BREAD baking

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

I use King Aurthur in my Airstream pantry because fresh milled has such a short shelf-life and there is little room for a wheat mill and a 45lb bucket. Would KA be a good choice, or is there another recommendation?

I use KA unbleached AllPurpose flour for my bread and it comes out wonderfully.
I've tried adding some whole wheat flour into the mix, but it never comes out quite as good in our opinion (even thought it's healthier)...so when making our bread I just use the KA all purpose. I buy mixed whole grain bread from our local bakery when I am not baking our own bread.

[sgtiger]

NoNo: Here's the master recipe if you want to try it while waiting to get your hands on the book:
http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=195

And for how to shape the dough, there's YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...rch_type=&aq=f


MommyBird - I'd recommend you check out the new book which has recipes that use whole grain.

http://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Bread-...8128465&sr=8-1

Here's the whole grain master recipe on their site:
http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=1087

And an article where Zoe uses freshly milled grain:
http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=1165#more-1165

[GLC1968]

It pains me, but I guess I will have to resort to buying processed flour if I want to attempt some of this beautiful bread. My research did not reveal the information that I had hoped. There is an incredibly tedious process you can use to prepare freshly milled flour for artisan bread but all sites said "don't bother, buy a high quality processed flour."

I have a friend in SC who mills and makes a variety of bread styles. I believe she she told me she uses Kamut for her artisan loafs. I will have to get in touch with her. I add spelt and kamut to my whole wheat for a lighter flavor and texture. I have not tried a straight kamut loaf. I ran out last week, so I will need to place a BreadBecker's order. Yippee!

I use King Aurthur in my Airstream pantry because fresh milled has such a short shelf-life and there is little room for a wheat mill and a 45lb bucket. Would KA be a good choice, or is there another recommendation?

But my mill will not sit idle...my men will still want their share of hearty wheat bread. Plus, there are always the tortillas and other goodies we make. In fact, I will have it out later today to mill flour for the cookies I am making for tomorrow's regatta.

How big is your mill that you need a 45lb bucket?!

I have an old but effective table top one that works very well.
http://simplemetamorphosis.blogspot....agic-mill.html

I also get 95% of my flour directly from Bob's Red Mill (local to me) but their stuff is high quality. I don't know if you can get all the varieties on the east coast, but I know I used to be able to find my favorite 10-grain waffle mix from them at Fresh Market when I lived in NC. It's worth a shot. KA stuff is wonderful too, of course.

[Susan Otcenas]

Well, I sent off my broken stone to Pampered Chef. But I still had one loaf's worth of dough left, so last night I made a loaf without the stone.

I put the shaped loaf on a plain ol' aluminum cookie sheet. It came out beautifully. Almost exactly like the ones I made using the stone. So, I don't think I'll wait for the new stone to come before I make more bread.

Susan

[NoNo]

I followed Tulip's suggestion and found the recipe on the NYT site. Mixed it up this morning, let it rise, and have two loaves waiting to go in the oven now While waiting, I threw together my first batch of soap, I'm very interested to see how it turns out.

[papaver]

I followed Tulip's suggestion and found the recipe on the NYT site. Mixed it up this morning, let it rise, and have two loaves waiting to go in the oven now While waiting, I threw together my first batch of soap, I'm very interested to see how it turns out.

soap? Or soup?

[NoNo]

soap? Or soup?

Soap. I'll get around to soup at some point. Right now I have to clean up this mess

[NoNo]

Oh my goodness, is my stomach happy! I will say that I pulled them out because the top seemed to be getting over-brown, but the bottoms were almost slightly undercooked. I'll have to play with leaving the stone in longer to heat up (did about 30min this time) and lowering the temp a tad to let it cook longer.

[papaver]

looks wonderful!

[NoNo]

Since I mentioned the soap, here's a picture of that, as well:



I had trouble getting them out and ran a little too much warm water over that guy on the left. Live and learn. They smell like cranberry

[papaver]

last night I dreamt that my mom threw away my dough... what a nightmare.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Oh my goodness, is my stomach happy! I will say that I pulled them out because the top seemed to be getting over-brown, but the bottoms were almost slightly undercooked. I'll have to play with leaving the stone in longer to heat up (did about 30min this time) and lowering the temp a tad to let it cook longer.

Non-no, those are gorgeous!

Might i humbly suggest that if you want the bottom to cook more, that you preheat the oven on at least 450F for 30 min, then put in the bread, let bake at 450, then lower it to maybe 400 for the last 15 min.
If you lower the oven temp from the beginning and cook longer, you are even more likely to have an undercooked bottom of the loaves. They need that really hot temp on their bottoms right in the beginning of baking to cook properly. Be sure to not put a cool fridge-chilled loaf into the very hot oven. The extremes might crack your stone and a cool loaf will not have a chance to expand much in the oven before the outer surface of the loaf hardens and prevents further expansion (called 'oven spring'). baking a chilled loaf would tend to come out small, dense, undercooked inside and overcooked outside.
I have found that I get the best results when putting a room temp loaf into a very hot well-preheated oven, then lowering the temp 25 degrees halfway through baking. Of course that is merely my own experience.

last night I dreamt that my mom threw away my dough... what a nightmare.

Wow, a classic mother dream! I have lots of weird 'mother dreams' too- i suspect many of us do, regardless of our level of love for our mothers. It's just our inner child being worried.

[withm]

I have succumbed to Artisan Bread. I had been on the waiting list at the library since this thread started and it was finally my turn for the book. I can see already I will have to buy it.

I cut the recipe in half - thinking I am only 1 person, and really don't need to have lots of good tasting bread around all the time. I made the dough Wed evening, intending to bake the first loaf Thurs - unfortunatley Mother Nature had other ideas (see November Nor'easter thread for those gory details). So I finally pinched off 1/2 of my dough from the fridge - it's a small loaf, about 3/4 lb but that's OK. Not owning a pizza peel and baking stone I opted for the Dutch Oven method. I cooked it covered in the Dutch oven for 20 minutes, but it was not brown yet, so gave it another 10 minutes and it looked pretty good so I took it out. Possibly it could have had a few more minutes but it's pretty tasty.

I can see that it will be good to have a full sized batch of this stuff in the fridge when I have my shoulder surgery next week. My sister and brother in law will be coming to stay with me then and it will be wonderful to have homemade bread so readily available. Even my sister will be able to do this and she is not so much of a cook.

[papaver]

withm... it's 20 mins with the cover on AND 20 mins without the cover...

[withm]

withm... it's 20 mins with the cover on AND 20 mins without the cover...

You know, I had a feeling it was something like that. But I didn't think I saw that in the book, only here on TE. Thanks for the tip.

Still tastes good, and crusty.