I got a GREAT cookbook for Christmas. It's beautifully photographed, has a lovely narrative about growing your own heirloom wheat, and it's very of the moment - Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm. I love the book and all that it seeks to impart on our way of thinking about, preparing and eating food.
I'll admit, we cheated a bit on our New Year's Resolution by starting early. Jeremy opened the book while we were at my parents' house in Idaho for Christmas and, encouraged by his recent success in baking bread with my mother the master bread maker, decided to try out a bread recipe from this book. It's called "Milk and Honey Bread" and the authors claimed to make loaves and loaves of this in their restaurant every week.
Well, we are stumped.
We have tried to make this bread no less than five times. We've used two different kinds of yeast, we've tried proofing the yeast before adding the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients; we've tried using the Kitchen Aid, we've tried mixing it by hand. I even broke out my great-grandmother's bread bowl and Jeremy's grandmother's bread pans to see if it was a matter of coaxing the bread into rising and baking properly by offering it up to the bread baking goddesses of the past.
Nothing worked.
This bread WOULD NOT RISE.
The best we did was on our final attempt. We hovered around the bread all day, tried to rise it for hours and hours more than it called for in the recipe. What we finally got was ever so slightly less dense than our first several tries, but barely more edible. To top it off, the end looked like, well, an ass. Thus, we have named it ass bread (Jeremy actually took a picture of the ass bread in a compromising position in the bathroom, but I'm choosing not to post it).
So, dear readers, I am posting the recipe for you (now that I think I've figured out how to post the recipes without completely blowing copyright laws) to see if any of you out there who have a little baking goddess (or god) in your blood can make this recipe work. I dare you to figure out how to incorporate six cups of flour into one cup of liquid. If you can, you must have done much better in high school chemistry than I did!
Milk and Honey Bread
adapted from Earth to Table
6 cups flour, divided
2 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp dry instant yeast
1 cup whole milk
1/4 cup local (um... not in Wrangell) honey
2 tbsp melted butter
Mix together 2 cups of the flour, salt and yeast
In another bowl, whisk together the milk and honey. Beat in the dry ingredients until combined and then gradually work in the rest of the flour (with a spoon, or a kitchen aid, or whatever magic you can make work)
Turn it out onto a floured surface an knead for about 10 minutes, place in a large greased bowl (if you have one from your grandmother it might help) and let it rise someplace warm, like near your fireplace or in the oven with the light on. This is where it's supposed to double in size.
Punch it down, divide it into two halves and put it in greased up bread pans. Cover them up and let them rise again... until doubled in size...
Brush them with butter and bake at 400 degrees until golden brown and hollow sounding when tapped, 30 minutes or so.
1 comment:
Amen! This bread is impossible. I'm so happy to find another person who is as stumped as I. There must be a cookbook typo.
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