Anadama Bread - not BBA Challenge but My Effort

The BBA Challenge looked so interesting to me so I decided to try the first recipe in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice like the challenge participants did in May when they began. So this weekend while I was deciding how to be inspired for baking going forward, I baked the first bread - the Anadama bread.

The name, by the way, of the bread is supposedly because a fisherman got tired of his wife constantly serving him cornbread and molasses, so he tossed in some yeast and said, "Anna, damn her." At least that is the version that Wikipedia offers!

I put the dough to rise in a straight sided Tupperware container (as per Beth Hensperger - see post earlier). It rose beautifully.



Then I patted the dough into a long rectangle and shaped my loaves. I use my fingertips to seal the roll to the dough remaining below it to assure a pretty slice.



Here's the bread just out of the oven. The recipe says to spray the loaves with water and sprinkle them with cornmeal before baking. I don't have a spray bottle up here in the mountains so I used a pastry brush and brushed a little water on both loaves. Then I sprinkled them with local cornmeal, ground at the Hambidge Center's grist mill.



The bread smelled great, sliced really pretty and tastes wonderful. It's sweet from the molasses but not too sweet and has a little crunch from the cornmeal.