Bread Adventures (Batch 7) Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day

      Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a Day!    Come join in the fun :-)  There is nothing quite as satisfying as pulling hot homemade bread out of the oven - and when you can mix the ingredients... shove it in your fridge and come back the next day to play and bake.... well, there's nothing quite like it :-)

   The next basic bread in the book is called Light Whole Wheat Bread - this one looks like a basic loaf.  I am getting lazy lately and enjoying using my loaf pans.  At least I know these won't go flat :-)

     The "trouble" I have with some of these is that the dough makes 3 - 4 loaves.  It's not really trouble since the bread is EASY to give away when you have too much :-)  I haven't tried freezing it yet... but I DO need to use up all the dough before moving on to the next one... because I am me and I USE UP!

At any rate - this made a nice loaf that we used for sandwiches.   My sons aren't quite buying into the idea of making sandwiched with my bread, but they will learn!

I did decide to make rolls with some of this dough.  The rolls I created worked well with sandwiches.  These turned out about the size of hamburger buns.

Next time I will make them a little smaller and try to flatten the tops.... maybe that is something I will learn about when I actually GET TO rolls :-)  This was all me taking a detour!

The next recipe - 100% Whole Wheat Bread - is absolutely delicious!  The only complaint I got was that it is really dense..... I think that is not a real complaint though - I think that is an observation!  Most of us who have always used 'store-bought' loaves are not accustomed to how heavy whole wheat bread actually is.

The specialty bread for this week is Limpa - a Swedish bread flavored with ground anise seed, cardamom & orange zest.  I never could find ground anise seed, when it occurred to me that I could try to grind them myself with my blender.  DUH!!  Took me weeks to figure that one out... I told you, I have NO kitchen sense!   That shows you how good this book is :-)

My blender was a wedding present - so it is a bit ANCIENT.. I suppose I could say VINTAGE.  But it did do the job.  I would say that the seeds were MOSTLY ground :-) And that seemed to be adequate!

   

This bread has a super flavor - but again, I was in a quandary about the four loaves I was going to have to deal with.   My neighbor said it would make great bread pudding (I don't care much for pudding so never tried it).  She made some for me to try and she was right!  Her bread pudding really didn't remind me of pudding per se... it reminded me of a sweet version of stuffing.  And this bread was terrific for that purpose!

Follow me to the next bread adventure, Batch 8, where I get to play with semolina dough... (what in heaven's name is that anyway?)  Hmm..... back to the stores....

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