Monthly Archives: September 2010

Sourdough Rye Bread with Walnuts (Revisited)

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You didn’t think I was going to give up, did you?

No strange ingredients this time!  Only thing I did was put half light and half whole rye flour in the dough, but otherwise I measured to the nearest gram and followed the timings and was rewarded by the Spirit of the Rye!

This is a classic rye bread, full of flavour. Make sure your walnuts are sweet before you put them in the dough. I broke them up a bit but maybe not enough but I quite like the way they break through the top of the dough. This was a very firm dough, I proofed it on a couche cloth having shaped it into a sort of peaked oval with my hands and it didn’t spread sideways at all. I could maybe have left it another half an hour on the cloth, who knows?

Not one for those who don’t eat nuts or don’t like rye, but you can still look at the pictures.

That’s the last of the September breads for Mellow Bakers. To see how the others got on, here are some links to pictures from some of the other Mellows…

Ulrike ‘s beautiful bread with its elegant scoring,  Bnom’s lovely twist with hazelnuts and figs, Cathy’s carefully detailed step-by-step post is here,  and Lello‘s great midnight bread!

Next month we are baking Roast Potato Bread, Challah and maybe having a play with making Pretzels.

Cheese Bread with Parmesan and Pecorino

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One of the lovely things about baking along with a bunch of great people, all the amazing Mellow Bakers out there, is that if you wait and see what they make of a recipe before you bake it, you can learn from what they do. So if there is anyone who fancies making this bread, do scoot over to the forum and join in anytime or just pop over to see what we have been baking!

This is a lovely bread, another great recipe by Jeffrey Hamelman,  only one thing has caused a little discussion. The recipe calls for the cheese to be added part grated and part cubed. If you get pieces of parmesan on the outside of the loaf, or breaking through the skin they burn while the loaf is baking, apparently the taste is not good and the cheese tastes burnt and bitter.

The solution:  either poke all the cubes back into the dough or simply, grate all the cheese. I did the latter; I’ve never had much success with cheese breads before, the cheese always coagulating in little reformed plasticy pools inside the bread with great caverns above.  So though you can’t see the cheese in this bread, apart from the colour, you can certainly smell and taste it. Got the thumbs up from both Brian and Zeb  (who loves cheese almost as much as Wallace).

I used half and half Parmesan and Pecorino because that is what I had in the house and I prefer Pecorino anyway.

The bread is a simple white sourdough with a little commercial yeast added to speed up the proving process.  I reckon if you had any left over,  it would make brilliant golden croutons with French onion soup, the bread has olive oil in it as well as all that lovely grated cheese,  or on a Caesar salad, or fatoush, that is if you don’t just scoff the whole lot in one go!