I have been trying to make good broccoli cheddar soup for years. I was always disappointed with the results. FINALLY, the stars aligned and I had both an excellent broccoli cheddar soup AND great tasting and great looking bread bowls to boot.
Bread Bowl Ingredients
We made gingerbread from scratch. Cutting the design by hand for 9 people was a PAIN IN THE BUTT! I cut two fancy Church style houses and it took forever, so I decided for the other 7 houses I would simplify things, but it still took forever.
Unfortunately, everyone had so much fun making the houses, I am sure we will be doing the same thing next year, so I want to take some notes to hopefully make the process less painful next year. My wife says I will forget how much work it was a year from now, she is right.
Christmas has been busy with activities so far. I am trying to stay disciplined and post my bakes, because I am finding the posts useful when I am trying to plan future bakes. I am going to post 3 blog posts today with the different bakes over Christmas I want to keep notes on.
Unfortunately or fortunately depending on who you ask, I am short on time this morning, so I will try to keep the posts brief.
Recipe:
100% AP flour, sourdough risen, 8 hour bake, 70% hydration
Took a break from baking bread for a few days to work on Christmas presents out in the shop and fail to fix an unruly toilet.
Got to bake pizza tonight. My favorite type of bake. My wife is out of town, so I got to take a departure from my 100% whole grain bakes. Tonight, we dine on 100% Central Milling Organic Unbleached All Purpose Flour. Bag says it is a mixture of wheat flour and malted barley flour.
This was a stressful bake. Mainly because lots of things did not go as planned and I had to think on my feet. I prefer mindless baking... thinking baking is stressful. The loaf came out nice though, a bit gummy, but nice.
I was thinking how I would blog about this bake, if I walked through the bake in chronological order, the blog post would get even more tedious than my normal blog posts. So, I think I will write a short summary about what went wrong and then write down the bake as it actually occurred without including the missteps along the way.
Time to start adding various ingredients to give this loaf some character. Not sure what ingredients to add, I asked for ideas in a separate post:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/66656/help-narrowing-down-ingredients-add-recipe
I think I am going to keep doing these bumper bakes while I work out the kinks in my sandwich loaf recipe. In case you were curious, I dubbed this a "bumper bake" in reference to a bumper crop. I am in the kitchen anyway, I have a double oven, why not just bake a second loaf, just for fun.
The Good:
The Bad:
This bake went well enough, I think I am ready to move onto the next phase of perfecting this recipe... flavor.
Recap:
The wife has tasked me to come up with a sandwich bread recipe our family can bake at least once a weak to completely replace our regularly purchased box store sandwich bread.
Requirements
Round #3 of experimenting with "Skipping the Bulk Ferment" step.
Recap:
The wife has tasked me to come up with a sandwich bread recipe our family can bake at least once a weak to completely replace our regularly purchased box store sandwich bread.
Requirements
I kept thinking while perfecting and especially while shaping my 100%WW sandwich loaf recipe, that this dough is so wonderful, I bet it would make a nice boule. So, I doubled up on the recipe yesterday and made a pullman loaf and a boule. I kept the mixing and everything separate, but the ingredients and the process up until the kneading was identical. When it came to kneading, I kneaded by hand for the boule and used the Ankarsum for the bread loaf. This blog post only talks about the boule, see my previous blog post if you want to know how the pullman loaf went.
