Oatmeal Graham Bread from Hensperger

I was out of town over the weekend and didn't get home until late Monday so I baked my October oatmeal weekend bread on Tuesday. I picked Beth Hensperger's Oatmeal Graham bread from her wonderful book: Bread for All Seasons.

I love this cookbook and this bread appears in the February section. Personally I think it's perfect for fall as well.

Here is the ingredient list:

2 cups boiling water
1 cup rolled oats (I always use McCann's)
1/2 cup honey (my own from my bees)
4 T butter - she calls for unsalted - I didn't have any and used salted
1 1/2 T active dry yeast
pinch of sugar (I used a dip of honey on a tiny whisk)
1/4 cup warm water
2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups graham or whole wheat flour
2 2/1 - 3 cups unbleached all purpose flour
extra rolled oats for sprinkling
1 egg yolk
2 T sesame seeds

As in many oatmeal breads, first you boil the water and pour it over the oatmeal, honey and butter. This has to cool in order not to kill the yeast in the third step.


Meanwhile you soften the yeast in the water. I stir the yeast with a whisk dipped in honey and then leave the whisk in the mix as the yeast begins to work.


Now that the oatmeal mix is cool and the yeast is up and running, you pour the yeast into the oatmeal in the mixing bowl. Add salt, whole wheat flour (I always use King Arthur's) and a cup of the unbleached flour. You beat this together well - about a minute.

Then you add the rest of the unbleached flour, 1/2 cup at a time. I switch to the bread hook after the mixture gets pretty stiff. Knead first by machine and then some on the counter before leaving it to rise for 1 1/2 - 2 hours.


When the bread has risen, divide the dough in half and shape it into two loaves. Grease the baking pans and sprinkle oatmeal all over the bottom and sides.



Before baking in a 375 oven, brush the tops of the loaves gently with the beaten egg yolk and sprinkle with 1 T sesame seed per loaf.

Bake for 35 - 40 minutes and then cool on racks.

This is a beautiful and absolutely delicious bread. It is soft and honey-nutty tasting.

The crumb is pretty and the bread crust is tender. So far this is my favorite of the oatmeal breads. It would do well for sandwiches (tried it at lunch today) or as breakfast toast.

Steel Cut Oatmeal Bread

My book club is meeting at my house on Tuesday. We read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout. I really liked the book, but the woman it was about is a sort of tall, raw-boned woman and when she serves food, it's pretty simple - applesauce, baked beans.

We usually try to have food that fits the book. I have baked beans in the oven now. I also thought I'd serve pimento cheese sandwiches. Oatmeal bread is great for pimento cheese. I have a loaf from yesterday, but that isn't enough for the book club, so I made a different oatmeal bread today.

Today I made the oatmeal bread from King Arthur Flour's 200th Anniversary Cookbook. The recipe called for either steel cut oats or oatmeal and since I used oatmeal yesterday, I used steel cut oats today.

Here are the ingredients:

1 1/2 cups boiling water
1 cup rolled or steel-cut oats
1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup butter (4 T)
1 T salt

1 T active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1 tsp honey
2 cups WW flour
3 1/2 - 4 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour.

First you mix the oatmeal mix (the first five ingredients) and let them cool to room temperature.

Then you soften the yeast in the warm water with the teaspoon of honey. When it is bubbling, you add all the rest of the ingredients. I didn't have any whole wheat flour so I used all unbleached flour. Of course, you add the flour gradually and end up kneading the mix with the dough hook.

Here are the steel cut oats, the butter and the salt, waiting for the honey and the boiling water!



After the first rise, you shape the dough into two loaves (8 1/2" X 4 1/2 " pan) and let the loaves rise about 45 minutes. Then you put the loaves into a cold oven and turn the oven on to 400 degrees for 15 minutes. By the end of the 15 minutes, my oven read 375 and wasn't up to 400, but you are then supposed to turn the oven down to 350 for 25 more minutes. So I did.



Here are the two beautiful loaves - and I wish you could smell them - they smell like the honey from my beehives. The little knobby steel cut oats add a nice texture to this bread. Can't wait for the pimento cheese sandwiches!



I LOVE this bread. The slices feel substantial - good for sandwich making - and the crunch of the steel cut oats is such an interesting addition.

Note: This bread makes good toast, but gets a little gummy when used for sandwiches. I used it for pimento cheese for my book club and it absorbed the pimento cheese in such a way that I found it unappealing.

The First Oatmeal Bread - Oatmeal-Potato Bread from Beth Hensperger

I believe that I own four of Beth Hensperger's books on bread baking. I decided to start the oatmeal breads for October with her oatmeal potato bread from The Bread Bible. I've made the bread many times before and wanted it to be a part of the oatmeal comparison because it is a never-fail, always delicious bread.

Since I began this blog, I have worried about whether it's OK to post recipes that I get from cookbooks. Today I searched and found an article on About.com that leads me to believe that it's OK to post the ingredients but not the words from the cookbook as regards the action taken in to create the recipe.

In this article, the author says: "According to the U.S. Copyright Office, a list of ingredients isn't protected by copyright law, but the instructions and any other "substantial literary expression" that go with it may be."

So here are the ingredients:

1 potato, approximately 6 ounces (I use a baking potato and didn't weigh it - but I imagine it was a little more than 6 ounces)
2 T unsalted butter
1 T active dry yeast
1 T sugar
1 1/2 cups warm milk
1 T salt
1 1/2 cups rolled oats (I always use McCann's - the best)
5 1/2 - 6 cups unbleached flour
a little bit of rolled oats to coat baking pans

The recipe calls for softening the yeast in warm potato water with a little sugar. I usually use honey instead, and did in this recipe. I used honey from my bees and a tiny whisk, dipping the whisk in the honey and then using it to stir the yeast into the warm water.



I am interested in how delicious most breads made with potato water are. I searched the web to figure this out. Sometimes the potato water is used as a substitute for using milk, but in this recipe, both are used.

I cooked the potato, cut into chunks but not peeled, in water to cover for about 20 minutes. Then I ran the potato without peeling it through my ricer and then stirred in the butter. The peels stay in the ricer and it's much easier than peeling the chunks.




Then you combine the potato, the yeast, the sugar, the milk, the salt, the oatmeal, and 2 cups of flour. Whe you beat this together, the dough looks pretty shaggy. Then you gradually add flour until the dough is the right consistency.

Hensperger suggests that the dough be a little sticky because the oatmeal will continue to absorb moisture during the rising.



After the dough has been kneaded and rises in a bowl, you shape it into two loaves. I sprinkled oatmeal on the bottom of the 9 X 4 pan as the recipe suggests, but I think it would have been even prettier in the end if I had sprinkled the oatmeal on the greased sides of the pan as well.



The bread rose beautifully.


Then I baked it in my oven with the baking stone for 10 minutes at 425 and then for 35 minutes at 350. It turned out just perfectly.


I tasted it and loved the salty, potato taste of the slice. The crust is nice - chewy but not tough. I thought the bread was a perfect oatmeal bread.

White Bread Comparison of Recipes

The time has come to compare the September white breads. I got all the breads out of the freezer and allowed them to come to room temperature. Then I tasted each one.

I decided that my comparison would be on crust, taste and texture.

1. White Mountain Bread: The Bread Bible

• Crust: Soft and easy to bite
• Taste: Slightly salty taste
• Texture: Funny - tore not in half but in a curve. The crumb was nice and had some openness to it.
  

2. Basic White Bread II: The Book of Bread

• Crust: Has character but is easy to bite through. It is a little chewy compared to the first one.
• Taste: Nice full taste, a little sweet and really smells of the honey that is in it.
• Texture: The slice feels moist and substantial. However, this one had huge air holes between the bread and the crust - probably because I let the loaves rise too long.

3. Sands Basic White Bread: The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook

• Crust: A little tough and chewy. The crust has a lot of body and complements the bread taste
• Taste: A sour-ish flavor with a bit of salt. Tastes like it would make great sandwiches
• Texture; Moist, even crumb

4. White Bread: Variation I: The Bread Baker's Apprentice

• Crust: Most substantial so far but not as tasty as the King Arthur crust
• Taste: Somewhat ordinary taste but wouldn't compete with anything that was on it. Slightly sweet - uses sugar rather than honey
• Texture: Prettiest crumb of all the recipes - tiny holes, nice feel, crust and bread married very well
  

5. Basic White Bread: Sunset Cookbook of Breads

• Crust: Tough, kind of crackles as you chew through it, not very tasty--has a burnt toast feel and flavor to it.
• Taste: Almost no taste - more like store-bought sandwich bread
• Texture: Almost as pretty as the Reinhart bread. Tiny air holes and a feeling of good holding together in the slice.

So now I have to decide my favorite. The Jones' recipe for Basic White Bread II was my very favorite.

I think I like sweeter white breads and this one smelled of the honey in it. This recipe called for 4 T of honey - 1 T more than the other recipes. It was the most moist of the breads and felt good in my mouth.

I also really liked the feel of the crust. I didn't feel disappointed because of the air hole in the crust - I am quite sure that was not the recipe but was rather due to baker error - my leaving the loaf out rising for too long while I hiked a trail!

For sandwiches, I liked the Reinhart (Bread Baker's Apprentice) bread the best. The tiny air holes in the crumb and the feel of the bread were very good. It called for 3 1/4 T of sugar. I think if I had used honey rather than sugar, this one would have been my favorite overall. I also liked the ease of using instant yeast in this bread which none of the other recipes did.

I am very disappointed in the Sunset bread - it really brought nothing new to the table. The King Arthur bread was good, but the crust is what made me put it aside. I liked the taste of it but didn't like the feel of the crust.

Except for the Sunset recipe, I would make all of these recipes again, but I'll give 4 stars to the Book of Bread for their great white bread recipe.

So tomorrow begins the first weekend in October. This month I am baking oatmeal breads. Oatmeal seems like a great way to go into the cool fall.

Although Reinhart doesn't offer an oatmeal bread, I have found five recipes that I will use for my October comparison.

The Last White Bread for September

I decided to make the last white bread in the series from one of my very first bread baking cookbooks: the 1973 edition of the Sunset Cook Book of Breads. I still use this cookbook a lot, as evidenced by the worn picture of it below. This weekend I baked the white bread recipe from it as well as two loaves of sourdough by the recipe in this cookbook.



Sunset was always good about pictures and this recipe is no exception. You can see in the scans below how well they demonstrate by use of pictures.




The finished bread had a rather chewy, tough crust compared to the other breads, but tastes great. The crumb is nice - helped by the milk in the dough.



In the next couple of days I'll compare the five loaves of white bread I baked this month and pick a favorite.

Bread Baker's Apprentice White Bread - Variation 1

As my search for the best plain white bread continues, this week I baked The Bread Baker's Apprentice white bread, variation 1, since it was closest to the other recipes I've used. It is a delicious bread and was relatively quick to put together.

First you put the dry ingredients into the mixer's bowl: flour, salt, powdered milk, sugar and instant yeast. Then you Mix the egg, butter and water together and pour them into the dry ingredients. The mixture comes together quickly - unlike recipes where you first soften the yeast in warm water.



Within a short time, the dough looked like this. I switched to my dough hook and kneaded it in the machine for 6 minutes. Then I kneaded it on the counter for a few minutes more. I did have to add a little flour to create a dough that wasn't too sticky to handle.



The recipe indicates that the dough should rise for 1 1/2 - 2 hours. It's warm in Atlanta and warm in my house, so the dough had doubled in an hour. I then shaped it into loaves and it rose for another hour.

He says to slash the tops of the loaves and fill the slash with olive oil, which I did.

I preheated the oven to 350 and as I headed to the oven with the two risen loaves, would you believe that I dropped one of the pans? It landed on its side and the rise sank. I put the first loaf into the oven. I set the second loaf back on the counter to rise back to its former glory. That happened in about 30 minutes, at which point I put it into the oven as well.



Here's what the loaves looked like straight out of the oven. Below you can see the crumb in a beautiful slice of this bread.



This recipe has no honey in it so it lacks some of the sweet flavor of the previous three loaves. However as a sandwich bread, it will be the perfect vehicle for any type of filling. Also it made great "Toad in the hole" for me for breakfast this morning!

Canadian Buttermilk Honey Rolls

Today I was supposed to bake Reinhart's white bread from The Bread Baker's Apprentice. All of his breads call for instant yeast and I always use active dry yeast, so I'm doing his white bread (Version 2) tomorrow after I purchase some instant yeast!

In the meantime my beekeeper's club has its annual picnic and auction on Sunday. I promised to bring some baked goods to auction in addition to some bigger items that I've donated. I always try to make something that has honey in it. Tonight I baked Canadian Buttermilk Honey Rolls - they are absolutely luscious - I've made them many times.

The recipe is from the Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones. It's only available used, so I'm giving you the ingredients.

2 cups buttermilk
1 T active dry yeast
2 T honey
2 tsp coarse salt
2 T butter
1/4 tsp baking soda
4 - 5 cups white flour, unbleached.

Interestingly, you get the buttermilk to a lukewarm temperature and soften the yeast in 1/3 of it.



The butter, salt and honey are stirred into the rest of the warm buttermilk. Then you add the soda. Soda is usually added to baked goods with sour cream, buttermilk or sourdough to do the chemical process to allow the bread to brown.

When you've mixed all that together, you begin to add the flour, a cup at a time. I ended with the dough hook and finished kneading on the counter. You press the dough into a flattened shape, about 3/4 inch thick.

I then do what my mother always does to rolls. I cut them out with a biscuit cutter and dip each roll in melted butter before putting it into a cake pan to rise. I love the soft sides of rolls baked this way, rather than sitting individually on a cookie sheet.

These rolls only rise once - in the pan. This means the recipe can be done start to finish in 1 1/2 hours.


They bake in a preheated 400 degree oven for 20 minutes.

Here are the finished rolls. I'll package them in Ziploc baggies and offer each dozen as a separate item at the beekeeper's auction.
I kept the small pan of rolls for me at home.