culinary experiments and explorations

Adapting from The Best-Ever Book of Bread today, I decided to try out making a variation on a granary cob.

A "cob" is one of those lovely round loaves of bread you often see at professional bakeries, the kind that are less frequently sold at supermarkets because they won't fit quite as readily into premade plastic bags to be left on a shelf. I have fond memories of my parents buying fresh-baked cobs at the bakery near where I grew up, usually for use with an Italian deli picnic or as a tasty extra with spaghetti sauce.

I've only made a couple of recipes from this book before, mostly because of my hesitation to approach rising yeasty breads, but with my newfound confidence I've decided to take another look through it and see what catches my attention.

Today's experiment was an adaptation of the first page I dog-eared -- ( An Oat-Topped Granary Cob. )

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this recipe was to make, and how readily adaptable it was. Moreover, the end result was impressively tasty and I certainly plan to make it in the future as a side to other dishes. The bread is soft and delicious, with a well-formed crisp crust.

Third bread recipe for today, appropriately enough, is adapted from the frankly very impressive Panera Bread Cookbook. This recipe made a lot more bread than I was expecting, particularly with the four-smaller-loaves pattern I'd been following -- two loaves sizeable enough that they wouldn't have been out of place on sale at a full-size bakery stall in the market.

Pleasantly enough, despite a substantial amount of rising for the dough, it also went relatively quickly. It's also adaptable to, well, whatever three or so different cheeses you might have on hand. I used what I had available to create a batch of ( Three Cheese Bread. )

Incredibly tasty and savory cheesy bread, equally servable sliced thin or with people just tearing off hunks at a party. The base recipe also makes a stupendous amount of bread, enough for two full-sized loaves -- I gave one loaf away to a convalescing friend and took another in to share with about a dozen or so other friends, and everyone got a decent quantity. Highly recommended, and I'll be trying out a number of other Panera recipes in the future.

Over the past week or so, after finally having an epiphany on how to make yeasty breads rise properly in my rather cool kitchen (namely, let the dough rise in a covered glass bowl near the oven vent with an extended preheating), I've been having quite a bit of fun experimenting with a small handful of recipes.

First off was my test case -- the Mall Pretzels recipe off of AllRecipes.com. Overall, it's really straightforward -- the only part I found, and continue to find, challenging was the shaping of the dough into the "pretzel" shapes after the rise. It just felt like there wasn't quite enough actual dough there to do it properly, particularly with the way the elastic risen dough didn't seem to want to roll out into meter-long pencil-thin ropes for proper twisting.

So I thought, why not play around with the division of the dough? Instead of dicing it into twelve pieces, why not try it with six pieces and a concurrently longer baking time? What about four pieces? I did still try to roll it out into pretzel shapes, but in the end it felt like too much trouble for just having fun experimenting and I chose to put it in loaves instead.

As it turned out, that made for some incredibly tasty bread, particularly once I added to the recipe with minced garlic, various herbs, and a little cheese to top it off.

Here's my ( Final Adapted Recipe for Italian Herb & Garlic Pretzel Bread )

I've totally fallen in love with this bread, and its salty goodness seems to be a big hit with everyone I've given it away to as well. Fresh bread -- it's great! (Unless you have a gluten allergy, in which case it's not, and I'm really sorry for your unfortunate dietary limitations. *wry grin*)