Gizmo Likes Bread, Too

In the foreground is a loaf of the trencher bread I made.  In case you wanted to know what it looks like being eaten by a greedy cat.

Better Bread

My previous foray into bread making was not a resounding success.  Keeping with my new philosophy of follow the recipe, I found a few new bread recipes to try out.

First up is a simple two pound white bread recipe from a bread machine book.  Total easy mode.  Go out and get a bread machine and follow the basic white bread recipe.  Bread machines really make this easy but of course the ingredients can be combined in a mixing bowl and cooked in a regular oven just as easily.

Stepping it up, I found an historic beer bread recipe called trencher bread.  The ingredients include eight cups of rye flour, seven cups of spelt flour, and two cups of beer.  A half ounce of dry yeast is proofed into one cup of warm water.  I've talked about proofing yeast before.  The recipe finishes up with an additional quart of water and two tablespoons of salt.  My grocery store has many things but didn't have these varieties of flour but I found them at the food co-op.  To make this bread, mix the flours together and split off half of the mix to rise overnight with the beer, yeast, and water.  The rest of the flour gets salted and mixed back together the next day.  It rises and gets kneaded again and formed into almost a dozen small loaves which rise one last time before they're baked.  Of course, we should be able use our yeast starter to make an ale for the beer in this beer bread recipe.  I'll report back on how that goes.

Beer Bread

I've started a series of articles on homebrewing.  I'm calling it "Febrewary" because I'm clever like that.  In our previous episode, we had our brew day.  In this episode, I share a simple beer bread recipe to use up the other half of the yeast packet.

The dough

Three cups flour, three tablespoons sugar, three teaspoons salt, the rest of the brew day yeast, and enough water to turn it into dough.  While the wort is boiling for 45 minutes is a good time to start on this.  Mix the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and then start adding water until the dough is sticky.  Set it aside to rise.  Come back to the dough after you transfer the wort into the fermenter.  Lay this out on a pizza pan and put in the over at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour.  Go clean up from brew day and the bread should be done.

The bread

What? You never seen bread before?