Sandwich Bread, Apple Strudel Bread, Hamburger Buns

This week for the HBin5 bread braid, I made a batch of the soft whole wheat sandwich dough. I think I am just very spoiled by my usual whole wheat dough that is so wonderfully elastic and makes fantastic bread. It's much easier to work with and rises into a higher loaf. I weighed out the dough on my scale to the amounts indicated in the recipes. Even though this loaf of bread is 2 pounds and my usual loaves are 1.5 pounds, it's shorter than our usual bread. I even let it rise for much longer than called for and let it get to the top of the pan before baking. It didn't have very much oven lift. I will stick with my regular dough for the everyday bread. It was good to try the recipe, though.



The Apple Strudel bread is basically cinnamon raisin bread with apples, or, I guess you could say it's apple pie with raisins in bread rather than pie crust. I didn't have raisins on hand, so I substituted well-chopped Craisins. I also left out the nuts since my kids won't eat them. I used half the suggested amount of apples and still found that it was quite a bit of apples. The kids were very excited about this bread and kept asking when it was time to eat it. :c)



I also made 6 hamburger buns and played a bit with the size. I think I like the larger size better. I'm pleased with how well the shape came out. I left off the sesame seeds because, again, the kids would have turned their noses up at the seeds. That's the reason I grind flax seeds and add them into most of our baked goods. Sssshhhh! Don't tell! ;c) I didn't add them to the HBin5 recipe, though.



And just because I found it interesting, here's a picture to compare today's sandwich bread with my usual sandwich bread. I used the same home-ground mix of red and white wheat for both. The recipe on the right has only one cup of all-purpose flour for the entire 5 loaf recipe. The recipe on the left has more than that. It was interesting that the HBin5 slice is darker. Perhaps that is because the dough aged in the fridge for more than 24 hours.

Crackers, Boule and Epi

The first recipe for the HBin5 Bread Braid(a bake along) is the Master Recipe. Now, I'm not going to be posting the dough recipes here. The book is copyrighted, so you'll have to buy the book or find it at your public library. The good news is that the authors of the book put the Master Recipe on their website along with the method of baking it, so you can try it before you buy it. :c)




I made one recipe of the Master Recipe. I used a freshly ground mix of red and white wheat. I mixed the dough one day and baked the next, letting it chill in the fridge overnight. From that I made 1 small boule, Spicy Whole Grain Snack Crackers and Epi shaped bread with about a pound to pound-and-a-half of dough leftover. This was my first time making a shaped bread!



I have made many boules because I have baked from the Artisan Bread pre-quel to this book, so this wasn't something new for me. It has a gorgeous crust and color.



I had never attempted a shaped bread before. Luckily, I watched a few videos online of people making Epi which helped. What didn't go so well was that my scissors didn't have a very long blade at all, so I didn't snip through the dough quite far enough. The finished loaf is supposed to look like a stalk of wheat. I think I also let it rise too long(I had to put the baby down for a nap!) so the "grains" aren't as separate as they should be. Still, it's a good first attempt, I think. It was very easy and fun!



The crackers were the most labor-intensive of the things I made. I will admit that while I was making them I thought they were more trouble than a cracker could be worth. I managed to get the dough paper-thin, but then transferring them from the counter to the pan was difficult. For the second batch, I rolled and cut them on parchment paper then just transferred the paper to the oven. That worked well, except I think I need a different brand of parchment paper. Everything sticks to the brand I have. I used only salt on the first batch and added the spiciness to the second batch. I have to admit I think I like the salt-only ones better. They are like super-delicious wheat thins. Very yummy! If I can streamline the process by finding a better parchment paper then I will definitely make these again.



Overall, a lot of fun! I don't think all my HBin5 or BYOB'10 posts will be this photo-intensive. Maybe every once in a while. :c)

Bread!

Last year I participated in BYOB2009 (Bake Your Own Bread 2009). My family and I enjoyed it so much, I'm continuing on into BYOB2010, but I'm adding another challenge. It may sound like a lot, but, really, they're so closely related that I can easily do them together.

You may remember(or not Ha!) the book I got in October called Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I joined a group that will be baking through the book over the next year and a half(approximately, it's actually a bit longer) by making one dough recipe every 2 weeks to use for several recipes. There are a few recipes I will be skipping because they contain either coffee or beer. I do realize that alcohol cooks out of food, but I personally don't cook with it(or drink it) anyway and we don't drink coffee so I won't be making those either.

The posts will be put up (hopefully!) on the 1st and 15th of the month, unless I'm not able to take pictures that time for some reason or if I'm running behind. If that happens, I will probably skip posting that time.

The first post will be up tomorrow!