Sunday, June 28, 2009

Fresh from the oven - Rustic bread

Seems its one after the other...the challenges..yesterday it was the daring bakers[check my previous post] and today..Through Daring Kitchen I found this group who were thinking of taking on bread baking challenges and I thought, why not !!No, seriously , Ive gotten interested in bread baking recently and thought this would be as good an oppurtunity as any...

For our first challenge ,we had to make this Rustic Bread ..
It is a pre-fermented bread recipe and it means that it needs an advance preparation.
The recipe is for 2 loaves and I wasnt sure about making that much and so I halved the recipe and seems it didnt really mar my breadmaking in any way..

The pre-ferment bubbled up pretty well, and the next day it was the main raising of the bread and that worked out pretty good :

I did something dumb here, I covered it with a plastic wrap which wasnt oiled and while removing it sort of spread out and I had to shape with hand and here it is :

or I know how to shape croissants if ever I make one :))

I used half AP and half Whole Wheat pastry flour and though the bread was a bit dense , it was formed pretty well. The taste was very non-distinct though and Im not sure if Im gonna make it again...for so much preparation it didnt really give me the outcome one would expect...

Im quite reluctant to use the empty calories white flour for bread baking...but Im yet to find a good recipe for whole wheat bread ...the search continues........

3 comments:

  1. The bread looks awesome, m still learning how to bake breads :)

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  2. One thing I figured out with wheat is to increase the yeast. I usually do half and half whole wheat and all purpose flour. You might want to try adding more gluten to your flour or using bread flour. It makes a big difference. Great job on this months challenge! I hope next month is a little easier.

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  3. Your bread looks so fun, almost a bread bowl! I usually use whole wheat pastry flour in place of AP flour with pretty good results.

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