Tag Archives: homesteading

despite the lack of posting, i have been sticking with my #breadchallenge. the last couple weeks have been busy and hard, for reasons i won’t get into here, but baking actually helps, and no one’s more surprised about that than me.

week four: i stuck with the same recipe as used in week three, although i did add a bit more flour and forgot the sesame seeds.

i also made clementine and lemon marmalade, based on the navel orange and lemon marmalade recipe in my favorite canning book: canning for a new generation, by liana krissoff. the three pound bag of clementines i bought, along with two lemons, made just a hair over three 8oz. jars of marmalade. and kept me somewhat pleasurably occupied in the kitchen for about three hours of an otherwise terribly hard day, so i consider it an overall success.

i gave one jar to a friend for christmas but we still have two jars left and marmalade is an obviously perfect complement to my bread-baking.

for week five of the bread challenge, i switched back to the oatmeal bread i made in week one. i remembered the salt this time and used honey instead of molasses. possibly the best loaf yet.

okay, i skipped week two of meg paska’s fall/winter bread challenge. week two fell smack in the middle of thanksgiving and, since thanksgiving in my family’s house starts with two loaves of white bread, if there’s anything i need less during thanksgiving, it’s more bread.

but i’m back in the saddle again. i started with the basic yeast bread recipe from farmer woob’s vintage copy of james beard’s ‘american cookery,’ but modified it a fair bit. i added a third of a cup each of wheat bran and oat bran and used four and a third cups of white whole wheat flour. added more water than the recipe called for and used the autolyse method – mixing the yeast, water and flour together and letting it rest for 30 minutes before kneading. it allows the flour to absorb the water better and makes for a nicer crumb in the final bread. then i added a bit of salt and kneaded until smooth and ready to rise.

even with the minor inconvenience of the multiple rises and kneading, i love this way of baking bread. i’m going to stick with this recipe for a while, i think. it’s hearty without being too heavy, filled with bran-y goodness, but with a light taste and good crumb. i may increase the amount of flour, though, to make slightly larger loaves. maybe i’ll add sesame seeds to the batch, too – yum!

saturday was quite the homesteading day. in addition to the bread, i put up two heads of cabbage for sauerkraut. which was meant to be a birthday present for my pop (november 24, often falls on thanksgiving) but i’m pretty sure he’ll be happy with a double batch at christmas. man does love his kraut.