Graham bread

Mmmm! Here’s a quickie post with some wonderful graham bread pics! The bulk section at our local grocery store is full of all kinds of different flours and jotimaz enjoys trying them all out. Graham flour is sweet and makes for a tasty sandwich bread. According to wikipedia, graham flour gets its unique texture from a 2-step grinding process. The endosperm is finely ground first and then the bran and germ are ground coarsely. These are then mixed together to create the final textured flour. If you haven’t tried a recipe using graham flour, I would highly recommend doing so. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving extravaganza

This is a post that truly illustrates how busy the holiday season is – it’s almost Christmas and I’m just now posting the buffet of bread jotimaz produced for Thanksgiving. You just can’t go wrong with bread at the holidays.

Herb cobblestone bread – mmmmm!

The loaf on the left had cornmeal in it (always a winner for me!) and the the loaf on the right was a simple rustic bread with GIANT bubbles in the crumb.

Top view – look at those crusts!

An improved close-up of the rustic white bread

Cinnamon raisin bread

Cinnamon raisin bread is perfect for breakfast or perhaps bringing to a brunch get-together! jotimaz timed his baking so that he could literally take the loaf out of the oven at our house and it would still be piping hot when we arrived at the brunch. It filled both of our houses with the lovely smell of cinnamon. What a great way to start the morning!

A nice dense breakfast loaf!

The initial mixing step in the bread machine chops up the raisins and distributes them nice and evenly throughout the dough.

Poppy seed challah

jotimaz and I recently attended a Thanksgiving potluck and our contribution was a shiny loaf of poppy seed challah.

Look at that shiny crusty goodness!

This loaf was quite a hit! People really enjoyed the look of the braid and the egg coating. One thing to keep in mind with this loaf is that since there isn’t much fat (butter, vegetable oil, etc) in it, it’s best to eat it on the day it is baked because it will start to dry out shortly thereafter.

jotimaz enjoyed re-learning how to braid for this recipe and I enjoyed the simple, fresh flavor of the finished loaf.

We’re back!

Hello all! Much has changed since jotimaz and I last posted to our humble blog, but one thing has not. jotimaz continues to bake bread for us at least once a week, if not more often. It has become a part of our weekly routine and I feel extremely lucky and spoiled to have a husband who takes pleasure from baking fresh bread.

With that said, we are going to inject new life into the blog and try our very hardest to keep up on it. I’ll post the first loaf of many today and please let us know if you’re interested in the recipe, the technique, etc.

I can’t quite remember bread

Hello all you bread lovers out there! jotimaz and I apologize that our posts have fallen off in the past weeks, but with Alaskan summers being what they are, we’ve been trying very hard to be out enjoying the sun as much as possible. There has still been much bread baking but most times I forget to take a picture before a big hunk is cut away from it. These pictures are from the beginning of June and I can’t quite remember what kind of bread it was. It’s a whole wheat loaf, but other than that I don’t know the specifics.

For a potluck last night, jotimaz whipped up a sweet multi-herb loaf that he shaped into a round. It came out so beautiful and brown and tasted so good! Well, we’ll try to be better about posting but I have a feeling it will become more regular only after the weather turns cold again. =)

Italian cobblestone bread

This is actually the recipe that started the cobblestone fascination, but for some reason I posted the other one first. Oh well. =)

Talk about an aromatic cooking experience – this smelled like an Italian feast was being made in my oven! And I can’t say enough about how quick and easy this bread is to make! Within 45 minutes, you have yummy smelling and tasting bread to eat. You really can’t beat that.

Cinnamon-raisin-almond-sourdough cobblestone bread

Oh my goodness! What a wonderful creation this quickbread is! It’s easy too: mix up the dough, cut it into pieces, let it rise for a bit and then bake it! It becomes this wonderful pull-apart bread that’s oh so tasty. jotimaz served this to his graduate committee and they almost ate the whole thing. =)

A little bit of everything bread

jotimaz and I apologize for not posting in such a long while, but grad school and a little bit of travel has kept us busy.

The sandwich loaf for this week has a little bit of everything in it – bread flour, dark and light rye flour, wheat flour, cornmeal and sourdough. It’s dense and aromatic. All the other flours negate the crumbly nature of the cornmeal so it stays together quite nicely. Unfortunately, our sourdough had alot of liquid in it so the loaf didn’t rise as high as it could have. No worries though – we just have a little bit smaller sandwiches. =)

Sunflower whole wheat sourdough bread

The bread for last week’s sandwiches was superb! Whole wheat sourdough is always a winner in my book, but throwing in sunflower seeds really was a nice touch. The whole loaf was moist and nutty…perfect for turkey sandwiches!