Lately I've been very conscious about unnecessary additives you find in commercially sold bread. The obvious answer to this problem is of course to bake your own bread. The only problem I had with this is the fact that all my loaves turn out to be quite dense and even when they tasted good spread with butter or as a side to soup they just wouldn't make proper sandwiches. So I started browsing the internet to find a recipe that would make a fluffier bread. I found this site and thought I might give the recipe a try. And I'm glad I did: Usually recipes I make don't turn out like the should even when tasting fine but this bread actually looked like in the picture shown on the site. Even though I substituted kefir for the milk (I do this whenever I can to use up the huge amounts of kefir that my grains yield) and used a cup of wholemeal wheat flour.
As for the taste, I will have to play around with seasonings a bit the next time, but I was very happy with the texture. Adrian and Aidan were too, so there wasn't much left by the time I remembered to take the picture. It did make lovely toast like it said on the website but it also worked as sandwich. So I expect we'll have more of this bread in the future.
The other recipe I tried out is this one . Not only did it look beautiful but the quick-no-knead-heading appealed to me as well. I had never heard of a Dutch oven but I figured it must be close to a cast-iron casserole dish which it said you can use instead. I was a bit nervous because of the high temperatures and handling the hot casserole but everything turned out fine. The bread rose beautifully even without kneading and it tasted very good. It's not a sandwich-style bread but I did't expect it to be. I will certainly do it again. It does say to let it rise for 12 to 18 hours or 6 hours in an oven with only the light turned on but mine had risen well after two hours in an oven with set to about 30 degrees celsius.
There's another recipe I'd like to try but I have to be a bit patient for that as I need to make the sourdough starter first which will take a few days. I've made sourdough bread before but wasn't very happy with it. It came out very dense and quite hard. After reading up on this useful website I figured that I probably didn't knead it enough and didn't let it rise enough. I am ready to give it another try now. I've started making the starter dough two days ago with just flour and water and I'm very curious how it will turn out and if I will be lucky enough to "catch some wild yeasts". It's a bit like trying to trap wild birds I think, you just lay the trap and hope some of them will be lured into it. The first day nothing seemed to have happened but this morning there were a few bubbles in the dough and a vinegary smell so I might be lucky.
My kitchen is getting pretty crowded with all the cultures feeding away: kefir, yeast and sourdough. A few years ago this really would have bothered me, but now I think doesn't look messy, just lived-in and cosy.
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