Carrot Bread

Sunday, July 23, 2006
After fussing all day yesterday with that temperamental baguette, I decided it was time for something simple. Except for grating a big pile of carrots, this carrot bread was no more complicated than a mix: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, sugar, eggs, oil, walnuts, and raisins. And the carrots, of course.
I saw some neighbors at our local Farmers' Market today, and invited them over for a mid-afternoon tea, assuring me of two good things: 1) that I would go ahead and make the bread, even though it was getting hot enough to make me doubt the wisdom of turning the oven on and 2) that enough of the bread would be eaten by hungry neighbors that I wouldn't eat more than I should. And both good things came to pass.
The bread quickly disappeared (I put out both butter and mascarpone as spreads, and the mascarpone was so delicious that I never tried the butter), and I ate two pieces, which, I'm sorry to admit, is less than I would have eaten if I'd been facing the whole thing at 4:30.

Baguette

Saturday, July 22, 2006
I said earlier that there were four breads in the cookbook that really caused me trepidation: bagels, sourdough, the baguette, and croissants. I've done sourdough, and now I've done baguettes. More accurately, I've made my first baguette. The disadvantage of my "All 82 breads" project, with no repeats, is clear to me now--it leaves me no chance to perfect a particular bread. (Jim tells me that can be next year's project).
I'm not totally happy with the looks of this baguette. It's too flat and unbeautiful. I'm very happy with the taste, though.
To tell the truth, I was a little irritated when I realized that I was going to have to bake a baguette. As Rose says in her introduction, they're very difficult to make in a home oven and you can get a good baguette in any good bakery. But she says that people who didn't live five minutes away from a good bakery were pleading with her to show them how to make baguettes at home. I suspect some exageration here--I seriously doubt that hordes of people were at her door, begging her for baguette instructions.
However, I bought a baguette pan, as well as the specified King Arthur artisan flour, and I even got myself in a good frame of mind. The dough required many steps (Make a poolish! Make a pate fermentee!) and a lot of tending, but it was kind of fun. Everything went swimmingly, but when I took it out of the refrigerator for its last rise, it didn't want to rise any more; nor did it rise much in the oven, giving me a loaf that was the proper length and width, but only about an inch high. And it wasn't the lovely golden brown that I was expecting--more of a cafe au lait brown.
Still....if you've never tasted a baguette 10 minutes out of the oven, you are a lucky person because you have a great pleasure waiting to be experienced for the first time.

Quintessential Corn Muffins

Sunday, July 16, 2006
These muffins were made by the sweat of my brow. Although we're doing Minnesota tropical right now, and although I was going to do only non-oven breads until the temperature went down, I decided to make corn muffins. Our friends Doug and Mary brought us some beautiful wild blueberries from their summer house on Rainy Lake, so the idea of adding them to the corn muffins sounded too good to pass up. I thought briefly about opening the kitchen door and letting the air conditioning reach the kitchen, but we saw An Inconvenient Truth yesterday, so I couldn't quite bring myself to be that irresponsible. The recipe calls for only a 20-minute pre-heat and 15 minutes of baking, so I figured I could tough that out. And I did, but the sweat was pouring into my eyes. (Back in the day, we girls were told that we didn't sweat, we "glowed." This was sweat).
After my experience with the stone-ground extra-coarse cornmeal (which I decided to give to the birds, by the way, and they wouldn't touch it), I ordered some organic cornmeal from The Baker's Catalogue. This organic stuff was the opposite of extra-coarse; it was so fine it was almost like flour, with just a little texture and bite. It made fabulous muffins. Rose says she usually makes these muffins without blueberries because she likes the taste of corn so much, but I find it difficult to believe that they would have been improved by leaving out the wonderful Rainy Lake blueberries. They are so good that I had to promptly put them in the freezer so I wouldn't be tempted to sit down with the basket of muffins and polish them off. I really am not usually so greedy, but there are certain foods that just cry out, "Eat me." This is one of them.
We served the muffins with grilled spicy shrimp, new potatoes, peas, and baby onions from the Farmer's Market, and a cucumber, yogurt, and fresh mint salad, also from the Farmer's Market. We're lucky to be able to buy fresh vegetables all year round, but the locally grown, fresh from the farm, stuff that's available only in season is spectacularly good.

English Muffins

Saturday, July 15, 2006
We're having a heat wave here in the far northland, so I'm moving to my list of "July breads"--breads that don't involve turning on the oven. These don't require an oven because they're "baked" on the griddle (my new electric griddle, yet another bread purchase, worked wonderfully). Homemade English muffins--I had to ask myself whether these were worth the bother since you can buy perfectly good English muffins. I discovered it's little like asking yourself if it's worth buying a hunk of Parmigiano Reggiano when you can buy perfectly good Parmesan in a green shaker or whether it's worth buying expensive French or Greek olives when you can buy perfectly good California ones in a can.
These English muffins don't really taste much like the ones you buy in a package. Although mine didn't have as many holes and valleys as the packaged ones do, they made up for it by tasting more like bread than cardboard. The dough is easy to make, although it calls for several long periods of refrigeration. If you read the recipe ahead of time, it's easy enough to accommodate this. I made the sponge on Thursday night, put it in the refrigerator, mixed it up and let it rise last night, put it in the refrigerator again, and rolled the dough out and let it sit for its final rise this morning. I finished them at a reasonable breakfast time. Although Jim had already had his first breakfast, which he eats by 6:00 a.m. without fail, he was willing to have a second one. (His record is, I believe, three breakfasts--a happy day for him!). Someday, when I'm feeling really decadent, I could have made some kind of eggs mcmuffin with these--maybe using Nueske bacon and sharp cheddar, but not today, when it's supposed to get up to 100.

Cracked Wheat Loaf

Friday, July 7, 2006
Every once in a while, Jim asks me, apprehensively, if I'm going to stop baking bread after I've made all 82 breads. I say no, and hope I mean it. I like having fresh bread on hand, or making my next loaf, or going through the Bible, looking for my next one. I expect I could get lazy (well, let's face it--I know very well I could get lazy), but I don't think I'll just give it up.
The cracked wheat bread is another one that's in contention for the standard bread you'd want to have around all the time--for toast, for sandwiches, for snacks. The bulgur gives it plenty of whole grain heftiness and crunch, but it's got a great texture too. It's a lovely dough. It looked so rich and creamy in the mixing bowl--it could have passed for a big bowl of butter brickle ice cream.
I got engrossed in the movie "Murderball" (it's a documentary about paraplegic rugby--it doesn't sound that good, but it really is!)while the bread was rising in the pan, so it grew more than I intended it to. When I took it out of the oven, Jim kept calling it the "fat bread" or the "chubby loaf" until I told him that we were not amused.
The recipe calls for added granular lecithin, which supposedly will make it stay soft and fresh for three days. I will be surprised if this loaf is still in existence three days hence, so I may not be able to accurately test the the lecithin's efficacy.
I am at the point now where I believe that it's very possible to actually bake all of the breads in one year, but an additional problem is coming up. I'm planning to remodel my kitchen, which will mean at least six weeks without a real kitchen. I'm not sure how I'm going to catch up with a six-week lag. There are a few breads I can make without an oven, although I was planning to do those in hot July or August weather. My kitchen remodel means buying a new range. I just realized that I've never bought a stove--I've always used the ones that came with the apartment or house. Does anyone have a range that they love and would recommend? Or one that they hate and would warn against?

Sicilian Vegetable Pizza Roll

Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Today was the retirement party for one of my colleagues. She's younger than I am, but apparently thriftier or something, because she's managed to retire and build a beautiful home in Oregon, while I'm still going to work every day trying to get criminals off on a technicality. That is, I'm trying to protect the Constitution. (Happy Fourth of July, by the way).
Anyway, instead of having a fancy party, she opted to have an international-food pot luck lunch. Of course, I wanted to make a bread, and the Sicilian pizza roll sounded like it would be perfect.
I made some substitutions in this bread. When I first started this project, I vowed that I would follow the recipes as faithfully as I possibly could. (Don't you just love the web sites where someone says I didn't like this recipe at all--I substituted margarine for butter, and I didn't want to waste money buying fresh herbs so I used some old Italian seasoning, and I'm a vegetarian, so I substituted tofu for the prosciutto, and the recipe was no good)? The vegetables in this bread were broccoli, garlic, and Jerusalem artichokes, and even if I were really convinced that Jerusalem artichokes were the genuine Sicilian thing, they're not in season. I felt completely morally justified in substituting roasted red peppers and black olives for the Jerusalem artichokes. I even roasted the red peppers myself instead of using the jarred ones. I cannot apologize for this substitution; in fact, I find it hard to believe that the Jerusalem artichokes would be better.
The dough was easy to handle and fun to roll out, but it split while it was baking, so the olive oil leaked out and caused the bottom of the bread to burn. I contemplated not bringing the bread to the pot luck because of the burned bottom, but, instead, I spent about ten minutes scraping off the burned layer. I sliced it and served it, at room temperature, accompanied by a cruet of EVOO.
It was fabulous. Another bread that I might not have made were it not for The Project. I might have looked at it and said to myself, you know, I really like broccoli as a vegetable, but how good can broccoli bread be? If I'd said that, I would have been wrong. It was also immensely satisfying to hear people say, "You MADE this? Do you mean you didn't buy it, you actually made it?" This allows me to assume my modest look and say, "Oh, it was nothing, really. Anyone could do it."

French Country Boule

Saturday, July 1, 2006


I remembered I still had part of a package of French Lalvain Pain de Campagne starter, the faux sourdough starter I'd used for the Low-Risk Sourdough bread, and this seemed like a good time to use it up. Although since this boule recipe calls for only 1/16 of a teaspoon of Lalvain starter, I didn't use it up--I have enough left to make many more loaves of this country boule, which is just fine with me.
This was another of those three-day breads. On Thursday, I made the liquid starter; on Friday, I mixed the starter with the flours (bread, rye, and whole wheat) and let the dough rise twice. This morning, I shaped it and let it rise again, slashed it in an adorable starfish shape, and baked it.
I had just enough time to eat one little slice before going to 10:00 yoga. I'm afraid that the bread put me in a non-yogic frame of mind. Instead of staying in the present, as we're so often told to do, I was thinking about having another slice of bread as soon as I got home and wondering whether I'd eat it plain, with butter, or with butter and jam.
The butter, no jam option won out. I figured I'd just spent an hour in yoga, so why not have a little butter on it. I'd sweated enough to justify jam, too, but I do like the basic and pristine bread-and-butter combination. I did take home enough yoga to remember to eat the bread mindfully, as opposed to greedily, which is nice because then it lasts longer.
I also decided that this bread would make an excellent sandwich, which it did. I made a tuna sandwich (my current favorite way to make a tuna sandwich is to add chopped roasted almonds, thin slices of fresh basil, and some capers to the tuna, plus just a smidgen of mayonnaise).

This is a very delightful bread. It's a smallish loaf, so I think you could probably make two in the KitchenAid without much trouble, and if you could, it would be an excellent idea.

Corn Fingers

Sunday, June 25, 2006
This is the 41st recipe I've tried! That means I'm halfway there--I've baked 41 out of 82 recipes from The Bread Bible. I feel good because I think I'm really going to make my goal, but I'm also wondering what I'm going to do without this obsession to keep me happy.
If I need to be happy next year, I guess I could whip up a batch of these corn fingers. They're easy to make, if you don't count cooking the corn and cutting it off the ears (I ran into a friend at the grocery store, and he eyed my two ears of corn--"You can actually buy this stuff in cans, you know," he said, but I don't think it would have tasted so sweetly tender). The same person advised against buying the coarse-ground cornmeal (the only stone-ground cornmeal available in the store); he said he'd used it for cornbread, and it was too rugged. I agree with him on this point--I think these sticks would have been a little better with a finer grind. Still, that's just nit-picking. The combination of the sweet corn, the hot red pepper flakes, and the buttery-rich batter is a real winner.
I was less pleased with the molds. Maybe it was just because this was the first time I'd used them, but they didn't really unmold that willingly. I had to fill up the bottom of the dish with the rag-tag corn sticks and cover them up with the few that turned out pretty well in order to get a decent picture. If you're not taking pictures, though, and you're not serving guests, you probably won't care. Although, come to think of it, if you don't have guests, and you don't want to invest in the cast-iron pan that's a little iffy about the unmolding process, you can just bake a pan of cornbread with this recipe.

Fresh Herb Focaccia

Saturday, June 24, 2006
I was a little apprehensive about making focaccia again since my first attempt was not successful, but this is an absolutely wonderful bread. I've noticed that every bread I've made with durum wheat has outstanding flavor and texture, so when I run out, I'll definitely order more.
This dough is great for your inner three-year-old. You knead it by hand, with a special technique that involves stretching and turning and pressing--in non-technical terms, you play with it. It's a lot like playing with Play-Doh only it's the real thing. It was also very satisfying to see it turn from a rather unpromising mass with blobs of olive-oil-soaked flour into a smooth, pliable dough.
And this bread is very forgiving. I made a few mistakes with it, and it didn't seem to mind at all. I forgot to add the salt, so I just kneaded it in after it had already risen, and let it rise again. Then I neglected to roll it out on floured parchment paper (and the directions are quite clear about this), so I had to scrape it off the counter and plop it onto the parchment. It got a little misshapen, but nothing really bad happened to it.
I gathered fresh basil, parsley, chives, and rosemary from my herb garden, placed them on half of the bread, folded it over, spread it with olive oil, and sprinkled it with some French sea salt (another unreasonable bread expenditure--$10 for a jar with a picture of French peasant women gathering what looks like gray ocean scum). It's very salty salt. It may not be worth $10, but maybe my palate is just not sufficiently sophisticated. It's sophisticated enough to appreciate this bread, though, which I must say is probably the best focaccia I've ever tasted.
Jim and I went to the new Trader Joe's and got gravlax, salami, cheese and strawberries to eat with the bread. Our wine was even a step or two up from Trader Joe's Three Buck Chuck. Another delightful Saturday afternoon cocktail hour.

Stud Muffin

Sunday, June 18, 2006
As it was Father's Day today, I told Jim he could pick the bread du jour. He picked stud muffin, more for the name than anything else, I think. I wanted to have the bread ready for cocktail hour, so there was no time for the 8-hour rest in the refrigerator. This 8- to 24-hour period is supposed to enhance the flavor, but it's hard for me to think that this bread could have been much more flavorful than it was. The dough itself is made with grated Parmagiano Reggiano and pecorino romano, plus the cubed gruyere studs, so it's well-nigh impossible for it to be boring. The gruyere, especially where it's moved to the top and sides and has become melted and crusty, is fabulous, and the bread is wonderful with wine and prosciutto at the aforementioned cocktail hour.
My souffle pan is only 1 and 1/2 quarts instead of 2 quarts, so I tore off about a quarter of the dough to bake several individual breads in glass custard cups. This is my own innovation, born of necessity, and I must say it's a fine variation. Because of the smaller size, there are more crusty bits than in the large loaf. In this bread, crusty bits are a good thing.

Angel Light Biscuits

Wednesday, June 14, 2006
My nephew Bob asked me to repeat the strawberry shortcake that I made last month. I'm not repeating recipes for anyone yet, even for Bob, but I realized that I could make a new shortcake using the Angel Light recipe. The best part of bakiing these in North Carolina was that, unlike in Minnesota, White Lily self-rising flour is easy to come by. In fact, it's impossible to miss at the Holden Beach Food Lion. The worst part about baking them on vacation is that I didn't have any of my equipment, and I had to improvise again. I didn't have any baking sheets (well, I did really, but they were hiding until after the biscuits were already made), I didn't have my scale, which I've come to rely on enormously, and I'd never used the oven before.
Although a few of the biscuits got a little brown on the bottom (from baking them in pyrex cake pans, I suspect), and although they were a little too lumpy and spread out to be gorgeous, I couldn't have asked for more enthusiastic eaters than my family. After they'd eaten some biscuits with strawberries and whipped cream, they tried them au naturel, and liked them that way too.

I brought them to a dessert spread at Bob and Karla's house, and Bob waxed rhapsodic about them, although it turned out that he isn't that crazy about strawberries, and Sarah said they were the second-best biscuits she'd ever eaten. I liked their lightness and their flavor was buttery and sweet but not too sweet, but I prefer the denser, more biscuity texture of the butter biscuits I made earlier.
MY NEPHEW BOB

MY NEPHEW TONY

Chocolate chocolate-chip bread

Tuesday, June 6, 2006
We've rented a beach house in North Carolina next week, for a family reunion. Staying at the beach in the summer generally entails wearing a bathing suit, and, the older I get, the more it seems that a bathing suit is exactly what I should not be wearing. At least, I thought, I could try to lose a few pounds before I get there. What does this have to do with chocolate chocolate-chip bread, you ask? Just that this is another bread that I took into work, where it's likely to be devoured quickly enough that it won't be able to do much damage to my hips.
A quick bread is a pleasant diversion after baking only yeast breads for a few weeks. The pleasure that you lose in not seeing the bread rise and not smelling the yeasty baking aroma is made up for by the ease of turning it out, and, in this case, the smell of chocolate in the air.
The dough for this bread was soft, almost souffle-like. When the bread came out of the oven, it unmolded nicely but left a few bits of chocolate and chocolate chips stuck to the pan. Although I had told myself that I wasn't going to eat any of this bread, I thought I'd just eat a crumb to try it out. Then I scraped off every crumb, every morsel, from the pan and gobbled it greedily. I was glad no one was around to see me.
I took it into work on the same day that Ben brought in a plate of chocolate cupcakes, so we agreed that Ben's cupcakes would be eaten in the morning, and my bread would be the afternoon's offering. I wasn't going to eat any bread--because of the bathing suit situation--but then told myself that I couldn't do an honest blog description if I didn't taste it. My verdict: an excellent, very versatile bread. It could pass as a cake and make a very respectable dessert, served with fruit and whipped cream, or a tea bread, or a morning coffee cake, or a midnight snack. I brought one piece home for Jim, who's out of town this week, and put it in the freezer. Of course, if I were to eat it as a midnight snack tonight, he'd never know.

Pugliese

Saturday, June 3, 2006
When I asked Jim what kind of bread he wanted this weekend, he said, "a crusty one." Instead of telling him that all bread has crust, as I might do if I'm in a snarly mood, I, like a good wife, looked through The Bread Book until I hit on the Pugliese.
There are no good stories about this bread because it came together as easy as pie (why do people say that anyway--has pie ever been easy?). I went to two garden stores with my friend JoAnne while it was rising; then I came home and shaped it and JoAnne and I went out for lunch while it was rising a second time. It was almost ready to put in the oven when we got back from lunch, but it was willing to wait patiently until I preheated the oven. The day was hot, and so was the oven, but the bread took only 15 to 20 minutes to bake.
This bread is stupendous. Look at those nice big holes--does this bread not look like I've been baking bread for years instead of months? And what a treat! I planted the flowers I bought, and Jim installed a new irrigation system. When we were both done, we rewarded ourselves with Pugliese with olive oil and glasses of Pinot Grigio and sat on our back porch, admiring our handiwork. There was a nice breeze and the scent of the last lilacs filled the air. Life is very good.

Monkey Bread

Monday, May 30, 2006
I've been thinking about baking this monkey bread for a couple of weeks, but it looked very rich, sweet, buttery, and caloric. Not that these are bad things, but I am going to try to get in a bathing suit in a few weeks. I finally decided that I'd bake it and take it into work, where all food gets devoured.
I started baking the monkey bread on Memorial Day, when Minneapolis was having record hot temperatures, and my kitchen is not air-conditioned. Jim asked me if I was really planning to turn on the oven when it was 97 degrees outside. His tone of voice led me to believe that I should not say yes.
So I whipped up the dough yesterday (I had to move it closer to the air conditioner after I noticed that it was rising before my very eyes in the 100-degree kitchen). Then I shaped the balls, rolled them in butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon (a half-pound of butter! See what I mean about rich, sweet, buttery, and caloric?), strewed them with raisins and pecans and put the whole thing in the refrigerator.
When I got up this morning, it was ready to bake. What a heavenly smell! I took it into work and sent out an email announcing the presence of monkey bread in the lunch room and telling people not to ask me why it was called monkey bread because I didn't know). They asked me anyway. My friend Susan said she loved the bread but she didn't want to call it monkey bread. She said she'd call it Ho Chi Minh bread because Ho Chi Minh supposedly worked as an apprentice baker at the Ritz-Carlton or someplace when he lived in London. This doesn't make any sense, and the Ho Chi Minh baking story is undoubtedly a myth, but that's how Susan's mind works. And not only did we finish the Monkey/Ho Chi Minh bread, but we also ate a box of doughnuts that Tony brought in because he won three cases in May, as well as two frozen custard pies, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, a lemon poppyseed cake, and cupcakes that various people brought in to celebrate all the May birthdays (of which mine was one, by the way).
Also, several people asked me if I made the bread with Pillsbury dough, a suggestion that offended Susan more than it offended me. ("Why don't you ask her if she gardens with plastic flowers?")
Did I get around to saying that this bread is fabulous? It is not really a bread in the staff-of-life sense, however. I was extremely happy that I took it into work because I could see it as a real possibility that one could just sort of pick at this bread all day and end up having consumed many thousands of calories without even trying.

Sourdough Rye

May 22-27, 2006
After being assured that it was not cheating to order sourdough starter instead of making my own, I ordered two different starters from sourdo.com .
I was very taken with the description of a New Zealand sourdough which a woman named Christy Dowling "captured" in Rotorua. I got a mental picture of a woman in a bonnet and a butterfly net scampering through fields trying to capture this culture. I also liked this one because it was supposed to be easy for beginners. And if I ordered the Rotorua sourdough, I also got another New Zealand culture--one for rye breads.
When I got the packages in the mail, I decided I shouldn't have worried about cheating. I had somehow thought that the cultures would arrive all ready to put in my mixing bowl and they'd activate automatically. But they're dried, and they have to be activated and fed with flour and water, just as if you were making your own.
I managed to lose the directions that came with the yeast, but the people at sourdo.com emailed me an abbreviated set, and I got more on the internet. The instructions are basically to add water and flour at certain intervals until it's bubbly and ready. What "ready" means is not totally obvious to a novice, but at some point, I decided it was ready enough, and then I could switch over to Rose's sourdough rye recipe, which has much more detailed instructions.
As I fed the starter, I didn't feel entirely comfortable with the whole process. It smelled a little weird, for one thing, and I didn't know if I'd be able to smell the difference between a normal tangy smell and a rotten bacteria-ridden one. As I was fretting about this at work, my friend Susan asked me if I'd ever heard of anyone dying from bad sourdough. I admitted that I hadn't, and feeling that I wasn't going to kill off my entire family with bad sourdough comforted me quite a bit.
Finally, on Thursday night I gave the starter its first and second feedings (it really does have a voracious appetite; it reminds me of Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors) and put it in the refrigerator overnight.
On Friday, I came home early from work hoping to turn out a loaf of bread for dinner. Oh, but I should have read more carefully. The recipe calls for mixing the dough, followed by a one-hour rise, followed by another one-hour rise, followed by a 3-5 hour rise, followed by another 3-5 hour rise, followed by baking. Rough calculation--I should be able to take the bread out of the oven around 3:00 a.m. Fortunately, Little Audrey turned out to be downright fervent about expanding, and she doubled in less time than she was supposed to, so I was able to put her in the oven around 10:00. (That is, I put IT in the oven, not her.) And it was done about 45 minutes later. (Yes, there was a time in my life when Friday nights meant something other than bake bread and try to go to bed early. But for everything there is a season, and this is my bread-baking season).
I couldn't wrap it up because it was still hot, and I was afraid that if I left it in the kitchen, it would be nibbled on by mice during the night. Jim pointed out, logically enough, that we didn't have mice. Still, once I'd thought of the possibility of hungry mice partying on the bread it had taken me a week to make, I couldn't just ignore it, so I brought the bread up to our bedroom, where it would be safe.
When I woke up, I knew that I was going to be able to eat sourdough rye for breakfast. I rounded it off with vanilla yogurt and blueberries, orange juice, and good, strong coffee. This is a bread was worth waiting for. It's chewy and flavorful and not too sour for my taste.



It made a big loaf of bread, so I gave half of it to our neighbors who love rye bread and told them to compare it to the original caraway rye bread I gave them a few months ago. Next to baking the bread and eating it yourself, sharing it is very satisfying.
Here's my question, though: I have two jars of starter left in the refrigerator. Do I have to keep feeding at least one of them to the end of time? Is once a week enough?

Basic Soft White Sandwich Bread

Saturday, May 20, 2006
This is the kind of bread that my mother and grandmothers made when they made "homemade bread." Simple, basic, white bread. The kind you don't eat any more because it's not a complex carbohydrate and it doesn't have enough fiber to satisfy the dietary police. Still, it's awfully good, especially when it's cooled just enough to slice and spread a little butter on it.
I made open-faced sandwiches for dinner: toast the bread, spread with tapenade and sliced smoked mozzarella. Broil until the cheese is starting to turn brown and bubbly, and top with roasted red pepper strips. It's a nice marriage of old-fashioned bread like Mom made and three foods she had never heard of when she baked her bread.

Butter Biscuits

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Jim and I had a small tiff about the strawberry shortcake. I said I wanted it for dessert on Mother's Day, and he said, "You shouldn't have to make your own dessert on Mother's Day!" And so on.
But he finally allowed as how he wasn't going to bake the biscuits, so he guessed it was okay if I did.
Sarah, who is supposedly on a diet (kind of like the diet I'm on, actually), nearly swooned with delight: "This is the best strawberry shortcake I've ever had in my life!!!" (She said it with three exclamation points, too--maybe even four). The biscuits were wonderful--so tender that any Southern cook would be jealous, slightly crisp and sugary on top, but not too sweet. This is the strawberry shortcake that explains why this is actually a wonderful dessert if it's not made with soggy store-bought sponge cakes and Cool Whip. (My family accuses me of being a food snob, but really, if you prefer the sponge cake shortcake, there's just no hope for you).

Tyrolean Ten-Grain Torpedo

Saturday, May 13, 2006
First of all, I have to admit that this is not a ten-grain torpedo; it's a six-grain. I couldn't find a ten-grain cereal mix, but I had a five-grain mix, and I added polenta as the sixth grain. The suggested pumpkin seeds sounded good, but not good enough for me to go out on a rainy night and try to find them.
Jim and I are going to a party tonight, and I volunteered to bring something to eat. Jim suggested that as long as I was baking bread, why not just bring that. It was very practical advice, but I'm afraid that if I don't make a move on the bread right after I arrive, other, less deserving, people will eat it before I get to sample it. I decided I could foil them by bringing it unsliced and then taking a piece for myself as soon as I slice it. If nobody but me eats it, I'll be offended too.
Four hours later:
The bread was eaten, so I am not offended. I also had a slice, and it was delicious, even minus four grains. This could easily become my daily bread. The grains add enough texture to make the bread interesting, and they make the flavor more complex. The light dusting of rye flour makes the bread very attractive--even more attractive than in the photo.

Swedish Limpa Bread

Tuesday, May 9, 2006
It was my turn to bring bread to book club tonight, so I decided to make a Swedish bread in Minneapolis, this very Swedish city. I had doubts about the limpa bread when I mixed it--the combination of molasses, ale, and aniseed seemed odd. In fact, it smelled downright nasty. I didn't like the smell, or the texture, or the color. I really liked nothing at all about this bread. In addition, I undercooked it (in my very unreliable oven, which I hope to replace soon), and ended up returning it to the oven after I checked its temperature. I muttered to myself about how I shouldn't expect anything from a Swedish bread since this is, after all, the land that brought us lutefisk, but I should have had more faith. In fact, the flavor of this bread turns out to be intriguing rather than nasty, and the texture light and solid at the same time. Tomorrow I'll try it toasted for breakfast, but it's a fine dinner bread with nothing more than a slather of butter.

Big Banana Muffins

Sunday, May 7, 2006
Wow--it is so fast and easy to make quick breads! I decided it was time for another non-yeast bread, because I hadn't checked anything off from that section of the book for quite a while, but I'd forgotten how quickly you can whip up a batter that doesn't have to rest and rise. (Perhaps that's why they call them quick breads, O Master of the Obvious.)
If you're thinking that these muffins aren't very big, you're right. The recipe says to bake them in a Texas-size pan, but I only had about a Nebraska-sized one. Anyway, I have an unreasonable bias against anything Texan, although, given our current administration, perhaps the bias isn't unreasonable. Although if the muffin pans were named after Texans Molly Ivins or Jim Hightower, I'd probably run out and buy one or two.
Back to the matter at hand--although these muffins were not big in size, they were big in taste. Their texture is quite delicate, but the lone banana packs quite a flavor punch, assisted by the toasted walnuts. (The recipe doesn't say how long to toast them, but I toasted mine the amount of time it took me to forget they were in the oven, which happened to be, fortunately, about 30 seconds before they started to burn).
If I'd made more, I could have given some away. I suppose I could have given some away anyhow, but then I wouldn't have very many left to eat myself.

Brioche

Thursday, May 4, 2006
I include this picture just to prove that I don't only talk about my successes. The topknot of this brioche was not exactly on top. First Sarah told me that it was "charmingly askew." Then, after it continued to tilt as it baked, she told me it was more like a monster child you've given birth to but love anyway.
Not only was this loaf aesthetically challenged, it was on the burnt side of normal. However, once I cut off the bottoms and sides of the loaf, I had a slice of delicious crust-less brioche: golden, buttery, and lush. Even though this bread didn't turn out perfectly, I'd like to try it again. I think that it could be spectacular if it didn't list and if I didn't burn it.
I actually started making this bread two days ago. I've gotten to the point where I feel that something is missing if I don't have a loaf of bread ready to eat, or at least in the process of becoming edible, so I started putting this together Tuesday night. I read the directions, but didn't add up the various 1 1/2-hour, 1 hour, and 2 hour segments until I had already started. Then I realized that I'd be up until 3:00 a.m. if I didn't fudge a little. As it was, I finally put the dough in the refrigerator for its two-day rest at midnight. (Having a full-time job really cuts into your bread-baking schedule). I was pleased whenever I looked in the refrigerator and saw the dough, and I was excited when I came home from work and started shaping the bread. Some of my younger friends would (and, in fact, do) scoff at my excitement over baking a loaf of bread. But baking bread has enriched my life so much that I can't understand why everyone isn't nuts about it. Really, if Osama bin Laden were tending to a loaf of brioche in his Pakistan cave, wouldn't he be a friendlier, homier sort?

Golden Semolina Torpedo

Saturday, April 29, 2006
I'll admit this bread is not as photogenic as the Pugliese, but that's only because I ignored Rose's voice. She warns that this bread should be slightly under-proofed, because if it's allowed to rise fully it will collapse when slashed. So I tested it by poking my finger in the dough, and it was at the stage where it was not quite fully proofed. I knew I should put it in the oven, but I wanted to let it get just a little bit bigger, so I decided it should rise for another 15 minutes. And, of course, it collapsed after I slashed it. Rose's voice then said, "I told you so."
This bread was served with the coscia di agnello alle erbe con patate rosto (herb-crusted leg of lamb with roasted potatoes) and with a 2002 Uva di Troia. A wonderful combination, by the way. I was a little apprehensive about the bread, seeing as how it had collapsed and all, but I figured people had had enough wine by that time that they wouldn't be hyper-critical. I didn't have to worry though--this turned out to be one of my favorite breads so far, and everyone loved it. It has a beautiful golden color and a rich yet delicate flavor. I'm already longing to taste this bread again.
Today was the first day I've made two breads at one time. It's very confusing. I kept flipping back and forth between recipes and trying to remember which bread was at which stage. (I also baked a ricotta-pine nut tart for dessert, so the oven was on pretty much all day).
Also, this is the first bread that I've kneaded by hand--maybe that's part of the reason I'm so fond of it.
I'm at 27 loaves of bread after four months--right on target to complete all 82 by the end of December. And then I can make another loaf of golden semolina bread.

Brinna's Pugliese

Saturday, April 29, 2006
I made an Italian feast for eight people today--a feast that required two different loaves of bread; I'll give each of them its own entry because they were both so good that they deserve their own.
The first course was mussels with saffron and mustard broth, served with an Erbaluce. (I've never made mussels before--the whole chore of debearding them and checking their open/closed status always seemed too onerous to me, but these were beardless mussels and almost all of them were closed and open when they were supposed to be). The bread--a flavorful, open-textured, peasanty sort of loaf--was fantastic and perfect to sop up the sauce.
Only one piece of bread was left when I carried away the bowls of shells. And that was left only because of the Minnesota tradition of never taking the last piece of anything.

Low-Risk Sourdough Bread

Saturday, April 22, 2006

There are four recipes in The Bread Bible that scare me: sourdough (because you have to make a starter that could be rife with bacteria), bagels (because you boil them, and who boils bread?), baguette (because there's no way to disguise a bad baguette), and croissants (because they're just scary).
And there are about six different sourdough recipes. Sourdough presents an ethical dilemma. I can buy sourdough starter on line at www.sourdo.com and I'd love to do that. But I'm afraid that if I don't make my own starter, I will get an asterisk, like Barry Bonds, after my record of making all 82 loaves of bread, indicating that I cheated by not making my own sourdough starter but buying it through the internet. I told a friend my dilemma, and she pointed out that I didn't mill my own flour, and that didn't seem to bother me. That cheered me up some, but I was still relieved to see that Rose has two sourdough recipes that call for a starter from The Bakers Catalogue. Now I can make these two breads before I have to make a final decision on my dilemma.
In fact, this bread was very low-risk, and very delicious. If I could buy this loaf of bread, I would.
By the way, I used my new French slashing knife, and it worked much better than my old knife.

Pullman Loaf (Pain de Mie)

Monday, April 17, 2006
I know that I've become bread-crazed when the first thing I did when I got home from the airport--before even unpacking--was to start mixing up a loaf of bread. I was in Seattle, a city that has many wonderful artisan bakeries. In fact, I had a ham sandwich for lunch from Grand Central Bakery that was so perfect that I talked about it for days; eventually Jim had to put a ban on any further mention of the ham sandwich. Then we went to Chicago and stayed at the Sofitel, where we had a basket of breads and pastries every morning. Every time I ate a croissant or a baguette, I wanted to start baking.
So, when I got home from Chicago, I pulled out the pullman loaf pan I bought on E-bay (at half the cost of a new pan), and started putting together the bread. This must be the easiest loaf of bread so far. It's got a whole tablespoon of yeast in it, so it rises so enthusiastically you have to keep your eye on it lest it take over the kitchen. I don't know what happened--since I got my scale the doughs have been perfect. This one, however, was way too sticky and moist, but I just added more flour (a lot more flour) until it seemed right. (At least this time I had enough sense to realize it wasn't right and to fix it instead of blindly going forward, as with the infamous focaccia), and it ended up just fine--a perfectly lovely moist, soft, tender crumb with a sturdy, crunchy brown crust. This is still another bread that I wouldn't have made if I hadn't undertaken the 82-Loaf Vow. I've bought a pullman loaf from the store and a more boring loaf of bread I've never seen, but this buttery, fine-crumbed bread is not at all boring.

Butter Popovers

Sunday, April 9, 2006

Why have I never made popovers before? I always thought they were hard, but they're not at all. They behaved exactly as they were supposed to, and they were a delightful dinner roll for Sarah's birthday dinner, along with grilled salmon with wilted basil and mint sauce and asparagus salad with capers, olives, and goat cheese. A perfect spring dinner.
Actually, there is a perfectly logical reason for never having made popovers before--the lack of a popover pan. If you think a popover pan costs, say, $4.99, you are wrong. This pan is just one in a string of expenditures. I can see that baking is going to be a lot like gardening in the money department. You think you're going to plant a couple of packages of seeds, buy a few perennials, fill in with some petunias. And then you start digging out more grass, lusting after $85 tree peonies, scorning petunias. Before you know it, you're spending so much money you can never afford to retire.
I'm off to Seattle tomorrow, and then to Chicago for Easter weekend, so I'll have a long bread-making hiatus.

Mediterranean Matzoh

Sunday, April 9, 2006

I'm making a birthday dinner for Sarah. I told her I wanted to make popovers and I'd also make some matzoh to eat with hummus and cheese as an appetizer. Two non-yeast breads! Just three months ago, that would have been a relief. Now I love the long, slow process of yeast dough. There's the initial suspense--is this really going to work again, or will it just sit there this time? Then the miraculous change in texture, the feel of the dough in your hands, and the amazing smells.
But the matzoh was an interesting change of pace. Matzoh wasn't a part of my heritage, and the few times I've tasted it, I thought it was pretty boring. Kind of like lefse, which is also not part of my heritage, also beloved by many, and also boring.
This matzoh, with chopped fresh rosemary and plenty of olive oil, is oddly addictive. On first bite, it was a disappointment--despite the rosemary and olive oil, it seemed bland. Then I realized I wanted a second bite, and a third--just to test it, I said to myself. Now, as I'm sitting at my computer, matzoh-less, I have a strong urge to go back down to the kitchen and finish the rest of the big wafer. Fortunately, I'm able to restrain myself.

Potato Buttermilk Bread

April 5, 2006
This morning I took the some flaxseed bread out of the freezer for my morning toast, and realized it was the last piece of homemade bread in the house. I would either have to bake a loaf of bread today or have a piece of toast made from storebought bread tomorrow. An easy decision.
I just got the little bag of flour that I ordered from The Baker's Catalogue and still had some leftover buttermilk in the house, so I whipped up the biga for potato buttermilk bread. I left a note for Chelsea, the wonderful woman who cleans my house, asking her to put the biga in the refrigerator. Then I mixed up the dough when I got home from work, let it rise, shaped it, and went off to yoga, with instructions to Jim to preheat the oven at 7:30.
I tempted my friend Karen to come home with me after yoga with the promise of freshly baked bread (although she looked at me like I was a crazy woman when I dumped the ice cubes in the oven). Karen has a gluten intolerance, but was willing to eat the bread just to get a mention in the blog.
This bread, which took a village to make, is excellent. The potato/buttermilk combination makes it moist, tender, and very flavorful. The variation with dill sounds tempting--but I still have 62 more varieties of bread to bake, so there will be no variations until I've baked all 83.
My French slashing knife has not yet arrived, so I've again done an inferior job of slashing, Rose says the single-edged razor blade works best, but I won't resort to that until I try the French slasher.

Alsatian Onion Pizza

Sunday, April 2, 2004
Some of the breads have ended up being dinner because we ate enough of them so that it seemed pretty piggish to eat something else, but this was the first bread that was actually planned as dinner. I've made homemade pizza dough before, and it's always good, but I like thin-crusted pizza the best and I didn't think I could make it at home. This pizza wasn't the prettiest I've ever seen--the crust didn't stretch out to fill my big pizza pan, but it may have been the tastiest one I've made. All the pizza variations sounded good, but I chose the one with lots of caramelized onions, fresh thyme, gruyere cheese, and olives. The woman at the cheese counter at Lunds, who helped me pick out the gruyere, asked me what I was making with it. When I told her, she said it sounded perfect for this chilly, rainy day. She was right.

Walnut Fougasse

April 1, 2006
Fougasse is the French version of focaccia, and, if I'd realized that before I made it, I would have realized I should have rolled it out a little thinner. I think if you knew what a fougasse was supposed to be, you'd look at mine and think, "Hmm, there's something not quite right about that fougasse."
Fortunately, nobody at my house knew anything about what it was supposed to look like, and so they were willing to accept my version as the Platonic ideal of fougasses.
This was a fun dough to work with--very soft and, with all the additions of walnut oil, a little messy. I felt like I was in kindergarten again. Rose suggested pairing it with blue cheese and port. Luckily, I found a bottle of port hiding in the back of the liquor cabinet, and I'd already bought a wedge of cambozola.
Sarah had just found a new apartment before she came over to share in the bread tasting, and the combination of her new wonderful apartment and the fougasse, port, and cheese made her pretty happy.

Flaxseed Loaf

Sunday, March 26, 2006
This flaxseed bread is another one that I probably wouldn't have chosen to make if I hadn't decided to work my way through the whole book--it sounds--well, it sounds too healthy. My vegan friends are always sprinkling flaxseed over everything.
Olive bread--now that sounds sexy; flaxseed loaf just sounds virtuous. But, at least in the case of breads, virtue is its own reward. This is a very rewarding bread.
After deciding that I'd better not grind the flaxseed in Jim's coffee grinder, I decided I'd just use the food processor. I figured it wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be easy. But nothing happened when I pressed "on." Some little piece of plastic had broken off after the workout with the olive bread, and apparently that piece of plastic was the equivalent of a vital organ. So I got out the old mortar and pestle, and cracked the flaxseed. This tedious chore also made me a little biased toward the flaxseed. Everything just went swimmingly after that. It's one of the fastest breads I've made so far; no sponge or biga is necessary, and it needs no coaxing to rise. It's also delicious, which I didn't expect. It's hearty, all right, but flavorful and with a little bit of crunch. How can so many breads be the best bread I've ever eaten?
By the way, I think I finally got the knack of slashing the bread. I ordered a special French bread slashing knife because I was dissatisfied with my slashing technique. (See picture of Levy's Jewish rye bread--an otherwise wonderful bread with inadequate slashes. In breadmaking, as in life, timidity is rarely the best technique).
I also ordered a new food processor. After reading the reviews, I decided to try a KitchenAid KFP760. The white one was $229.99, and the black one was $179.99. Black is beautiful.

Olive Bread

Saturday, March 25, 2006
One of my favorite bakeries is Turtle Bread Bakery
http://www.turtlebread.com, and one of their best breads is olive bread. Never did I think that I would be able to bake a bread that equals theirs, but I think I did. I made my first biga for this bread (never mind what it is--if you bake, you probably already know, and if you don't, you won't care), but, although I was a little apprehensive about the biga, there was no need to be.


This bread is simplicity itself: other than the olives, it has only all-purpose flour, yeast, water, and salt. With LaCloche bread baker, the crust was as crispy as you can get in a regular oven, and the body of the bread is tender and delicious. It's embarrassing how close Jim and I came to finishing this bread in one sitting.

Southwestern Corn Spoon Bread

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

I was very excited to make my first bread using my brand new MyWeigh scale. At last I could have precision measurement! (Have I ever used the word "obsessive" in connection with this project?). I looked through the box for the directions, and finally found a piece of paper about the size of a business card. Directions: "Turn power on. Weigh." This is akin to The Bread Bible having a recipe that would say: "Mix ingredients. Knead. Let rise. Bake." I need more direction than that. So I'm not totally sure that I got precision measurements, especially since I'm not so sure I got the "Tare" function right. Next time, I'll measure first and then weigh. The scale will be my second opinion.
Even without total precision, the bread was great. Really, how could it go wrong--it's got butter, garlic, onion, roasted red pepper, jalapeno, cilantro, cheese, and corn, in addition to cream, cornmeal, flour, and eggs. It's baked in a souffle pan, and looks puffy and golden and delicious--good enough that it caused me to violate my "no seconds" rule. I also fed some to Sarah, who is a more effusively appreciative audience than Jim is, and I was able to send the rest of it home with her. Let her worry about the excess ten pounds!

Banana Feather Bread

Sunday, March 19, 2006

I had my doubts about this banana bread that isn't really a banana bread. It's a yeast bread with only one banana in it, so there's just a hint of banana. As Sarah said, "This bread is amazing! It's so light and the crust is so crisp....it makes me happy to eat it!" And the lemon curd that Rose suggests as an accompaniment is an inspired idea.
This is one reason that I'm happy that I decided to make every bread in the book. If I hadn't made myself that promise, I'm sure I would have passed this recipe by because why would I want a white bread with a little banana in it? But the reason I'd want it is that it's very, very good.
I got the Baker's Catalogue today, and I made a quick once-through, circling about $500 worth of baking items that I must have. I will narrow that down soon.

Levy's Real Jewish Rye Bread

Saturday, March 18, 2006

A few days ago, I was talking to my neighbor Fred about my bread-baking project. He was completely uninterested, until it occurred to him to ask me if I could bake a nice crusty caraway rye bread. I said I didn't know if Rose had caraway rye as one of her 83 breads, but if she did, I'd be baking it sometime this year. He said if I baked some he'd be my friend forever and would do anything I ever asked him to do. (Or something like that). Well, naturally, I went home and checked the index. I found this Jewish rye bread with two tablespoons of caraway seed. So I baked it for Fred. It was crusty and chewy and absolutely delicious. This was the first time I used my new La Cloche bread baker--it's a heavy round stone pan and dome; when you use it, you get a good crust without going the ice cube and water spray route. In fact, I've had a whole serious of successes lately, which is making me a little nervous. I remember the rosemary foccaccia, and I think it must be about time for another disaster. I'm also realizing that I have to pick up the pace. The first quarter of 2006 is almost over. If I'm to stay on track, I should have baked 21 different breads by the end of March. Counting today's caraway rye, I have only 14 different varieties. That means I have 13 days to bake 7 loaves. The pressure is intense. Coming at the same time as the NCAA tournament, it's almost more than a body can bear.

Royal Irish Soda Bread

March 17, 2006
It's St. Patrick's Day, so of course the bread du jour is Irish Soda Bread. This particular bread is Royal Irish. I don't know how it's different than peasant Irish bread, but I highly recommend it. First, it's fast. Second, it's easy. Third, it's tasty. Fourth, it's got whiskey-steeped raisins in it. (This is probably related to #3). You can serve it with Irish Whiskey butter if you want to, and you should.

Basic Hearth Bread

Sunday, March 12, 2006

March in Minnesota is a lot plainer and colder than March in St. John. But never mind, I can turn the oven on without sweltering, and I can get back in the rhythm of baking bread, whipping up a loaf of your basic free-form hearth bread. As you can see, the bread has a big hole in it. So it's not perfect! It's still a damn fine loaf of bread, perfect to nibble on while watching the first episode of the sixth season of The Sopranos.

Rich and Creamy Ginger Scones

March 4, 2006

We spent last week in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. It was gorgeous and sunny, but this is the cooking channel, not the travel channel.
I didn't want to miss a week of baking, but our cooking facilities were limited. I decided I could make a quick bread if I brought all the ingredients, so I brought everything, including candied ginger, for these scones. It was still kind of a trick to bake them because the oven in our cottage was tiny, and there were no baking sheets or mixing bowls. But they still turned out OK. In fact, it is pretty close to paradise to sit on a porch with a view of the Caribbean eating freshly baked scones. Our friendly pearly-eyed thrasher ate the scone crumbs, and then came back every other morning looking for more handouts.