Bread

Let it be known throughout the land that garlic bread is the most delicious piece of food ever made on God's green Earth.

Sorry guys - I haven't had much time to compose a thoughtful response, but I've been thinking about it.

In my limited experience with rye breads, I feel like there are two distinct kinds - the americanized standard deli-style rye that you use for reubens that are mostly wheat flour with rye as an adjunct (which can be called Jewish rye, or more often, New York rye) and the old-world sour rye that is made with sometimes as much as 100% dark rye flour (which confusingly is also called Jewish rye). Those sour ryes can be very tricky indeed, and I can't say I've had much luck with them. I mean, they taste amazing to me but are decidedly NOT what customers round here want in bread: dense, crumbly, gummy, and weird(ly wonderful IMHO). We make a deli-style seeded onion rye which sells reasonably well, although not nearly as well as other breads.
This website, The Fresh Loaf, is a great resource for recipes and techniques for home bakers - you might want to start there for recipes. Those people over there take bread very seriously indeed. It's awesome.

And pairesta I hope you weren't upset about holes in your bread (I'm sure you're not)! Here's a picture from the front page of the Fresh Loaf that looks like great bread to me:


It's so disheartening when a customer wants to return a loaf because it has holes in it. Oh god, especially the ciabatta. It's not their fault really - they're accustomed to those supermarket ciabattas.

When I see bread with big holes like that, I dream about how wonderful the crust must be. All the crackly-meets-chewy bits up top. Nirvana.

That looks like the breads I make and it's what I strive for. But for me there's a line between that and a hole so big a hobbit can curl up and nap in it that takes up the middle part of the loaf.

I'll be in my bunk

I need to learn to make a good ciabatta. That might be my fall project with my new oven(s)

I don't know. I see no need to do it.

Here is a use for breads that have already been baked.

"When we made caramelized onion and Gruyère-stuffed pull-apart bread in the office (inspired by French onion soup and this jaw-dropping Kitchn tutorial), there was not one person who was not thrilled about it."

YUM! Thank you. I'm going to make a few loaves for my friend's birthday. He'll love it.

I have to make a 'healthy' item for our potluck tomorrow, so I'm going with english muffin bread with blueberries. I have to use frozen, so I'm letting some thaw today, and I plan to use a recipe similar to this one, with no kneading, just mixing. The key thing is that it has to rise once after mixing and again after putting it into bread pans.  Should I just use frozen berries, and not let them thaw?  Is it best to add them near the end of mixing, or after the first rise?  I'll mess around with both, but if anyone has advice, it would be handy.

Thanks! If I have time, I'll try one batch frozen and one thawed. Frozen is going to mess with temps a bit, but thawed is going to add more liquid to the mix.  When I made that cheese bread, I wasn't able to keep any at home, so I should make more of this one.

This weekend, we made banana bread using this recipe.  I think it uses more bananas than most banana bread recipes - we ended up putting three large bananas into it.  I added about a cup frozen blueberries and put some old chocolate chips on top of it.

It looked pretty good when it came out of the oven. It took about 70 minutes to fully bake.



We made the batter and poured about a quarter of it into the pan, then folded in the frozen blueberries into the rest of the batter to keep them from sinking to the bottom, which worked pretty well.


 
The bread is very moist and is good as is or toasted.  The berries are kept most of their juiciness and didn't leak into the batter all that much. I'd have used mini chips if I had any, but these were still fine. Total prep was pretty simple - I'll probably make a couple of loaves for our next potluck.

That looks really good. I'd like it with the blueberries in there, though the chocolate would do nothing for me (sheesh, you and PET both!). I wasn't blown away by my recent Alton Brown version, so I might give this recipe a try the next time the baking urge strikes.

I have made bread four times in five days. Nothing fancy just experimenting with the variables in the same white bread recipe, pursuing something that can make good sandwiches. It's fun.