Flashes of Panic

My latest experiments have been in bread. I’ve had breadmakers for years and often feel guilty with store-bought loaves, but recently I decided I wanted more traditionally-shaped loaves. My breadmaker has a rectangular pan, but the loaves are still pretty tall; I wanted to try bread in a regular loaf pan.

I haven’t gone cold turkey on the machine, though; what I do is take a recipe that looks promising, run it through the dough cycle of the machine (which essentially just shuts off the cycle without baking it). Then I shift the resulting dough out of the machine and into the pan, let it rise a bit there, and bake in the oven.

My first loaf tasted great, but I mis-timed the rising and forgot to pre-heat the oven. While the oven warmed, the dough ballooned, and the resulting loaf was a bit fluffier than we like. It was supposed to be sandwich bread, but today I used the last two slices to make the first and last sandwich with it. It made great toast, but ultimately

Tonight, I am trying pumpernickel for the first time, and so far it smells fantastic. (The fact that pumpernickel involves using coffee instead of water was something which had been hidden from me until today. Astounding.) I didn’t give it a whole lot of rising time, but it has risen nicely in the oven. In fact, I told A after I pulled it out, it’s probably going to taste horrible because it’s the best looking loaf of bread I’ve ever made.

In other kitchen tinkering, my ever-evolving granola formula has expanded to accommodate barley flakes. I tried rye flakes, but they were too hard. I have to imagine the miller grinding rye flour put some serious weight on that stone.