I bake my own bread these days, taking advantage of the fact that I live in a country where there is easy access to all the flours! It is also cheaper than buying on a daily basis or baking the rolls every morning. Saturday is my homesteading day aka gardening and baking time, so that I have a loaf for the rest of the week and happy plants. For those of you who bake bread at home, you will agree that there is nothing quite like the seductive aroma of freshly baked bread floating through the home.
When feeling particularly productive, yeast breads will be churned out, though I have no patience for waiting for the dough to rise. On most weekends, Irish soda bread (my own tweaked recipe) does marvellously. Everything is baked in my cast iron pan, no such thing as metal bread pans for this diva! Seriously, the crust resulting from the cast iron is topped only by a clay bread pot, which I neither have nor need. Should I ever want a clay pot for baking break, then I could always cure a terracotta flower pot! There are enough recipes online for flower pot bread.
This weekend I decided to undertake a project that has been sitting patiently for months in my bucket list, waiting for me to finally get my act together: brioche. What always deterred me from making this gorgeous bread is the overnight rising. Brioche, I have learned in the last 24 hours, is definitely not a bread for the exhausted working girl to make during the week! Geez, you need a lot of time and a good hand for this dough, otherwise it goes downhill very quickly. After searching for the best recipe, I ended up merging everything I found into a single sassy loaf.
First of all, I don’t use wheat flour (I can hear the entire French faction groaning), but spelt (Dinkel), used four eggs instead of the recommended six in some recipes or two in others. Added milk and more butter. You are supposed to split the dough and bake two loaves from a single recipe. Rebellious moi did otherwise, and ended up with the mother of all brioches, but absolutely love it! Wait two hours for it to cool? Hell no!
FrogDiva Thoughts 