R.Acosta's blog

My first baguettes ever, from the formula for French Bread in BBA. Saved the big one for our family and sent the other two off with a big steaming pot of chicken and sausage stew to a friend who'd just had a baby. I was very pleased, except I would have liked a more open crumb and a thinner, crispier crust. Plus, I don't have a lame and apparently a bread knife just dents and drags the dough, so they weren't as pretty as I'd hoped. Nevertheless, they were a treat sliced up, slathered with butter, and dipped in some stewy goodness. Yes.

I have been pretty terrible at getting a regular dose of my TFL (as you can tell by the 8 month gap between entries), but this has been an incredible transition in my life. About 6 months ago, back in Georgia, life was not going our way, what with unemployment and money issues closing in on us with no relief in sight. So we called up a priest that my husband had the good fortune of meeting and staying on his ranch some time ago. Why? We're not sure how we came to that conclusion.

Yesterday was the infamous Mardi Gras, and since my drinking and partying days are (for the most part) over, I decided to celebrate by baking pretty much all day.  My husband's family is from Louisiana, and we both assumed that someone would be having some sort of dinner, so the night before I prepared a laminated brioche to be formed into a danish ring King Cake. I had tried this recipe on a smaller scale a couple weeks ago with good results, despite the fact that some of the recipe was somewhat "lost in translation".

So after two loaves with tons of flavor, but not the rise that I was looking for, I decided to try to make up my own honey whole wheat recipe.  I know, 'tis a little ambitious for a novice whole wheat baker, but I did do a little research beforehand, and it was wildly successful!!  So here's the recipe!

Night Before:

1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups bread flour
2 1/2 cups warm water
2t yeast

Combine all ingredients together and mix until well incorporated, then cover and let sit overnight. Mine was pretty wet:

I gotta say, that even though I've only worked with whole wheat twice now, I haven't run into an ingredient that puts me on edge as much as this one. 

9:30am-

Up until now I've avoided doing anything whole wheat, just because I've gotten the feeling that whole wheat bread is a little more finnicky than its white bread cousin.  However, I don't want to be a one trick pony, so on our last grocery run I closed my eyes and tossed in a bag of King Arthur's Whole Wheat Flour, praying that whatever resulted would exceed the $4.00 of the bag's worth (I'm still on the look out for flour in bulk so I don't have to re-up every two or thee weeks.) I'm soaking the flour now. The anticipation of the loaves to come is already killing me!!