Nutritional Information for Whole Wheat Flaxseed Bread (or any other recipe in our book): Using the USDA National Nutrient Database

By jeff, December 14, 2009
Filed Under bread questions, Nutrition | 66 comments

Many of you have asked about nutritional information… you can use the USDA Nutrient Database , at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/ to calculate nutritional content for the ingredients in any recipe you like. The US Department of Agriculture provides this as a free resource, available to everyone in the world. Using that database, I’ll work through an example of what you can do:

For our 100% Whole Wheat and Flaxseed Bread in the new book, here’s what I came up with for a 2-ounce slice:

Protein: 4 grams

Fiber: 4 grams

Carbohydrates: 21 grams

All these gram amounts are rounded to the nearest whole number, which introduces some error, but this gives you a great starting point to compare your homemade breads with commercial products. You can use the USDA database to come up with gram weights for nutrients for any ingredient and portion size you can think of.

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How’d That Fresh-Ground Whole Wheat Store? Report at 15 Days

By jeff, December 1, 2009
Filed Under HBin5, Recipes | 82 comments

15-day-loaf

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:

in-jar

So, I’m liking this fresh-ground wheat. Very curious as to all your experiences with it.

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Thanksgiving Stuffing from Homemade Bread (and, announcing 10 winners of Bob’s Red Mill products)

By jeff, November 25, 2009
Filed Under Recipes | 33 comments

boule-cover

(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 →

Thanks Peter!

By jeff, November 15, 2009
Filed Under press | Reply

Peter Reinhart is the dean of American bread bakers, possibly the best in the world. He teaches baking at Johnson & Wales University in Providence RI, has written six books on bread baking, and has won the James Beard and IACP Cookbook of the Year awards. On any given day, he’s flying around the world spreading the gospel of great bread– Peter’s an international authority on my favorite subject.

So I was pleased to see his latest book, Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day, which was released on October 27, 2009. Here was a world authority giving his take on super-fast bread (he doesn’t store his dough so it’s very different than what we do in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and in Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day). Peter acknowledged our books and the quality of our results in his own book. Here’s what he had to say in Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day:

Page 7: “… when I first read the instructions for the master hearth bread recipe in a recently published book, I immediately assumed, based on my understanding of dough science, that it contained way too much yeast to work as promised. How could it possibly last in the refrigerator for even one day without overfermenting while the yeast gobbled up all the released sugar? How could it possibly create a tasty, moist, and creamy loaf (what some describe as the custard-like quality found in great breads)? Yet, when I made the recipe, it worked and didn’t overferment. Sure, I saw areas where the recipe could be tweaked and improved upon, but this didn’t diminish my astonishment at how greatly it exceeded my expectations. Although I have yet to find a scientific, chemical, or biological reason to explain why it works, the results forced me to reconsider all of the premises I once held sacrosanct…”

In case anyone’s wondering if Peter’s really talking about our method, turn to page 204 of his book, where he acknowledges our first book by name, as a resource, and again mentions our “excellent results.”

Thanks Peter!

Using Fresh-Ground Whole Wheat Flour (and some highlights from our book tour)

By jeff, November 11, 2009
Filed Under bread questions, Special techniques | 247 comments

scoopers-of-flour

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The flour on the left (the browner, coarser one) is an organic fresh-ground whole wheat. On the right, the commercial whole wheat flour is obviously finer-ground and lighter in color (it’s the Dakota Maid brand, a very consistent and tasty product). So many of you have asked about grinding your own wheat to make whole grain breads, that I decided to try it myself.

OK, I didn’t really grind it myself, I sourced fresh-ground wheat from Sunrise Flour Mill at the Mill City Farmer’s Market, next to the Guthrie Theater in downtown Minneapolis. After Zoe and I did an event and booksigning there, Marty Glanville of Sunrise Flour came by to say hello. She gave me a great home made whole grain bread to try, made from her fresh-ground whole wheat, and I was sold. The flavor is, well, very fresh.

It’s not an absolute requirement for whole wheat bread, but here’s a little on my first experiments with this great flour. Considering how different the fresh-ground product looked compared with commercial whole wheat, I was surprised at how easily this stuff was able to be used in our Master Recipe– with no changes. After some whole wheat talk, a little about the West Coast leg of our book tour (Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco). Continue reading →

Apple, Ham, and Blue Cheese Tart, plus: the secret to getting really thin crust (and a visit to White Pine Orchard for apple-picking)

By jeff, October 13, 2009
Filed Under flatbreads, Recipes | 52 comments

cover1

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 →

Sweet Provençal Flatbread with Anise Seeds

By jeff, October 5, 2009
Filed Under Recipes, Uncategorized | 26 comments

cover-sweet-provencal-flatbread1

In our first book, we covered the classic European baking tradition, and that meant lots and lots of bread from France, a country where I love to eat anything, but especially bread. Sweet Provencal Flatbread with Anise Seeds is a marvelous example of a bread that is so versatile that it can be split to make great sandwiches today, and then dunked, stale, into strong cafe au lait tomorrow morning. You can mix a whole batch with the sugar, orange zest, and anise seeds, or roll a little of those three into a plain dough to make just a pound’s worth (see end of post). Continue reading →

Fresh-picked Strawberry Danish

By jeff, July 6, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized | 68 comments

6-finished-strawberry-roll1

fresh-strawberries

The secret of great fruit tarts and danishes? Great fruit, of course. If you have great stuff, it’s not all that complicated. Take out some stored dough, and just a little more effort gets you a great dessert. My family and some friends had visited Sam Kedem Nursery Garden, near Hastings, Minnesota, where we’d heard they had perfect strawberries ready for picking (they’re on to raspberries now). So we were well stocked with great strawberries.

Continue reading →

Swedish Limpa Rye Bread, in a Cloche, on the Grill (and, announcing winners of free books)

By jeff, June 15, 2009
Filed Under Recipes | 28 comments

limpa-in-cloche-on-grill-cover

OK, it’s finally 85 degrees in Minneapolis, so we really have to get outside and do everything on the gas grill. Even Swedish Limpa Rye, which we’ll get to in a second. But first, the five winners of last week’s drawing for free copies of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The winners are: Brie, E Nassar, One Crafty Mumma, Jules, and Sheri M. Please drop me an e-mail with your snail-mail address so we can send you a book. As always, please use this website, not e-mail to submit bread questions.

OK, here’s how to do the Swedish Limpa Rye, in a Cloche, on the Grill: Continue reading →

Our New Book, a New Look and a Giveaway! [WINNERS WERE ANNOUNCED 6/15/09, CONTEST CLOSED]

By zoe, June 5, 2009
Filed Under HBin5 | 584 comments

hbin5-test021

As many of you know Jeff and I have spent the past year working on a new book, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients
(HBin5). It is a project that started with you! Because of your questions, comments and requests for breads made with whole grains, seeds, nuts, fruits, veggies and even gluten-free ingredients, we set to work to create new recipes. We liked them so well, we decided to do another book. We’ve been playing with ways to make breads that are not only nutritious, but incredibly tasty and still fit into our busy lives. The methods will still be fast, easy and only take 5 minutes, but the results are wonderful breads made with ingredients that will keep us happy and healthy, no matter our dietary needs. Who better than a pastry chef and a doctor to write such a book?

Writing a cookbook takes a long time, not only to test and retest and then test again the recipes, but the editing and designing of the book after we write it. Although it is nearly done we still have more work to do before it comes out this fall. HBin5 will be available in the book stores on October 27th of this year. In the mean time Amazon has posted it for pre-orders for those of you who want to avoid the mad rush at the book stores!

In honor of HBin5 we’ve launched this new home page on our website. My husband Graham designed and built the site for us and Jeff’s wife Laura, who is also our copy editor, wrote much of it. We are so fortunate to have such a creative and talented team to help us. We want to thank them for all of their work!And THANK YOU for inspiring us to write our second book. As a thank you we are giving away 5 signed copies of our CURRENT book: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

Here is a little glimpse into our life of writing HBin5: Continue reading →