Tucker, my sous chef, approved of these too, judging by the amount of drool on my husband's pant leg, but unfortunately for him he wasn't allowed to taste test these because of the spices.
Thank you for visiting my blog and stop by mellow bakers online to see what the rest of us were up to in March!
On Thursday of this past week it started to feel kind of like a bakery around here, at least to me it did. There are 9 more loaves scattered around the rest of the kitchen. Just kidding!!!!
I decided to make all of the Whole Wheat Bread's on the list for Mellow Bakers for February. I try to make the breads as written the first time, and then if I don't like something about them, I change them the next time. I don't like the crunchies too much in my breads, but I thought I'd give the millet a try since I had some in my pantry anyway. I poured the boiling water over my grains the night before and let them sit all night on the counter just to give them maximum soaking time:)
On baking day I measured my flours and salt into my stand mixer bowl, gave them a good stir with my dough whisk, added the soaker, and gave it another really good stirring with my dough whisk to make sure everything was well incorporated. Then I added the rest of the ingredients and started with the paddle attachment of my stand mixer for a few minutes before switching to the dough hook.
After mixing for 4 minutes or so with the dough hook, I turned the dough out onto my rolling mat and also kneaded it by hand for a couple minutes before I put it into a bowl for the bulk fermentation. This was the most dough I had ever worked with in one baking session before- 4lb, 1oz. I had to go buy a third pan so I would have enough to bake these. Here are the breads before rising ( in the warmed oven with the light on)
and then after an hour when they were ready for loading into the pre-steamed oven. I ground a few tablespoons of golden flax seed in my spice grinder, spritzed the top of the loaves with water and sprinkled with the ground flax right after placing the dough logs into their pans.
I baked these at 375 for about 30 minutes and after several burns to the fingers, I managed to get the loaves out of their pans and onto a cooling rack:
Even though I was stuffed and felt about to pop (we went out to dinner after the bread came out of the oven), I had a slice with jam before I went to bed. I couldn't wait until the next day to taste it.
This bread is really quite good. It's a little crunchy from the millet, but not overwhelmingly so. I did not even notice a texture from the cracked wheat as I ate the bread, so it must have softened quite abit. I placed two of the loaves in paper bags and put those into gallon, plastic zip-lock bags that I left partially open. This did a nice job of keeping the crust firm and chewy instead of soft, so that the next day this bread made wonderful sandwiches for our lunch.
Thank you for visiting my blog and please visit Mellow Bakers if you'd like to see what others made for February!
When I think of dinner rolls I think of big family get-togethers, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. We didn't usually have dinner rolls for an everyday meal at our house when I was growing up. To me though, homemade rolls are comfort food and are meant for anytime you want to make a meal kinda special. When I saw a recipe for honey wheat rolls in one of my King Arthur Flour catalogs, I thought how good homemade rolls would be and started hunting for potato flour, since that was the only ingredient I didn't have.
The recipe, which you can find here, makes 16 rolls, but I only wanted to make a pan of 8 so I cut the recipe in half. I used King Arthur White Whole Wheat for my wheat flour, 1/8 cup of potato flour (1/4 cup for a full recipe) instead of the mashed potato flakes, and I subbed 1 Tbsp Baker's Special Dry Milk (2 Tbsp for full recipe) for the nonfat dry milk. I mixed my ingredients in my bread machine and let it complete the dough cycle. Then I made my 8 balls and placed them in a 9 in. cake pan like so:
I like taking a before and after picture of rolls. I think it's so cool the way they kind of magically expand until they're touching and pushing to burst their way out of the pan. After only 45 minutes the rolls had puffed up and spread until they were touching, so I pre-heated the oven and popped them in. I baked for 15 min., covered loosely with a piece of foil, and baked another 10. They were nice and brown, a mahogany-brown, and boy did they smell good!
These were the best rolls I've ever made!!! Actually, I've only made homemade rolls one other time. I made them at Thanksgiving this past year for my husband and I. This batch, though, turned out much nicer and very pretty. My husband and I couldn't really discern much honey flavor, but I'm sure if the honey hadn't been there we would have noticed a difference. I will definitely be making these again!
Mmmmmmm!!
BYOB is a group committed to a year long adventure of baking our own
bread and other baked goods instead of buying them.
Since hazelnuts are my husband's favorite nut to crack open and eat at Christmas time, I knew I had to try the Whole Wheat Bread with Hazelnuts and Currants. I also love currants and use them alot in making biscotti, which I love with my morning coffee:)
I had never roasted hazelnuts before, which is odd since we love them so much and they are readily available in bulk bins at two stores where I shop. I think I had my oven set between 350 and 375 to roast the nuts and I took them out at 9 minutes. They were plenty brown, smelled wonderful, and there was smoke coming up from the pan. Yikes!! The skins just began to fall off as they were roasting which was cool, making it easier for me to get the rest off. Here's my roasted hazelnuts:
I decided to cut the recipe in half, which was a good thing, because I hadn't grabbed enough hazelnuts to make a full batch of dough! Jeffrey said that this dough makes very nice rolls, so I wanted to make a couple with the extra dough I knew I'd have. I shaped my loaf into a batard with 1.5 pounds of the dough, and with the remaining 8 ounces I made two rolls. The first thing my husband said when he walked into the kitchen was, "Ahh, aren't they cute", when he saw the rolls. I used kitchen shears to snip an X on the top of each roll before baking.
This bread is very, very good!!! My husband is sad now that it is Friday and our loaf is almost gone. The roasted hazelnuts go really well with the sweet little currants dispersed throughout the loaf. We have thoroughly enjoyed this bread with our meals this week and I'll definitely make again!
Here is a picture of the interior of the batard:
Thank you for visiting my blog and be sure to go to mellow bakers.com to see what others have made for February!
Mellow Bakers is a group of bread baking enthusiasts looking to bake a particular bread or breads together each month, with the recipes being chosen from Jeffrey Hamelman's book Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes.
This past week I made my first bread from Jeffrey Hamelman's book "Bread-A Baker's Book of Techiniquesand Recipes". I'm joining Mellow Bakers a little late, seeing as how they started the book in March 2010, but better late than never! I received the book for Christmas and really wanted to start in January, but since I have neither a starter or a Pullman Pan, I decided to wait till February.
I know it's a simple bread without any fancy nuances, but I really liked the whole-wheat bread recipe found on page 122 of this book. Since it was a very simple recipe, it gave me a chance to become familiar with JH's various techiniques, such as folding and preshaping. Here are my two preshaped pieces of dough resting comfortably before they become loaf shapes:
The dough was really easy to work with and the only problem I had was mixing up the final dough in my stand mixer. The dough wanted to constantly be climbing the dough hook. I would stop the mixer, push the dough off the hook and within 20 seconds after turning the mixer back on, the dough was all the way up the hook again. It was kind of frustrating. I was wondering if any kneading was getting done at all, with me constantly stopping the mixer to push the dough down into the bowl. Oh well, we're still learning :)
For the final fermentation I shaped both pieces of dough into logs and put them into my 9X5 loaf pans. This was to be our sandwich bread for the week. I was puzzled that JH didn't give a lower temperature to bake at if you were using pans to bake in. In every recipe I've made so far this year and in Peter Reinhart's "Bread Baker's Apprentice", bread baked in a loaf pan is baked at 350, but JH said to bake this bread at 450 and that it would take 40 minutes. Well, I just couldn't bring myself to set the oven at 450, because I thought it was too high. So I kept it at 425 to start with and remained squatted there in front of the oven peering in at the bread the whole time it was baking. I turned the pans around 180 degrees after 20 minutes and the tops looked really brown!!! I decided to put my probe thermometer into one of the loaves to check the temperature. After 25 minutes in the oven at 425, the temperature was at 192 and climbing, so I took them out. After depanning the loaves and putting them on a wire rack, I took a stick of butter and rubbed it across the top of both loaves to keep the crust tender. Here they are:
I was really pleased with their shape. These were the most symmetrical, nicely shaped loaves I've made so far. I think I waited roughly an hour and fifteen minutes before I couldn't wait any longer to try the bread.
We had slices for dinner with butter/canola oil spread on them. Mmmmmmmm!!
I agree with some that whole-wheat bread isn't the best title for this recipe, but I still liked the taste of the bread for what it was and when I want a 100% whole wheat bread I'll look for another recipe, but when I want something a little lighter and softer I'll go to this recipe!!
Here is a nice close up of the crumb and texture of this bread:
Thank you for visiting my blog and hop on over to Mellow Bakers if you would like to see what others made for February!
