When you love baking as much as I do, you become an evangelist. After we moved to Israel, and our whole lives were topsy-turvy, the only time I felt like things were at all “normal” were when I was making bread.  Those breads were rudimentary at first – hey, we didn’t even have an oven.  But they kept me grounded.  I was so ecstatic when all our possessions arrived, including my gorgeous cast iron loaf pans, plastic dough bucket , and other beloved bakeware, accumulated over the years.  It was time to get my hands floury and really start baking again. I love how centered and grounded baking makes me feel, but can’t help wondering why other people seem to think it’s hard, or complicated, or just not something they have space for in their lives.  We all have time and space to make bread.  Sure, it takes a while, but very little of that is active prep time.  A bread that takes 36 hours from start to finish may have less than ten minutes of actual st...

Okay, I will spoil the surprise with a great shot of the finished challahs and the message that there is NO such thing (short of cake batter) as a too-wet dough.  Are you cut out for no-knead challah baking?  Maybe!  Read on to find out. When people find out I bake challah, their first question is usually, “do you use a mixer?”  The assumption here is that making bread is onerous; so onerous that we need heavy-duty motorized tools to accomplish it.  Um, hello?  For thousands of years people baked bread without mixers.  Okay, they also did laundry without washing machines… so maybe that isn’t as good a point as I thought. But here’s my point:  making bread dough is easy, and you don’t need a mixer.  Heck, you don’t even need to mix the dough at all.  And if you play your cards right, your bread will be even moister and more delicious for the experience. Aside:  You do, however, need one important tool:  a dough scra...

   I continue to be intrigued by the concept of pumpkin challah, and I recently made a whole LOT of pumpkin mush .  I posted about that on my regular blog, but saved these luscious pumpkin-challah pics for this blog, as a special treat for readers here. First of all, a fun discovery – you don’t need a shmancy recipe to get pumpkin challah!  I actually just used the basic Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day no-knead challah recipe , which I didn’t even love all that much.  The pumpkin kicked it into far loftier spheres. Rather perfectly, this recipe called for 1 3/4 cups of water… for which I substituted about 1 3/4 – 2 cups of homemade frozen pumpkin purée , thawed.  That’s it – that’s the trick.  No water at ALL.  If you’re using canned pumpkin, it might not work, because it’s very dry, but homemade frozen purée is a bit waterier and this worked out just fine.  If you find that you can’t stir the mixture with your dough whisk, add a bit of ...

Facebook status update:  “No-knead dough meets all-day crock-pot caramelized onions = easy happy pletzel eatin'!” Made the dough last night – basic no-knead recipe, with 1/3 spelt, mostly because I was out of white flour, but also to feel just a teeny bit virtuous despite our second “starch” supper in a row (last night was homemade pasta with home-grown tomato sauce; so sue me). Spent the morning at Humber Arboretum, but I came home to… this: Crock-pot caramelized onions !  Actually, I hadn’t meant to leave the crock-pot on the whole time we were out, because I started them at 1 a.m., and as far as I was concerned, they were ready by breakfast time.  But I don’t think they suffered much for the overcooking, except for looking even more disgusting than they had before. Anyway, they look GREAT spread out on a crust… (This dough was so soft I didn’t bother with a rolling pin.  Just grabbed 1-lb for the cookie sheet and approx 2/3 of a lb (or 3/4?) for the sma...

This is another stab at blender challah , but it turned out super-wet, for some reason, skirting that fine line between soft, wet dough and extra-firm cake batter. Here’s the formula – super-simple and quick, once you’ve weighed everything out: Mix in blender:    401    g flour 711    g water 189    g sugar 156    g oil 40    g salt 21    g yeast 3     large eggs Pour over in bowl: 802    g flour Stir with dough whisk, wooden spoon, or really anything.  Let rise, etc. I definitely should have done the Stretch and Fold move on this dough after it had risen, but I was in a hurry and figured I can do anything with even the wettest of doughs.  Even with stretching and folding, I still wouldn’t have been able to let the kids help out with this dough, which they were very disappointed by.  I promi...

Always a milestone after Pesach!  This was just my basic no-knead “Ryelicious” Loaf .  It was super-easy, but left me thinking, “hmm… not enough rye!”  Maybe it’s because my rye flour is a little old, but it just left the impression of a slightly-more-flavourful white bread.  Delicious nevertheless! I kashered my new cast-iron loaf pans in the self-cleaning oven cycle so I could use them for Pesach, and I have spent the last two weeks worrying about how long it will take to get them back in working order again.  They worked SO perfectly from the get-go: loaves released like a charm – amazing.  Just tip them upside-down and they pop right out.  I have used cheap loaf pans for so long, I was amazed that I didn’t have to use parchment and STILL didn’t have to dig the bread out when it was finished.  Even my sister seemed a bit jealous – in a commercial setting, it simply isn’t viable to be tossing around pans that weigh this much even when they...

  Besides a bunch of Auntie Sally’s challah which I whipped up before Rosh Hashanah and still had in the freezer, this is the main “overnight sponge challah” I’ve been playing around with this yom tov season. Because the base recipe doesn’t make very much, I thought I’d quadruple it for the first days of Sukkos, when we were expecting lots of guests.  With the help of my trusty sourdough spreadsheet (which works even with NO sourdough, just by filling in “0g” of starter), here’s what I came up with for the sponge: 1620 g flour (mix of ap and bread) 1960 g water 200 g sugar 220 g oil 4 tbsp salt 4 tsp yeast Here’s the wet stuff going into the bucket first.  With its happy new batteries, my scale held it all,  even though officially it only holds up to 2kg.  I was so happy I’d finally gotten around to marking the bucket weight on the side, just ...

Mmm…. my baker sister was coming up today to babysit the kids and she said (half-joking?) that if I had some sourdough awake, she could make something with it. Well, I didn’t, but I happened to have a bucket of no-knead dough left over from last Thursday… and I came home to these yummy handmade fougasse PLUS a pan of apple-and-cinnamon buns!   Mmm… now THERE’s a talent! And now you can even Follow her on TWITTER !!!