Bread Updated

I am so glad so many people seem to be interested in the multigrain bread! My curiosity got to me and Monday when I got home from work I made ONE more loaf of bread to test out some of the theories I mentioned in the last post. It turned out GREAT and is my favorite loaf so far.

1) I put the honey in with the wet ingredients... and the salt in with the dry ingredients, worked perfectly.

2) I put the kneaded dough immediately into a greased loaf pan and let that rise for about an hour before baking. It was MUCH puffier and the texture is better as well. (Note: if you can bear to wait, the longer dough rises/the yeast develops, the better the flavor. So if you mix up a batch and leave it in a cold oven (where there are no drafts) for a couple of hours to get the same amount of volume, you can change the flavor of your bread)

3) If you choose to try the vital wheat gluten you CAN add it to the wet ingredients as well. It becomes elastic in water and helps your bread retain the gas it gains during rising.

Also I cut the recipe in half in case you are interested in just making one loaf at a time. I enjoy the physical act of baking so much that I think will continue to due it one loaf at time unless our bread consumption changes drastically.

Recipe for ONE loaf:

3 cups whole wheat flour
1T OR 1pkg dry active yeast
1tsp salt
1 1/2 T Vegetable Oil
2T Honey
1 1/4 cup hot water



For the Multigrain additions:
3T Flax
1/2 cup oats
1/2 cup 5-10 grain cereal

Above: Fluffy risen loaf waiting for the oven to preheat.

Below: Side by Side, slice on the left is from a previous batch, and the slice on the right is from the loaf that did all its rising in the loaf pan. You can see the difference in size AND the difference in texture. Taste has been pretty consistent.

You'll never knead to buy bread again!

reaA few weeks ago Sean and I started a pretty strict diet. I am pleased to say that its definitely working. I feel like I've lost weight and we had to go buy new pants for Sean today. (Losing weight is one of the great gender inequities in life). My standard breakfast on said diet is 2 slices of multi grain toast with peanut butter. At first I was buying whole wheat bagels to have with my peanut butter, but about 2 weeks ago my friend Catherine shared her recipe for whole wheat bread with me, and my life has not quite been the same since. It truly is a simple and delicious bread recipe, and best of all you can easily recognize and FIND all the ingredients. If you are a generally conscientious person you might even have them all on hand. I however had never purchased whole wheat flour in my life (we might be discovering the need for above mentioned dieting ;) ) and had to run to the store after work to pick it up. Everything else though I did have on hand!


And since that day 2 weeks ago when Cat shared her recipe, I've done a little bit of experimenting...I have my fourth loaf in the oven right now. There's a lot to say on this subject, because I find it fascinating, and really knew nothing about baking bread before this experiment. I've included lots of pictures and as much detail as possible: this post is a little bit long.


Makes 2 loaves:
6 cups whole wheat flour
1T + 1 tsp dry active yeast
2tsp salt
2 1/2 T Vegetable Oil (you can use olive oil but its got a stronger taste)
1/4 cup honey
2 1/2 cups hot water (between 105-110F)

For a Multi Grain Version (as I did below) add:
1/3 cup flax
1 cup oats
1 cup 5-10 grain cereal
(I found 5-grain at my store, but on the Bob's Red Mill website I saw 5, 7, 8, and 10 grain at the very least. It was located by the flour, right next to Bob's Red Mill flax, but its really sold as a hot cereal like oatmeal so it might be over by the oats or in the organic section)

I also added about 6T of Vital Wheat Gluten which, as I understand it, is a bread additive processed from wheat that provides more elasticity to your flour. It helps whole wheat flour act more like white flour. I added all of the above to my dry ingredients, but its quite possible that I was supposed to add the gluten to the yeast mixture... admittedly a bread novice over here.

Yeah, that's a cheesy shot of all my ingredients. And I did pull my mixer out and put it on the peninsula, but NOT entirely for the purpose of the cheesy ingredient shot. MAINLY I put it there because my family gave my bed bath and beyond gift cards for my birthday, and with those cards I was able to purchase myself 2 GelPro kitchen mats... which are awesome and one resides right in front of the peninsula... which is my new favorite workspace.
Wait what? You want me to get get back to the bread.... Ok Ok.
1. Put 2 cups of flour and the yeast in your stand mixer. Add the hot water and mix for 1 minute. (I mix mine with the paddle attachment) then let sit for 10 minutes.
2. While your yeast/flour mixture sits, measure the remainder of your dry ingredients (4 cups flour, plus your multi-grain additions if you like) into in a bowl to incorporate later. The above picture shows my yeast/flour mixture after about 7 minutes, its definitely starting to bubble away!

3. After 10 minutes, add your honey and salt to the yeast mixture. At this point I switched to the dough hook attachment on my mixer. (Not positive about this, but I am pretty sure you can add your honey in step one and salt in with the dry ingredients. Yeast loves sugar and it will probably help it get bubbling faster, but I haven't actually done it this way yet.)

4. Slowly add your dry ingredients. I did this about a cup at a time, but did not wait for each addition to be fully incorporated.

5. Set your mixer on low with the dough hook in and let it knead your dough for another 10 minutes. (the photos below show about 2 mins worth of kneading after the dry ingredients were added). The dough, particularly with multi grain additions, will be pretty dense by the end. I am pretty mesmerized by the kneading process and could watch all 10 minutes of it, but at this point I try to drag myself away and clean up a little bit. Mainly I rinse out my dry ingredient bowl to get it ready for the rise.
6. After 10 minutes, either oil or "pam" a bowl and dump your dough in. Make sure to coat all sides of the dough to rise. You can let the dough rise on the counter OR a really neat trick I read online was to turn your oven on to preheat for ONE MINUTE and then turn it OFF. This will make your oven nice and warm and encourage your dough to rise. Cover your bowl with a damp cloth and put it in the oven for 45mins - 1 hour. Its like magic!*

See!

7. Once your dough has risen, dump it out on the counter and knead it a couple of times to release the CO2. Then divide the dough into 2 halves, shape it into general loaf shapes and put them into oiled or sprayed loaf pans.**

8. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and let the dough rise once more (not in the oven) until it comes above the sides of the loaf pan. Bake for 30 minutes or until the bottom sounds hollow when tapped.

9. Move your bread to a cooling rack immediately to prevent the bottom from getting soggy.

Above is my plain whole wheat loaf, which is half eaten and more golden brown next to the multi grain version.

* The original recipe Cat sent me, and the way I made the whole wheat loaf pictured above, was to immediately divide the dough into 2 loaves after the kneading process and then let it rise for 30 - 40 minutes on top of a preheated oven before baking. This is obviously a lot faster, but the bread is pretty dense, perfect for toast and peanut butter, but not quite was I was picturing for a sandwich. Everything I've read about bread is that the more time the yeast has to work the better the texture will be... and most other/similar recipes used the double rise method described above. When I did my quick knead though the dough actually became REALLY dense. Like I could have sliced it up and eaten it right there. I think kneading it down undid the excellent rise that happened in the oven. NEXT TIME... I think I will actually divide the dough immediately after kneading and put it in my loaf pan, then use the oven rise method for 45mins to an hour but skip the second quick knead and rise. Then bake... Just to see how it goes. It could be a big mistake... I'll let you know.

** We can't actually eat 2 loaves of bread fast enough for it to stay fresh so instead of letting both rise the second time I wrapped half of the dough in saran wrap and then a freezer bag and stuck it in the freezer. When I got it out today to bake, it had actually risen some, and burst through the saran wrap before totally freezing. But that aside, I put it in the loaf pan this morning and let it sit most of the day. It rose perfectly (don't know exactly how much time, just kept an eye on it) and baked up perfectly. This allows me to make dough about every 2 or 2.5 weeks and freeze one loaf, bake the other and ALWAYS have fresh bread.

Put a little fall in your mouth

I made these cookies about 2 weeks ago now and put a little teaser picture up on facebook. I really meant put them up here last week, but a combination of lots activity/travel and excessive laziness prevented me from doing so ;) Its past time now to post these cookies though because fall is finally in the air, and in some cases has jumped directly into wintry weather! Anyway, this time around I decided to add some "spice" to the cookie dough to really ring in the season.

I added aprox. 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp all spice, 1 tsp nutmeg, and "some" ginger to my normal sugar cookie recipe. The unbaked cookies were perfectly spiced, but once I put the icing on I think they could have used a little bit more. But since everything I do is SOOOO scientific it might take me a while to get the proportions just right.

You sadly can't really see the difference in the color of the dough in these pics, but it was a little bit darker than normal. I used the smallest pumpkin and leaf cutters from 2 sets I purchased at Michael's, which incidentally is an Excellent place to buy holiday/seasonal cookie cutters. I got about 25 fall cookie cutters for $13.99 by purchasing 2 different sets. Last year at Christmas I got 2 sets of miniature Christmas cutters for $2.99 each!

I love the way these turned out. I was kind of stumped about how to decorate the leaves because they were so small, but the swirl technique (which was used as an example on the cookie cutter box) turned out really cool. I only had to make 3 icing colors for these guys. They are also sprayed with a generous helping of gold luster dust which is adding a little bit of glare to the photos.

For the leaves, I made my icing a kind of medium consistency, not quite flow consistency, but definitely not stiff enough to pipe detail either, and used piping bags with plain #2 or #3 sized tips to pipe on the icing. I think they are really too small (for me) to use a knife to do a layer of flow over without making a huge mess. I was able to do about six cookies at a time and just covered aprox. half the cookies in one color and then went back with my second color to cover the rest and worked quickly to swirl the middle with a toothpick. You will need colors with some contrast to really see the swirl effect. If your icing is drying too quickly and not swirling properly you'll just have to do two or three at a time instead of 6. Also try to clean off your toothpick after every few cookies to keep the swirl really clean.

PS- Sean and I are officially dieting these days so I have to curtail my "baking for no good reason." Good thing we're gearing up for the holidays and I will HAVE to bake.