Anadama BBA Recipe

Yesterday I made the BBA Anadama bread.  The composition of the bread actually started the day before when I had to make a "soaker" of corn meal and water:

I used the same Great Smoky Mountain stone ground corn meal that I used in the Anadama bread on Friday.  In many breads with cornmeal, the cornmeal soaks in boiling water until it reaches room temperature, but this one started in lukewarm water and soaked all night.  I wondered if it would make the bread less "crunchy" than the Jones' recipe.

On Saturday the real Anadama work began.  Reinhart uses instant yeast, something that isn't a staple in my kitchen but will be in this year of BBA baking!  First you put the soaker in a mixing bowl with some of the flour and let the sponge sit for about an hour until it is bubbly. (I almost forgot to take the photo below so the rest of the flour is sitting on the right half of the sponge).

Then you add all the other dry ingredients along with the molasses (2 T less than in the Jones' recipe), the salt and the shortening and mix it all together.  I used and will continue to use my Kitchen Aid for this project.

Really difficult to mix this in - in most bread recipes, you add the flour 1/2 cup at a time.  I would have been happier to mix the rest of the ingredients in more gradually.

But it did all come together as described into a "tacky" dough.

Then the bread had an opportunity to rise until doubled:

I weighed the risen dough to put equal amounts into each pan.  Mine weighed 26 ounces per loaf instead of the 24 ounces that the recipe said.  I don't think I added flour, but I don't know what was different.

The bread was supposed to rise for an hour but in my warm kitchen, it was cresting above the pans at half an hour.  Reinhart would say that the bread would have a deeper flavor if I had a cooler place in which it had risen - I'll do that the next time.

I had preheated the oven so I brushed the tops of the loaves with water and sprinkled them with corn meal.  

They had good oven spring and looked lovely when they were done.  One side looked perfect:

But the other side looked like this.  I guess I didn't secure the seam very well when I rolled the loaves or they had too much oven spring in my convection oven.

The BBA Anadama sliced beautifully, had a nice crumb and was a much lighter loaf than the Anadama from the Book of Bread.  

Here are the two side by side.  The loaf on the right is from the Book of Bread.  The Anadama on the left is from BBA.  They have approximately the same amount of flour.  The bread on the right has 2 T more of molasses which makes it a darker, more colorful bread.  The BBA bread used instant (rapidrise) yeast and the bread on the right used active dry yeast.

In taste, the Anadama from BBA is much lighter and has a crunchier, crispy crust.  The Anadama from the Book of Bread is sweeter and denser than the BBA loaf.  Both are delicious.  I gave one of my daughters the second loaf from the Book of Bread and another daughter the second (prettier) loaf from BBA.  As for me, I had two soft boiled eggs for breakfast - one on one type of toast and the other on the other type of toast.  A truly luxurious treat.

This coming weekend, the challenge bread is a Greek bread and has a starter, so I got my sourdough out of the downstairs refrigerator and will be feeding it all week to get it up to the task!

Last Oatmeal Bread

There has been an interruption in my posting and I apologize. We had a death in the family and I spent the first couple of weeks and weekends in November going back and forth to Mississippi where my family lives.

I made the last oatmeal bread on Halloween weekend, uploaded the pictures and then went to Mississippi and never posted the recipe. The recipe came from the Bread Cook Book from Better Homes and Gardens. My edition was published in 1963.

Here are the ingredients:

2 pkg active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1 1/4 cups boiling water
1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats,
1/2 cup light molasses
1/3 cup shortening (I used butter)
1 T salt
6 - 6 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 beaten eggs



While the yeast is softening in warm water, I put the other ingredients up to the flour in a mixing bowl and allowed it to cool.

Then I added 2 cups of the flour, followed by the eggs and the softened yeast. After kneading, the picture below is what the dough looked like.


It was quite happy to rise well in a relatively short time for an egg bread.



While the bread was rising, I greased the loaf pans - I used three 8X3.5 pans - and sprinled them on the bottom and side with extra oatmeal. Then the loaves rose in the loaf pans.



I let it rise a little long so the loaves were tall when they went into the oven! The oven temp was 375 for 40 minutes. I was supposed to use egg white and water to brush the loaves and then to sprinkle them with oatmeal, but I forgot.

The finished loaf was a little lop-sided but delicious.


Since my November did not go as planned, I'm not baking a type of bread this month. Instead I am baking holiday breads from now (the middle of November) until the end of the year. I had planned to bake rolls in November but I'll save that experiment for 2010.

I'll thaw and comparison taste the oatmeal breads tomorrow.

Oatmeal Bread from Dolores Casella

In the mountains over the weekend, I made the oatmeal bread in one of my favorite old bread-baking cookbooks: A World of Breads by Dolores Casella. This recipe is designed to make three loaves of bread.

Here are the ingredients:

1 pkg active dry yeast
1/4 cup lukewarm water
4 cups boiling skim milk
2 cups oatmeal
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup molasses
1 T salt
10 - 11 cups bread flour

This bread tasted great, but I am sorry I made it because it is such a large recipe that it overwhelmed my mixer in the mountains. The dough crawled up during the mixing process and gunked up the top of the mixer. It really made a mess and I finished making the bread by hand.

First the milk, oatmeal and butter go together and sit for 30 minutes to cool. Then you mix in the yeast, and the rest of the ingredients. Obviously you add the flour gradually - and you might have the same fun I had with the mixer!


My daughter says that she doesn't bake because making bread is its own unique version of making glue! That's how the mixer cleanup seemed to me....


Here's the bread rising before I divided it into three loaves.


Here are the three loaves rising. I didn't have 3 nine inch pans at the mountain house so I used two 8 1/2 inch pans and one nine inch one.



The bread bakes at 400 degrees for 40 - 50 minutes. I set the timer for 45 and regretted it. I was knitting and didn't get up to check it and the tops got too dark in my oven. I'm used to myThermador at home that is well-calibrated. I believe the mountain oven runs hot.


At any rate, I wished I had checked at 40 minutes - really they were probably done at 35.


The slices were pretty and tasted really good with the molasses in the recipe.

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.