The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

shaving my bread

reddragon's picture
reddragon

shaving my bread

My newly-developed totally immature habit. Shaving my bread.

Oh OK, from the beginning. I'm thinking about not baking bread anymore, because I'm not good at controlling how much of it I eat when I have a beautiful sourdough loaf in front of me. But I thought another solution would be to bake bread that I'm not crazy about, even if it's pretty good. That would be rye bread. (Apologies to rye lovers - just not part of my culture.) Besides, I had all this rye flour at home, and white whole wheat flour (which I still don't understand). I couldn't bring myself to throw them away, so I thought I'd bake with them and see what happens.

I used these two flours with some bread flour (lost my notes, don't remember proportions - but you wouldn't really want to duplicate this bread anyway), sourdough starter, and a soaker consisting of steel-cut oats and flax seeds. Of course, topped with sesame seeds before baking.


Looks pretty good, eh? The taste is nothing extraordinary, which I expected, and the mouthfeel is not great. But the crust is beautiful.

Here comes the really immature part. I found myself nibbling at the crust, 'cause toasted sesame seeds are always awesome. And I couldn't stop. But I didn't want to eat the bread, 'cause that wasn't as great. So I kept picking at the crust. It was not an efficient method. I took my bread knife and sliced off the crust very thinly all around. Now I had nothing but goodness. The loaf ended up looking like this:


It's completely acceptable if you toast the slices. Plus this way, I don't eat a lot of bread. I think it's a great solution, but I don't know if I can continue to bake bread which I'm not crazy about. We'll see.

EvaB's picture
EvaB

the big loaf in half and freezing half, then again, get soem will power. I never have that problem as I rarely eat bread, but then again, that's me, I do know people my brother for one who will sit and eat a whole loaf just because its there and tastes good!

Doc Tracy's picture
Doc Tracy

My mom and i always joke that you can have all the little nibbles and tastes that you want, just so long as you don't take a slice or a serving of something. Those little tastes don't count towards your calories!
Just an inside, family joke. Our pies, cakes, breads and dinners always have little nibbles out of them because we lack will power.