This batch of bread was to answer a couple of questions. Now that I have the dough whisk to get all the ingredients mixed enough to start kneading can I successfully knead a bit over 4 kilograms (almost 9 pounds) of dough? And after I produce that dough will my oven be up to the task of baking bread in four 9 by 5 pans at one time?
This photo answers both questions. The result was 4 nice loaves of Anadama Bread of about 34 ounces each.
In four earlier posts (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4) I experimented with cornmeal and molasses bread, switching corn into an oatmeal bread recipe and swapping molasses for honey. It was interesting, but left a lot of room for improvement. This version is based on the Anadama Bread recipe and formula in Peter Reinhart’s book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice
This is the Cornmeal Molasses Bread from part 4 with a couple changes to correct problems. It is scaled up to make 2 kilos of dough rather than only about 1.5. The 2 kilos will fill two 9 by 5 inch loaf pans. The raisins were mixed in with the ingredients to get better distribution in the loaves, and their weight was not counted when scaling to get 2 kilos.
I hadn’t considered it before, but from the photo above it’s apparent that white loaf pan is not only a 9 by 5 inch pan, but its shape is not the same as the darker ones. The loaf on the right, from the white pan, is a bit wider and shorter than the one on the left. From this I was reminded that if I want the shape of loaves to match I need to be sure the pans I bake them in match. Continue reading
The last try making Cornmeal Molasses Bread the dough was too sticky for me to form into nicely shaped loaves to go into the pans, so this batch will have some changes to try to get less sticky dough. The last batch was also a bit off as I had planned on a large loaf and a small loaf, but the white pan I had planned on using was 9 by 5 and not an 8 by 4 like I had thought. (I know, I should pay better attention.) To correct that problem this time I will be using one of the small loaf pans and the white 9 by 5 pan to make two sizes of loaf.
Since I was making two loaves I decided to try making raisin bread out of the smaller one.
Continue reading
Since the previous try at Cornmeal Molasses Bread came out quite tasty and edible even if the dough was too sticky to form into a loaf before proofing. I decided to try again, with changes to hopefully make the dough less sticky.
My daughter gave me a nice loaf pan she got at a yard sale or something. It’s got a white coating on it that I assume is non-stick. I thought it was the 4 by 8 inch size, so I proportioned the ingredients to be enough for a 2 pound and a 1 pound loaf. If you look at the photo above you’ll notice that the two loaves are about the same size. The white pan was 5 by 9, not what I thought. What I did was divide the dough in half and make two loaves, each about 750 grams, The result was two sqatty loaves. I should have followed my original plan and used one of the 4 by 8 pans I have. Next time.
To cut down on the stickyness I made a couple of changes from a strictly proportional mix. Water would have been 537 grams, so the 510 is 27 grams less. The cornmeal would have been 127.5, so the 150 is 22.5 grams more. Continue reading
Since the result from the bread machine in Cornmeal Molasses Bread – part 1 was reasonably acceptable I decided to make a full size loaf and bake it in the oven to get a better idea of where to go next. The goal is a good loaf of Anadama Bread, not just a somewhat recognizable one.
So I made a full size batch of dough using the same formula as in part 1 in the bread machine to bake in the oven.
The left photo shows the dough in the bread machine after it has been mixed and kneaded and before the bulk fermentation (first rise) has started. There is dough stuck to the side of the pan that didn’t stay attached to the main ball of dough that surrounds the paddle in the bottom of the bread machine’s pan. In the initial mixing stage it took a lot more scraping the side of the pan with a rubber spatula to get all the ingredients into the mix.
The right photo shows the dough at the end of the 90 minute dough cycle in the bread machine. The dough has risen nicely, and the 93 or 94 F temperature that the bread machine maintains to encourage the yeast to grow has dried out the thin layer of dough that was on the wall of the machine at the start of the bulk fermentation part of the dough cycle.
The ingredients for this loaf are listed below by weight. They go into the bread machine pan in the order listed. The salt needs to go in at the edge of the pan so it does not come into direct contact with the yeast. The yeast goes into a depression made in the top of the flour so it is separate from the salt until the machine starts mixing. Continue reading
For a first attempt at make the Anadama Bread I remember as a kid growing up in New England I took the formula from the previous posts for Oatmeal Bread and siwtched some ingredients. Unsulfered Blackstrap Molasses for honey and Yellow Cornmeal for Quick Oats. Since I wasn’t sure that the result would be very good I decided to let the bread machine do the entire job. That way I invested less effort into it than if I baked it in the kitchen oven.
The recipe I was using to mix the oatmeal bread in the bread machine before baking it in the oven resulted in a loaf that was almost a kilogram (2.2 pounds) which is a little too much for my 2 pound bread machine. So I cut back on the formula and used proportionally less of all the ingredients to come up with a loaf that would fit the pan of the bread machine.
As the photo above of the just baked loaf in the machine shows, this recipe is a good fit for baking in the machine. Continue reading
After having produced a nice loaf of oatmeal bread using honey as one of the ingredients I decided to try making a Molasses Oat bread. I had some unsulferd blackstrap molasses that I bought to use making Anadama Bread so I decided to just substitute the molasses for the honey just to see how it would come out. If it was awful it would give me a place to start zeroing in on a good recipe. Blackstrap molasses has a pretty powerful flavor, and I was worried that I had so much in the loaf it would have an overpowering taste of molasses. It is definitely a darker color than the Oatmeal Bread loaves in the previous few posts, but I was surprised — it came out great, with a mild molasses flavor.