Breads

I have been working on a few bread recipes and have been pretty happy with an augmented Multi-Grain recipe from King Arthur Flour's website. The bread is pretty hearty and includes a sunflowers, milled flax seed, cornmeal, sesame seeds, and whole oats. The recipe is low salt and contains no butter. A slice of this with honey is unstoppable.

I am attempting to create a natural sourdough starter, or sourdough without any commercial yeast. Sourdough has a pretty interesting history including heavy association with gold miners who would take it with them wherever they went. NPR has some great information history about sourdough and a few recipes at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6061648.

The Window Pane Test is an easy test to evaluate the readiness of dough for bread while kneading.

1. After the dough appears to be elastic, 10 minutes using an electric mixer or 15 minutes by hand, remove a small piece of the dough.
2. Roll the dough between your fingers to repair the tear.
3. Slowly stretch the dough apart, alternating sides.
4. The goal is to stretch the dough until you can see light through it without it tearing or ripping.
5. Once you can stretch the dough sufficiently, you can stop kneading.

I will try and add some picture of this next time I make bread