Last night I stepped into my zebra-stripe boots, cocked my purple fur cowboy hat to the side just so, and baked up some funky cinnamon bread. It was a stone cold groove, cat.
Actually, I didn’t like James Beard’s recipe very much. It was skewed for hand-kneading, so the flour amount was really imprecise, he used sugar instead of honey, and used a ton of yeast and salt. I modified everything a bit and it came out okay. It might have been one of the best smelling breads in the oven. Taste is good but not, as my wife sadly admits, as good as the heavenly sandwich bread.
Today is all about pictures, though, so enough gasbag exposition and on with the images.
Here's a closeup of the crust. Please ignore the creature shedding its carapace in the background.
Finally, the wheat sandwich bread. The crust did some weird stuff, I would bet from a little over-rising. Since then I've learned to ignore the advice to put the seam side up. I now put the smooth side up and cut a slit in the top to control expansion. It looks much prettier that way.
PS, Vox is infuriating when it comes to posting with pictures and getting everything correctly aligned. There is no preview function and apparently no way to get rid of the big gaps in this post. $#%@!
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Maybe you can figure out a heavenly healthy sandwich bread?
First off, nice bread, man!Second, please, please, please get a wordpress blog. WordPress.com has free blogging. I hate this vox platform. I read my bloglines on my phone and click through to the blog to comment, and having to sign in to comment every time is so irritating, especially since it reroutes to some weird spammy splash invitation board half the time. I end up just trying to remember that I should leave a comment later when I'm on the "real" computer, and then I still have to log in since it never remembers me, and by then I've forgotten what stupid little thing I was going to say anyway. Harrumph. WordPress is awesome, just install the Akismet plug-in for the spam and then people don't have to jump through a whole bunch of registration hoops just to let you know they're still thinking of you even though y'all are far away. With wordpress you can also set certain posts to private, the whole blog to private, whatever, good wysiwig editor but you can still do all the html formatting you want, preview, edit, embedding, tons of neat plug-ins, support, free templates, etc. But I'm sure you've got your reasons for being here. :)Anyway, back to bread. I've actually been making some with the Almost No-Knead recipe you linked to, and it's going quite well. Eventually I may be brave enough to branch out like you are doing, but right now I'm really happy that there's an edible bread at the end and it's pretty easy. I'd like to make challah though, I remember my mom and I making challah bread, only in bird shapes, for easter.
"We've attached the lifting cable, Sir. The object is secure.""Very well, Ensign. Haul away. My God, what … what is that?""Sir, it's some sort of … droopy baby.""Careful! Don't let it look at you or you must do its bidding! Ensign! Avert your eyes!""Must … bake … bread … for … droopy baby. Must…must.."
Loved BH in the Coast Guard sling but the lifting cable comment beats all. Laughed too hard!
Thanks, Wendy. The no-knead is really gratifying and it's nice to have 7/8 of a bottle of beer to "have" to finish off. Which is good when you're baking bread in the morning. And you're thirsty. And you're an alcoholic.I'll check out WordPress, but I'm thinking there won't be any easy way to migrate my blog over. But I don't know how much longer I can live with this non-WYSIWYG blog composer. It's even easier to do it in Word, but I can't copy/paste a whole entry with the pictures intact. Pon angry!
It's pretty easy to import to a WP blog. When you've set one up, you
go to the Tools menu in the sidebar of your admin area after logging in
and click import. Since VOX is part of the Movable Type family I'm
guessing that's the option you'd pick and upload your blog export
file–the file you create when you're backing up your blog anyway. And
you are backing it up, right? 😉
Upload it, and there you go. My problem with the no knead bread beer thing is that it asks for a mild flavored lager…what is that? This thing, it does not exist in our kitchen, and I'm not buying Budweiser just for the bread. 😉