Two British beer breads

I've made this spent grain recipe many times before, but I'm still tweaking it. This week, I tried measuring the flour by weight instead of by volume. I also used ordinary Trader Joe's honey and olive oil, instead of going fancy (for the honey) or tasteless (for the oil). Finally, I used the whole wheat cycle on the bread machine, instead of the normal cycle.

British porter

The spent grain for the first loaf was very dark, from a British porter kit from Oak Barrel Winecraft that included half Black Patent and have Crystal 77°L. The spent grain was probably in smaller pieces than before, since we used our own mill to crack it. (This is a new attachment to our stand mixer, and we used the coarsest setting... but that still seems to produce too much powder for beer. The product is, however, great for bread.)

Dark spent grain

As before, I put the following into the pan first:

• 1 scant cup water
• 3/4 cup packed spent grain
• 2 T TJ's clover honey
• 2 T TJ's olive oil
• 3/4 t fine sea salt (also TJ's)

Spent grain, salt, and liquids went into the pan first

Then I added the flour, topped by the yeast:

• 270 g bread flour (my approximation of 2-1/4 c)
• 90 g whole wheat flour (approximately 3/4 c)
• 1 t bread machine yeast

This was my favorite iteration of the spent grain bread recipe. When I lifted the lid to check on it during a rise, it smelled rich and alcoholic—that yeast must have loved these grains.

Lopsided but tasty

The resulting bread was a bit lopsided, as it often is, but had a great, almost chocolate taste that worked wonderfully with peanut butter and jelly. It tasted almost like a pumpernickel bread, without the seeds.

North English brown ale

The next loaf of bread used the same recipe, but with a few differences:

• I used frozen spent grain from the mid-December brewing of North English brown ale.
• I thawed the grain in a full cup of water in the microwave (1 minute high, 2 minutes half power).
• The flour mix was slightly different. Instead of 270 g bread flour (King Arthur) and 90 g whole wheat flour, I used:
• 45 g King Arthur bread flour (all I had)
• enough King Arthur French-style flour to bring it up to 272 g
• 88 g whole wheat flour
• I used a scant teaspoon of yeast, instead of a whole teaspoon.

The French-style flour looks less white than the bread flour, and it has 2g of dietary fiber per 30 g—twice as much fiber as the normal bread flour. The website says has 11.5% protein content and is a "medium-protein, high-ash flour.... The higher ash count indicates that the flour is higher in minerals (since it's milled closer to the bran), which gives this flour a deeper flavor than all-purpose." Its ingredient list has just two items:

• hard white wheat flour
• malted barley flour

The bread flour was unbleached enriched hard spring wheat flour, which contains wheat flour, malted barley flour, and some vitamins. It has 1 g of dietary fiber per 30 g and, according to the website, 12.7% protein content. It also warns that bread flour is more absorbent than other flour, so I was a little worried that the bread would be gloppy.

I used the basic whole wheat delay cycle on the bread machine, which delayed the start time for 5.5 hours. The next morning, I woke up to a fantastic scent.

Brown ale bread

The bread was beautiful and tasty. It's much less dark than the previous bread, and perhaps even the previous incarnation of brown ale bread, but it had great texture and flavor.

Went well with salad

Next time I want to try the French flour with the porter grains, using a full cup of water, to see how much of the difference between versions of the brown ale bread is attributable to the flour.

Swedish rye and Kölsch spent grain bread

For the first time in many months, I made Hensperger's Swedish rye bread (p. 136). I also made a spent grain bread, using still warm grains and some barley syrup left over from my husband's latest brew.

I made the following adjustments to the Swedish rye recipe:

• Reduced salt to less than 3/4 teaspoon (maybe 1/2 teaspoon; I didn't measure precisely).
• Reduced yeast to a scant 1.5 teaspoons.
• Reduced gluten to 1 T (mostly because I couldn't be bothered to find a clean teaspoon measure).
• Used organic safflower oil and TJ's multi-floral and clover honey (northern U.S.).

As I have been doing lately, I put the oil, honey, and salt in with the water. I didn't want to stay up until 2:30 a.m. for this bread to cook, so I put it on a delay timer for 9 a.m.

I denuded a huge orange for this bread.

The bread smelled great the next morning. It looked pretty good, too, if a little lumpy.

Rorschach test: What does this bread look like?

Most importantly, the Swedish rye bread smelled and tasted really good. We didn't quite finish it, but we sawed quite a bit of it away before abandoning it.

Next, I baked the same spent grain recipe I've been making for a while, but with leftovers from brewing Kölsch ale. I even scraped the malt syrup jar so I could use liquid malt extract instead of honey. Here are the details:

• Instead of 2T honey, I used 2T barley syrup (which was half Pilsen and half Munich).
• The spent grain (3/4 cup) was half white wheat malt and half crystal 10°L.
• The 2T of oil was safflower (organic), instead of olive, because I wanted to taste the grain and barley.
• As before, the first things into the bread pan were the spent grain, oil, syrup, salt (3/4 t), and a scant cup of water.
• As before, I used 2-1/4 c bread flour, 3/4 c whole wheat flour, and 1t bread machine yeast.
• The rising bread was way over on one paddle's side, so I picked it up early and redistributed it.

Spent grain going into the bread pan

The bread came out looking pretty good.

Lighter than the other breads, as you'd expect given the grains

The taste of the bread was good, but I wasn't crazy about the texture. The bread was soft, like a buttermilk or potato bread. That didn't bother my husband, who ate a bunch of it the night it was baked.

I didn't notice the pyramidal shape of this loaf right away,
so I suspect it got squeezed at the top when it was first sliced.

If I can find any malt syrup, I might make this bread again, doing everything the same except changing the crust control to dark.

Spent grain bread, sourdough onion rolls, cornbread, bread to go, and starting a starter

This past week, I made spent grain bread successfully, a relief after last time's weirdly low loaf. I also cooked a couple of great cornbreads, made sourdough onion buns again, brought bread on a family trip, and started making a starter.

Starter

Why do I need a third starter? I don't, so I converted my white starter (50-50, by volume). But why convert it? I'm beta testing an app, Bread Boss, which guides you through a variety of sourdough bread recipes. Now's the perfect time to test, since I'm staycationing the two final weeks of the year.

Spent grain bread

I used the same ingredients for my spent grain bread as last time (and almost the same as the time before). The only differences were in the prep:

• I put in the salt, olive oil, and honey first, with the water and spent grain.
• The spent grain was frozen, so I nuked it with the water until it was warm (but not as hot as last time).
• I took out the bread as soon as it was done.
• I didn't use the delay timer.

This loaf wasn't as tall as the first one, but it had great taste and texture. It was a bit lopsided, which is common when baking in the bread machine, but hadn't happened the two times before.

The outside

This recipe, especially with the spent grain from North English brown ale, is a winner.

The inside

Cornbreads

I used The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook recipe for Southern Skillet Bread (p. 496), and the results were so good I made the cornbread again just a few days later. Here's what was different from the recipe:

• Instead of 3/4 cup buttermilk, use 3T buttermilk powder and 3/4 cup water.
• Instead of bacon drippings, use 2t roasted peanut oil and 2t vegetable oil (safflower, I think).
• The usual sodium reduction measures:
• No salt
• Sodium free baking powder and baking soda

I'd used all peanut oil before, which I rather liked, but it seemed to taste too peanutty for our guests. Half the amount seemed perfect.

I used Quaker Oats yellow cornmeal, which worked just fine. Before I'd used Bob's Red Mill medium grind cornmeal, which I liked, but sometimes it had hard bits of grain that would hurt my teeth. If I happen to find Bob's fine grind, I'll try that.

This bread tasted fine the next day, but it had lost its wonderful crunch. Also, it's best warm.

Sourdough onion rolls

I've made these before, with success, but it's been a long time since I made any sourdough bread, so it felt new.

We had only one, smallish onion, so I chopped it, cooked it, and put all of it (2/3-3/4 cup) into the dough. I added it during the final stretch-and-fold, which turned into a dough mangling session.

I wanted to bake the rolls the next day, so I immediately put the dough in the refrigerator.

Dough, the next morning

The next day I took it out, let it warm up (partly in the oven on proof mode), and divided it into 8 parts. I shaped 6 buns and left the other 2 until later.

6 buns ready to rise

I cooked a little more onion and put it on top of a couple of buns, but I think the bread without the onion topping was just as good.

The buns at the bottom left have additional onion on top.
These buns probably would higher if my niece didn't pat them.

I cooked the buns at 450 degrees for 20 minutes with a cover over the pan, and then about 15 more minutes uncovered.

After cooking

These buns are amazing within the first hour or two out of the oven, when the onions are warm and the crust is still crunchy. After a few hours, they're probably best toasted, to bring out the onion flavor and make the crust crisper.

The next day I took the remaining two roll portions and shaped them into balls. After letting them rise a bit, I cooked them at 475, covered, for 15 minutes, and then uncovered for about 15 more minutes.

Mini boule

Bread to go

So I'd have food to eat with 10 of my closest family members, I baked a couple of loaves of bread: Bohemian black bread (BBB) and spent grain bread.

The BBB was much better looking than last time, thanks to using black cocoa.

Dark and out of focus, just the way I like it

The spent grain bread was the same recipe I made the last couple of times. I checked the dough a few minutes into its first rise and noticed that it was very soft and was almost non-existent on the left side of the bread pan. I picked the dough up, as best as I could, and put it back down in a more symmetric shape.

It worked! The loaf was high and symmetric.

Spent grain bread

For future reference, here's the ingredient list, in pan-addition order:

• Scant 1 cup water, mixed (and, if the grain is cold or tough, microwaved 2 minutes) with 3/4 cup spent grain, firmly packed
• 2 T olive oil
• 2 T honey
• 3/4 t salt
• 2-1/4 c bread flour
• 3/4 c whole wheat flour
• 1 t bread machine yeast

It's best to check the dough's shape when it begins rising, so you can fix the shaping (making it symmetric) if necessary.

North English brown ale bread

My husband was itching to brew a new batch of beer, using a kit we'd recently bought from Beer and Wine Makers of America, down in San Jose. It didn't hurt that his Christmas gift had arrived and was obviously the brewing hardware he'd asked for. Yes, Nathan gets to open Christmas presents early. Way early.

The kit was for North English Brown Ale, and the spent grain smelled delicious—dark without the bitter overtones of his last beer, Celebration Ale. He mentioned that the brewing process was different from the one he was used to, and that not all of the grain got soaked. More on that later.

I was eager to make bread with the spent grain, but I decided to make a smaller loaf. I basically multiplied all the ingredients of the recipe I like (Snappy Service Cafe's Homebrewed to Home Baked: Spent Grain Bread) by 3/4 to 2/3, using Hensperger's similar recipe (whole grain daily bread, p. 181) as a guide. The ingredient list ended up being:

• Scant 1 cup water
• 3/4 cup spent grain, firmly packed
• 2 T canola oil
• 2 T honey
• 2-1/4 c bread flour
• 3/4 c whole wheat flour
• 3/4 t salt
• 1 t bread machine yeast

The Hensperger recipe, besides using buttermilk instead of water and having slightly different proportions, also calls for a bit of rolled oats and gluten. But I stayed with the Snappy recipe's ingredient list.

I used a new honey this time, from Bay Area Bee Company.

Mmmm... This is a great smelling honey.

Another change I made was using the delay timer (on basic cycle, regular crust). I set it to finish at 6:30 a.m., before my alarm goes off but after I sometimes wake up anyway. If I got it out right away, it'd have time to cool before I had to leave to catch the bus.

The next morning I woke up (a little early) to the delicious scent of baked brown bread. I took the loaf out of the bread machine and set it out to cool. It was tall and light for its size, with a nice, medium brown color—darker than the hefeweizen bread, but lighter than the celebration bread.

English brown ale bread, fresh out of the bread machine

An hour later I had to leave, and since the bread was almost cool, I felt free to cut a slice off. This is some tasty bread! Its only fault, as far as I'm concerned, is that some of the grain was a little hard on the teeth. This might be due to my husband's problem in getting all the grain wet and cooked.

First slice

I'll make this recipe again in these proportions. I have plenty of leftover grain from this batch of beer, and I might try cooking it a bit in the bread water (perhaps in the microwave) before putting it in the bread machine.

Two semolina breads

We needed some white bread to use for Thanksgiving stuffing, so I made a Hensperger recipe that features a bit of semolina: pane italiano (p. 208).

Tragically, the stuffing recipe used the whole loaf. Still craving semolina bread, I made a similar (but not as tasty) recipe a couple of days later: semolina country bread (p. 202). I soon tried the first loaf again, but it turned out to be quite different from the first time.

Pane italiano numero uno

I made the 1.5 pound loaf with no ingredient changes except for the usual halving of yeast and salt. I baked it on the normal cycle, not noticing that the recipe called for extra kneading, accomplished using either the French bread cycle or by resetting the machine to double the kneading time. The recipe calls for a dark crust, but I specified a normal crust, figuring that stuffing bread needn't be overbaked.

I should've made the 2 pound loaf so we could've had some left over! The little bits that stuck to the paddles were delicious and crunchy—semolina's a great ingredient. The crust had some big bubbles for some reason. I couldn't resist poking one, and it shattered.

No picture, unfortunately. But the stuffing was really good.

Pane italiano numero due

When I made the bread again, I still used the 1.5# recipe, but I measured by weight instead of by volume. That was probably a mistake, as the recipe specifies only volume, and I think that the flour bag's weight/volume ratio was too high, resulting in more flour than when I measured by volume.

Otherwise, I followed the recipe instructions more precisely than before. I specified a dark crust and reset the machine after kneading was finished, so it could knead again. I checked the consistency when I reset the machine; it seemed dry, so I added some water. Then, unfortunately, I had to go to bed, so I didn't get to see the bread until the next morning. 

The loaf was much taller than before—too tall to fit into the breadbox unless I took out the cutting board. It wasn't noticeably darker than before, and it wasn't crisp at all by the time I saw it.

A very tall loaf

We liked it OK, but it's just kind of a semi-interesting white bread at this point. I have a feeling that this bread is much better if you eat it while it's warm.

If time allows, I prefer the Italian semolina bread recipe (p. 252). I might make pane italiano again, but only for stuffing bread or if I plan to eat it right after it finishes. And I'll measure by volume.

One good thing about pane italiano is that you can make it using a delay timer. I'd have to create a homemade course to be able to do the extra kneading without intervention. (My machine doesn't have a French bread setting, which would make the extra kneading happen automatically.)

Semolina country bread (pane di semola)

This bread has a higher proportion of semolina than the first, with no sugar or potato flakes. It also has sesame seeds, which make it a little more interesting. But not much more.

Cooked on dark, this bread doesn't look very dark
(the side wasn't as dark as this picture makes it seem)

This bread was fine, but I probably won't make it again.

Cornmeal honey bread

Last night I decided to wake up to some bread, so I put the ingredients for Hensperger's cornmeal honey bread (p. 148) into the Zojirushi and set it to be finished this morning.

Cornmeal honey bread

What a great smell to wake up to!

This isn't a cornbread. Instead, it's a soft white bread with buttermilk (powder), honey, butter, and a small amount of cornmeal. Although I love the cornmeal texture, Bob's medium-grind cornmeal always manages to lodge in my one sensitive tooth. Ouch.

The crumb

The bread looked a little crestfallen and uneven, like many of my bread machine breads (probably because I reduce the salt and yeast). That didn't bother me.

A bit of a dip in the middle

Notes on recipe ingredients/adjustments:

• Halved the salt to 0.5 teaspoon.
• Halved the yeast.
• Used dark, flavorful honey.

One thing I wondered was why it added so much gluten. I can see adding gluten to a whole wheat recipe, but this has no whole wheat at all, and only 10% of the flour by volume is cornmeal. (The rest is bread flour, which has plenty of its own gluten.) I don't object to gluten. But additional gluten in a white bread just seems questionable.

Cherry-chocolate whiskey ice cream and a bunch of breads

Last week was busy, due to choral concerts, so I never managed to blog about the ice cream and breads I made two weekends ago. I tried making baguettes for the first time, to meh results. I also made a white whole wheat bread and a yeasted cornbread; both worked out well.

This weekend I made my first bread with instant potatoes (but mostly with whole wheat flour): Irish potato brown bread. It also was a winner, but it didn't stay fresh for long, so soon afterward I baked a loaf of Swedish rye.

More excitingly, I unvented a new ice cream flavor: cherry-chocolate whiskey. It's like Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia, but with a better recipe and added rye. I also made a yummy chocolate peanut butter ice cream, with peanut butter chunks.

Ice cream

I started out wanting to make a fruit ice cream, to go along with a peanut butter chocolate ice cream I was already planning to make. Strawberries looked great, but the birthday boy wanted cherries, so I figured I'd make Ben & Jerry's recipe for Cherry Garcia ice cream.

This was the first time I'd tried Ben & Jerry's recipe book, and although it was good for inspiration, it seemed lacking in implementation. It called for shaved Hershey's dark chocolate, when I expected chunks of better chocolate. It didn't give any hint as to how to avoid having the cherries freeze solid. And it used whole eggs (not egg yolks) and didn't cook them—an interesting approach, but one I'm leery of. It's not even close to their own recipe, I suspect. So I decided to adapt a recipe from The Perfect Scoop.

Since the occasion was an adult's birthday where whiskey would be consumed, I got the idea of adding some sort of booze to the chocolate-cherry ice cream. My daughter informed me that bourbon and cherries go together, and I found some Bulleit in the cupboard. It was rye, not bourbon, but I figured it'd work.

Cherries and whiskey go together

I pitted maybe half a pound of cherries, cut them in half, poured rye over them, and put them (covered) in the fridge.

Then I got some good dark chocolate disks (from Berkeley Bowl), chopped them, and refrigerated them, too.

I made the rum-raisin ice cream base from The Perfect Scoop, minus the salt, and refrigerated it.

The next day, I churned the ice cream, substituting the cherry-infused rye for the rum. When it seemed to be close to done, I added the cherries (which I'd chopped a bit more because they were very alcoholic) and chocolate. The alcohol in the cherries seemed to unfreeze the ice cream, so I had to churn it another 10 minutes or so.

If you like whiskey and boozy ice cream, this is delicious! The cherries were perhaps overly boozy; I might try soaking them less next time. And there will be a next time.

An added bonus was that the alcohol made this ice cream stay scoopable, even after a couple of days in the freezer.

The peanut butter chocolate ice cream, on the other hand, did not stay scoopable, but it was delicious. I added little peanut butter disks to it. I might do that again, but I'd make them much smaller.

The only other difference from before was that I made the ice cream using Skippy "natural peanut butter spread" (no stirring needed) instead of TJ's unsalted peanut butter. I don't know if the difference was noticeable, but I tried the Skippy because David Lebovitz recommends against peanut butters that separate.

Bread

I tried to make baguettes, but they were disappointing—they didn't rise well. Apparently, they tasted good, though. I used the usual Josey Baker sourdough recipe, mixing the dough at 4 pm or so, and "kneading" it at 4:50, 5:15, 5:40, and 6:20. I expected the dough to be risen at 8:20, since it was warm, but by 7:30 it looked dangerously big, so I put it in the fridge.

The next day at 2 pm I took it out, and divided the 820 g of dough into 3 parts that I pre-shaped. At 2:15 I shaped it into baguettes, which I supported using rolled-up placements that were covered with parchment paper. I covered the baguettes with plastic. I scored 2 of the loaves and tried cutting the third into an epi, but my scissors were too short to do that well. Still, the epi disappeared first. People like bread that they can grab a chunk of.

I used rolled-up placemats to support the rising baguettes

The white whole wheat bread was a Hensperger bread machine recipe (p. 127). I might have used a delay timer. I used light sesame oil, which is currently my favorite oil for baking. The maple syrup was half grade A and half grade B, because that's what I had. I reduced the salt and yeast by one half. I don't remember much about the bread, except that I liked it, and it didn't seem very different from a regular whole wheat bread.

The yeasted cornbread was a Josey Baker recipe (p. 208). I used whole wheat pastry flour instead of Kamut flour, and sodium-free baking powder and soda. I don't recall whether I added any of the salt the recipe called for. People liked it, but I think I like regular cornbread better.

Yeasted cornbread

I'd been wanting to make a bread with instant potatoes, so I made Irish potato brown bread (Hensperger p. 117). It was nice but delicate, and it turned stale quickly. Like all breads with potato flakes, it can't be made using the delay timer.

Sunday's Irish potato brown bread was great for French toast Wednesday night

Tuesday night I set up some Swedish rye to be baked by 7 a.m. Wednesday. With fennel, honey, and citrus zest, that bread is a heavenly smell to wake up to!

Swedish rye, baked on the delay timer

The recipe (Hensperger p. 136) calls for orange zest, but we were low on that, so I used mostly lemon zest. This bread is delicious, whether on its own, in French toast, or as the basis for a tuna sandwich.

Swedish rye, the inside

Cornbread & sprouted whole wheat bread

Yesterday I made two tasty breads:

• Bread Machine Sprouted Grain Bread, from the One Degree organic foods website
• Company Corn Bread, from p. 305 of the Better Homes and Gardens New Baking Book (which was new in 1998)

I wanted to make a sandwich bread, but I couldn't use my normal recipes because I'm almost out of regular bread flour. (Most of the sandwich bread recipes I like are about 50% whole grain.) I'd had some sprouted wheat flour for a while and not known what to do with it, so I searched the web for recipes that use 100% sprouted wheat flour. Of three recipes that looked reasonable, this was the only one with reviews, and the reviews were positive.

I made the following changes to the One Degree recipe:

• 1 t salt (instead of 1.5 t)
• 1.5 t yeast (instead of 2.5 t; next time I might try 1 t)
• raw cane sugar (turbinado) instead of coconut palm sugar

When I opened the flour bag, I realized that the flour smelled a little stale. Sure enough, it was 3 months past its "best by" date. Oops.

Best by 3 months ago

I went ahead anyway. We needed bread!

I set up the bread to cook on a delay. It was too early to set it up for the next morning, so instead I timed it to be done by an hour before the latest time I expected we'd be home. We ended up coming home early, and the bread hadn't even begun to cook. I'd forgotten to reset the bread machine clock when time sprang forward the week before. I was too tired to wait for the bread, so the cooked bread stayed in the machine for hours. Oops.

Despite the stale flour and extended time sweating in the bread machine, this was still a tasty loaf of bread. It had a bit of a flying roof, but mostly the texture was very nice. The recipe had said to set the crust to light, but I didn't, and I'm glad.

The worst of the flying roof

On to the cornbread. It's a simple, quick recipe that I'd made before and was sure would work. I made the following adjustments:

• no salt instead of 3/4 t
• TJ's roasted hazelnut oil instead of plain cooking oil
• sodium-free baking powder (Hain's Featherweight)

Delicious. This stuff is great warm or cold, and nobody missed the salt. The recipe has quite a bit of fat (1 T butter in the skillet plus 1/4 cup oil in the recipe). The fat no doubt helps the flavor, and the pan required no cleanup afterward.

I'd used roasted peanut oil the previous time I made this cornbread. I loved the taste (roasted peanuts, yum!), but some of our guests didn't seem so enthralled by it. The hazelnut oil is more subtle, and it's been great in every bread I've used it in. (Walnut oil, on the other hand, didn't make a good tasting bread.)

The cornbread cooks in a 10-inch cast-iron skillet in a 400-degree oven. The texture is great, but the bread could be thicker. Next time I might try an 8-inch skillet. The recipe suggests a 9-inch round baking pan as a substitute, but I love using cast iron to cook.

The cornbread in the skillet 

Nine-grain honey bread: meh

Saturday I made nine-grain honey bread (Hensperger p. 190), which is a simple bread with some honey and butter. About half the solid part is whole grain flour or soaked nine-grain cereal.

I set up the bread before going out for a few hours, and it was ready in time for dinner. The bread was a little bitter tasting at first but good once you got used to it. A thick slice of bread and a slice of swiss cheese... that was dinner, and it wasn't bad.

Nine-grain honey bread

I made the smaller size loaf (1.5 pounds), reducing the salt to 3/4 t and bread machine yeast to 2 t. I used the Basic setting (not Whole Wheat), with a Dark crust and the delay timer. If I make it again, I'll reduce the yeast to 1.5 t, since the top of the loaf collapsed a bit. But I'm not sure I'll make it again.

The top of the loaf collapsed a bit.

Swedish rye and Turkish flatbread

This weekend I had 50-50 success with two new breads: a sweetish Swedish rye and a Turkish flatbread that I'd hoped to have with shawarma.

Swedish rye

Swedish rye 

This bread (Hensperger p. 136) has honey, fennel seeds, and orange zest for flavor. The only change I made to the recipe was reducing the salt and yeast by 40%. (The salt went from 1-1/4 teaspoons to 3/4, and the yeast from 2-1/2 teaspoons to 1-1/2.)

Before I went out Saturday evening, I set up the Swedish rye for a delayed bake ending at midnight. I was a little sad about not having warm, crusty bread in the morning, but I thought that letting the bread rest overnight might be good, since fennel seed can be sharp at first. As it turned out, the bread's crust stayed crisp longer than usual, so I got to have cool and crusty bread in the morning.

This bread has a very nice, slightly sweet flavor. My picky nephew didn't "like" it, but he didn't refuse to eat it, either. I count that as a victory. My husband also liked it very much. It might just join our list of staple recipes.

Update: This bread lasted a whole week, without going noticeably stale. A week from Saturday, I had the last of it in a tunafish sandwich.

Now on to the failure.

Turkish flatbread

The flatbread attempt came about because of an invitation to a friend's house for homemade shawarma and kefta. (He and his wife always make me a smaller, low-sodium version of whatever they're cooking, proof that they love me!) He was going to serve the meats with pita bread, which I didn't plan to eat, partly because I assumed the pita would have a tons of sodium (it's not too bad, actually) but mostly because I'm used to shawarma with flatbread. So I figured I'd make a low-sodium flatbread.

I found a recipe and video by Ana Sortun that looked perfect. The recipe is for yufka, a Turkish flatbread, and the video shows how to make it and the filling for shawarma. The recipe seems detailed enough, but the video has lots more details—like shaping the dough into a flat circle with your fingers before rolling it out—that make it worth watching. The ingredients are very basic—oil, water, flour, salt—and we reduced the salt by half or so.

I had spent most of the day at a choral rehearsal (concerts next weekend!), so my husband made the dough in the morning while I was out. He just followed the recipe directions, not bothering with the video. The dough seemed good after resting for 4 hours.

Then I took over, and things went south. I rolled out 6 misshapen circles of dough, managed to cook a couple of them, and then couldn't separate the rest of the dough from the wax paper. (The recipe recommended parchment paper, but I don't know if that would've been any better.) The dough seemed way too thin and prone to break, and after I pulled it off the paper, it was much bigger than the 9" circle they recommended.

Lots of dough and waxed paper in our compost bag

The directions for cooking seemed fine, but because the dough was so thin and doubled in spots (being too big for the pan), the bread ended up mostly crisp instead of soft. The crisp parts were fine for scooping up hummus (yes, my friend made me a batch of low-salt hummus!), but I threw away most of the bread. Oh well.

Out of 6 tries, 2 semi-succeeded; I ended up having the shawarma with rice instead

So how'd I screw up so badly? First, I didn't watch the video before shaping the dough, so I just kind of rolled the little dough balls between my palms. If I'd watched the video, I would've folded the edges of each piece into its center, before rolling it into a sphere and covering it with flour. So the shaping technique was suspect, but more importantly the dough didn't have enough flour on it.

I did look at the video before rolling out the dough, but I think it misled me when it said to roll the dough as thin as humanly possible. The dough probably wouldn't have torn if it wasn't so thin.

Next time we try this, I'll let my husband make the dough again, since he kneaded it so nicely (and I dislike kneading). I might pre-shape the dough, but I'll try to get him to roll it out, since he's used to wielding a rolling pin. (He's a great pie maker.) Then, as soon as each bread is rolled out, I'll cook it.

Last weekend's bread

Last weekend, facing the loss of the Reinhart and Josey Baker books, I reacted in a few ways:

• Making another recipe from JB (dark mountain rye, definitely not one I'd make again)
• Ordering the JB book, which is worth the price even if the sesame seed bread recipe is the only great one (although I suspect it has more gems)
• Converting Andrew's starter from a Reinhart starter into a Josey Baker starter (into two batches of starter, actually—one to be stored at room temperature and one to be refrigerated, to see which I prefer)

I also fed Lee's starter and made a Hensperger recipe to provide bread for the weekend, since the JB bread wouldn't be ready to eat until Monday. (Although the pre-baking time is less than for many of JB's recipes, you're supposed to wait 24 hours before eating the baked bread.)

Feeding Lee's starter turned out to be more of a process than I expected. I started late Friday night by mixing the starter with 1 cup each flour & water. After letting it sit overnight it still didn't seem to be very active, so I added a heaping tablespoon of plain yogurt. It still didn't take off (maybe not enough yogurt?), so I added some sugar. That did the trick. Within an hour the starter was frothy and sour. (During feeding time, I mostly kept the starter on the counter at 65-72 degrees; at other times it was in the oven, sometimes on proof mode.)

On to the JB recipe: dark mountain rye. Saturday I took one teaspoon of Andrew's original starter and made a pre-ferment for the bread. Sunday, I mixed the bread, let it rise twice, and baked it. Monday night I took a bite... and wished I hadn't. Maybe I don't like 100% rye breads or maybe it was the seed mix, but it smelled/tasted a bit like Alpo to me. Eau de canned dog food. Yuck. Composted.

One bite was all it took... to realize I hate this bread

Saturday I also made a loaf of toasted sesame whole wheat bread (Hensperger p. 113) in the bread maker. I made the following adjustments: toasted walnut oil instead of sesame oil; reduced the salt to under 1 t; reduced the yeast to 1-1/2 t. I used the dark, flavorful Norcal honey.

Toasted sesame whole wheat bread

Unfortunately, the bread didn't taste very good by itself, although it did have a nice texture and was fine as a sandwich bread. I suspect walnut oil was a bad choice. I might try it again with another oil, since it would be very handy to have a flavorful bread that can be made on the delay timer. I might also increase the amount of sesame seeds; I couldn't see any inside the loaf.

I see no sesame seeds

Sometime that weekend I also made two batches of JB sourdough starter from Andrew's starter. One batch (started from Andrew's original) is in the fridge, and the other (started from a starter I created from Andrew's original) is in the kitchen. I'm curious as to which one I'll like best, both in terms of taste/behavior and in terms of the work to maintain it. You have to refresh the room-temperature starter every 2 days, while the fridge one will last "a few weeks". JB has you take the fridge starter out "a few days" before using it, so the fridge is most useful if you don't expect to bake sourdough 2/week, or you want to avoid wasting flour.

So far I've been good about refreshing the room-temperature starter every couple of days, but we'll see if that lasts.

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.