Continuing Adventures in BREAD!

Since last  time I posted about my alchemical adventures, I have continued to experiment with that basic “no-knead” bread.

I’ve baked it in different shapes, in different pots, and with different flour.

The first thing that I played with was trying to make something other than just a standard rustic loaf. The one evening, I realized that we had some left-over pulled pork. I already had a batch of bread dough already, but wouldn’t that pork taste MUCH better on a good crusty roll than it would any other way?

Of course it would! So instead of just baking another loaf of bread, I instead cut the dough in half, and divided what was left into six equal parts. The easiest way to do that was just roll it into a ball, flatten it, and cut it like a pie. I still baked the dough in the dutch oven, so the six wedges still fit nicely in the round bowl.

The other half of the dough was put into a small enameled cast iron pot – sort of a mini-dutch-oven. It also had a lit and was almost the exact right size for the dough. It was also small enough to fit in the oven at the same time as the full-size dutch oven with the rolls in it.

I reduced the baking time just a bit, figuring that dough cut in half is going to cook faster. Part of the magic of bread is that you can tell when it is done just by using your nose. That’s more intuitive than an electronic kitchen timer could ever dare to be.

Once out of the oven, and cooled for a bit, the ring of rolls was easily pulled apart by hand. I sliced the rolls and topped a few with warmed pulled pork, sharp cheddar cheese, and homemade barbeque sauce. Oh man were those good. Wish I had gotten a photo of them…. The rolls most reminded me of something like a really good ciabatta bread.

The bread in the mini-dutch-oven also turned out well. The smaller shape of the vessel gave the loaf more lift and height. It was sort of a “personal size” bread. Good crust and interior.

It was only a week or two later that my wife had some Italian Sausages around that she was planning to use to make spaghetti. Her recipe usually calls for about two sausage links cut up, sauteed, and mixed in with the sauce. Packages from the grocery store usually have 5 or 6 sausages in them. So, I was planning to grill the extras up for lunch – too bad we didn’t have any sausage rolls! But we did have a bowl of bread dough!

I again divided the 1.5lb loaf dough in half, and then cut one half of it into thirds (I only needed 3 sausage rolls.) I shaped the pieces by hand into roughly the size and shape required, then put them in the dutch oven, covered it and baked it. In the mean time, I went outside and got the wood-fired Rocket Grill ready to launch. With the other half of the bread dough, I tried another batch of dinner rolls.

The sausage rolls turned out well. Hearty and wholesome – serve with a pickle. The round shape of the dutch oven doesn’t lend itself well to the long skinny sausage rolls. I don’t think I could have fit more than three in there at a time, even if I wanted to. If I do a half-dozen or more long rolls in the future, I’ll have to find some sort of rectangular covered dish.

In this photo, you can see the pull-apart dinner rolls and another loaf of bread in the background.

I’ve always heard that WHOLE WHEAT is better for you. That most all-purpose flour is bleached and stripped of it’s natural nutrients and that “enriched” means that they just add enough fake nutrients back in to keep you from getting rickets or scurvey. So, I thought I have enough baking experience under my belt for me to give a WHOLE WHEAT LOAF a shot.

The main trick that I have heard is that ALL whole wheat is likely to make any loaf fail, so I thought I would start easy, with a PART whole wheat loaf. I went down to the Natural Goods store and bought several pounds of all natural, whole-wheat flour. It was a bit pricy, but still less than what I would pay for two loaves of bread at a regular grocery store. I had enough flour to make a LOT more than two loaves!

I did up the no-knead bread dough, but instead of using 3 cups of my regular flour, I used two cups of it, along with one cup of the all-natural whole wheat. I noticed that the whole-wheat was a courser grind than the all-purpose flour, just a little darker in color, and had a nice wholesome smell to it. I didn’t bother to use a sifter or anything, I just mixed it up as usual. After the typical long rise time, I baked the loaf.

The main thing that I noticed was that the bread was just plain darker. The whole wheat flour itself didn’t seem so dark, but the finished bread was most noticibly darker than my regular recipe.

After cooling, I sliced off a hunk, and took a bite. ACk! It was HORRIBLE! I called to my wife,”Come here, you have to taste this!”  ”Oh my God, that’s BAD! Ick! What did you do to it? That really is horrible!”

That’s when I realized that I forgot to add salt.

In all my excitement about mixing in a new flour and guessing at the best ratios, I had COMPLETELY missed the salt! The whole recipe only has FOUR ingredients, and one of them is WATER! Leave it to me to forget the salt. The bread really was quite inedible. It was chewy, and had a nice crust, looked great. It was very misleading of the brea to try to get me to eat it like that. I was AMAZED at how big of a difference that bit of salt made. It’s not so much that the bread tasted bad, it’s more like it didn’t taste like anything at all.

When first hitting the mouth – Yum! Chewy! Hearty!…chew chew…wait a minute… yech! It just sort of blahs out on you in the worste possible way. It sort of reminded me of when a friend and and I made a batch of homebrew beer. I don’t care for too much hops, so we tried a batch without any hops at all. The first sip of the beer was good, but the taste never finished, it just pittered out on you. It felt like a film or a play without a third act!

So, my first experimental loaf of whole wheat went to the birds and othe woodland creatures that so love when I make baking mistakes. As I write this, the crumbs are still sitting on my back porch – it tasted so bad that not even the birds will eat it!

But other than the salt mistake, everything else about the bread turned out  well, so I had another go at it. This time, I baked Christmas morning, and took the bread over to my Aunt and Uncle’s home where we were meeting relatives in the afternoon. My uncle sliced up the coarse round loaf and displayed it on a square white ceramic platter. Surrounded by ham and turkey, it had the look of a Norman Rockwell painting or even a Martha Stuart dining table. Now THAT I wish I had grabbed a photo of.

The bread did indeed turn out to be tasty. Perhaps the best compliment of all was from my brother-in-law, who has been a professional baker on and off for years. Rather than any kind of critical opinion, the simply mentioned “Mmm.. That’s quite good…”

High Praise from his lips.

Everything in life is an experiment. Every time I try something, it’s either new, or just trying to be a little better than the last time. I think that’s all any of us can hope for in any realm, whether it’s our careers, our relationships, or a simple mix of yeast, flour, and water.

-Ben

PS: And Salt! Don’t forget the salt!

Tagged as: baking, bread