Rustic Bread for MellowBakers

My third bread in the MellowBakers.com group bake, the Rustic Bread from Jeffrey Hamelman’s wonderful book Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes is a pre-fermented loaf and has a combination of white bread, rye and whole wheat flours. Although it takes about 22 hours from start to finish, the time actually spent doing anything besides ‘waiting’ is really not that different from other breads.

The pre-ferment is designed to allow a portion of the dough to ferment and age, bringing out a lot of the wheat’s flavour without needing the whole batch of dough to sit about for 12-16 hours. I pretty much went from start to finish doing everything as expected, except for a little extra hand kneading after the first rough mix to add a small handful of flour as the dough was just a little too sticky.

As I noted, this bread used a pre-ferment so let’s start with a look at this step.

Continue reading “Rustic Bread for MellowBakers”

Mellow Bakers’ first bread bake on it’s way!

It’s Official! Mellow Bakers is launched and we’ve picked our first group bake bread: Hot Cross Buns.

This bread happens to be a seasonal regular for Easter, although these spicy & fruity buns aren’t specifically religious in origin.

We’re baking the recipe from two sources, Bakers choosing between either the Hamelman Bread recipe on page 266 OR it’s online offspring, a variation given by Susan of WildYeastBlog.com, so even those who don’t currently own the book can join in and make the March bread with us.

[easyazon-image-link asin=”0471168572″ alt=”Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes” src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51OV5EvTM6L._SL160_.jpg” align=”right” width=”130″ height=”160″]Mellow Bakers is a bread baking group that’s choosing an easy, relaxed  pace where members can follow along with the main group as we select a recipe from a popular bread book (currently Hamelman’s [easyazon-link asin=”0471168572″]Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes[/easyazon-link]) and an online recipe which may or may not be similar. This allows people to bake along even if they don’t have the book the group uses.

Registration to the discussion is simple and free and you can hop on and off as your schedule permits and any one can bake a bread at any time and add their own post and/or blog about it even if the bread they pick was done a long time back.

Join us at MellowBakers.com!