Last week's bread

A few months ago we received a tin of fancy olive oil from Italy. One of Becky's friends got it as a holiday gift from some relatives of hers who run an olive oil operation in Italy. She has kids who are very allergic to a variety of things though, so she can't eat stuff like this due to the possibility of cross contamination by other food items. So she kindly gave it to us.

Violet said she wanted to eat some of the "old" bread I used to make with the fancy oil and salt. So last week I baked some extra bread in addition to the two sandwich loaves for the week.

First, the sandwich loaves. I did approximately 1450g KAF white whole wheat flour, 50g vital wheat gluten, 1.5 TBS salt, 1 TBS instant yeast, 1/4 cup each of chia seeds, olive oil, and honey, plus about 1L water. Mixed/kneaded in the kitchen aid, turned out well.

For the more crusty bread, I thought I would try a whole wheat no-knead recipe. The one I tried came from Mother Earth News. I was mixing up the dough late on Saturday night though and accidentally put in 1.5 TBS of salt instead of the 1.5 TSP of salt called for by the recipe. No good excuse, but my feeble one is that 1.5 TBS is what I normally put in a big batch of the usual bread so I must have been on autopilot there. In any case, the dough was WAY too salty, so I quickly realized the error. I could have thrown it out and started over, but instead I tried to rescue it by putting in two more recipes worth of other ingredients.

This however was going to result in way too much dough for cooking in the dutch oven, no knead style. So I divided it roughly in half, then added more flour to one half to make it into something more like regular dough. The unmodified half got cooked into the boule shaped loaf in the picture and the modified half got made into a few rolls and the baguette shaped loaf in the picture.

Both were cooked at 230C (450F) and turned out ok, but the no knead loaf was a little heavy and rather too wet in the crumb for my taste. The kids seemed to like it though, especially dipped in olive oil and salt. The baguette was pretty good.

Here is Violet enjoying a slice of the baguette dipped in oil and salt, accompanied by black tea, for breakfast.