Showing posts with label baking with Boxer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baking with Boxer. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Baking with Boxer- white sandwich bread
Todays item is white sandwich bread that I made yesterday. I know what you are thinking, white sandwich bread, like that white bread crap that you can get at the grocery store that has no nutritional value, well yes and no. It is white bread, but there are no preservatives and chemicals and other crap in it. Also, I intend to use a mix of white whole wheat flour and all purpose flour next time, this time I just wanted to make it following the recipe and see how it turned out. I turned out with really good texture and a slight bit of sourness at times. As to the sourness, I think I may have over rose the dough. Those of you who saw my facebook page yesterday saw that the dough was rising incredibly fast, it must really like the heat and humidity, well that might have been the problem. I might have over fermented the yeast and thus had some lactic acid in the dough, but I am not sure. I even try to slow down the second rise since GG and I were going out for a bit to get a new car. (We got the new Honda hybrid, Insight.) Well, even in the fridge it still tripled in volume, now I know and I will be more careful next time. I am not going to give the recipe this time as it is kind of a long recipe and I want to encourage you to buy, get from the library, or steal from a friend a copy of the Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. It is a great book and many of the bread recipes I have started to use are from this book. So, I will just leave you with a picture of the finished product. It may not look pretty, but it is good. Oh and the ridges on the top of the bread are not supposed to be there, I had the oven racks too close together and as the bread rose in the oven while it was cooking it pressed against one of the racks.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Baking with Boxer
I am hoping to make this a regular feature on this blog. I like to bake and I have been doing it a lot more lately, so I figured I would share with y'all the fruits of my labor. Well, at least pictures and recipes and the ideas of the fruits of my labor, to get the actual fruits you have to be here.
This post will be written as I work on this recipe. I am experimenting today as I try to make a bread that is sprinkled with chocolate. I have a chocolate bread recipe and I really like it, but there was this Swiss bakery in NC which made a sweet, white bread that had chocolate in it. It was awesome on its own, but with some peanut butter it was even better. I am attempting to recreate this bread. As I was thinking about this, I remembered a blog post from the now not active blog Harp and Sword. I went there and found the chocolate bread recipe except it was written to be made in a bread machine, I do not have a bread machine, so I am attempting to adjust on the fly and make this recipe.
Ingredients straight from Harp and Sword:
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
1 large egg, beaten
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp sugar
1 1/4 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
2 3/4 cups bread flour
1 1/4 teaspoon yeast
1/3 cup coarsely chopped bittersweet chocolate (about 12 squares of a Trader Joe's Pound Plus® 70% cocoa mass Bittersweet Chocolate) (I could not find this so I got the 72% dark chocolate from Trader Joe's- BR)
How I made the bread:
Mix the sugar, buttermilk and yeast together and let the yeast bloom for at least 10-15 minutes. Place the bread flour and salt in the Kitchen Aid. Turn the mixer on low for approximately 30 seconds to mix up the flour and salt so that the salt does not come in direct contact with the yeast and kill it. Add the eggs, butter and yeast mixture to the flour and salt. Mix on low for a minute or so to get the flour moist, turn the mixer up to #4 and mix for seven minutes. At this point, the dough was still too sticky for me so I added another 1/4 cup of bread flour and let the mixer go for another 2 minutes. Place the dough in a bowl to rise for at least 1.5 hours. Cut up the chocolate into chunks. Knead the chocolate into the bread dough a little bit at a time till all of the chocolate is mixed in with the dough. Let the bread rise again, for another hour. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees at least 45 minutes before you plan on baking the bread. I did this with my pizza stone in the oven already. I then placed the bread onto a silpat covered jelly roll sheet pan, but you could spray the sheet pan with oil to keep the bread from sticking to the pan. Place the bread into the oven. I also boiled some water and put it into a small cast iron pan and put that into the oven as well right below the sheet pan with the bread. I do this to help add some moisture to the oven and so that the bread will have a nicer crust, or so I have read. Bake for 45 minutes. Let it cool completely on a cooling rack and eat.
This post will be written as I work on this recipe. I am experimenting today as I try to make a bread that is sprinkled with chocolate. I have a chocolate bread recipe and I really like it, but there was this Swiss bakery in NC which made a sweet, white bread that had chocolate in it. It was awesome on its own, but with some peanut butter it was even better. I am attempting to recreate this bread. As I was thinking about this, I remembered a blog post from the now not active blog Harp and Sword. I went there and found the chocolate bread recipe except it was written to be made in a bread machine, I do not have a bread machine, so I am attempting to adjust on the fly and make this recipe.
Ingredients straight from Harp and Sword:
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
1 large egg, beaten
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp sugar
1 1/4 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
2 3/4 cups bread flour
1 1/4 teaspoon yeast
1/3 cup coarsely chopped bittersweet chocolate (about 12 squares of a Trader Joe's Pound Plus® 70% cocoa mass Bittersweet Chocolate) (I could not find this so I got the 72% dark chocolate from Trader Joe's- BR)
How I made the bread:
Mix the sugar, buttermilk and yeast together and let the yeast bloom for at least 10-15 minutes. Place the bread flour and salt in the Kitchen Aid. Turn the mixer on low for approximately 30 seconds to mix up the flour and salt so that the salt does not come in direct contact with the yeast and kill it. Add the eggs, butter and yeast mixture to the flour and salt. Mix on low for a minute or so to get the flour moist, turn the mixer up to #4 and mix for seven minutes. At this point, the dough was still too sticky for me so I added another 1/4 cup of bread flour and let the mixer go for another 2 minutes. Place the dough in a bowl to rise for at least 1.5 hours. Cut up the chocolate into chunks. Knead the chocolate into the bread dough a little bit at a time till all of the chocolate is mixed in with the dough. Let the bread rise again, for another hour. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees at least 45 minutes before you plan on baking the bread. I did this with my pizza stone in the oven already. I then placed the bread onto a silpat covered jelly roll sheet pan, but you could spray the sheet pan with oil to keep the bread from sticking to the pan. Place the bread into the oven. I also boiled some water and put it into a small cast iron pan and put that into the oven as well right below the sheet pan with the bread. I do this to help add some moisture to the oven and so that the bread will have a nicer crust, or so I have read. Bake for 45 minutes. Let it cool completely on a cooling rack and eat.
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