For years I have always made Hot Cross Buns for Easter and leaving the cross off enjoy them year round. This is the first time I have made them with buttermilk. Using buttermilk in baking is one of my all time favorite ingredients.
Bread baking really is a lot like the Wide World of Sports. A really nice bake that lulls you into thinking you've 'conquered' a particular bread is often followed by a rude reality slap when a bake goes awry, leaving me, at any rate, wondering whether the former was just a lucky fluke or the latter a bad day.
Rarely do I experience both the high and low in a single day, but today's bakes managed to fill the bill.
One of my goals in learning how to make bread was to be able to recreate a bread I ate as a child called tzitzel. As I understand it, tzitzel mean caraway in Yiddish, and tzitzel is a rye bread with caraway and covered with cornmeal. So far, despite many attempts and many different formulas, I have not come very close to recreating this memory bread. Perhaps one can never recreate memory bread. In any cases, my searches on this site, with its many rye bakers, led me to Greenstein's Secret of a Jewish Baker. I have tried makin
Several days ago I made the Savory Bread from Bernard Clayton's Complete Book of Breads. It is practically just a white loaf of bread (similar to a less-rich brioche) that before the final rise is rolled into a rectangle, spread with a seasoned butter, and rolled back up and placed in a loaf pan. The butter ingredients include thyme, garlic, hot sauce, pepper, etc., so can imagine how good that would taste in a bread (now that I think about it, I could have added some red pepper flakes that I had sitting in the spice cabinet). Anyway, it tasted very, very good.
I decided to start a blog to keep a log of my baking and hopefully get some feedback on my efforts. Rather than start by driveling on about how long I've been baking for etc. (plenty of time for that). I think I'll get straight on to posting this mornings efforts.
I am happy to have found a bread that my wife and I agree upon. I prefer hearty flavors (that stand up to obscene amounts of toppings and sauce), whereas she prefers tender white breads. It's important to find this balance given that the bread I bake is the bread we're both stuck with until I bake a new batch.
Hello,
Over the past 2 weeks, I made several easter breads to share with family and friends, here they are...
- Tsoureki - Greek Easter Breads. No, I am not greek, and I didn't know of this bread until this year, but some of my running friends are, and I made this for our recent gathering.
Greek Easter Bread
Makes one 2 ½ pound loaf
4 Tablespoons butter
2 heaping dessertspoons of honey
2 eggs
2 teaspoons dry yeast
1½ teaspoons salt (2 if using unsalted butter)
1 teaspoon anise extract
20 ounces (about 4 cups) unbleached white flour
1 1/3 cup water at room temperature
