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...

One of the mamas at our homeschool matzah bake today pointed out how many calories are in matzah compared to bread – I forget, but it’s something like 4 times as many – because matzah doesn’t have all the air and water that bread does so it’s just pure calories. Which got me thinking – it’s  astonishing how much flour today’s baking wasted… or, if you don’t want to think of it as waste, because everybody was learning and having fun, at least how INEFFICIENT matzah baking is. Each kid started with a cup of flour and 1/3 cup of water.  There were six kids, plus I had two cups of flour, which makes 8 cups of flour altogether.  If I’d made BREAD with 8 cups of flour (about 1080g), it would be enough for at least two big loaves.  In fact, I made two 680g loaves yesterday with 877g of flour, and I had dough to spare at the end of the evening.  Just one of those loaves would have fed everybody here for lunch quite handily. As it was, out of those eight cups, ...

This is from last week… Tuesday?  I wanted to have a plain meal, with tinned comfort-food tomato soup and awesome bread.  And I had a dream, not a literal dream, but an in-my-head-so-close-I-can-almost-taste-it dream of a savoury RYE bread full of ONIONS.  No poppy seeds, not a pletzl.  FULL of onions, like almost to bursting.  And not just an ordinary loaf – a ROUND loaf. Luckily, I had everything I needed just sitting around.  I modified this Sourdough Rye Bread recipe , using some sourdough but the full amount of yeast for the yeast version, and cutting the rising time by about ten hours.  While the dough was rising, I caramelized two regular supermarket yellow onions, using my no-fail, idiot-proof caramelization technique:  cast-iron skillet, little bit of oil, salt the onions, let them sweat until translucent, then just keep dumping water in and simmering on medium-low until the water was gone.  Repeat a few times, boiling water of...

As my sister the baker has pointed out often, she sometimes (probably not often) envies the flexiblity I have in deciding what to bake.  Too often, however, that “flexibility” translates to inconsistent, mediocre bread simply because, like anything, you need to rehearse a bread many, many times before you can make it reliably well. And the other day, she pointed out that the upside of her inflexible routine – baking the same breads over and over every single night – is that she has absolutely no experience refreshing and rejuvenating an old starter from the back of the fridge, which is where mine lives most of the time. If she wants a starter, she’s got one – heck, she’s got several.  Rye?  Probably a bucket of it somewhere in the back.  Spelt?  Whole wheat?  Maybe.  Definitely, there are active cultures just waiting around in buckets for someone to reach in and grab out a scoop.   Whereas if I want to bake sourdough, it can’t be a s...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  A whole week of bread adventures! Not all entirely successful….   Sourdough rye bread that I finally got around to baking in my little dutch oven.  Beautiful loaf!  Just not all that flavourful. The “bread” that isn’t bread :  Seitan for hot & sour soup that turned out so gloriously well last time… but this time globbed into chewy rubberish nightmare.  Flavourful, but the texture was horrid!    Ew! But finally, finally, to cap things off, a sourdough challah that was amazingly buoyant; this rose better, and with less commercial yeast, than any sourdough challah that I have made so far.  I had 324g of starter, more than I’ve used before, and it performed super-well, though I did add 1/2 tsp of yeast.  The rise times were comparable to non-sourdough loaves, despite the wintry-cool house.  On the downside, it tasted like there was no sugar in the loaf, and I’...

This is the Pumpkin-Oatmeal No-Knead Bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (which I still don’t own!). It’s a fun bread because it doesn’t taste like a “healthy” bread (being mostly white flour), but does contain token quantities of rye, whole-wheat and oat. It is a very easy bread to make, despite the sloppiness of the final dough. I baked these seven loaves, along with gingerbread and shortbread cookies, to fill up holiday parcel boxes whicih we mailed to members of our extended families. (actually, the 7th was for our supper: shhh…) I added cranberries and lightly toasted walnuts to make it into more of a “festive” bread. Anyway, ours was delicious with tomato soup this evening; soft and fresh. Almost too soft, I hope, because, this being Thursday, the others won’t arrive at their new homes until perhaps Monday. This particular loaf is one that would be delicious slightly stale and toasted, so I was hoping that even if the loaves aren’t completely fresh when ...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Time to dust off the sourdough! No excuses… life is as “back to normal” as it’s gonna get, and there’s no reason I can’t bake good bread this week! (plus, now that I used up the last of the spelt , I have some nice whole wheat flour my sister gave me last week… and some rye to use up and some oat flour and… OMG, Pesach is coming!!!)

  Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Breads I forgot to blog about! …Like Wednesday night’s excellent rye-licious loaf!  Exactly the same ryelicious formula as the first time, and it worked out beautifully.  I even used corn starch – properly, this time ! – to create a lovely crusty sheen on top of the loaf.  Yes, it’s peanut-shaped, the result of a mis-handled transfer from peel to stone… but I’m getting the hang of it, really I am.  And yes, there was a bit of a blowout on the side.  I don’t know why my slashing is so unsuccessful lately.  But inside, the bread was perfectly baked and absolutely luscious with Alton Brown’s beef stew.   Mmm… And then there were Thursday’s (vegan night) Scallion Pancakes .  Super, super easy, this is a boiled-water-and-bread-flour dough that mixes up quickly and it’s ready to roll after only about half an hour.  Yes, I truly am obsessed with flatbreads these days – I can’t w...

Searching for an eggless or almost-eggless challah, I set out to see what the most popular one was on Recipezaar.  And, well, gack!  Recipezaar is apparently now food.com .   And my login doesn’t work… well, it sort of does, but kind of doesn’t.  I assume they’ll work out all the kinks eventually. But there IS one recipe that, with 77 reviews – apparently ALL five stars – seems to be the outstanding favourite.  And the pictures are gorgeous.  It’s called Tante B’s Famous Challah . First of all, let me just say that the recipe is PERFECT.  I rarely find a bread recipe that doesn’t need some kind of tweak.  Not this one.  I did ignore some of the technique; I use instant yeast, so no proofing or premixing required.  Plus, I used the food processor, not a mixer, for the initial step. I also “metricized”/scaled the quantities – at an equivalence of 140g Canadian all-purpose flour per cup – but otherwise have not changed a thing....

I used the basic dough recipe from my new bread book , which, as far as I can tell, is exactly the same as the basic dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes, which is probably exactly the same as Jim Lahey’s basic dough.  Stirred it up last night in about five minutes in the bucket that had held the yummy rye dough . Then, before we left for the farmers’ market today, I divided it into three – it was pretty thick – and spread it out labouriously into three tinfoil pizza pans.  Ted is much better at this than I am; he has a ton more patience. I sprayed and covered the dough with plastic wrap simply because there are a few fruit flies around (not many, since the door is shut due to air conditioning), and as my baker sister will attest, there is nothing fruit flies love more than sourdough – or, in this case, bucket-raised hint-o-rye-sour Basic Artisan Dough. (ugh – this book really makes me hate the word “artisan” ) When we got home 2-3 hours later,  I pulled t...

Note to moron bakers:  it is nice, when baking rye bread, to glaze it with a cornstarch-water mixture.  It gives a nice, shiny, crisp crust. To the REAL hard-core morons among you:  boil the mixture first, or you’ll end up with “iced” buns bearing a mysterious tasteless starchy residue: Ick.  Drat – forgot.

While we were in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, I had a gift card and decided to bite the bullet and buy a no-knead bread book. They had Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which, of course, I’ve raved about many times here. But I know there were tons of typos (hee hee – I typed “tongs of typos,” just to show you that no-one’s immune!) in the first edition of that book. Plus, they’re all so expensive. I’m no fun when I’m looking at prices of things in stores . Finally, I compromised with this book, 200 Fast and Easy Artisan Breads , by Judith Fertig, which didn’t look like much fun, but has a lot of good, basic recipes. Today, I used it for the first time to make the Caraway Rye Dough. I left out the Caraway seeds because I really dislike them, but otherwise made it exactly as written. The formula is very simple – basically, wheat flour, rye flour, water, yeast, salt, molasses. I did cut down the molasses slightly because Elisheva doesn’t like molasses – down to just ove...

Thursday night:  pâte fermentée, mixed. Friday morning:  risen nicely!    Add roasted potato, flour, whole-wheat flour, water, more yeast, salt.  Also a bit of fresh rosemary (next time, I’d use more… the flavour was VERY faint): Knead well, until gluten is moderately developed (short of the shinier chewing-gum texture I’m learning is characteristic of highly-developed dough).  The finished dough (some crumbly finger-leftover-bits dropped on top):   Fully-formed loaves, set to rise on parchment and cornmeal: Fully-risen loaves, floured, then slashed (much neater than trying it without the flour!):   Crispy crust, hot and fresh… delicious!   Would I make this bread again?  It WAS yummy, with a faint tang from the preferment and a bit of a rye taste, mysteriously, from the rosemary. It was moist, but not extraordinarily so.  At Shabbos lunch, it may have tasted marginally fresher than a bread without all ...

Planning ahead:  a week in bread!   (left:  my own ryelicious no-knead, right:  basic no-knead master dough) Up close with the rye:  looks dry, dry, dry, but it will mellow and soften as it sits…)

Needed bread in a hurry for last night’s supper, and luckily I had some dough left over from the breadsticks I made on Sunday evening! So I quickly whipped it up into a boule shape, let it rise for an hour or so, and baked it at 460 with as much steam as I could muster.  It started to get very dark (even with just a couple of tbsp of oil!), so I tented it with tinfoil. What was incredible to me was the amazingly cracked crust on this bread!  I have been trying for months to achieve this effect, and here it happened almost entirely by lucky accident.  See?  Lovely!   The bread was fairly dense, not artisany at all.  Almost the texture of a deli rye bread… because it was so highly kneaded, I guess.  But it was VERY well-risen, completely cooked through, and absolutely delicious.   A neighbour stopped in and we invited her to stay for supper. Neighbour:  “Why are you taking pictures of the bread?”  (bit of a pause while nei...

Well, I made this one last night with the leftover molasses-y rye dough. I think I will definitely NOT make that pumpernickel again. The molasses taste is too pervasive; it is the strongest note in anything made with it, and it throws the rye flavour off completely. Not a disaster, but not a Happy Bread Night either… on to bigger and better things!!!