Hello everyone,
Shepherd’s Bread, from Beth Hensperger’s book Bread for all Seasons, is the May challenge for the Bread Baking Babes baking group.
Thank you to Karen of Bake My Day for hosting the challenge - this bread caught my interest, seeing the beauty of
Karen's loaves and having enjoyed reading Ms. Hensperger’s book :^)
What is traditional bread anyway? The more I read, the murkier this question becomes. Steamed golden crusts, curling gringe, high protein flours mixed into sloppy doughs and possibly even salt are a pretty new phenomena in the history of bread – yet they are marketed as ‘traditional’. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to create ‘traditional bread’ but I do like to understand where we came from to get were we are going. I guess I don’t want to get caught up in trends. Saying this however, I do have a particular bent towards French bread.
This weekend, I departed from my cheese bread experiments to try again a wonderful tasting bread from Hamelman. The Whole Wheat Multi-grain is a sourdough with about 50% whole wheat, a taste of honey and the baker’s choice of other grains and seeds. Some day I want to try it with cracked wheat, but I couldn’t find any.
I was inspired to try adding some balsamic vinegar into one of my breads after reading about Karen Hanseata's Wild Rice bread on the Fresh Loaf this past week. I have some cherry balsamic that I love using so I was curious to see if it would have any affect on the taste of my bread.
There are a few cookbooks that I have on my shelf that I find myself coming back to time and time again. The last few days, I've enjoyed browsing and re-reading sections in three such books, namely Jane Grigson's classic «Charcuterie and French pork cookery» and Fergus Henderson's more recent cult classics «Nose to tail eating» and «Beyond nose to tail».
A real Brown Plate Special with 2 different tamals, chipoltle sauce, red curry mac & cheese, brown and black re-fried beans, corn tortilla chips, Baja grilled chicken and a touch of guacamole. Plus this weeks amber ale and our take on Hanseata's Wild Rice brown bread.
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Made this today in my new Cajun dutch oven
120 g 100% hydration starter (fed night before)
My first intention was to make some hamburger and hot dog buns, but as usual I couldn't resist the temptation to be more creative. These rolls really didn't turn out ideal for its original purpose, but they do taste real good none the less.
Hanseata’s wild rice bread looked so enticing we had to move it up to the top of the bake list. To her recipe, which hardly needed any changes at all if one of us was sane and not barking, we used high alcohol ice beer for most of the water and upped the hydration about 10 %. We didn’t use all beer for the liquid because it had to pass quality control to make sure it was not spoiled in some way. It actually took two or three tastings just to make sure, but it finally passed.
