Time for some holiday breads and I've just tried my hand at Norway's entry to the Best Christmas Bread competition. And even though it doesn't blow you away with richness like panettone nor is as indulgent as Stollen, I must say it will be my favourite for Christmas breakfast. Toasted and buttered!
Here I am posting something what was going on at the end of August this year. Unfortunately I had not enough time to prepare this post earlier, so better late than never.
My wife found some high extraction sprouted rye and high extraction sprouted red and white wheat hanging around somewhere. I knew it was sprouted because it said it was on the label on the lids. I’m guessing it was ground up about month ago…… so you could say it was properly aged, the term millers use to make people think they are getting their flour at the peak of freshness when it really just hiding their 30 day supply chain timeline to get it to you.
Bernard Clayton Jr's The Breads of France, Daniel Leader's Local Breads, and Joe Ortiz' The Village Baker each offer formulas, recipes, and lore on European bread. The authors, all from the USA, published their books between 1978 and 2007 after travels in France, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia (as it was then), and Poland. In recent weeks I've been concentrating on French breads from these books, specifically pain campagne and pain de seigle.
Probably everybody who was reading my recent posts is interested to hear how the bread assessment finished. As this will be a slightly longer post I am revealing now the most important fact: I got the gold award.
So you can stop reading here, you already got the crucial part of information. However, maybe you would like to continue and read some background information and some interesting facts about this kind of assessment.
I am LOVING the crust I get from the 00 flour! I now bake a pizza every 3 or 4 days and am getting better at forming the crust. Still don't have the courage to try a toss, but it doesn't seem necessary. This dough had been in the fridge for 3 days before I divided it today.
