Rye rounds

Rye bread!  40 of these little rounds for a friend's Baba Yaga show.  I used a recipe from The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones, though I substituted dark beer for the coffee.  When I was doing test batches, I successfully made bread with the ingredients from the recipe using my starter instead of the yeast, but for the show we used jar yeast because of time constraints.  There will be more rye bread in my future!  And not just because I bought a 25 pound bag of rye flour!

Coconut milk bread

This is the finished coconut milk sourdough bread.  It was one of my all-time favorites.  The crust was great; the bread was rich and tasty.  The golden smears are bits of saffron.  I will make some version of this bread again.

Coconut milk sponge

Hmm.  I was feeling experimental yesterday, so I used coconut milk as the liquid in the sponge.  It smelled pretty good.  When I uncovered it this morning to add flour, salt and do the first rising, it smelled . . . different.  Sort of a little bit like hard boiled eggs.

I don't know how it will turn out.  There will be a follow-up post.

Sourdough with some oats

Regular old sourdough.  I threw in a handful of steel cut oats.  YUMMY!

Olive bread

This was another loaf with disastrous beginnings.  I used some vegetable smoothie (carrot, garlic, beet green, red pepper, celery, lemon, cucumber, quinoa, green tea) as part of the liquid in the sponge.  In the dough, I added kalamata and green olives.  

I rolled the dough out into a lovely, perfect rectangle, sprinkled it with the olive chunks, rolled into a tidy bundle, and put in into a warm oven for its second rising.  

In my haste to create a delicious loaf, I forgot that this was actually only the first rise.  And I forgot about my oven ooze from just a couple days before.  So once again, I woke up to a bread dough mess, but this one was much worse since the dough worked its way out of the pan and all over the racks and element.  

Though it was a mess, I thought I should try to save the dough, so I scooped what was left from the pan, kneaded, and put it back in the cast iron loaf pan to rise at room temperature while I was at work.

I threw it in the oven when I got home, still dubious that it would turn out.  Amazingly, it made bread!  And it tasted a little like pizza! 

Back in the bread!

I am back in the bread habit.  I took a little break so I could shrink back into my pants and started keeping my starter in the refrigerator so I don't have to feed it everyday.

Here is a loaf I made that I thought wouldn't make it but turned out to be one of my all-time favorites.  I used potato water as the liquid and a warm oven for rising.  For the second rising, I put the dough in a 4.5 quart dutch oven and left it overnight.  In the morning, I woke up to a huge, sticky mess that completely filled the oven and adhered to the lid.

I pulled the lid off, sliced the top, threw it all in a hot hot oven, and expected a deflated mess.  To my surprise, the bread stayed tall and the crumb was very open - much closer to my goal of huge holes!

And it was GOOOODD!

carb love

Here is my shameful emission:  I have not been making much bread.  And several starters died.  I still LOVE bread and the process, but I had been growing out of my pants.  I don't really believe in dieting, but when I am suddenly unable to dress in anything but sweatpants, something has to change.  So I took a little bread break.  Mostly I just laid off the pancakes.  

But I'm back!  And the pictured loaf is one I made with beer and milk in the dough.  I have been touching (I can't seem to stop looking at the pictures long enough to actually read it) the book Tartine Bread and dreaming of bread with big, open crumb.   This bread is NOT there.  Though not incredibly dense, the crumb was tight.  I would almost be disappointed with the loaf if it was not heart-breakingly delicious!  I was eating slices of it 2 days old, untoasted, and could barely stop.  

I still want to read the cookbook and try the recipes and see if I really can replicate what I see in the pictures, but I am also excited about making bread in whatever why I am curious about.  Listen to the dough.  Smell it.  Taste it.  Watch it.  Try something wild.  Eat the results.