Saturday, November 17, 2007

The Bread Adventures continued...

Nathan has been baking again. I cant complain, the results are fantastic (even though fresh bread to me means butter, and butter is not really so good for my diet...). These are his latest creations, taken again from Richard Bertinet's bread book. The loaf on the left is a pain de campagne, a sourdough-esque bread that we left for 2 days in its dough form to develop the flavours. The loaf on the right is a rye, caraway and raisin bread. This bread we have been eating like raisin toast - with a nice cuppa tea and lots of butter... yummmm


The breads were made with a mixture of rye, spelt and white flour. The rye and spelt we got from a friend who grinds his own grains for bread making. It has proved very hard to buy bakers four! Apparently most bakeries these days buy their doughs premixed with the yeast, improvers etc already in the mix. A kind of 'add water and mix' thing. I think we have found an internet supplier who delivers flour who we might try. It is amazing to think that something we eat so much of is so processed and is so different to the bread we used to eat 100 years ago. I am not sure I really like the thought of all those chemicals in my bread, even from so called fresh bakeries.
We have tried partially baking and then freezing loafs as suggested in the comments in my last post about bread, and then rebaking them when we want fresh bread. This worked ok, though I think we need to tweak the initial baking time (to make it longer). Making 4 loaves of bread at once is the easiest way to do things and if we manage to control ourselves and not eat it all at once, it can last us for a week . Below is a photo of an asparagus and pea soup (for recipe see my post in October) which the pain de campagne was a perfect friend to...

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