ejm's blog

[center][/center] The multigrain bread dough I made yesterday was turning out wonderfully. It was just the right consistency. It had risen to just the right level when it was time to shape it. I decided to make it into two loaves and four buns shaped like tabatières.

[center][/center] The cooler weather has set in with a vengeance and whenever it is windy, our draughty house is even colder than usual. Consequently, I was once again having difficulty getting dough and/or shaped bread to rise. cold kitchen = SLOW rise So I decided to add a tiny bit of commercial yeast to our wild bread recipe. The dough still took forever to rise - it was after midnight when I took the bread out of the oven.

[center][/center] After seeing Eli's version of Maggie Glezer's sourdough challah from her book A Blessing of Bread, I really wanted to make challah. But this particular bread uses a firm starter. (Firm starter?! I don' know noth'n' 'bout makin' no firm starters, Mizz Scahlet!) I don't have A Blessing of Bread yet (I do have Glezer's wonderful book Artisan Baking though and it's one of my favourites).

I don't know if any of the Fresh Loafians (thank you, Mark, for such an excellent term!) has already talked about this - there are SO many posts here!! But even so, it bears repeating: The Breadline Africa Worldwide Blogger Bake Off was created and began on 15 October 2008. (It ends on 15 October 2009 or when US$1 million has been raised, whichever occurs first.) With our support, Breadline Africa can "convert shipping containers into locations for food production and distribution.

[center][/center] Our multigrain bread recipe has a fair amount of rye flour in it. I still haven't found reasonably priced rye flour so decided to replace the rye flour with wheat flour and some corn flour. This is the great thing about bread recipes. They are pretty forgiving and substitutions can be made fairly easily. The dough was somewhat slacker than it is when it's made with rye flour. But it still rose well. Ha.

In August, I received an email from Hayley Mick asking if I would do a telephone interview about how "rising food prices (particularly when it comes to grains, flour etc) are affecting bakers" and whether "it put a damper on [my] productivity". She said she had found me through The Fresh Loaf.

[center][/center] I mixed the focaccia dough at around noon. It was around 25C in the kitchen. The dough hadn't even budged by 5:00pm. Still no sign of any rising by 6:00. So I decided to cut the dough into 8 pieces and try making pitas. As I rolled out the discs, I wracked my brains trying to think what was different.

1. I had rehydrated the yeast with cold water. That shouldn't have been a problem.

The other day when I made these hamburger buns, based on Susan's (Wild Yeast) recipe for soft hamburger rolls. [center] [size=16][b]What excellent hamburger buns!![/b][/size][/center] And easy to make too! Buns are SO much easier to shape than loaves! The only slight difficulty I had with the recipe was with the fractions of grams Susan called for. My fancy new scale isn't THAT fancy.

[center][/center] I've been meaning for ages to rave about the onion rings we made weeks ago using Tanna's (My Kitchen in Half Cups) brilliant idea for using up left over sludge after feeding the wild yeast. They were fabulous!! And very very bad for us. Because we want to have onion rings every day. This is not good.