The day before I got back on an airplane, I jumped on the computer and discovered that the Bread Baking Babes, an intrepid group of bread aficionados, had been at it again.  This time, the bread of the month was an incredibly fascinating recipe for Russian Black Bread.

Why “fascinating?”  Because the recipe called for sourdough starter, plus yeast, plus coffee grounds, plus crusty old stale bread pieces.  In fact, one of the unfortunate nicknames for this baked good is . . . “dump bread.”  How could I pass up an opportunity to make such a bread, especially when this month’s Bread Baking Day theme is to bake a bread you’ve never made before?  So, I got to work.

Luckily, I had been feeding my sourdough starter, Son of Boris, so he was ready for action.  Boris Senior died earlier this year, when I discovered that he was consorting with something pink in his sourdough container.  So down the drain he went.  Both of them were derived from a sourdough starter recipe by their godmother, Mary over at The Sour Dough.

So, this recipe starts with a sourdough mixture, and a soaker which is supposed to sit for 12-14 hours.  My sourdough sat for 19 hours, and when I took a look at it it was bubbling away, a welcome site to anyone who bakes with sourdough.

The soaker was very interesting, indeed.  You see, in addition to fennel and caraway seeds (which I have on hand and actually was able to find!), I had to toast up some stale bread from my freezer, and grind up some coffee.  As luck would have it, all I could find was Mystic Monks Rum Pecan coffee.  Now, I am NOT a fan of flavored coffees, with a couple of exceptions, and this is one of them.  So, I thought, what the heck!  And in went the Rum Pecan coffee grounds.  Yes, never let it be said that we home bread bakers don’t like to live on the EDGE!

Flours used:  King Arthur Medium Rye, Arrowhead Mills Rye, and Golden Temple Whole Wheat Durum Attah Flour.  To make up for not be able to find the high gluten flour (I know it’s in my freezer, aka “the Time Machine,” somewhere), I added 2.5 Tablespoons of vital wheat gluten (Hodgson’s Mill), following Karen’s lead over at Bake My Day.

The dough came together very easily, and I kneaded it in a stand mixer for about 12-15 minutes at low speed.  It was pretty sticky when I took it out to rise, but I did not add more flour because I’ve found that the stickiness tends to diminish after the first rise with most breads, and I was right.  I decided to shape the loaves into batards, mostly because I stink at it and need the practice.

After slashing the tops, I popped them onto the baking stone.  To my surprise, the loaves baked up beautifully, and did not explode or develop odd growths due to my having shaped them incorrectly.  The loaf was chewy but not too dense.  And the flavor was amazing – deep, complex, with hints of sweetness (from the molasses), sourness, and . . . coffee.  Yes, the coffee flavor, not the rum pecan flavor, came through in different bites.  In fact, this is the most complex rye bread I’ve ever made in terms of flavor, so if you love rye bread, as I do, you will probably enjoy this one!

Thanks to the Babes for inviting all of us to join them.  Gorel at Grain Doe will have a list of everyone who participated, as well as the recipe.  And please check out imafoodblog for Sara’s Bread Baking Day roundup after September 1.  And every week, Susan has a YeastSpotting roundup, which is always fun and inspirational.

I love it when I can do several things at once.  For example, blog about a chocolate cherry bread for Bread Baking Day (BBB), and that same bread uses ingredients that I had on hand (for Frugal Fridays), and closes out my week of chocolate!  For BBB #22, our challenge is Sweet Breads hosted by Hefe und mehr.

I tried chocolate bread for the first time about three years ago, and I wasn’t too impressed.  A year or so later, I gave it another shot and bought a loaf from Wegman’s.  Now, that bread was really good – it tasted of chocolate with a faint sweetness in the background.  They produce it seasonally, I think from December through February, and I decided to make some one day so that I could have a good chocolate bread whenever I wanted it.

Enter Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë Francois.  I’ve had the book sitting on my bookshelf for over a year, and it is full of post-its marking the breads I would like to try.  But it was not until recently that I finally made something out of this wonderful book.  Of course, I chose the Chocolate Bread for Chocolate Week.

I had never made a no-knead bread before, so I had to mightily resist the Urge to Knead.  You see, I like kneading, but I like learning about different breads and techniques even more, so when I caught myself stirring a bit too much with a wooden spoon I stopped immediately, even though there were still a few streaks of white through the dough.  You see, this dough as a LOT of chocolate – 9 ounces of chocolate and a full cup of cocoa, so it’s pretty dark, and unincorporated flour really stands out.

My thoughts on the bread: the chocolate flavor really comes through, so pick one that you like.  If you prefer milk chocolate, this bread may not be for you – it has the true intensity of bittersweet chocolate.   I think using chocolate chips instead of the 5 ounces of chunks would work out fine.  The bread was a tad too salty for me, so next time I might use just one tablespoon of salt.  The cherries that I added were a nice bright counterpoint.  As for the texture, the the loaf was tender and very rich – I could eat only small slices.  The crust was not chewy at all.  I liked the bread with butter, and Nutella was fabulous on it.  The original recipe says to bake it for about 35 minutes, but mine took 65 minutes to reach an internal temperature of 190 F. The loaf is on the repeat list, and I look forward to playing with the recipe a bit more.

I was really amazed at how quickly and easily this bread came together, and I’m looking forward to trying more recipes out of the book.  And be sure to check out Susan’s weekly YeastSpotting roundup every Friday – it’s a great source of inspiration and instruction for me and a lot of other bakers.  Next Friday, Nick of imafoodblog will be hosting for Susan, so be sure to check out his blog.

continue reading "Chocolate Cherry Bread – Day 5 of Chocolate Week, and Bread Baking Day!"

This month’s Bread Baking Day (BBD) theme is multigrain bread, picked by Rachel of Tangerine’s Kitchen.  BBD is the creation of Zorra (1x umrühren bitte), and a brilliant idea it was!

It had been a while since I participated in BBD, and I really wanted to get back into it.  My life has been so busy, that when I sat down a few weeks ago and tried to figure out when I had last baked bread, I was horrified to realize that it had been about four months.  FOUR MONTHS!  I had to remedy this, and soon.  So I started baking bread again, and discovered that I had missed it a lot.  I think of all the baking I do, bread baking is my favorite, and life is too short not to do something you love, particularly when it makes everyone happy.

For inspiration, I turned to the wonderful King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking: Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains.  I had a lot of options, and one of the great things about baking bread is that you can end up with a large assortment of flour.  I think I have about 18 20 different flours on hand, but I am a lightweight in that department:  Mary has about 27.   Thanks to Mary and the Bread Baking Babes, I have added teff flour to my inventory, but that’s another story.  So, pretty much whatever I chose to make, I would have an opportunity to use up what I had on hand, the theme of Frugal Fridays.

As I was perusing the pages of the cookbook, Master Chow informed me that we were out of bread, and by golly, he wanted a turkey sandwich that day.  I quickly settled on Toasted Sesame and Sunflower Loaf.  The bread contains wheat and rye flours, as well as cornmeal, and oats (I forgot to add the oats.)  It also calls for sunflower and sesame seeds, which we love.  Bingo!  I had my bread! I tweaked things a bit, using atta flour, leaving the seeds raw, and changing some of the oils, but that’s about it.

This bread was remarkably easy to make, and yielded a sturdy but tender loaf that is great toasted, and works well in sandwiches.  When I say easy, I mean easy – you throw everything in a bowl, mix it together, and a couple short rises later – voilá!  Bread!  That apparently goes really well with turkey!  I, myself, made a soy bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich with it, and it was exceedingly good.

And this week, Nancy of The Dogs Eat the Crumbs joins me with a tasty looking entry:  Smashed Fingerling Potatoes with Peas and Onions.  Nancy and her freezers were having issues, space issues that is, so she’s taking the bull by the horns and using up what she has on hand. I’m also sending this along to Susan’s blog for her weekly roundup of yeasty things, Yeastspotting.  If you want to join me for Frugal Fridays, here is the info that you need.  Recipe after the jump.

continue reading "A Multigrain Bread for Bread Baking Day #20 and Frugal Fridays"

In the movie “Top Gun,” there’s that famous line:  “I feel the need, the need for speed!”  Well, in my case, I’ve been feeling the need for yeast. So, this month’s Bread Baking Day provided just the excuse I needed to whip something up, particularly since the topic is bread with cheese.  Yum.  Specifically, Bread with Cheese hosted by High on the Hog.

I turned to a recipe that I had bookmarked over at King Arthur Flour’s baking blog, and substituted parmigiano reggiano for the Asiago cheese called for in the recipe.  I think Asiago is an Italian cheese, so I don’t have a clue why this is called “French” Asiago Bubble bread.

I tweaked the recipe a bit since I don’t have a bread machine, and in a remarkably short period of time, had these warm, flavorful little cheesy nuggets sitting on my counter.  I should say, on the counter in my smoke-filled kitchen.  Why?  I forgot to put the pan on a baking sheet, and as the bread rose in the oven, the olive oil overflowed and burned, leaving me gasping and gagging for fresh air.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a picture to the right, proving yet again that I make the mistakes so you don’t have to!

One other thing that I did was to mince the garlic instead of crushing it – I thought that would reduce the chance of burned garlic, and I was right.  Use a strong cheese for this – your wimpy parmesan in a green can will not provide the flavor punch needed to have a tasty bread.  The end result is a flavorful, doughy bread with a slightly crisp crust. This is not a fluffy bread, but it’s not really dense, either.

This is my submission for Bread Baking Day.  I also recommend that every Friday (and heck, every other day, too) you wander over to Susan’s wonderful blog to check out her weekly roundup called YeastSpotting.  Happy yeasty baking, everybody!  Recipe after the jump . . . .
continue reading "French Asiago Bubble Bread for Bread Baking Day"

I’ve baked quite a few things from Carole Walter’s fabulous book, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More: 200 Anytime Treats and Special Sweets for Morning to Midnight, but if I had to pick one favorite so far, it would be a particular dough. A dough that takes literally minutes to make. A dough that freezes exceedingly well, and can be used to make many different pastries. And a dough whose taste and texture approach or exceed that of homemade Danish pastry, with a fraction of the time and effort.

Sound interesting? It’s Walter’s rich sour cream dough, or simple sweet dough, which can be used interchangeably. The difference between the two is that the former uses milk, while the latter uses sour cream. The end result is a rich, tender, flaky, and flavorful yeast bread that can be used to make braids, tea rings, buns, kuchen, sticky buns, cinnamon rolls, etc. If I have some milk or sour cream that need to be used up, I make a batch of this dough (or two), and freeze it. It is phenomenal.

A few weeks ago, I made the Dimpled Sugar Cake. I suspect that dish will make rare appearances in my house, BECAUSE WE ATE THE WHOLE THING IN ONE DAY. No wonder I have to spend so much time at the gym. For a great picture of the cake, and a review of Walters’ book, check out Ivonne’s blog. Ivonne describes the Dimpled Sugar Cake as “heaven in a pan.” To be honest, I was too busy eating the buttery, brown sugary creation to try to stage a decent picture.

Recently, I decided to try the crumb buns. These are little pillows of warm, yeasty goodness, sprinkled with a streusel topping (I used my own recipe). I pulled the dough out of the freezer the night before, and let it thaw in the refrigerator. In the morning, I shaped the buns, let them rise for an hour, and baked them. If you wanted to, you could shape them the night before and keep them in the refrigerator overnight, ready to pop in the oven the next morning. Is that great, or what? Note: the streusel topping that I made is not terribly sweet – if you like it very sweet, add a bit of white sugar to the mix.

These buns are my entry for this month’s Bread Baking Day #12, created by Zorra, and hosted by Aparna of the wonderful vegetarian blog, My Diverse Kitchen. Her choice this month was “small breads.” Be on the lookout for her roundup of everyone’s entries. And be sure to check out Susan’s weekly YeastSpotting roundup at Wild Yeast Blog. Recipe after the jump . . .
continue reading "Delicious and Easy Crumb Buns"

To celebrate Bread Baking Day’s one year anniversary, Zorra has chosen bread with sprouts. Technically, soaking the seeds for 12 hours makes them sprouts – you don’t have to see little shoots or roots coming out of the seeds.
continue reading "Flax, Sesame, and Sunflower Rye for Bread Baking Day"

I’ve been pretty busy, but decided to jump into Bread Baking Day for the first time by making a delicious cheese kuchen from Carol Walter’s wonderful book, Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More: 200 Anytime Treats and Special Sweets for Morning to Midnight. Bread Baking Day #10’s topic is Breakfast Breads, an excellent choice by Melissa of Baking A Sweet Life.

One of the recipes in Ms. Walter’s book yields a versatile sweet dough that you can make with either cream cheese or sour cream, and then you can use the dough for a variety of other yummy baked goods, such as crumb buns, sticky buns, or the cheese kuchen. The dough is easy to make, easy to work with, and it freezes well. If you’re as busy as I am, that is an unbeatable combination. And, of course, the kuchen also tastes very good: it tasted like Danish pastry, but without all the work! The cheese filling was phenomenal, even with the raisins, which I usually don’t care for, but loved in this. In fact, I had to restrain myself from eating the filling with a spoon. I will be using this dough a lot! Keep reading more after the jump . . . .
continue reading "Cheese Kuchen"