Bread Bakers Apprentice - Anadama

Well, since one of the things I am enjoying making is bread, we bought ourselves a really nice little book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I've noticed during some of my googling, and blog-reading, that there's an unofficial challenge out there for people to cook each recipe in the book, in order, at the rate of one bread per week.

Well, I don't plan to do every bread in the system (some of the decorated ones I might pass on) I do plan to go through most of the book.

Bread one is "Anadama Bread" so that's what I started tonight.

All I've had to do so far is mix cornmeal and water... I think even I can manage that much. Now it soaks on the counter overnight and tomorrow morning I start the next few steps... this recipe has me waiting around a lot. Updates will follow, as will pictures.

Update 1 (Day 2)

Here's the "soaker" stage. Soaking the cornmeal is supposed to bring out extra flavour. It didn't do anything overnight except absorb water.

This morning I added a bunch of flour, salt, etc to the "soaker" to make a "sponge"... doesn't look very sponge like to me

Well, after letting the "sponge" sit for a while, I see why it's called a sponge... lots of little bubbles in the top, now to add the rest of the ingredients and knead it up

Here we see the bread being kneaded... I love the KitchenAid, makes things like this so easy

 Here is the bread dough about to left to rise for 90 minutes. I love the way it seems to glow.

Oh boy did it ever grow! I think that's easily more than double in volume

And two loaves about to get their second rise (another 60 - 90 minutes). And then I finally get to bake it. This recipe definitely isn't one to make when you want bread for lunch. I started working on it at 9:15(ish) this morning, and it likely won't be done until after 3PM

 Here are the two loaves ha;f-way through their cooking time, when they went in, the dough had risen up just above the pan, so a nice rise happened while cooking

 Two loaves out of the bread pans cooling down

Cutting into one of the loaves for breakfast this morning, nice flavour!

Well, that's it for this bread, while it tastes good, I don't think it beats the potato bread I made last week.

Next week is Bagels (probably cinnamon raisin), and then Brioche