January 15th Bread Braid with HBin5

It is the start of our Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day assignments! We were to do a full Master Recipe on Pages 53-59. With that dough we were to make

1 "regular" loaf,

1 Epi or Wreath shaped bread ( pgs 71-73), &

1 batch of crackers (pgs 233-234).

We can make substitutions, but need to share that with the group in our blogs.

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The first substitution I made was swapping the measurements of the white whole wheat flour for the all purpose flour. As I have mentioned before in my blogs, Ken doesn't like whole wheat, in fact he equates it to sandpaper! So unless I don't plan to give him any of the bread I lighten up on the whole wheat. I used:

2 c of WWW( white whole wheat) and 2 c of WW (whole wheat),

&

3 and 1/2 c AP (all purpose) flours.

I also increased the kosher salt from 1 to 1 1/2 tbsp,

&

added 1/4 honey.

I'm anxious to see how everyone did, especially with their crackers!
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For the regular loaf I flattened out my dough and sprinkled it with a cinnamon and splenda mixture, and cran raisins. Then I rolled it up like a log, pinched the seam and ends to seal them and set them in a loaf pan to rise. That loaf came out looking great as you can see in the picture below and best of all Ken loves it! Matter of fact he ate 4 slices and didn't know it had whole wheat in it! LOL.

Next I tackled the Epi. While this is a shape to make me sigh with delight, I had not attempted it previously. Being a bit nervous about it, I looked up the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day website to see if they had more pictures on how to do it. I wasn't seeing any that really helped so next I viewed a video on YouTube to get a better idea of how it's done. Then I made my basic baguette shape as seen below.

I have had problems before with my baguettes spreading too much, even when making the envelope shape first. Usually I flatten out the dough and then roll it tightly which works better. But this time I decided to try supporting the sides like I've seen in the King Arthur Baking book that I have. In KAB book they show that the shape is formed by placing the formed dough onto a floured towel that has a stiffness to it, then folding a section of the towel up on each side to support the baguette. I didn't have any of that material type towel, so I used a rolling pin on one side and my loaf pan (with the cran-raisin dough in it) on the other side.

Once the dough rose enough I made the scissor cuts at a very shallow angle as the instructions say and the video showed. I was a little concerned that the shape wouldn't come out right, so reshaped a few ends with my fingers. Just before baking I sprinkled sesame seeds and poppy seads on one of the loaves, but left the other plain just to see how they came out.

I was extremely pleased with the results! The only thing I would say is the next time I make them I will make the baguette bigger, I'd like to have all loaves with full size "leaf-buns" instead of half size.

Finally I started on the crackers. I've made crackers many times, but usually with dough that is stiffer. First I tried rolling out the dough on the floured counter. I sprinkled the dough with Penzey's Southwest seasoning. When I went to remove the cracker sections of dough I ran into a problem. The dough stretched completely out of shape! I tried removing the dough with the dough scraper and that was even worse.

I was having more and more trouble with losing the shapes, so I finally just scraped up all the dough and kneaded it together for a minute. I formed it into a round boule and flattened it out. Then I sprinkled it with a four cheese Mexican cheese blend, rolled it into a log and set it aside to rise. When baked it came out very good with just enough flavor from the Penzey's Southwest seasoning!

I tried once more with the crackers. This time I rolled out the dough onto a silicon mat, sprinkled the same seasoning on and then using my dough scraper I cut it into squares. I transferred the entire mat into the oven and placed it on my baking stone. I had rolled the dough as thin as I could and docked it all over with a fork, but you can see how the crackers still puffed up. I found that most of the "crackers" were not to my liking. They were too puffed up. Even after cooling for 1/2 day I found I still didn't like the puffiness and ended up throwing half the batch out and only keeping the really crisp ones.

As I've stated before, I love to share my baking and cooking with friends, neighbors and associates. In this case I took down the biggest loaf of Epi to Carla. She works at our favorite Batteries Plus and has helped us with batteries on a number of our techy devices. Most recently she had one of the guys replace the batteries in my Scooba. While talking to her that time I explained I really needed the Scooba working to help clean the kitchen floor after my baking exploits. We talked about breads and I found out that Carla loves whole wheat bread! To make sure the Scooba worked before I picked it up, they ran it over part of the floor in the shop. That was all it took to convince her she should get one for her mother in the near future!

She loved the Epi as you can see by her smile in the picture!

Cranberry-Orange Challah with wholewheat

Another successful bread recipe from "Healthy Bread in 5 minutes a Day" by Jeff Hertzbert, M.D. and Zoe Francois!  Actually this recipe was provided by Jeff to our HBin5 google group for our December bread recipe.  So let me jump right in with the details!

First I have to confess, my husband is NOT a fan of whole wheat...to the point where if he KNOWS whole wheat is in the recipe he doesn't even want to try it.  But I coax him to try it, and occassionally he is delighted with the results of my efforts. 

For this reason I switched the all purpose and whole wheat flours around.  Instead of 5 cups of whole wheat and 3 cups of all purpose flour, I used 3 cups of whole wheat and 5 cups of all purpose flour.  The other substitution I made was flax seed meal for the wheat germ.  This was one of the substitutions that Michelle posted and it worked fine.  I just hadn't had time and the memory to get wheat germ, but had the flax seed meal. 

The texture of the dough was spot on.  I've been making challot (plural of challah) for about 20 years now.  I love Jeff and Zoe's recipe for it in the original book "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day" and had switched to it last year.  Previous to that I was doing the "old fashioned" type of recipe that was time consuming, albeit a good bread. 

My kitchen is very cold this time of year.  Matter of fact I am sitting here with an undershirt on under my Chanukah tee shirt, and a sweatshirt with a hood on it typing this!  I could turn up the heat, but let's face it, since I pay the utilities I am too cheap to do that!  LOL. 

The point of that paragraph is that it takes longer for my dough to do the first rise.  So I just let it sit there for about 3-4 hrs.  When I came into the kitchen to check the dough just before retiring for the evening I found that my dough was pushing the lid off!  It's a very active dough!  I jiggled and then pushed the dough down a bit to where it was about 3 inches below the top of my container and put it in the frig.  Checked it again in the morning and lo and behold had to jiggle it down again!  Hm.  Didn't know what I was going to come home to at this point! 

When I took it out of the frig to start working with it, it was once again up to the top of the container, but hadn't pushed the lid up.  Working with the dough was very easy.  Some of the ABin5, and the HBin5 doughs are very soft and loose but this challah dough was just right. 

First thing I decided to make was "sufganiots" or jelly donuts.  I don't make donuts usually, and only buy donut holes every once in a blue moon.  But one of our HBin5 group members had suggested using the dough for the jelly donuts and I decided to try it.  After looking up several sites on the web about how to get the jelly in the donuts I chose to attempt the "wrapping the dough around the jelly" method and then frying them.  It was NOT successful.  All the jelly leaked out in the frying! 

Although I had bought two different kitchen gadgets to try stuffing the donuts, I decided not to attempt it until later.  Just running out of time, and energy since I was also cooking latkes for the first night of Chanukah for my hubby, Ken, and I, after a full day of work! 

When frying the donuts, which looked more like small cannon balls, I found it very difficult to tell when they were cooked through inside. I don't make donuts, remember?  Eventually I took them out before they burned.  Then rolled them in sugar and set them aside. 

We ate the donuts as part of our Chanukah meal last night for dessert.  Whle they were good, and the texture was quite acceptable, Ken just didn't care for the dough done that way.  He also made a comment about the whole wheat! 

This morning I made the rest of the dough into two challot, putting both into the standard 3 braid.  After reviewing all the different braiding techniques I decided to stick with my traditional 3 strand braid.  But one thing I did different was roll the ends of the three stands together instead of tucking them underneath.  On the larger loaf I made an indent, moistened the dough, then placed a very small challah on it. 

Just before baking I put the orange zest and sugar on the top of the smaller loaf.  But I had put the sugar and orange zest together in a bowl thinking that that would help the orange zest dry out.  Think again!  It just made a gunky mess.  I couldn't really sprinkle it on top, instead I kind of dropped it on top and then used my egg wash brush to schmear it around on the top of the braided dough.  I just did a regular egg wash on the other one.  Both baked up beautiful! 

On Saturday mornings I go to Wayne and Wanetta's house, my neighbor's, for breakfast.  Wayne makes great poached eggs for me and we all have a great time talking and laughing.  This morning their daughter Denise was there also and it's always fun to see her!  I took down a stack of latkes, the cran-raisin, orange zested challah, and some great Dundee orange marmalade that Denise had picked up at Trader Joe's for me.  I had already sent down some of my homemade Rosh Hashanah apple sauce for the latkes the night before.  So we had a feast for breakfast! 

The challah had just the right balance of orange zest and cranraisins in it.  The texture of the bread was  between cake and bread.  The crumb was excellent.  It all held together extremely well when applying butter, no tearing or having to be ever so gentle with the spreading knife. 

Wanetta, my neighbor cutting the challah.  I always take down a loaf of any of my breads to her and her husband, Wayne.  Denise checking the crumb of the bread.  By the time I left, we'd devoured half the loaf!  Oh bother, now I have to make Wanetta another one!  LOL.  BTW Denise loved the donuts!

Ken enjoying the Cran-raisin and orange zest challah!