(almost) Wordless Wednesday: What Are you Baking For Thanksgiving?

Susan's Carrot Herb Rolls Recipe

I think these are going on my Thanksgiving table this year. How about you? What are you baking? Leave a comment, with a link to the recipe if you have it posted.

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Friday Favorites:Janneke's Whole Wheat Seeded Bread Recipe

Janneke's Whole Wheat Seeded Bread

Welcome to Friday Favorites, where A Year in Bread readers guest blog about their best bread recipes. If you bake a Friday Favorites bread at home, we hope you'll come back and share your experiences with us in the comments section of that post.

Click here to find out how you can become a Friday Favorites guest blogger. You'll find links to all of the previous Friday Favorites recipes at the end of this post.

This week's guest is Janneke, who says she has been "baking bread for some years now but have seriously been improving my baking skills after starting to read your blog this summer. Thank you for the bread making tips - I had so much fun baking with you. Now I make bread every other day in as many variations I can." (We love it when we're to blame for newly acquired bread baking addictions.) Janneke is a student at the university in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and writes about her European- and Mediterranean-influenced cooking at Limonana. She recently made her first sourdough starter.

Last summer I started trying all types of bread recipes - from fresh pita and Jerusalem bagels to Lebanese holy breads, beer breads, crusty white loaves and focaccia. Since it’s not easy to find whole wheat flour where I live, I left whole grain baking aside until I received a kilo of whole wheat flour as a gift. This might sound funny to some people, but to me it was a great present - though I ended up needing more than that first kilo for this experiment. The flour was ground by an old-fashioned but still operating Dutch windmill, so I knew it was good flour that deserved to be treated well.

Baking with white flour is different from baking with whole wheat, so I had some experimenting to do. I started by making a whole wheat bread the same way I make my white loaves, but the bread turned out very dense and heavy. I read somewhere that you should soak the flour in water overnight before using it to make the texture soft, but this trick didn't have the result I was looking for either. The seeds I glued on the crust of this loaf did add to the taste - toasted sunflower seeds are delicious.

For the third try, I decided to add some all-purpose flour and Italian 00 flour* to get a more soft and airy interior. Unfortunately I did not really look at the clock, and when the bread was halfway through its second rise I had to run out to an appointment. I wrote a detailed instruction list with a time table for my boyfriend to finish the bread, but he also lost track of time so the second rise was stretched to over 2 hours. It also baked a little too long in the oven, and I forgot to add salt (don’t forget salt, it’s really not tasty without it).

I did feel that structure-wise I was going in the right direction, so I went for another try. This time I made sure I did not have any appointments, and all the ingredients were present. I used the same quantities of flour, added salt, and decided to 'glue' a combination of seeds on the crust again.

It turned out to be my best bread so far, so I did not let go of the recipe and made it part of my routine. I love the lightly sweet and delicate yet full taste of the bread - and the soft interior with its thin crust covered in seeds.



Janneke's Whole Wheat Seeded Bread
Makes one small loaf

This is a versatile everyday bread, and I love to eat it with butter and homemade plum jam. If, like my boyfriend, you're more into a savory breakfast, try it with a scrambled egg. We also enjoy it for lunch with tahina and salad, and it makes great sandwiches.

1 package instant yeast (7 grams - 1/4 ounce - 2¼ teaspoons) or 14 grams fresh yeast
200 ml (1 cup minus 2 Tablespoons) lukewarm water
1 Tablespoon honey
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup 00 flour (Italian fine flour)*
1 egg

Seeds (poppy, sesame, sunflower)

1. Empty the package of yeast in 200 ml of water, add honey and stir with a wooden spoon to dissolve. Let this mixture stand until the yeast becomes active and crawls out of the cup.

2. In the meantime, put the whole wheat flour in a wide bowl and add the salt.


Porridge-like Mixture Before the First Rise

3. Add the yeast mixture to the flour and stir briefly until you have a porridge-like substance. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and set aside in a warm place for one hour or until doubled in size.


After the Mixture Has Doubled in Size

4. The mixture should look all bubbly and full of air. Press it back with your wooden spoon, and work it into a ball, still with the spoon. Add a handful of 00 flour and mix until incorporate in the mixture. Continue this until the mixture is to hard to handle with the spoon, then use your hands.


Tucked in and Ready for the Second Rise

5. Fold, press and knead the dough for about 10 minutes until it is soft and flexible. Continue to add flour until it is no longer sticky.


After the Second Rise, Ready to be Covered in Seeds

6. Dust a baking tray with polenta or flour, form the dough in a ball and place on the tray. Cover with the damp cloth and set aside for another hour or until doubled in size.

7. Preheat the oven to 375°F/190°C.

8. Beat an egg with a little bit of water. Brush the dough lightly with the egg wash and cover with the seeds, then let the bread stand for another 10 minutes before placing it in the oven. Be gentle, don’t slam the door on it, we don’t want to lose all the air and softness we build up in the second rise. The egg wash will give the bread its shiny crust and will also work as 'glue' for the seeds.

9. Bake for about 20 minutes or until nicely browned. Check if the bread is ready by knocking on the bottom; the sound should be hollow.

10. Let it cool on a wire rack.

* 00 flour (doppio zero) is a highly refined Italian flour. In Italy, flour is classified as wither 1, 0, or 00, and refers to how finely ground the flour is and how much of the bran and germ have been removed. There is no one agreed upon substitute for 00 flour. Some people mix cake flour and all-purpose flour. In her book, The Italian Baker, Carol Field recommends that you mix 1 part pastry flour with 3 parts all-purpose flour. And many people simply use unbleached all-purpose flour.

Previous Friday Favorites:
Anne's Oatmeal Toasting Bread
Marielle's Overnight Bread/Burger Buns/Cinnamon Roll Dough
Kelli's Pain au et Noisettes ou Pacanes for the People
Beth's Fauxcaccia
Jennifer's Reliable Food Processor Challah Recipe

A Year in Bread Recipe Index

© Copyright 2009 AYearInBread.com, the seedy bread baking blog where we think the secret to achieving world peace just might start with sharing homemade bread recipes—and freshly baked bread—across the miles.

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Friday Favorites:Jennifer's Reliable Food Processor Challah Recipe

Challah: Messing with Tradition


Welcome to Friday Favorites, where A Year in Bread readers guest blog about their best bread recipes. If you bake a Friday Favorites bread at home, we hope you'll come back and share your experiences with us in the comments section of that post.

Do you have a great bread recipe you'd like to share? Click here to find out how you can become a Friday Favorites guest blogger. You'll find links to all the previous Friday Favorites recipes at the end of this post.

This week's guest is Jennifer, a Yiddishe supermama of four in Ontario, Canada who blogs her bread obsessions at Adventures in BreadLand and has actually grown her own poppy seeds for challah. She writes about everything else at Adventures in Mama-Land.

Can I help it if one of my 2-year-old’s first word was "dough?" Actually, that was a few months ago; he’s just now starting to be able to say the harder part: "challah."

As a religious Jew, and as a homeschooler, baking challah with my kids is more than just another fun activity. It's a doorway to non-stop conversations about traditions, customs, holidays.

Think you’ve eaten challah? I guarantee you haven’t.

The word “challah” actually refers to the part that you don’t eat. A law going back to the days of the Jerusalem Temple says to set aside an egg-sized blob for the priests every time we bake bread. The law is still on the books, but today the separated piece, the actual challah, is just tossed into the oven and burnt.

Another misconception: challah is often defined as egg bread, but eggs are not essential. Bakeries here carry “water” challahs, which aren’t sweet, and “egg” challahs, which are richer. I don’t like either one; I make a sweet but eggless challah instead.

So how did the word “challah” come to mean the rich, delicious Shabbat (Sabbath) loaves? I like to think that, just as the lump of dough is set aside, the sweet, special bread is set aside for us as a taste of something spiritual and unique.

Would it taste as good on a weekday? Perhaps, and certainly challah’s many non-Jewish fans seem to love it. But there’s something special about marking the passage of another week by making and eating bread together.

We say a blessing in Hebrew when separating the extra piece after the first rising, before we form the loaves. Except for during the High Holidays, when we use round loaves, I usually braid mine. I like a four-strand braid, rather than the more traditional three-braid. Maybe I just love being able to pick my own challahs out of a lineup. It’s a lot fancier-looking, and my 4-year-old is into fancy. She loves watching me braid.


Braided Loaves: My Daughter's on the Left, Mine on the Right

As for her own challahs, I picked up a great trick a couple of years ago that works with a wide range of ages:

Spray a loaf pan with oil. Break off a small ball of dough and hand it to the child to roll around for a couple of minutes. Then, have her toss it in the pan. Give her a second piece and do the same. You know your own kid’s attention span; keep going as long as you have dough and an interested child, placing each ball in a different spot, preferably touching other balls of dough, in the pan.

After not very long, the pan will be filled with little balls of dough. Rise and bake according to your recipe you’re using. The blobs will merge to create a lovely intricate braided look she’ll be proud to show off, and pull apart for easy consumption at the Shabbat table.

I’ve heard that separating challah is one of three special mitzvot (commandments) given specially to Jewish women. Perhaps that’s because a woman will include her kids in the rituals of breaking off the piece, saying the blessing, sharing out the dough, rolling and braiding it, connecting them to thousands of years of tradition.

Plus, what kid wouldn’t want to mess around with dough and come away with a delicious warm challah loaf?



Jennifer’s Reliable Food Processor Challah
Makes 1 big loaf or 2 small loaves

The WET stuff:
1/3 cup oil
1 2/3 cups water (you probably won't need all of it)

The DRY stuff:
3 Tablespoons “dusting” flour
5 cups flour - a mix of all-purpose and/or bread flour, with perhaps a bit of spelt (I love this with 1 cup of spelt)
1/3 cup sugar (I’ve never had any luck substituting honey, though it works for me in other recipes)
1½ Tablespoons kosher salt
1 Tablespoon instant yeast
¼ cup “spare” flour – set aside, just in case!

The STEPS:
1. Combine oil and water in a 2-cup measure. Set aside so oil will rise.

2. Sprinkle “dusting” flour into an extra-large (non-zip) freezer bag. Close bag top, with air inside (it’ll look like a balloon), and shake flour around to coat inside of bag.

3. Add remaining dry ingredients (except ¼ cup spare flour) to food processor and process with steel blade to combine.

4. With food processor running, slowly pour oil/water mixture into dry ingredients (oil will pour first; you probably won’t use all the water).

5. Continue pouring slowly until mixture pulls away from sides of bowl and forms a “ball” that moves around the machine in one clump.

6. Continue processing for 30-45 seconds. One of two things may happen:
a. If mixture gets gloppy & starts clinging to sides – add a sprinkling of flour.
b. If mixture crumbles and doesn’t hold together – slowly add a bit more water.

7. When a nice “ball” texture is achieved, process for an additional 30-45 seconds.


Here's what happens if you're lazy and leave it in the food processor to rise. Messy: don't try this at home!



8. Dump dough into floured freezer bag, knot top and set aside to rise (2-8 hours) OR rest in fridge overnight or longer; bring to room temperature before continuing.

9. Preheat oven to 375°. The longer it’s hot before bread goes in, the better.

10. On floured table, gently divide dough – how many loaves do you want? Do not knead at this point! Try to encourage your kids not to overwork the dough, but don’t go crazy if they want to pound it. They’ll still love the end result.


Round Loaves for Rosh Hashanah

11. Shape each portion into a “loaf”. Be creative: braids, snakes, balls, whatever!


Fancy Six Braids for a Special Recipe

12. Set finished loaves on parchment paper in tinfoil or regular pan best-suited to desired final shape. Sometimes I rise braids in a loaf pan for a formal rectangular bottom. Sometimes I just let them sit on a cookie sheet for a casual look.

13. Spray finished loaves with oil, cover with plastic, and let rise 1 to 1½ hours.

14. Brush loaves with beaten egg if desired.

15. Sprinkle with: poppy, sesame, streusel*, whatever!

16. Bake for 30 minutes at 375°. Large loaves and those in loaf pans may take longer; upend the loaf after 30 minutes and check that the bottom is firm, dry and brown. It should make a hollow “echo” sound when tapped with knuckles.

17. Remove from pan as soon as it’s cool enough to handle and cool on a rack so the bottom doesn’t get soggy.

* Streusel topping: ½ cup flour, ½ cup sugar, add oil and mix until crumbly. Add cinnamon if desired. Perhaps not authentic, but if it looks like streusel and tastes like streusel, it IS streusel.

Previous Friday Favorites:
Anne's Oatmeal Toasting Bread
Marielle's Overnight Bread/Burger Buns/Cinnamon Roll Dough
Kelli's Pain au et Noisettes ou Pacanes for the People
Beth's Fauxcaccia

A Year in Bread Recipe Index

© Copyright 2009 AYearInBread.com, the traditional, yet non-traditional bread baking blog where everything definitely tastes better if it's braided—or coiled into a snake and topped with streusel.

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