Sunday Bread Baking

I am not sure what bit me in the ass recently and told me that I must bake bread from scratch, but this past week, I was itching to make fresh bread. And not the kind from a bread machine, either, but the old fashioned, knead-by-hand kind.

Then, I saw this recipe on Smitten Kitchen's blog (which, incidentally, is a gorgeous website that chronicles a Manhanttanite cooking fabulous recipes in a small NYC kitchen), and I could not get it out of my mind. I recalled eating black bread when I lived in St. Petersburg, Russia during my junior year abroad. I haven't really enjoyed/been able to find the same type of bread again, so, I ventured forth to make the 17(!) ingredient-incorporating black bread. Here's all the ingredients gathered. I don't have those small clear glass bowls that make ingredients look so organized and pretty on cooking tv shows, so I made do with our sushi-soy sauce dipping bowls and random other bowls. They worked pretty well, actually:

Note the small mortar and pestle in the picture for grinding seeds. I recall getting this as a wedding present from a certain someone who reads this blog with a comment about how this person thought it would be funny to get me things I would never use, but insisted on registering for. Haha - the last laugh is on you, because I use this thing all the time for spice grinding. I also use the Microplane grater that was in the gift - you would have to shoot me to part me with it. But, I confess, the flour sifter, not so much...I just use a small sieve.

The black bread calls for ingredients like chocolate, shallots, molasses, rye flour, fennel seeds, caraway seeds, espresso, etc. It wasn't easy tracking down all the ingredients, and it involved going to Whole Foods (aka Whole Paycheck) and wandering up and down aisles.

I mixed together the dry ingredients, prepared the wet ingredients, including the yeast, and then combined to make the starter mix:


The mix looks sort of unappetizing and gross, but had this wonderful rich smell wafting forth of yeasty, dark goodness...

Then, came the mixing together of the wet and the dry ingredients. Ok, here, as another aside: I may have registered for a mortar and pestle, but I never registered for a Kitchen Aid stand mixer. You know, the kind that ubiquitously shows up on every bride's registry. I figured, hey, we are going to be living in a small condo in San Francisco, with a small kitchen, so why get even more gadgets that only take up valuable counter/cabinet space? I mean I have a hand mixer, and I have my own two hands to beat stuff with whisks and wooden spoons, right? Well, this recipe will go down in the books as having humbled my cavalier attitude about stand mixers. I will have reconsider getting a Kitchen Aid mixer with a dough hook. The hands/arms in the picture are those of husband. I had to call in the big guns when the dough got harder and harder to mix in the bowl and it was time to turn out the dough on the counter to knead:

Ok, finally, I left the dough to rise in a greased bowl. Then, after a couple of hours, I came back to this - a nice, round ball of dough, roughly doubled in volume:

Then, husband and I each shaped a round loaf, left them to rest again, and then finally placed them in the pre-heated 350 degree oven:

About 45 minutes later, out popped these gorgeous, scrumptious-smelling loaves:

After we let the bread cool a little bit, we came back to make ourselves some delicious snacks. I wanted the traditional Russian-style buterbroad (sounds like boo-ter-bro-oad) open face sandwiches. First, you slather on butter, as any good Russian knows (and which Smitten Kitchen notes in her blog, as well), then layer on the goodies. We choose some Blue Moon cheese, hard salami and sliced cucumber. Very Russian. And as another option, we used some organic fig spread from Greece that we picked up at Whole Foods (so delicious, go get some for yourself right now, yes, now, don't make excuses).

Then, we ate it all up! The bread is spot-on, folks. Delicious, dense (but just the right kind of dense, not dense like sitting-in-a-lump-in-tummy dense), flavorful with the caraway and fennel and shallots coming through, and with a wonderful crust. So YUM. In the end, the bread baking was a success, but the process was long. This is not an everyday kind of bread, but I will definitely be making this again.

Bonus Kitty Pic! Elvis, in a a pensive moment.