Pretzel Buddies

One of the joys of the Bread Baking Babes is the fun of baking bread...another is baking with the Bread Baking Buddies because it expands our world and gives us the opportunity to visit other blogs and see wonderful photos of the bread of the month and to see if our experience was anything like theirs. Sometimes the Buddy is new to bread baking, but often they are very experienced and I learn a lot by reading their posts.

In September we gathered around the virtual kitchen table and baked Pretzels. Some of the Babes even did a Google+ virtual group bake! The Internet is wonderful...makes the world smaller and brings us closer together. Now if only we could smell the lovely fragrances in each other's kitchen as the bread bakes.

Our intrepid Buddies this month did some excellent twisting. They baked pretzels both sweet and savory. Their Buddy Badges have been sent and now it is our reader's turns. Do visit their sites by clicking on the links so that you can read all about it. To whet your appetite here is the round-up:

KELLY :
GOSIA :
JUDY :
CATHY :
MICHELLE :

Thank you Cathy, Gosia, Michelle, Kelly and Judy! You are great bakers and wonderful Buddies and I hope you bake with us again.

Dear readers, do check out their posts and be inspired yourselves...it is still a great time for soft pretzels.

Calling All Buddies!

One of the fun things about the Bread Baking Babes is that lots of bloggers who bake the bread of the month get to be Buddies. Not only do you get to make something delicious, you can read all of the Babe posts to get our take on it, you can always e-mail the Kitchen of the Month (this month that's moi) to get help with the recipe and, after the 29th, you get a Bread Baking Buddy Badge to display on your site if you have a blog. As you can see, tomorrow is the last day for posting your bread and sending me a link at plachman at sonic dot net.

Since life is rearely simple, I'll make the cut-off midnight East Coast of America Daylight Savings Time (9 pm my time) and send badges to everyone who have e-mailed me by then. The round-up will have to wait until Monday or Tuesday of next week due to circumstances that are allowing me to have fun and earn money all weekend.

So give those pretzels a try, send me an e-mail with info on how the baking went, how you liked them, etc, and please include a photo.

XO Elle

Buddies Bake Stromboli

A big 'Thank you!' to all the bakers who joined the Bread Baking Babes around the kitchen table this month and baked Stromboli. Some experienced the lava-like eruption of melted cheese, some changed it up by changing the fillings and shape. Everyone's loaves, long or short or in between looked so delicious that I wanted a slice when I read each post.

Here, in the order I received their e-mails, are the Buddies for May. Each of them received a Buddy Badge which they can display with their post and on their blog.

Soepkipje

Connie




Heather




Kydoime



Ana


Kelly


Michelle


Judy


Please visit the blogs (you can click on the name of the blogger to take you there) and make a nice comment..blogger love it when you comment, especially favorably. Check back in Mid-June to see what the next challenge recipe it...and maybe you'll be a baking Buddy next month!

Russian Black Bread Babes Buddy

It's September. The leaves are starting to get the first bits of fall color and the grapes I pass on the way to work are deep, deep purple and golden green since they are just about ready to be picked and turned into wine.

Even though the temperatures have been pretty warm...right around 100 degrees today, fall always makes me want to bake, so today I baked bread and some cookies. I'll post on the cookies another day.

When I saw that the Bread Baking Babes, the dozen of intrepid bread bakers who bake quite interesting bread, were making Black Bread this time, I had to try it.


Some of them referred to it as Dump Bread, probably because there are some peculiar ingredients, including toasted bread. I used some leftover sourdough baguette for the toast. Sweetie was also surprised to see me add ground coffee to the soaker. If you look at the first rise, you can see some small chunks of the toasted bread that have still maintained their own shape, but no coffee grounds. Since the soaker sat about an hour longer than specified in the recipe, I decided that having bits of the toast still in the dough must be how it is supposed to be and just kept going.

This is sticky dough my friends. The bench scraper got a real workout as I kneaded in the last of the flour on the board. The stand mixer just wasn't doing the job. It was still sticky when I shaped it into loaves, which probably explains why only one of the two is well formed...the other one kept sticking to my hands when I tried to create a nice skin.

There is plenty of flavor and a nice texture in this rye bread. I call it rye because, including the flour used for the board, it took almost a whole pound of rye flour. It is great toasted and will probably make awesome sandwiches for lunch tomorrow.

If you want to be a Buddy, too, go to Gorel's blog for the recipe (or look below). Bake the Black Bread before September 7th, blog about it, and send a link to Gorel, and she'll give you a lovely Baking Buddy badge for your website plus you can then really relate to the experiences of the Bread Baking Babes...links for their websites can be found at Gorel's Grain Doe blog too. It was interesting to find that Gorel combined two very different recipes to create this delicious bread.

I'm also entering this in the Yeastspotting event for this weekover at Susan's Wild Yeast. Each week there are wonderful yeasted breads, rolls and more to be inspired by.

Görel's Russian Black Bread
INGREDIENTS


SOURDOUGH

300 g (10.6 oz) medium rye flour
350 ml (1.5 cup) water
2 Tbsp active sourdough culture*

SOAKER

100 g (3.5 oz) old bread, toasted
15 g (0.5 oz) coffee, ground
25 g (0.9 oz) vegetable oil – I used safflower oil
60 ml (1/4 cup) molasses
2 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 Tbsp minced shallots
400 ml (1-2/3 cup) Water, hot

FINAL DOUGH

300 g (10.6 oz) medium rye flour
400 g (14.1 oz) high gluten bread flour
20 g (appr. 1 Tbsp) salt
YEAST -
Fresh: 15 g (0.5 oz) OR
Instant dry: 1.5 tsp
Soaker- All of the above
Sourdough- All of the above

* If you don’t have any active starter at hand, you can cheat by using a small amount (say 5 g fresh or 0.5 tsp instant dry yeast) instead.

DIRECTIONS:
Sourdough
Mix the ingredients to the sourdough, cover the container with plastic and leave for 12–14 hours at room temperature.

Soaker
Toast the old bread in a toaster or in the oven. The bread should be browned, but absolutely not blackened. Dice the bread or just tear it in pieces and put it in a bowl. Add the rest of the soaker ingredients except the water. Heat the water to near boiling and pour over the soaker ingredients. Cover and leave for the same duration as the sourdough.

Final dough
Mix the two flours in a separate bowl.
If using fresh yeast: Take a small amount of the soaker liquid and dissolve the yeast in it. Add the yeast mixture OR the instant dry yeast, soaker, sourdough and salt to a mixing bowl.
Add half of the flour mixture and work the dough by hand or in machine. Continue to add about 100 ml or ½ cup of the flour mixture at a time and work until the flour is completely absorbed before you add the next round. The dough shall be firm but still quite sticky. You might not use all the flour, or you might need to add more flour, all depending on the flour used.
Place the dough in an oiled container, cover with plastic and leave for 2–3 hours or until doubled in size.

Shaping and proofing
Drizzle some rye flour on the table top and place the dough on top. If the dough is very sticky, pour just enough rye flour on top of it to make it possible to handle.

Divide the dough in two and shape the parts into oblong loaves. (I placed them on parchment paper to make it possible to just slide the loaves into the oven.) Stretch the surface using both hands to get a tight loaf. Use more rye if the dough is too sticky to handle.

Cover with a tea towel and leave for 60 minutes. Don’t over-proof! (Fire up the oven after 30 minutes to have it ready.)

Baking
Place an empty metal container in the bottom of the oven. Put in your baking stone or an empty baking sheet. Heat the oven to 225 °C/435 °F.
Put 3–4 ice cubes in the metal container.
Move the loaves to the hot stone or sheet. Bake for 10 minutes.
Open the oven door to vent out some moist. At the same time, lower the temp. to 200 °C/400 °F. Bake another 30-40 minutes or until they sound hollow when tapped underneath, or when the inner temperature has reached appr. 97 °C/207 °F.

Let the loaves cool down before you slice them.

Being a Buddy with Bread

I've wanted to be a Bread Baking Buddy, someone who makes and posts about the bread of the month baked by the Bread Baking Babes, but something always got in the way. This month, just in time for their first Anniversary, I finally managed to carve out the time to do it. It was a good month for it, too. The recipe for the BBB Anniversary Bread is Carol Field’s Pane ai Cinque Cereali con Noci, also known as Five-Grain Bread with Walnuts,Adapted from The Italian Baker by Carol Field.

The Kitchen of the month is Tanna's My Kitchen in Half Cups, which is very appropriate since she is described as the Den Mother of the Babes. The bread is chock full of walnuts, has five yummy grains, and makes a delicious loaf or two. I made both of mine into oval loaves and had them do the final rise and their trip in the oven on a baking sheet...no pans for these loaves. As a result, they were flatter and wider than sandwich loaves, but really beautiful with two kinds of slashes on the top. One is what I've heard is a traditional wheat grain slash. The other is just diagonal slashes.

Both loaves were given a milk/egg wash and they came out of the oven shiny and brown and gorgeous.

Often when I make bread using the stand mixer I let the dough hook do most of the kneading. This loaf was different, perhaps because the walnuts are added along with the flour near the beginning instead of being kneaded in once the dough is elastic. The dough hook just didn't want to hook up with this dough, so I had fun kneading it for a while.

Once the loaves where shaped I put them in the fridge and went off to work. When I got home they had risen a little, but the most interesting thing was that they looks a bit pale purple. I think that had to do with some chemical reaction to compounds in the walnuts. Once baked the purple hue mostly went away, but it did look weird for a while before baking. Sorry, didn't get a photo...dinner was underway and photos were not encouraged by Sweetie.

This bread is delicious, with a hearty taste from the different grains and some crunch from the walnuts. I was hoping for a stronger walnut flavor. Next time I might use some walnut oil in the dough and maybe even more walnuts. The crumb is good and the bread is moist enough, but not too moist for my taste.

Thank you Bread Baking Babes for a year of bread adventures, even though it was mostly vicarious enjoyment. Guess I'm finally a Buddy.

You can find the recipe at Tanna's blog, My Kitchen in Half Cups. I followed it very closely, using barley flour instead of the rice flour, but otherwise baking the recipe.