BREAD baking

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

I preheat oven and my two iron dutch oven pots to 500 for a good 25 minutes.

Then i slip the two large loaves in the pots and cover. Bake 20 minutes at 500F, then I take covers off quickly and bake another 20 minutes at 450F.
That's perfect for the two large loaves at once.

[ummbnb]

Love this thread. I can't bake to save my life but my husband is an excellent bread baker, he's excellent at everything in the kitchen which is good since he's a sahd and the house is his domain! Some yummy looking stuff on here!

[shootingstar]

Looks great, bleekerstgirl. If we did it, we would be double-loading the dough with the olives, sundried tomatoes!

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Looks great, bleekerstgirl. If we did it, we would be double-loading the dough with the olives, sundried tomatoes!

I know what you mean! But last time I made it, i did double load it and the Kalamatta olives became just too salty and overpowering, and the bread was too tomato-y, not in a good way, believe it or not. K.olives are very powerful stuff, especially when baked in!

[Blueberry]

This thread is such a bad (but tasty) influence. I got frustrated with the weekly fighting to get bread from our local bakery (they never know when it will be out, whether they have any, they'll tell you do and then you get there and it's not out of the oven, etc., etc.). I made the basic Boule yesterday (before I stopped to buy the book - I had the wrong yeast measure off the internet and it STILL worked), and I'm in love.

My next project is to see if I can replicate the bread type I've liked. It's a whole wheat sourdough (but not very dark), so I think the basic recipe from the HABin5 will work. However, it has what I think are wheatberries scattered through it. I have some soaking - can you use them in dough after soaking but without sprouting? The ones in the bread we've bought didn't LOOK sprouted. Any idea how much of them to add to the recipe? Or how long they should soak before I do? Any other ideas/tips? I wouldn't think I'd need to adjust the other quantities much.

[Susan Otcenas]

The Volkornbrot recipe uses wheat berries. It has more water in it than the typical recipes, and instructs you to not use the dough for 24 hours, to enable the wheat berries to absorb moisture.

[Blueberry]

So...to follow up on my request:

I think I've found my magic bread recipe (or at least one that makes me very happy as a daily loaf). I'm using the recipe from the original book (I think it's called light wheat - it's 5.5 cups white to 1 cup wheat). To that I add 1/2 cup of wheatberries that have been soaked overnight in cool water or quick soaked in nearly boiling water (until it cools). Love the flavor and texture - it's whole wheat without being too dense or chewy.

I still want to try olives in the plain dough - but it's always much stickier and I haven't quite figured out how to add them. All in good time