Showing posts with label bread bakers apprentice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bread bakers apprentice. Show all posts

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Anadama Bread

A number of years ago the Internet was buzzing with the BBA Challenge - over 200 people participated in a challenge to bake every recipe in Peter Reinhart's book: The Bread Baker's Apprentice

I missed that challenge, although I owned the book at that time.  Most of Reinhart's recipes require several days to complete.  I just didn't have it in me to commit that much.

But this year I am up for trying something challenging in the bread baking arena of my life.  I typically bake bread every week - usually on Friday or Saturday.  So this year as of November 1, I am going to bake my way through Reinhart's book.  Unlike previous challenges, I plan frequently to make a different version of the bread in addition to the recipe in BBA.

For example, the first bread is Anadama Bread.  This weekend I made the recipe for Anadama Bread in Judith and Evan Jones' great bread book:  The Book of Bread (Reinhart even refers to the Evans book for a source for the Anadama story), and then today I made the Anadama Bread in BBA.  It was fun to do both versions and we'll see in my taste test in the morning if there is much difference between them.

The Jones' recipe took one afternoon.  I used great corn meal from a Smoky Mountain grist mill for both breads.  And I used a great molasses that I buy when I'm in Asheville at the Farmer's Market in Asheville (which is an amazing place).

Here are photos from making the one day recipe:












You can see that it came together well and made two lovely loaves.  I gave one to my daughter when she brought my grandson for babysitting, but kept the other one.  Yummmmm, is all I have to say!  It has a richness and a sweetness.  Will make delicious toast, I think.

The Anadama story is as per the Jones book, this type of bread was created by accident.  A Yankee fellow came home to his lazy wife.  She had not fixed dinner, but had left him with corn meal mush and a pitcher of molasses.  The angry husband threw the mush and molasses together and added yeast and flour.  He was so mad that he spent the entire time saying, "Anna, Damn her," and thus the bread became known as Anadama bread!