Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

This week was a bit of a tough one, I had to run to Michigan for my Grandmothers funeral. That does not mean that there was not time to make some fabulous bread; just that it had to be rather quick and easy.

This makes it the perfect week to make a quick bread! Given that it is October and all things pumpkin are in vogue the choice of Pumpkin Walnut Quick Bread all but made itself.

Now, let’s bake!

Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

Okay, this week’s recipes (yeah there are two) fall into the category of “only make a couple of times a year”. They also are the kind of knowledge that once you have it you will never be the same again. I am talking about being able to make great doughnuts at home.

Now, these recipes are the way doughnuts are supposed to be. You don’t need pastry cream filling; you don’t need sprinkles or coconut, or even nuts on top of a well made doughnut. At most you need a little glaze or powdered sugar, but really if you have done it right you could skip those as well. Crispy on the outside, tender on the inside and just slightly sweet, homemade doughnuts will make wonder why you every paid the exorbitant prices for Krispy Cremes.

Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

I love garlic, I love garlic toast, but I find it is a drag to have to mince the garlic then toast is with butter. So I just make Garlic Bread (Pain D’ail). The thing is that garlic can inhibit the growth of yeast, so we can’t just take a bread recipe and add the garlic, nope, we have to fix it so we get all the garlicy goodness and still have a nicely risen loaf.

The way to get around it is our old friend butter. By blanching the garlic, then mincing it fine, then mixing it with butter we coat the garlic in a layer of fat that keeps it from killing off our yeast. Bingo! Garlic bread that has a nice open crumb and is a fabulous piece of toast for sandwiches or your favorite pasta meal.

Cold, then hot. Cold, then hot. It must be Fall. Soon, it will be entirely soup weather, but until then? One can never know. Will it be spinach salad? Or will it be…Indian lentil soup with spinach? Better watch the weather.

Happy Autumn, friends.

Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

This week we’re going to make Cinnamon Oatmeal Bread. This is bread that an old co-worker used to make just at Holiday time. Personally I think it is too tasty to be reserved just for the holidays, plus there are other breads I like to make then. I think that the lovely crumb that the eggs, butter and oatmeal give are just the right vehicle for the cinnamon sugar swirls.

Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

This week we are going to take a little break from the sourdough and bake one of my favorite fall breads the French Harvest Loaf. Why is it the Harvest Loaf? I have no clue, it is what this recipe was called when I learned it and it was always at this time of year when it was baked. It has a cool feature that will seem intimidating until the first time you do it. That is the wheat stalks which decorate the loaf.

One of the great things about these stalks is they are so impressive that even when you do them poorly they look great. The real masters of this technique make them look like real wheat but even your first time they will look great, trust me on this! Plus the technique is easy to learn, it just takes practice to master. So, as always, don’t despair, don’t freak out, just follow the instructions and take all the credit when you show this loaf off to your friends and family.

Since this is a French style bread it does require a starter, which means you have to start the night before. It is also a half whole wheat, half white flour bread. The thing is that the flour they use in France is not one you can get easily here in the United States. It is a medium hard wheat, instead of the hard or soft wheat that we have here. It is also milled a little different than we mill our flour here. Still there is a way to get around this. We will be mixing 3 parts all purpose flour with 1 part bread flour to approximate the French white flour. If you don’t want to do this you can just use all purpose flour, though you will not get the same level of open cell structure in your final product.

Enough talk! Let’s bake!

Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

This week we are going to make one of the all time great white sandwich breads, Oatmeal Sourdough. It is made with milk and honey and oats, all of which conspire to give the bread a soft creamy crumb with a lightly sour finish. This bread is what the giant mass produced “Texas toast” bread is trying to imitate.

There is nothing hard to this bread, you just have to have a sour dough starter and you are ready to roll! Just in case you have not seen the way to make a starter, I’ll post that first. You really ought to give this a try just for the interesting way that it grows and feeds. The starter is really alive (well the bacteria in it are) and it changes over time and interesting in and of itself. It makes a great little science project for kids.

Happy Holiday Sunday Bread Heads!

This week we’re still working our way through some sourdough breads. Hopefully by now you have given into guilt and made a starter. If not, I’ll give the starter instructions below.

There have been lots of requests and questions about making bread with whole wheat flour. Most of the more fancy recipes I have shared really can’t be made with whole wheat flour (okay you could make them with it but they don’t turn out like you would expect, especially croissants and the like, trust me on this). However, there are plenty of great whole wheat breads. A whole wheat sourdough is one of them. This recipe gives a really tart sour flavor and a little of the nuttiness that whole wheat brings. It does require a cup of white flour, though. Without it the dough will not rise enough and you will wind up with a sourdough brick and no one wants to eat that.

So, on to the bread!

Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

This week we’re going to handle a request and keep going on the sourdough breads. Sourdough Pumpernickel is one of the great sandwich breads of all time. The dense crumb and complex flavors make this bread more than just the base for some meat and cheese, it makes it part of the overall meal.

As with all the sourdough breads it begins with a starter. If you have not made your sourdough starter yet, now is the time! I have posted it twice, so I am just going to skip it this time, you can find it in the links at the bottom of this post if you are looking for it.

My wife is not a huge fan of rye bread, she does not like the licorice (in fact hate is so much she even thinks the word is stupid) so this recipe is pretty mild. However if you want to pump up the licorice flavor, you can add caraway seeds (I’ll provide the instructions) .

One of my favorite summer foods is bread — the kind we can cook on the grill. Flat breads are easy to make and bake, don’t require heating up the house with the oven if you have a grill. And so much better with fresh basil from the garden!