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Brooks Bakes Bread
A novice breadmaker's adventures baking all 104 loaves from Beard on Bread
After one year and 104 recipes, I finished the Brooks Bakes Bread Project on March 27, 2012. You can still find me baking and cooking at my new blog, Tangled Up In Food.
Archives: 25 February 2012
Jane Grigson’s Walnut Bread from Southern Burgundy
February 25, 2012
“This recipe comes from a delightful cookbook called Good Things by an English writer, Jane Grigson…It makes one of the most attractively flavored and textured breads I have eaten in a long time.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread
In an effort to make my March 27 deadline, I am doing three recipes this weekend. The first is Jane Grigson’s Walnut Bread from Southern Burgundy.
Here are the ingredients:
Since I couldn’t find walnut oil, I substituted olive oil, and I left out the chopped onion since I didn’t really like it in Dill-Seed Bread.
I mixed all of my ingredients, except the walnuts, together to form a nice soft dough that was a pleasure to work with (especially after Gluten Bread).
Although the recipe indicates a rising time of two hours, my dough tripled in size after an hour and half, so I punched it down and kneaded in the chopped walnuts. Then, I shaped it into four round loaves and let it rise for another 45 minutes.
I baked the loaves at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. They ended up a bit over-browned, so I probably could have shorted the baking time a few minutes.
Jane Grigson’s Walnut Bread from Southern Burgundy is absolutely lovely. Personally, I think it tasted wonderful without the onions and a subtle hint of olive oil. The texture is perfect: a thick, crusty exterior with an incredibly light and fluffy inside.
Gluten Bread
February 25, 2012
“Making [Gluten Bread] is a fascinating lesson in what gluten does: the dough will resist you when you knead, will try to contract when you spread it out, but the resulting loaf is worth the battle.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread
On Wednesday, I made Gluten Bread, which will go the list of bizarre bread recipes along with English Muffin Bread for Microwave Oven. The unique thing about Gluten Bread is that it uses gluten flour, which is typically added to whole-grain breads in small quantities to improve the texture.
Here are the ingredients:
I mixed my ingredients together and then attempted to knead the dough. Since the dough, quite literally, had the same texture as well-chewed gum, this proved to be a near impossible undertaking. It also had an unpleasant brown color that made it look dirty, and I think I would have had more success shaping a rubber tire into a loaf of bread than this dough.
Anyway, I finally formed what is most definitely the ugliest loaf that I have ever made, and let it rise for about an hour and a half.
See? I wasn’t kidding about the ugly thing.
The recipe instructed me to bake the bread at 350 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes. After 25 minutes, I noticed a burning smell and checked on the bread to find this:
I poked the bread with a knife to deflate some of air (at this point remembering that I was supposed to slash the top of the loaf before baking–oops) and used a heat resistant spatula to detach the dough from the broiler.
Before investing more effort into a loaf that was shaping up to be a disaster, I sampled a slice of gluten bread off of the end. It had the texture of a popover, assuming said popover is made of rubber. The taste wasn’t much better, and in fact was reminiscent of an eraser I ate as a child. Mike described it as tasting like “a cooked rubber band with a hint of industrial chemicals.”
Needless to say, I didn’t finish baking my loaf and tossed it in the garbage. I hate wasting food, but I honestly would not classify this bread as food. James Beard let me down with this one.
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