Make It A Double

   For this weekend's flavor, I decided on rye. My parents have been really supportive in my bread baking efforts and if I ever get a business off the ground, I know they will be my biggest fans, second only to my husband, Ian. So, I figured they should be receiving the benefits of my learning process by getting their very own loaf once in a while. Because you can always double the recipe (as long as you have space for all that dough), I made enough for 2 loaves. Beginning Saturday morning with the starter or "sponge", I mixed the bread and rye flours, yeast, honey, sugar and water. You can let the sponge sit for just an hour or two, or ferment in the fridge for several hours for a more flavorful taste. Obviously I chose the more tasty option and let it sit in the fridge while I went to Crystal River with my parents to visit my husband at his boat show.
   My mom and I spent the afternoon nurturing my dad's new notion to buy a boat. Airboat, flatts boat, pontoon....oh the options. I think he's leaning toward a pontoon because you can do so much with them - fishing, water sports, cruising, etc. I'm all for it. And if he buys it from Ian, all the better :) We ate lunch at Cracker's on the river and then took a stroll down by the boat dock to hypotheticaly see where dad could tie up a boat, if he had a boat, hypothetically of course. The weather was beautiful - a perfect day to be out and about.
   Back at the house, my sponge had grown to fill the mixing bowl to the rim. I stirred it down and added the dry flour mixture. When you allow this to ferment, the sponge will bubble through the flour. After a few hours, I started mixing it all together using my Kitchen Aid mixer and bread hook. However, it was a double recipe and the dough just got so big I had to take it out of the bowl and knead it by hand, which was kind of fun! The recipe called for the final rise to only be an hour or two. But, I didn't want to bake it until Monday morning so it would be hot and fresh for my coworkers. I let it rise overnight and when I woke up at 5:30 a.m. to prepare it for the oven, it had tripled in size and spilled over the sides of the bowl. Woopsies! Kneading it for about 5 minutes reduced it in size just enough to form 2 loaves that fit on my baking stone. I sprinkled cornmeal on the stone and placed it in the very hot, 450 degree oven. Again for really firm crust, I used icecubes in a pan below the baking stone to get the steam effect.
   I jumped in the shower and started getting ready for work while my tiny masterpieces baked. At 6:50 a.m. they were golden with perfection. I slipped one loaf into a plastic bag for an early morning delivery to my parents. I placed the other loaf in my baked goods carrier with a half stick of butter to cart off to the office. Both my parents and the folks at work were big fans of this loaf. I got e-mail responses like "DELICIOUS!" and even requests for cheese bread and corn muffins. I guess we are on the right track if I'm getting orders in already!

Not My Favorite

   For Valentine's Day, my husband spoiled me. We agreed to stay at home for the evening and make a really nice prime rib dinner together. But much to my surprise, he came home from work with gifts. Yes, plural. GIFTS. #1 - The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. I had seen it in Barnes and Nobles and fell in love with it. It has drawings and pictures, how-to guides, "for best results" tips and tricks. And the great thing about this book is it's for by hand bread makers and there's not a lot of bread machine recipes. I refuse to use a bread machine. The best part, my husband wrote this beautiful message in the cover about following my dreams and believing in me. I cried. #2 - A bread/pizza stone with wire handles for delicious authentic bread making. #3 - A wooden oven paddle for retrieving my breads from the oven without burning myself. He got me all the essentials to get started on my bread journey. So of course I put them to use right away.
   I thumbed through the Bread Bible sticking post-its on all the recipes that looked good. Before I knew it I had a post-it on every other page. So I think I'll just start at the beginning and bake my way through the whole thing! The first recipe I decided on was for potato bread. The starter required yeast, all-purpose flour, and water from boiling a potato. I got all that together and let it ferment. The recipe said to peel and mash the potato for the next step. But the potato was not soft enough to mash. I tried boiling it again and found myself a little frustrated when I saw a notation: You may substitute the mashed potato for 3/4 cup potato flour and 1 cup warm water. I had found potato flour at the Mother Earth whole food store last week so I said screw it and threw the potato away. The starter, or "sponge" as the book calls it, slept in the fridge overnight. The next afternoon I added the flour mixture, let my Kitchen Aid mixer do the kneading work for the required 10 minutes, plopped the dough in an oiled loaf pan and let it rise. I'm not sure why, but the recipe required I preheat the oven to 475 an HOUR before baking. That seems like a lot of wasted electricity, but I did it anyway since it was my first time using this recipe. It also said to place a baking sheet on the bottom of the oven during preheating and then toss a 1/2 cup of icecubes on it when I put the bread in. Well this made my pan shrivel and creak and it RUINED it! I was pissed. I guess the ice allows for a steaming process that makes the crust extra crispy, but I'm not happy about my pan. When the timer went off, I took is out of the oven and glazed it with butter. The crust was firm and crispy, the inside was perfectly fluffy and soft. Overall, the bread was good, but I'm not a fan of the recipe and preparation process. I'll have to play with it and come up with another solution for creating steam in the oven.

Music and food

   One of my guilty pleasures is doing my grocery shopping with my iPod. I'm a coupon clipper and list maker. So when I go grocery shopping, it takes me quite a while to go through the whole store and get everything I need and save the most money I can. Listening to music during this process helps me concentrate and stay sane. Many people don't appreciate it - I get a lot of menacing looks. But I don't care. I really enjoy it! I spent almost two hours in Wal-Mart getting groceries and toiletries. After check out, I had saved $30.50 in coupons alone, not counting all the savings from items on discount! Then I hit Sam's Club to buy meat and my bread ingredients in bulk. I was kind of disappointed because they only carry white bread flour, no wheat bread flour, oats, seeds, nothing else. I guess I'll have to find a whole food store for those items.
   At home, I took out my starter from the sourdough bread a few weeks ago when I made my first loaf. I prepared it to make wheat sourdough by substituting 2 cups of wheat flour for the white. While that was rising, I flipped through several cookbooks looking for tasty things to make for Sunday dinner. We settled on apricot glazed pork chops, sweet potatoes and grilled asparagus. Then I came across a recipe for cheesy spoon bread. I had never heard of it, but it only took an hour to make so I decided to add it to the menu.
   You need: yellow corn meal, milk, cheddar cheese, eggs, salt, baking powder and sugar. I thought it strange that the recipe didn't call for any flour. How can you make bread without flour? It also called to seperate the eggs and beat the egg whites until they peak. What an odd thing to do for a bread. Well, this was some trickery "bread". When it came out of the oven it looked perfect and plump, almost like cornbread. But the constistancy was kind of like cheese grits and it was really "airy" or fluffy like a sufle. It was very tasty! However, I would consider it an imposter bread. It seemed to me, more like a breakfast item. Note taken.
  Now, my wheat sourdough. It didn't rise as much as the first loaf I made with this starter, but by midnight I was ready for bed and divvied up the dough into three loaf pans to let it rise again overnight. I timed the rising process so I could bake it Monday morning and take it to work. After all, I don't need all this bread laying around the house. My coworkers are great for providing feedback and suggestions, albeit sometimes unsolicited and from people who know nothing about cooking, I do appreciate it while I'm learning. This loaf was a little sweeter than the original sourdough, so I'm going to assume that's because the yeast and sugar had longer to ferment? The wheat flavor was delicious. I actually liked the wheat sourdough, better than the original. Success!

Friends in town

Baking is personal. You usually don't do it for yourself - you do it for others. Last night I had a few girlfriends pass through town and stay the night with me. My husband offered to make dinner - I love when he does that because he's so great at it. So, I decided to focus my efforts on making fresh bread for my guests. I needed a recipe that didn't take 3 days and 3 nights of rising and kneeding and rising and so on. As soon as I got home from work I buried myself in my bread book in search of a good loaf to make. Focaccia. Three hours tops and I had all the ingredients - yeast, flour, salt, olive oil, garlic and sage - perfect! I got it started and let it rise while I put fresh sheets on the bed in the guest room. Bread needs a warm place to rise, but it has been really chilly here the last few nights and there's not a warm place in my house (I never turn on the heat). I needed to do laundry anyway, so I started a load and placed the glass bowl of dough on top of the dryer and covered it with a towel. Hey, best thing I could think of! Focaccia is a fun bread to make because when it's done, it looks really cool. During the preparation process, you must poke holes in the dough with your fingertips making several dimples. I basted it with the olive oil, sage and fresh garlic mixture and put it in the oven on the bottom rack @ 400 for 25 minutes.
   While my masterpiece was in the oven, the girls arrived and we opened a bottle of wine. I told them about my new obsession with bread and my ideas for future experimentation. By oven light I could see the loaves were probably done just a few minutes before my timer went off. I pulled them out of the oven and popped them out of their little round pans so they could cool on a rack. Which is really a silly idea if you think about it, because isn't the whole point of baking bread to eat it hot, right out of the oven? So, we did. It was delicious. The crust was nice and firm with a soft center, the herb flavor was not overwhelming. Another success!

First Loaf

   I have recently become interested in baking bread. Practically overnight I became obsessed. Previously, I have only made a few box recipes of pumpkin and banana bread. So, I am embarking on this journey, which could take years to satisfy, of making any and all kinds of bread, using all the resources I can possibly get my hands on for recipe ideas. My starting point - a sourdough recipe given to me by a coworker for a cookbook I organized as a fundraiser a few years ago. I began last Thursday with the yeast starter just to be able to put the dough in the oven on Sunday. Good grief! The sweet yeasty aroma filled the kitchen and soon the whole house, fueling my new obsession to create dozens, hundreds of loaves of chewy, flaky, crusty goodness. It came out perfectly, with a somewhat dense center as sourdough should, a hint of sweetness and a slightly chewy crust. I took it to work and asked my colleagues for feedback. Evidently, it tasted just like someone's grandmother's bread from her childhood. I considered it a success.
   My new year's resolution to lose 25 pounds is completely shot with this new ambition but I'll just have to work around it. Because I'm doing it. I found myself in a frenzy to get to the nearest bookstore to buy my first bread cookbook. And there in the bargain section of Barnes and Nobles, I sawThe Best-Ever Book of Bread by Christine Ingram and Jennie Hapter. The binding was coming apart but I didn't care - I needed to go home with some kind of direction, some recipes, some help! I asked the cashier for an extra discount due to the condition of the book, paid $8.36 and took it home. It's great so far because it starts with the history and variety of the many kinds of bread from various countries.
   With all three loaves of my first experiment nearly gone, I will have to thumb through the new book and find a beginner's recipe. Before I do so, I'll have to head to the store to buy ingredients to stock the pantry with bread baking essentials - white and wheat bread flours, grains, seeds, eggs, milk, yeast and more yeast. I don't want to find myself stranded in the middle of a recipe!