Baking A Sweet Life

Its time again for the monthly Bread Baking Day bake-off!  Zorra, the founder of BBD is hosting the one year anniversary edition - and the theme for this exciting occasion is Bread with Sprouts!  For my bread I decided to do a variety of sprouted grains - an equal mix of Hard Red Wheat, Kamut, and Spelt.  I chose these grains because I love the flavor of each, and for ease of sprouting - they are all roughly the same size.
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I’ve been so eager to try this bread, and I’m so glad I finally did! The reason I had put it off for so long is that the high extraction do-it-yourself-part had intimidated me. I don’t know why - it ended up being so easy to do, and so worth this 4 extra minutes that it took.

This bread was gargantuan! But so incredible. It was probably 14″ across, and about 8″ or 9″ tall. This would be my first jumbo-sized loaf, and it really could feed an army. Well, a small army. Maybe a small baseball team. Anyway. I have an electric mill and normally mill my own wheat, spelt, kamut, etc for my whole grain breads. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to sift anything out of it, since the entire wheat berry is milled at the same grind.
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When Holly of Phemomenon asked for participants in her one-off foodie event, “Blogging for Babies - An Invitation for Little Wonders” I didn’t hesitate to say yes. This is an event to promote the March For Babies, which does amazing work in the way of improving the life quality of infants, both full term and premature.

I have a particular interest in causes like this one because I work at a childrens’ hospital, specifically doing anesthesia on these little miracles. We sometimes have to anesthetize patients as little as 23 weeks gestation, and they barely weight ONE pound. They are so tiny, and are fighting so hard for their life. Its both heartbreaking and amazing, and I’m so glad that there are organizations like this that are able to help these little ones make it through this rough start to life. Please consider going to the link above to donate to this cause - your money will be truly well spent.  Please see below for Holly’s personal statement to everyone regarding this event/cause. Read the rest of this entry »

The difficultly level of this bread is marked as “advanced” in Maggie Glezer’s book. I took one look at that and thought, what the heck. I’ve got a bread class under my belt, and I just won’t take pictures of it if its inedible :).

I adapted the recipe from her book Baking Across America, and this particular recipe is from Della Fratoria’s Bakery. I happened to have all the ingredients on hand which was about 70% why I chose to get started on this recipe last night. The other 30% was that it used sourdough starter, and I’m always looking for a reason to use it! I keep my starter at 100% hydration, and adapted the recipe to account for that.
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I’d been daydreaming about trying my luck at English muffins ever since I saw Susan’s post at Wild Yeast. They just looked so tasty, and so much better than what you get out of a package! I’m so glad that I tried them - they are every bit as good as she promised. I didn’t know until I was about to make them, that English muffins are not baked - they are merely cooked on a griddle (or nonstick skillet in my case) on both sides, much like a stiff pancake batter. I was also surprised by how much milk they required.
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It’s that time again! Except this time I feel like a fool. Somehow I had it in my head that this month’s posting was to be done on the 31th (last day of the month, just like last month, which was my first time participating). But my assumption was wrong, and I just realized it today. I went to a few of my favorite DB‘ers sites and saw that they had put theirs up yesterday. I initially thought that they must’ve been breaking the DB rules, (gasp!!) but it was I that hadn’t paid attention. To my fellow DB’ers, I apologize!

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I was so excited when Susan of Wild Yeast posted that she was going to be hosting this current BBD, and I was also thrilled that the theme was celebration breads. That excitement didn’t last long though. I sat there for a while and thought about the different celebrations that I’ve been a part of. There were no breads that made a regular appearance, unless you count white sandwich bread, but that was merely a celebration of lunch time at school. There really was nothing that I could say was a heritage bread or a “from my grandmother’s family” bread… I come from a long line of non-cooks. If anything was baked, it was baked by Publix, or Nature’s Own. I liked that Susan had baked Hot Cross Buns for her entry. That got me thinking of a holiday celebration bread, even if it wasn’t my own. I liked the idea of a Pannetone, but I didn’t want to spend the 85 days doing it just as we were coming into spring. So I started to look into Easter breads, or spring celebration breads, and actually found a good number of them out there. **please see the second recipe in this post for my actual “submission” to this BBD - it was much better**

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The kitchen remodel!!! Its finally done! It was four straight weeks (and *very* naive me thought it would be two - ha!) but its finally done and wonderful.

Here are some “before” shots: (the old floor had already been ripped out)

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It’s been a wonderful week but it must come to an end. Today is my last day at SFBI’s Artisan 1 Bread class, and I must say.. I’ve learned a ton! I can’t wait to go home and apply everything that I’ve learned, not to mention actually using my at-home equipment, which is so different from the industrial versions that we used during the class.

We started the day with a little bit of lecture. We had made our pre-ferments on day 4 that we were going to focus on today. We made a poolish (named after the Polish, no less), and a sponge. We also did a pate fermentee, and I’ll talk about what happened with that later :)

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I was completely dumbfounded to see that someone (I don’t know her name, either!) had said that my blog was one that made their day - I mean, its not even a month old, and there’s hardly any content! But, nonetheless, I am totally honored, and thrilled, not to mention motivated to keep things bloggin’ along! She said that she lusted after my bread - now if I could just get my kitchen finished (remodeling) then maybe I could bake some more! I am desperately hoping that it will be completed by Sunday.

So, here are 10 people that make my day by all the scrumptious stuff they have on their blogs, and the delightful and funny insights they write about - not to mention the amazing pictures that keep me saying “I want to try that too!”: Susan, Kalyn, Foodie Bride, Tartelette, Lis, Zorra, Michelle, Jen, Bakerina, and finally Half Cups!

Apparently you all would need to keep on the tradition… but don’t feel pressured - just feel special ’cause I love your blogs!