A Few Notes on Bread

Just a little note for you all today as we enter into my Very Favourite Month Ever: October.  I've been busy collecting recipes and trying to select a few Really Good ones for a special October series of posts I will be calling: The 13 Days of Pumpkin, debuting later this week.  Month.  Week.  I dunno.  Sometime before October is over, I promise.  In the meantime, I wanted to update you on a couple things I learned about the bread recipes I've posted here and here.

I have an awesome hippie friend from the dog park with whom I shared a loaf of the infamous zucchini bread.  As awesome hippies are wont to do, he decided to go wild mushroom hunting and ate his bounty, thinking they were the kind of mushroom that was okay to eat.  Alas, he was wrong, and ended up with a beastly case of wild mushroom poisoning.  But then!  He ate a piece of my zucchini bread and found himself miraculously cured!  Or at least feeling soothed and more balanced--I chalk it up to the yogurt in the recipe, which contains probiotics for intestinal fortitude, and the zucchini itself, which has anti-inflammatory properties.  It's also related to pumpkin, and pumpkin is known to help regulate digestion, so I suppose the zuke does the same/similar.  (These statements have not been verified by the FDA.)  Regardless of where the magic comes from, the point is, my zucchini bread IS magic when you eat mushrooms you shouldn't have!  Woohoo!

My awesome hippie friend is also a big bread baker, so he was excited to give the Dutch oven crusty bread a go, but he made one crucial error: he put the rising dough in the fridge!  Remember, if you make this bread, to leave it to rise at room temperature.  Don't put it in the fridge EVER!  Awesome hippie friend will tell you: bad news bears.  The dough won't rise and after baking, all you'll have is a ridiculous blobby mess suitable only for the wildlife.

I picked up a pointer myself in baking my second and third loaves of the crusty bread.  I did another plain loaf and on of rosemary garlic (just add about 5-6 chopped cloves of garlic and maybe 1-2 teaspoons of rosemary [I didn't actually measure, just used the last of my bottle--just make sure when you stir the dough you see a little bit of rosemary everywhere]) and baked them back-to-back.  I noticed the dough this time around was massively sticky, so bad that I had to use another cup of flour in trying to shape it into a ball and still scrape most of the dough off the pasty cloth with a pasty cutter to get it into the oven.  At first I thought I had miscounted my scoops of flour, but since both loaves were soupy, I think the issue lie with how long and let the dough sit.  The first time around, the dough went easily 18, maybe more, hours and I had no problem working it.  For these loaves, it was just over 12.  Some more experimentation may be needed, but I'm going to go ahead and suggest letting your dough sit more toward the 18 hour mark than the 12.  The bread turned out just fine, it was just a pain in the posterior to get from the bowl to the Dutch oven.

So that's it for now; stay tuned for the 13 Days of Pumpkin, coming to a Confessions of a Yankee Baker blog post near you soon!