Same ingredients, a fraction of the height

What a difference a day makes.

I made another loaf of the North English brown ale bread, with the same proportions as before, but this time it turned out completely flat. I thought it'd be horrible, but it was actually tasty and chewy—a completely different texture from before.

The loaf on the left (and slice on the right) is the flat version of
the loaf on the right. The darker color is no surprise, since I
cooked the grain in the water, turning the water dark brown.

Here's all I can recall doing differently:

1. Instead of putting the oil and honey in first, with the water and spent grain, I put them in last.
2. A few hours before loading the ingredients into the bread machine's pan, I microwaved the water and spent grain together for 2 minutes to cook the grain a little more.
3. I used olive oil instead of canola oil.
4. I took the bread out 35 minutes after it was done instead of right after.

That's all I can remember. I suspect #1 is the cause—perhaps because the delay in mixing in the honey somehow made the yeast too active or not active enough. Another possibility is that the heavier oil and honey weighed down the flour and let moisture or salt get to the yeast sooner than it should have, or maybe later and the bread over proofed and sank. A thin skin of dough along the side of the bread pan might support the overproof theory.

Here's why I put the oil and honey in later than before:

• That's the order the Zojirushi instructions recommend.
• It's easier to pour in the honey after the oil, since I measure them in the same container.
• I thought olive oil might be more susceptible to off flavors (from being mixed with water for a few hours) than canola oil.

I'm going to make another loaf soon from frozen spent grain, doing everything more or less the same except no delay timer, and the oil and honey and salt will go in before the flour. Why add the salt then? I want it to be more evenly distributed, and I suspect that when it's left until last, it's not. Also, I want to reduce the odds that the salt will touch the yeast before the bread is kneaded.

Back from vacation, back to bread

I just returned from being out of town/country/continent nearly three weeks. Fortunately, I had 4 days to rest, recover, and get back on Pacific time.

The first thing I did upon getting back, late Wednesday night, was to take my two sourdough starters out of the refrigerator and refresh them. Then Friday morning I made some cinnamon-cherry bread in my Zojirushi. Saturday morning I made sourdough.

The cinnamon-cherry bread was based on Zojirushi's 1.5# 100% whole wheat apple bread recipe, but with the following changes:

• instead of 1/2 c of dried apple, I used 3/4+ c of chopped dried sour cherries (from Berkeley Bowl)
• instead of regular sugar, I used raw sugar
• instead of molasses (which I couldn't find in the house), I used a strong honey
• I increased the cinnamon about 50%
• I reduced the salt and yeast 50%

The resulting bread was very good, either fresh or toasted. I just had some toasted, with butter, and that was delicious.

On to the sourdough. Both starters woke up after their 25+ day rest, with no problems.

Saturday morning I started making the usual Josey Baker sourdough loaf. The kitchen was warm, so everything progressed much more quickly than the times listed in the book.

I slashed twice,
but not deeply enough or at a big enough angle,
so the top cracked a bit between the slashes.

The result was good, as usual.

I put our biggest stock pot on top for the first 20 minutes,
but it was a little too small, so one end was a bit misshapen.

I went for a bold bake, which resulted in a nice crust and still moist interior. I think I might back off a little bit next time, though, since some parts of the crust tasted almost burnt.

Hunting for a good raisin bread

Although I'm not fond of raisins on their own, I love a good raisin bread. I've tried three recipes lately, with varying degrees of success. (Please tell me if you know a great bread machine raisin bread recipe! I still haven't found the perfect one.)

Here are the results of my raisin bread hunt, in order of how likely I am to make them again (which is the reverse of the order I made them in):

1. C.R.O.W.W. (Cinnamon Raisin Oatmeal Walnut Whole wheat), from Beth Hensperger's ever-reliable The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook: Delicious, although I could've used more raisins and nuts (1/2 cup + 1/4 cup, to 3 cups flour). Besides the usual ingredients and those listed in the title, this recipe also uses egg whites, buttermilk, oil, and a vanilla powder that I couldn't find in local stores, so I bought it online. For the raisins I used "jumbo mixed medley" raisins from Berkeley Bowl's bulk section.
2. 100% whole wheat fruit bread, from the Zojirushi cookbook: Also delicious, and kept fresh for days. Instead of raisins, I used dried sour cherries from Berkeley Bowl. Yum. I might've liked to have more fruit (it had 2/3 cup, to 5 cups flour) and maybe nuts. I might try changing the butter to hazelnut or walnut oil. Instead of cinnamon, this recipe used allspice, which tasted great with the cherries. Every recipe I've tried from the whole grain section of this cookbook has been really good. (The party bread is another story, but that came from another section.)
3. Raisin, cinnamon, and nut wheat bread (aka fail bread) from Beatrice Ojakangas' Whole Grain Breads by Machine or Hand: Such a tasty failure, I had to make it twice to believe it. Both times, almost all the fruit and nuts (3/4 cup of each, to 4 cups flour) ended up at the bottom of the pan. I don't know if this was because there was too much fruit/nuts, or because the consistency of the dough was too thick or thin. Whatever the cause, this recipe must not have been tested with a Zojirushi—or maybe with any bread machine. Also, this bread went stale quickly. I'll think twice before making another recipe from this book.

The C.R.O.W.W. bread was my dinner the day I made it, and breakfast the next day. I should perhaps lay off, but at least it was a reasonably nutritious substitute for a real meal. I made the 1.5-pound loaf, changing the salt to a scant teaspoon, and yeast to 2 teaspoons.

C.R.O.W.W.: Dinner and breakfast in a loaf

The Zo bread was their typical, gargantuan size. It was supposed to use 100% whole wheat flour, but I ran out and used about 1/3 bread flour. (I reduced the gluten from 4T to 3T to compensate.) I reduced the salt to 1 teaspoon, and the yeast to a heaping teaspoon.

Zojirushi ~67% whole wheat fruit bread

Finally, we come to the fail bread. Take a look at it.

The bottom of the fail bread

Spectacular, isn't it? I think that's my second version, which had cranberries and walnuts. My first try had jumbo raisins and pecans, I think. Both tasted good, if you ignored the fact that the only fruit was on the bottom. (Some of the smaller nut pieces made it into the dough.) I didn't record my alterations the first time, but the second time I made the large-loaf size, reducing the salt to 3/4 t and the yeast to 1 t.

Because you just can't eat enough gluten, I've also started working my way through Josey Baker's bread book, which I've borrowed from the library. I'll blog about that next.

Redemption of a fallen pumpernickel

I love pumpernickel bread, although I didn't know that until I started baking it for myself, using Zojirushi's recipe.

A big, delicious loaf of Zo pumpernickel

I'm not crazy about caraway seeds, but since my honey is, I decided to try a recipe in The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook (which I'll just call Hensperger, after its author). It's called Bohemian black bread (BBB), and it's a pumpernickel with fennel and caraway.

At first, the bread was a flop. Neither of us liked the flavor much, plus the bread fell! I've never had this problem before, despite all my messing around with the amount of yeast and salt. The bread is perfectly light, so I assume the problem was too much yeast for the amount of salt.

A fallen loaf of Bohemian black bread

The second day, however, both of us really liked the bread. (The recipe had said it was better the second day. Maybe it's because the fennel mellows.) We tried the bread various ways—with olive oil and mustard, plain with a slice of ham, topped with tuna fish salad, toasted with peanut butter and jam—and the combinations were delicious! For some reason, this bread was also easier to slice than the others I've made, so I could eat thinner slices.

Thin slices of the BBB

Since I've successfully cooked Zo's pumpernickel every time I've tried, here are some notes comparing the recipes (or, to be precise, my interpretation of the recipes). I cooked both breads using the delay timer and the whole wheat setting.

Things that are similar:

• The liquid: both use water (though Zo uses a bit less)
• The sweetener: both use molasses (though Zo uses more)
• The coloring: both use cocoa and coffee (though BBB uses more cocoa)
• The main flours: both use about 2 cups of bread flour, and about a cup of rye flour
• Salt: both call for 2 teaspoons, though I used just a pinch for the Zo and maybe 3/4 t for the BBB

Things that are different:

• The fat: Zo uses oil; BBB uses butter (and twice as much, by volume)
• Other flours: Zo uses some whole wheat flour plus a bit of cornmeal; BBB just uses a bit of wheat bran
• Gluten: Zo uses almost 3 times as much
• Seeds: Zo uses none; BBB uses some caraway (though less than in the book's Scandinavian light rye recipe) and a bit of fennel
• Yeast: Zo calls for 2 tsp (I used 1 heaping tsp); BBB calls for 1 T (I used 2 scant tsp)

Other things that might have made a difference:

• I used dark rye for BBB instead of the rye flour I usually use
• I used black cocoa for BBB instead of the regular dutch process I usually use

I might make the recipe again. It's not the best standalone bread, but (on the second day, at least) it combines really well with other flavors. If I make it again, I'll try lowering the yeast to 1 heaping tsp. Or I might just make the Zo recipe, but add caraway.

Pull-apart dinner roll bread

For Thanksgiving, I wanted to have freshly baked pull-apart bread from the bread machine. Finding recipes for this was hard enough that I worried that it wasn't a good idea. It ended up working pretty well, but could still use some tweaking.

I've already blogged about the first time I tried making pull-apart in the machine, using the honey whole-wheat recipe from Hensberger's Bread Machine Cookbook and techniques from the Zojirushi cookbook's weird recipe for "party bread". I also found a recipe for buttery herb-garlic pull-apart bread, which uses a bread machine and gave me the idea of dipping the top of each ball into butter or oil.

I decided to try the same honey whole-wheat recipe, and I planned to dip the bread balls into a mixture of melted butter and olive oil. This time I expected the bread dough to be sticky, and I knew (no thanks to the Zojirushi recipe) to use oiled surfaces when working with it.

I used the program from before, which is a modification of the Zojirushi recommendation:

• no resting time before starting (instead I warmed the milk and water a bit in the microwave)
• 20 minutes kneading (though I should probably do 22 minutes, like the whole-wheat cycle does, since the dough is somewhat sticky)
• shape (up to 1 hour)
• rise 1: skip
• rise 2: skip 
• rise 3: 45 minutes
• bake: 40 minutes

During the shaping time, here's what I did:

1. Take the dough out, put it in a ball, then put it into large oiled mixing bowl. (I used olive oil.)
2. Cover with a damp cloth, and let the dough rise for 20 minutes (probably more like 25 minutes).
3. While the dough is rising, remove the blades from the bread machine, and wipe out the pan.
4. Push down the dough, and then shape it into 15 mini-balls, putting them into an oiled casserole dish.
5. Cover with the damp cloth, and let the dough rise for 10 minutes (probably more like 15 minutes).
6. Put the mini-balls into the pan of the bread machine. (I squeezed them to get rid of air. That's sort of like kneading.)
7. Press Start, making the bread machine continue with rise 3.

Good lord, that was nerve wracking. The dough didn't seem to be rising much, and the mini-balls didn't fit as well into the pan as I remembered. I decided not to dip the mini-balls into oil/butter, since they were pretty oil covered already. The recipe does say "This one is a slow riser, so don't despair," so I was guardedly optimistic.

The outcome was pretty good, but interestingly, the dough wasn't as easy to pull apart as the time before. I guess the oil didn't separate the mini-balls like I thought it would.

Thanksgiving day, I tried lengthening the second rise and shortening the third one. (This happened to work out well, since the bastard turkey cooked faster than expected.)

All told, the time to make the bread was just short of 3 hours. Add an hour of bread machine warming (and the uncertainty of turkey cooking), and I could have started the rolls 4 hours before dinner. As it turns out, we had enough fridge space that I was able to do the first rise in the fridge, so I started the bread even earlier.

Using less oil helped the dough be a little easier to pull apart, but it still wasn't as easy as the first time. Perhaps a coating of flour or something else might make the dough-balls easier to pull apart. Ideas, anyone?

Goodbye old Zojirushi, hello new Zojirushi

I have a new bread machine! The old one was great the few times that it worked, but its single paddle soon stopped stirring at all. As I blogged before, the result was layered flour bricks like these:

  

If I stirred everything ahead of time, I could still use the machine to bake, which came in handy when my oven broke and I wanted to cook cornbread.

Thanks to the few times the old machine did work, I decided to buy myself a brand new Zojirushi.

Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso (BB-PAC20)

I considered getting a machine that had an automatic dispensing tray for raisins or nuts, but that tray wasn't very big, and the machine just didn't sound as good.

The new machine has a few improvements over the old one, such one:

• 2 mixing paddles instead of 1
• Bigger capacity
• Horizontal loaf rather than vertical

Here's what the new bread machine is producing:

Whole-wheat walnut bread

Whole-wheat and white, cooked with a timer

Pumpernickel, cooked with a timer

By the way, the pumpernickel is delicious. (Who knew that the dark color comes from coffee and cocoa? Crazy!) I used the Zojirushi recipe but reduced the salt to a pinch and the yeast to just over a teaspoon. I made similar adjustments to the other Zojirushi recipes.

The latest bread I tried was a pull-apart honey whole-wheat, using a recipe from Hensberger's Bread Machine Cookbook and techniques from the Zojirushi cookbook's weird, "home made variations" recipe for "party bread". This was a trial run for Thanksgiving dinner rolls. I want to cook them in the bread machine, if possible, so they'll be ultra-fresh and we won't have to use the oven for anything but turkey. Plus, you know, it'll be cool.

The remains of the honey whole-wheat

First, let me say that the bread was tasty. I don't know how well it'll keep, but since it's mostly gone, who cares. I made the 1-1/2 pound loaf recipe, reducing the salt to 1/2 teaspoon and yeast to 2 teaspoons.

Second, although the Zojirushi recipe is very unclear and incomplete, it worked better than I expected. The loaf, created from 15 mini-balls of dough, was fairly easy to pull apart, despite having no flour or cornmeal or oil/butter to keep the mini-balls from sticking to each other. I guess the mini-balls' little private rising time helped.

Third, although the Zo recipe calls for embedding sausage, chocolate, or cream cheese in each piece, I had nothing savory to put in them. I did, however, put a TJ's speculoos chocolate cup in one, just to see what would happen.  It was a bit messy, melting into a spreading puddle that my husband and I gleefully chased down. Perhaps chocolate chips might work better, since they supposedly don't melt as well. However, for dinner rolls I'd stick with savory fillings, if any.

By the way, the Hensberger book is one of several that my friend Shams recently gave to me. Thanks, Shams!