Oat Bread

I got this recipe off the back of a package of Bob's Red Mill Organic Old Fashioned Rolled Oats.

I love Bob's Red Mill. Not only do they make a huge assortment of grains and beans, but they were also underwriters on my favorite PBS reality show, "Colonial House". This is a show where a bunch of people went to live in a faux 16th Century New England colony for five months. They had to live completely in period: clothes, tools, food, houses, bathroom situations etc... I don't imagine it comes as a surprise I am a fan... anyway, Bob's Red Mill made it possible, so I buy his oats.

I am currently in the process of making my second loaf of this bread. I thought the first one turned out really nicely. It is a much better contender as a sandwich bread than the Simple Bread recipe I have been using. (I'm not saying it's better, the simple bread is denser and a more suitable companion to soups and stews.) I am going to put this recipe down as it is given by Bob's Red Mill, but in my current effort I have made a couple changes I will note below.

1 Tablespoon Active Dry Yeast
11/2 Tablespoons Turbinado Sugar
11/4 cup warm water (95º-105ºF)
11/2  teaspoons Sea Salt
11/2 Tablespoons Vegetable Oil
2 Tablespoons Oat Bran
1/4 cup Rolled Oats (I doubled this to 1/2 cup the second time because I didn't think it was "oaty" enough the first time.)
1 cup Whole Wheat Flour
2 cups Unbleached White Flour (The second time I switched it to 2 cups whole wheat flour and one cup white flour)


In a large bowl mix the yeast, sugar and warm water. Let rest for a few minutes. Stir in the remaining ingredients in the order given. Turn dough out on a well-floured pastry cloth (I have never heard of a pastry cloth before, I just kneaded the dough in the bowl.) and knead until smooth and elastic, adding more whole wheat flour as needed to prevent sticking.

Place dough in a large oiled bowl and cover with a towel. Set bowl in a warm place and let dough rise until doubled in bulk. (About 1 hour). Then punch dough down and turn onto lightly floured pastry cloth, shape into loaf.

Place in an oiled bread pan, cover with towel and let rise again until doubled in bulk
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Place oven rack in the center of oven and place bread pan on center rack. Bake for 25 minutes, or until done.

Makes 1 loaf (13 slices).

 

Cornbread

This is from Bon Appétit, November 2007. It is for the cornbread to accompany the Cornbread Dressing. But it could be used for just eating too.

Preheat oven to 400ºF. Generously butter 9x9x2" metal baking pan.
Whisk together in a large bowl until well blended:
13/4 cups buttermilk. (I made the butter milk by combining milk and 13/4 tablespoons lemon juice.)
5 large eggs
2 Tablespoons sugar
1.5 teaspoons kosher salt
1.5 teaspoons baking powder (I'm still using what I have. But I plan to make some soon.)
3/4 teaspoon baking soda

Then whisk in 21/4 cups cornmeal
Then 3 Tablespoons melted butter.

Transfer batter to prepared pan. Bake until top is golden brown and tester inserted in the center comes out clean, about 23 minutes. (It took about 35 minutes for me.)
Cool cornbread in pan on rack.

If you make this one day ahead, cool completely then cover and store at room temperature.

Simple Bread

This is my sister K.K.'s recipe. I have reprinted it here as she gave it to me. Things did not go exactly as it says. See my notes at the end.

Ingredients:
3 cups lukewarm water
1 packet of yeast
1 ½ tablespoons kosher or other coarse salt
6 ½ cups flour
Optional: You can add-
· raisins and cinnamon,
· walnuts and orange flavored craisins (I might also try adding some orange zest to give some extra zing),
· basil and garlic cloves,
· or just some honey to give it a little bit of sweetness

Instructions:
1. In a 5-quart bowl, mix the yeast, water and salt. Add all the flour and any other optional items, then use a wooden spoon to mix until all ingredients are uniformly moist. This will produce a loose and very wet dough.

2. Knead the dough for aprox. 5 min

3. Place the kneaded dough in an oiled bowl and cover, allowing the dough to rise for at least 2 hours, but not longer then 5 hours.

4. After rising, the dough can be baked immediately, or covered (not completely airtight) and refrigerated up to 14 days. The dough will be easier to work with after at least 3 hours refrigeration.

5. Uncover the dough and sprinkle the surface with flour. Pull up and cut off a 1-pound (grapefruit-size) piece of dough (serrated knives are best). Store the remaining dough in the bowl and refrigerate for baking at another time.

6. Hold the mass of dough in your hands and add a little more flour as needed so it won't stick. Create a smooth ball of dough by gently pulling the sides down around to the bottom, rotating the ball a quarter-turn as you go. While shaping, most of the dusting flour will fall off. The bottom of the loaf may appear to be a collection of bunched ends, but it will flatten out during resting and baking. Shaping the loaf this way should take no more than 1 minute.

7. Place the dough on a lightly floured pan. Allow the loaf to rest for about 40 minutes. It does not need to be covered.

8. Preheat oven to 450 F and while the oven is preheating place a broiler pan on a rack below where you will place the bread or on the floor of the oven.

9. When the dough has rested for 40 minutes, dust the top liberally with flour, then use a serrated knife to slash a 1/4-inch-deep cross or tic-tac-toe pattern into the top.

10. Quickly but carefully pour 1 cup of hot water into the broiler tray and close the oven door.

11. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until the crust is nicely browned and firm to the touch. Allow the bread to cool completely, preferably on a wire cooling rack.

Notes:
Apparently the "lukewarm water" part is very important. I think the water I used was more on the" luke" side, and apparently yeast leans more to the "warm" part. So it didn't activate. I'm not sure if this is because of the yeast situation, but my dough was never wet and loose. It was dry and compact as soon as I got all the flour in. I don't understand this part, but maybe the yeast causes the water to expand or something. Anyway, that was my first tip off that something was wrong, but I forged ahead and set the kneaded dough aside in the oiled bowl. At two hours it had not risen at all, so i turned it over, convinced that that the other side was less floury and dry and was sure to rise. At five hours I believed that it was starting to feel a little springy and perhaps had risen a bit, but since the instructions warn against more than five hours of rising I didn't want to risk further catastrophe, so I put the dough in the fridge. Since I had waited an extra three hours for it not to rise, I missed my window to bake the bread yesterday. So I left it in the fridge overnight in hopes that a miraculous transformation would happen. But I was met today with a large, hard, dry block of dough. My choices were to throw it out and waste all the effort and supplies, or keep the faith and follow instructions 5-11. It was a little absurd, but I made the grapefruit sized dough ball and set it aside to rest, and (I hoped) to spread out and fill the pan. (I didn't use any extra flour because it wasn't sticky at all.) After forty minutes, a grapefruit sized dough ball was sitting in a pan. I pounded it out to the edges of the small cake pan, added a little more dough from the fridge to fill it out and baked it for thirty-five minutes. The result is a thin, dense bread. It's not terrible though. I had two little pieces when it was fresh from the oven, so it wasn't hard. But DR gave a piece to Baby J a few hours later and said it worked great as a teething biscuit. So it probably wants to be heated up and eaten with coffee or tea. It's kind of like a biscotti. But there is another huge block of this dough in the fridge that still needs to be baked. It will be a lot of unleavened bread to eat, would you like to come for tea and toast?