In the month since our trip to Scotland and Ireland, baking around here has been rather hit or miss. No, scratch that, baking around here has been hit and miss. Consequently, this post is sort of a catch-all for the this's and that's going on in my kitchen.
One bake was the honey oatmeal loaf from the KAF Whole Grains Cookbook. I love that stuff; it's hearty and moist and hefty and just a little bit sweet. Makes a great sandwich, too.
Since I had Friday off last weekend, and since the weather on Friday and Saturday was rainy, it seemed like a golden opportunity for baking some bread. While perusing Hamelman's Bread, the Whole Wheat Levain was the one that I kept coming back to as I weighed the alternatives.
Many of us get rather, well, steamed, about our inability to produce steam in our home ovens. Some good techniques have been posted here on TFL. While I doubt that any of us will be able to produce anything close to the blast of steam that commercial ovens can provide, we may be able to do better than we think we can.
I've begun fiddling with Scottish Oat Cakes. They are a bit of a departure from my usual yeasted bread baking. What makes it tricky is that I really don't know what my target is; I suppose I may have to wait for our trip to Scotland and Ireland this summer to see whether I'm on the right track.
The past two weeks have been rather more demanding than usual. We had gone to Colorado Springs to visit our youngest daughter's family for the Easter weekend. We were just a few minutes away from their house when my brother-in-law called to let us know that he had taken my mother-in-law to ER; her cancer that had been diagnosed a year and a half previously was causing new complications. We decided to cut our visit short and drive back to Kansas on Easter Sunday. The following morning, April 1, my wife flew to Traverse City, MI, to be with her mother.
Most of my bread for the past couple of weeks has come from the freezer, rather than from the oven. That's a good thing in that the freezer needs to be cleared out but not so satisfying as baking. It also means that I've had a pretty steady diet of rye bread. Again, that's a good thing but it was time for a change of pace and taste.
Today was, well, not your ordinary Saturday.
Instead, the morning was spent in the company of 9 beginning bakers, ages 5-9 (and their adult "assistants"). Off-hand, I'd estimate more of the bakers were closer to the age 5 end of scale. There were three dad/daughter combos, a couple of grandmothers with grandson or granddaughter, and the rest were mom and child. All in all, some really nice kids. We baked two different breads; one a cheese and onion scone (some opted not to use the onions) and the other a Cape Seed Loaf.
This past Friday, I taught a class on rye breads at the Culinary Center of Kansas City. The class was scheduled to run from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Three different breads were featured: the rustic pumpernickel from ITJB, Eric's fav rye (compliments of the late Eric Hanner), and a vort limpa. That gave a nice sampling of the diversity of rye breads. We were able to bake both the pumpernickel and the vort limpa during class; students then took the dough for Eric's fav rye with them to bake at home.
The first week of December featured a lot of baking, in marked contrast to the prior week. Having my hands in that much dough was a genuine pleasure. Even better was the knowledge that most of it was for the benefit of others, rather than for myself.
