Busy Bread Baking Weekend!

My mom was here for the weekend and I love baking for her to bring food home so a busy bread baking weekend it was! (ok, not busy since most was hands off it just sounds better that way haha) and this was the first time I make her bread from freshly milled wheat berries! But the weather outside was frightful, ok, so it was very rainy and yucky and we didn’t get any of the snow promised so I made up for it by baking some bread with my momma.  I’m trying to show her how hands off most of the bread items are, because she is very busy and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on these things.

So, this weekend I made:

• Whole wheat olive oil and honey loaf bread
• Sourdough English Muffins
• Pancakes
• Rustic bread loaf

We started off feeding my sourdough for sourdough English Muffins, I used the recipe here, and this is the third time using it and I’ve not had bad results.  When I fed my starter I made way too much of course. So I decided to make another batch of English muffins for Ryan and me and our family.  This recipe is an overnight recipe where you mix all the ingredients in the evening/night and then the bulk fermenting happens overnight.  In the morning my toddler and I rolled out the dough and used a 3 inch circle cutter (don’t try to use a smaller one, it’s just weird in the end, trust me!) and this is the one I used, let them rise for another hour (actually it was two because it was a bit chilly in our house) and since our griddle was already out for pancakes used that.  And when I say these are so much better than store bought I mean it, and I love my good old fashioned Thomas’ English muffins.  Plus you have the added benefits of knowing every ingredient that has gone into it which is the main reason I started making things from scratch. 

After feeding the sourdough we used our amazing grain mill to make our loaf bread, and of course my toddler loves helping as well.  I used this recipe and I think it’s delicious, the olive oil gives it an interesting flavor at the end and it uses commercial yeast and is NOT sourdough.  The only thing I would add to this recipe is the weight of the individual ingredients, I have started using a kitchen scale when I started baking with sourdough and continued in everything else.  I think I accidentally used Soft White Wheat instead of Hard White Wheat so I think my flour was more thirsty and I ended up adding almost ¾ extra cup of wheat.  (I forgot to label my wheat berries after bringing them upstairs from the bulk storage basement, whoops!) This recipe didn’t call for kneading anything more than the initial kneading in the mixer or by hand so super hands off.  After the rise I used a bench scraper to split it in half and shape and roll it and place each into a bread pan.  And because of that, this was a very easy bread to make and it yields two loafs. The hardest part of this was waiting for it to cool before cutting haha!

The last thing but actually the second thing baked was pancakes., I’ve been using this recipe I love this one and it uses a whole cup of sourdough starter so make sure you have enough on hand! I had a couple of cups left over so this was perfect for me.  We always make more than we eat then freeze the rest for weekday breakfasts, these freeze perfectly in silicone or ziplock baggies.  

So I started off wanting to make some french baguettes for soup, nothing fancy, but we changed our minds at the last minute and ordered local pizza for dinner, but I kept the dough in the refrigerator for a day and formed it into a boule and baked it in the dutch oven to use for grilled cheese sandwiches the next day. If you’ve never had grilled cheese on bread you’ve made, you are missing out. I think a lot of people call this rustic bread or something?

But I am very happy about the bread baking productivity of our weekend and I’m hoping it is a good indicator of the rest of the year!

To check out our garden updates from last year, check here!