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, ...

Not pita exactly, since this is basically the same way I make any flatbread.  Roll it, pat it, and toast it in my wonderful cast-iron skillet.   Dry – no grease or anything on the pan beyond the olive oil we apply to store the pan. I used the basic “50% spelt” recipe from Artisan Pizza & Flatbreads in Five Minutes a Day .  Not sure I love the cookbook, since there seem to be many many sauces and dips and not so many actual bread formulas, but I have it out from the library for a while longer, so I will keep exploring. The reason I wanted spelt – other than the fact that my mother and sister picked me up a big bag of nice, fresh spelt a couple of weeks ago – is that I was preparing these “pita” for an “ Egyptian feast ” to tie in with our ancient history studies.  Spelt may not be Emmer and Einkorn , but it’s a bit more authentic, and it adds whole grain without weighing down the taste and texture of the bread.  As far as I’m concerned, the words ...

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!  “No knead” bread broke my mixer! Forgot to blog about this one during the week.  I have some wonderful, local Red Fife whole-wheat flour my sister gave me that I wanted to try out, so I decided to do the No-Knead 100% Whole-Wheat Bread from King Arthur Flour again.  I made it once before with spelt and it wasn’t fantastic.  This time around, it made a VERY dense loaf, but one that was eminently sliceable and eatable. This is an unusual no-knead bread because you use a hand mixer (or stand mixer) to mix the ingredients.  The finished “dough” is somewhere between a thick cake batter and a thin bread dough.  Definitely not kneadable.  And as the six words point out, really too heavy for what my cheapo hand mixer could take on, apparently.  (Luckily, I had a spare in the basement, albeit a tippy one I hate.) Once mixed, you let the dough rise in the loaf pan (mine’s a bit big, which the King ...

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!!!)

It’s my disasters that keep me humble… that’s for sure.  (Speaking of disasters, have you entered my Kitchen Disaster contest yet???) Then again, I bet you don’t get so many disasters with all those other marginally competent bread blogs out there!!!  I bet that’s how I earned my fifteen loyal followers in the first place, by being human, just like them! So.  If you recall, I decided to make a delicious sprouty, wheaty bread for our supper tonight!  I started sprouting the wheat berries on Monday, and mixed up a couple of components of this bread last night . Here’s what I started with when I picked it up this afternoon:  “soaker”, preferment, exactly 11g of sprouted wheat berries.       Ground the wheat berries to “kneadable” consistency.   Holds together when smooshed into a ball in your hand:   Tossed in the rest of the flour, touch of honey, touch more yeast and kneaded the whole mess together.  Should hav...

I’ve been sprouting these wheat berries for a few days now… they’re ready.  Now what should I do with them??  I have some rye flour I’ve been wanting to play around with… any thoughts? (the sprouts are in the fridge now, awaiting their fate – they should keep for a bit while I decide!) Postscript:  I’ve found the solution (I hope!):  Sprouty Spelty Wheat Bread. Original recipe, speltless, is here , apparently adapted from Peter Reinhardt’s Whole Grain Breads , which I haven’t read.    (from Kath Eats , a blog where I borrowed another recipe a while back, for making Ciabatta and Focaccia from the same batch of dough. (I also just discovered that the lovely Kath and her husband Matt – who bread-blogs at her food blog – are opening their own Great Harvest Bread franchise this fall!) I have no whole wheat flour in the house, but some leftover whole-grain spelt, a gift from my sister a long, LONG time ago.  I decided to use it up with thi...

Eek!  I’ve gotten sucked in by a Hebrew-Christian (aka Messianic) website!  I was originally searching for Shabbat Party songs and found online copies of an old magazine (no links, sorry!)… and also this fascinating challah recipe, loosely extracted from a PDF.  Haven’t found anything quite like it online. Quick Knead Challah Sabbath Bread Makes two 2-lb. loaves or four 1-lb. loaves Thursday afternoon or evening: In a mixing bowl, combine: 3 cups warm water 1 cup honey 1 cup olive oil 5 t salt Whisk together and add enough whole wheat flour to form a soft dough, scraping the bowl and folding the dough over with a large spoon to blend in all the flour.  Cover and leave to sit at room temperature overnight. STILL Thursday afternoon or evening: Next, put 5 eggs into a small bowl.  Whisk together with enough whole wheat flour to make a soft dough.  Cover and refrigerate overnight. Late Friday morning:  (frankly, t...

Since this blog appears to have a few readers now., and by “a few” I mean the traditional usage of “THREE,” I’m just curious… This week’s non-challah Shabbos is perhaps indicative of my general “challah ennui” (is it a googlewhack? no: 4340 hits), and I want a new recipe – a new challenge, maybe. What’s your favourite challah? Does anyone want to bail us out by sending a challah recipe you absolutely LOVE? What I like, in general: challah must be sweet. It must not have too much whole wheat, but some, or some spelt, is just fine. I do not love EGGS in challah, but most of our challahs lately have been made with eggs. I am particularly looking for “next-day” challahs… ie, a loaf you are not afraid to bite into, perhaps slightly warmed on the blech but nevertheless officially “day-old” bread. We are torn on the “density “ issue. Elisheva adores a thick, heavy loaf. I tend to prefer a bit on the fluffier side. I guess that means we’re open-minded. If you’ve read thi...

Sadly, not a rave. I don’t love dried fruit and I guess was hoping this homemade granola and the accompanying granola bread (both from Artisan Bread in Five, which went back to the library yesterday) (an “adapted” version of the recipe is here if you’re interested; it looks the same as the original to me) for which it was made would somehow transcend all of that and make me love it. It didn’t. (if you followed the sentiment despite all the parentheses) (don’t bother). The bread was good. So good I gave half a loaf, hot n’ fresh, to my sister. But Ted talked me into using dried cherries in the granola; they were too big and weird. And I guess I’m just not a “bits and pieces” gal. However, t he granola did get rave reviews. (the online recipe is slightly different; it includes sunflower seeds, which the book’s recipe does not) Naomi couldn’t get over the fact that I actually made cereal! And after years of aspiring to “crunchy-granola” status, I can finally remove the ...

So I made two batches this week for Sukkos:  one batch of no-knead Master Dough (big bowl on left; I subbed oil for the butter) and one (small bag on right) of my regular no-fail challah, with 1 cup of spelt flour. The no-knead dough was wet, wet, WET, but behaved well enough once I floured it up.  Meanwhile, my regular dough was SO dry and hard and tight.  Look at the wrinkles in the middle of the coiled challah!     The no-knead challahs were definitely less attractive.  The moisture makes them kind of loose and sticky-looking:   Here are all 5 lined up ready to go in the fridge to rise overnight (fun, fun, trying to find space the night before Yom Tov).   And here they are, all streuseled and baked up!  None of them are my most beautiful challah ever.  Next week, we’re back to braids.   The one at the front right is my regular recipe.  The others are the no-knead.  Not much difference in appearance wh...

Forgot to take pictures before cutting into this challah. This was the one I made for the kids’ challah-making last Wednesday, but it was also a test run of the recipe I used for the entire Yom Tov. The main difference from what I usually do is that instead of 5 cups of wheat flour, I used one cup of stone-ground spelt (courtesy of my baker sister, who gave me a free sample!), plus two cups of bread flour and two cups of all-purpose. It was delicious, and I’m constantly amazed at how the spelt makes the bread so soft and lovely. Not at all like whole wheat, which I don’t usually enjoy in a Shabbos or Yom Tov bread. The spelt does give a bit of an unfortunate grey cast to the bread (not as much as barley, though!). I like to think that when people see it coming, they kind of brace themselves for “healthy”-tasting bread, and are then pleasantly surprised when it is so soft and cakey! In this picture it looks a bit too damp and soggy in the middle, but that’s probably because I cu...