Our new book has a terrific braided challah with whole wheat and wheat germ, and I’ve been playing with a variation that includes cranberries and orange zest. This same challah recipe lends itself to many other holiday traditions as well, forming the basis in our book for Scandinavian Christmas breads like Pulla and Julekage. It’s really just a lightly enriched yeast dough that is very, very versatile. The recipe… Continue reading
(… and a recipe for pitas from so-called “Cornell” dough). Our third book will be officially released on October 25, 2011, but it’s now available for Pre-Order on Amazon! To view the book’s cover, which is now finalized, click here. It will have pizza and flatbreads from all over the world—plus, the recipes will be complemented with soup, salad, and dip recipes so that these pizzas and flatbreads become the basis of an entire five-minute meal. As in all our books, the idea is to do all the mixing once, but serve many times from a big batch. That’s a perfect fit for soups and dips (and you can get a salad ready while your bread’s in the oven).
Turns out that you can make great flatbreads (like the pitas above) using a modification of our Whole Grain Master Recipe (that original appears in Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day). The modification was inspired by ”Cornell Bread,” a bread baked from soy-enriched dough originally developed as a vegetarian protein source during World War II. Many of you have asked us about whether our recipes work with some soy flour— they do… Return to FAQs page, or scroll down for more on Cornell Pitas…
Panettone was traditionally a Christmas bread sold all over Italy during the holidays. It finds its origins in Milan around the 15th century, and has been the subject of much romantic lore. The most often told story of how this bejeweled bread came to be goes something like this. A young nobleman by the name of Ughetto Atellani fell in love with the daughter of a poor baker named Toni. In order to impress her, Ughetto disguised himself as a pastry chef’s apprentice in her father’s bakery. He creates a tall fruit studded bread to present to her father, calling it “Pan de Toni.” The bread, rich with eggs and butter, sweet with honey, scented with vanilla and lemon zest, with the finishing touch of dried and candied fruits was a success in the bakery and wins the admiration of the lady and the father’s respect. The baker blesses the marriage and Ughetto marries the daughter.
The story is rich and fanciful, just like the bread. Today this sweet loaf is no longer saved just for Christmas, it is eaten at other holidays throughout the year and served sliced and toasted for brunch and as a dessert with a selection of cheeses and sweet wines. The bread, despite its rather lighthearted lore is quite sophisticated. The traditional method for making panettone is done over the course of several days. It included long sessions of kneading and allowed for up to 20 hours of rise time in order to create a flavor that is both sweet, but also has a complexity caused by the fermentation of the dough. Today, we want the same balance of flavor, without having to labor over the process or wait several days to enjoy our bread. Although you can bake the bread after only a couple of hours of refrigeration we recommend letting it sit for about 24 hours to develop its full flavor.
There are traditional Panettone molds that are very high sided which come either straight or fluted, they give the bread its characteristic cupola shape. These molds can be found in either metal Panettone-Charlotte or Paper Moulds varieties at cooking stores or on the web. We have also used a Brioche Molds
Back on November 11, I posted about my experiences with fresh-ground whole wheat, and I promised I’d come back and let you know how the dough stored. Short answer: pretty well. I baked off some of the dough on day 10 of the batch-life, and it did beautifully. Here, pictured above, is the same batch on day 15, which is a day longer than we usually recommend. I had a feeling that it was going to be OK when I took the jar out of the fridge (remember, don’t screw the top down if you store dough in jars– gas is still being produced and this could cause a hazard). You can still see some decent hole structure:
So, I’m liking this fresh-ground wheat. Very curious as to all your experiences with it.
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(photo by Mark Luinenburg)
We’re spending Thanksgiving with friends this year, and our family is doing the stuffing and bread for a table for 25. Sounds like a job for a household where they bake bread twice a day anyway…
I’m making the stuffing from basic boules, ball-shaped breads as above. You can use any lean dough you like, including whole-grain dough from the new book. Tomorrow I’ll be using the Peasant Bread from our first book, which is basically the white-flour Master Recipe, swapping out 1 cup of whole-grain rye for 1 cup of all-purpose flour.
Breads for the table are going to be a mix of seeded and unseeded rye breads, very rustic, maybe Anadama bread from the new book. All we’ll need is the belt-buckles on our hats.
Before we talk about the stuffing recipe, I need to announce the ten winners of the Bob’s Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten giveaway. If you’re one of these folks, please supply your mailing address so that Bob’s Red Mill can ship your prize:
Marta Lynn
Rosalie from New Mexico
Darlene (MamasNutHouse)
Cat (@catsee)
Lynn B (BeeHive5)
Becky (SabbathSupper)
Joan Vibert
Kristie Larsen
Elizabeth (eyow)
Ranee (Arabian Knits)
Two other Thanksgiving recipes from our “library” are:
Thanksgiving Buns and Other Helpful Holiday Hints
Thanksgiving Cranberry Corn Bread
OK, let’s make some stuffing… Continue reading
By zoe, November 18, 2009
Filed Under bread questions, HBin5, Recipes, Special techniques | 264 comments
Pumpkins are associated with the quintessential Thanksgiving dessert, a decadent pie filled with spices and sweetness. The pumpkin adds a smooth and luxurious texture that amounts to pure comfort food. Pumpkin is not only wonderful for its flavors but is also chock full of healthy vitamins. This was the inspiration for making a pumpkin pie brioche to include in Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I wanted to take some of the butter out of this healthy version of brioche, but I didn’t want to lose the rich texture. Pumpkin is the answer! I added the spices and a touch of sweetness to create what I love about pumpkin pie in this fantastic and versatile bread. It can be baked as a loaf, in a brioche pan or even made into our Indian Spiced Doughnuts (page 287) or as the bottom crust for the Pear Tarte Tatin (page 290). It is fabulous as dessert or breakfast.
Check out this video that Lenny and Denise from ChezUs made for us at Omnivore Books while we were on book tour in San Francisco. Thank you both for taking the time to make the video, it was so wonderful to see you.
(picture from color insert of Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, taken by Mark Luinenburg)
The brioche dough in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day was the very first recipe I developed after meeting Jeff and deciding to write the book together. It seemed a natural place to start considering my pastry chef roots and absolute love of this quintessential enriched bread. I had plenty of experience making it the traditional way after working in a restaurant with Andrew Zimmern. He put a fabulous sandwich on the lunch menu that was served on fresh brioche. I went to work early, got the butter to just the right temperature, made sure the room was also at the proper temperature and then set about on the long journey which is brioche dough. Too much work, although fabulous. Fast forward a decade and I meet Jeff, he introduces me to his method and I try melting the butter and just dumping it, along with all the other ingredients in a bucket and quickly stirring. Low and behold I have a luxurious brioche dough in a couple minutes of stirring. I was thrilled and only wished I’d figured this out when Andrew set that lunch menu all those years ago.
For Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day we still wanted to offer a variation of sweets and enriched breads, but they had to fit with our goal of healthier ingredients. This meant less white flour, less sweeteners, less fat and yet still delicious, tender and rich. It took some time to develop, but we came to just the right balance and now I use this dough for everything from a Tarte Tatin crust to my kids’ sandwiches.
But, in the final push of producing the book some numbers were switched around and it makes the recipe as written in the book unworkable–this only affects the very first printing in 2009. We are sad to see any mistakes in the book, and in particular one that will be such a staple to our readers. We apologize and below is the correct recipe. Continue reading
(The picture above is another Mark Luinenburg gem; Mark’s done the photography on our new book). Speaking of our new book…
… this has been a long and wonderful road; tomorrow (Tuesday October 27) is the publication date for:
Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients
We are thrilled with the early reviews, and already have already been on TV to talk about the book. On Amazon, the order window has changed from “Pre-Order” to “Order on Amazon”, and bookstores should have it (if they don’t please ask them to order it). It’s a book we wrote because people posted to us in this website and asked us for it (as in, “can you do something similar with more whole grains?”).
The answer: Yes, you can, but you have to make some changes. We’ll be talking more about this on our book tour, which starts tomorrow, and teaching classes about the changes you need to make to succeed with stored whole grain doughs (check our Events tab for details on cities, bookstores, and cooking schools). If you can’t wait, I’m walking through our whole grain Master Recipe here in this post today. I’ll cut to the chase: you need more water, and one extra ingredient called Vital Wheat Gluten (sometimes labeled “vital wheat gluten flour”), which is available in most supermarkets, or mail-order/on-line from anywhere… Continue reading
Jeff and I are so excited to be heading off on a tour to introduce our new book Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients
As you all by now I take my sweets very seriously and chocolate is one of the essential food groups in my world. So I wanted to share one of the great pleasures of ABin5, the Chocolate Bread on page 211, with all of you who may not have ventured back that far into the book. It has an intense chocolate flavor without being too sweet. This bread is equally as good with a sweet cherry jam as it is with a sharp cheddar, just depends on your mood. There will rarely be leftovers, but just in case there are we’ve got a recipe for Chocolate Cherry Bread Pudding on page 237 is out of this world!
This dough is unlike any other in the book. It has no stretch to it, due to all the chocolate. I’ll show you how to handle it so that you end up with a fabulous loaf! Continue reading
Apples in a savory tart/pizza? Absolutely! One typical combo in a savory fruit tart is blue cheese and pear, but this is the Upper Midwest in October, and our friend Keith Kozub runs the world’s finest organic apple orchard: White Pine Orchard, near River Falls, Wisconsin. We went apple-picking with friends and ended up with what seemed like bushels of apples. This will be the first of many new apple recipes, and it was a chance to play with a better way to get a really thin crust for this kind of tart or pizza… Continue reading
