The bread has great flavor, and the texture allows for thin slices if desired. I will definitely bake it again.
The recipe starts with a yeasted soaker that includes flax seeds, whole wheat flakes, rye flakes, 2g yeast and 120 g water. Leader says that the "combination of wheat flakes, rye flakes, and flax seeds give the bread great flavor, especially because they've been allowed to ferment with the yeast" (p.143). I had added the flax meal to that, which made for a gummy soaker, although I do not think it affected the rise.
I used the malted wheat flakes that King Arthur sells.
Probably a leftovers night here today, at least for me. (My wife isn't a big fan of leftovers.)
I bought a copy of Daniel Leader's Living Bread a couple of years ago. The recipes are more complicated than I usually bake, with ingredients not easily available for bakers living in a rural area. I wanted to try this flax seed bread, so I found a source for rye flakes. Today I have started the recipe. I made one change in that I do not use flax seed, so I substituted an equal weight of flax meal.
The bread is on its first rise, and I'm letting it go a bit longer than the 1 hour and 30 minutes, as the house is cooler, and it has not quite reached the nearly doubled mark. What puzzles me is that he says the recipe makes two loaves, but there does not seem to be enough dough for two 9x5 inch loaves. The dough started at the quart line, and is now approaching the two-quart line, and that is the amount of dough I usually use for a single loaf.
I'm trying to decide if I should trust him on this, or if there is an error. I looked online but did not find any errata. Can it really make two 557g loaves? The picture in the book actually shows three standard-sized loaves.
Here are the grains amounts:
22 g whole wheat flakes
25 g rye flakes
425 g whole wheat flour
95 g medium rye flour
40 grams flax seed (I used ground)
Any thoughts on this? I'm about to turn the dough out and divide it into two pieces, at which point it rests for 15 minutes before shaping.
Italian Cook--I've seen recipes for tomato tarts that use cherry tomatoes. It's one reason I asked my husband to include a cherry tomato plant in a pot in the upcoming garden. CWCdesign has a great idea as well. I like to toss mushrooms, asparagus, and cherry tomatoes in olive oil and roast them. Leftovers make good filling for omelets.
I roasted a chicken for dinner on Friday. I used the defatted drippings (Iâm always surprised at how much of it is fat) with deglazing in the pan to make a small amount of gravy that I combined with sauteed mushrooms and spinach noodles. We also had microwaved fresh broccoli.
The Lincoln paper has a story today on how the war in the Ukraine is likely to increase the price of wheat and corn, both major export products for the Ukraine.
Add to this the growing number of economic sanctions being levied against Russia (which always seem to affect us at least as much as them) and food prices are likely to go up.
Wheat prices are already higher than the peaks experienced in 2008 and 2013, though down a little from last November but likely to go even higher. Corn prices are still well below the 2011-13 peaks but going up as well.
Oil futures prices topped $100/barrel on world markets today, and natural gas prices are surging in Europe. Let's hope we don't have the kind of temporary instability that cost consumers dearly last February. (We've still got about a $45/month surcharge on our gas bill for the next 2 1/4 years to pay for the spot price surge last February.) And we're in the middle of the biggest cold snap of the winter.
Today I made egg muffins for the first time. I sauteed onions, red pepper, celery, carrots in olive oil, and browned some hot sausage. I got shredded sharp cheddar from the fridge. I whipped up a dozen eggs. Then I layered the ingredients into well-sprayed muffins tins: about 1 teaspoon of sauteed veggies, a teaspoon of sausage, a generous teaspoon of cheese. I poured the eggs over the top, filling the tins almost to the very top (the recipe said no more than 3/4 full; I was afraid they might overflow and make a mess in the oven, but they just puffed up nicely). This made 12 egg muffins. I baked them at 350 for 18 minutes. Delicious! Next time, I will check them at 16 minutes; I prefer my eggs a little on the wet side. My husband will grab and go with a couple of these on his way to the sugar orchard in the coming weeks.
I spent all day working on a software issue for my former employer (I still consult for them), and it's only about 1/3 done, so we would up doing takeout because I was too darned worn out and frustrated.
On Sunday, I baked my version of the Lemon Ricotta cookies from the Olive Tomato website. I always use half white whole wheat flour and part-skim ricotta cheese, as well as a large rather than a medium egg.
I also made Sourdough Pan pizza for Sunday dinner with sauce made from a can of Muir fire-roasted tomatoes, Canadian bacon, part-skim mozzarella, mushrooms, green onions, black olives (on my half), and grated Parmesan. Usually, I include chopped red bell pepper, but I used the last one in last week's stir-fry.
I haven't looked for it at Sams recently, but I'll look for it the next time I'm there, probably not for another 2-3 weeks since I was just there in the past week. Costco only has part-skim.
I haven't found anyone else locally that has whole milk mozzarella, though I haven't checked Whole Foods. Leprino Foods, which supplies many of the national pizza chains and is one of the largest producers of cheese nobody's heard of, probably makes it (most of the major chains have a Leprino cheese made specifically for them), but they sell in big boxes, probably 25 or 50 pounds, and not to end consumers.
Dinner on Thursday was stir-fry made with the rest of the turkey. As usual, I used soba noodles with carrots, celery, green onion, red bell pepper, mushrooms, and broccoli. I used some Penzey's chicken base (free sample a while back) mixed with 1/4 cup boiling water, since I did not have any deglazing liquid to add, and it worked out well.
KABC is currently selling some smaller handled lames which require the blade to be bent. Supposedly those work better for making swirling patterns. I usually do a tic-tac-toe setup for round loaves.
We are in the midst of another Winter Weather Warning on this Thursday. It began with rain, which created ice onto which snow has now been falling. We may get major snowfalls. (Predictions are all over the place.) With that indeterminate forecast, I retrieved the rest of our Winesap apples from the garage yesterday, and I baked an apple pie with streusel topping. I joked to my husband that if we do have a power failure, we can survive on apple pie!
There were two posts on my iPhone news tab yesterday on alfredo sauce. Surprisingly, neither of them had garlic in them. (Too many restaurants use garlic in alfredo sauce, which is a food crime.) Both of the recipes had cracked black pepper and nutmeg in them.
The original recipe for alfredo sauce just used parm reg, s l o w l y melted. Chefs add cream because it makes the recipe more reliable and easier to make in advance and keep on the line and, to be honest, cream is a lot cheaper than parm reg.
It must be alfredo week, there's another iPhone news post today with a Serious Eats recipe that just uses butter, parm reg and salt.
I've tried several different types of lames, the one I got at SFBI which uses a double-edge razor blade that's bent in a slight curve has worked well for me most of the time. But IMHO the consistency of the dough is more important. Most of the time I wind up using my 5" santoku knife (which I keep very sharp) for slashing dough.
Italian Cook: I buy low-fat mozzarella balls, cut them into 4 oz. sections, then wrap and freeze the section s I'm not using. For a half-sheet pan pizza, I cut a 4 oz. chunk into small, diced pieces, then sprinkle it over the pizza after I have spread on the sauce and placed the Canadian bacon on the sauce. I then add the other toppings (mushrooms, chopped red bell pepper, green onions, black olives on my side, then the whole pizza gets topped with grated Parmesan before going into a 450F oven for 15 minutes. The cheese melts well.
Well, a few weeks ago the artichokes were on a pallet at the end of an aisle and I haven't seen them on the shelf since then, so I think there's a good chance they've been dropped. I did buy several jars then, that will keep me going for a while, we haven't been using them much lately. Just not in the menu rotation, other things have sounded better, I guess. (Once you open a jar you have to use it up quickly, but it has a fairly long shelf life before that.) Costco also has big jars of artichoke hearts, but they're marinated in oil and IMHO that messes them up. The little jars are really expensive by comparison and the canned ones always taste tinny to me.
Last year Sams dropped the 4 shredded cheeses blend we've been using for several years, there's a shaved cheese blend and I won't buy a second bag of it, not the same cheeses and the shavings don't melt the same way. Also gone for several months is the black diamond cheddar cheese spread. The latest to disappear seems to be the large (3000 foot) 18" wide plastic wrap, I only saw the 12" wide boxes last time.
Sams changed what brand of instant dry yeast they're carrying, I haven't run out of the Fleischmann's yet, so I haven't tried it yet. (My yeast usage is way down, in large part because I'm just not making much yeasted bread.) I can get SAF Red IDY at Costco, so when the time comes to buy yeast I've got options.
Some stuff comes and goes, that's always been the case. For a while they had 12 packs of the size/type of Kleenex my wife likes, but I haven't seen it there lately. (It's been hard to find anywhere lately.)
And speaking of things hard to find, Pepperidge Farms Bordeaux cookies have disappeared everywhere again. BakeWise has a recipe that uses 28 of them for a pie crust (that may be more than is in one bag), at about $4 a bag that would make a cream cheese pie crust cheap by comparison!
