Sugar…..ah, Honey Honey (Originally Posted 24 Sept 2009)

So, I’ve been trying to perfect my apple cinnamon bread, made with the apples from the cannery. If you put in just the right amount you get this cake like texture at the top and a denser bead on the bottom. Not exactly what I wanted for a consistent bread. So, I add more apples and I get a brick. A good tasting brick, but a brick nonetheless. So, Patrick wants me to make his roommates some “welcome to the apartment” bread. I’m sure he’d tell them that he baked it himself, but I digress. So, I had finished up my apples and thought I’d make some raisin bread. Raisins are reduced grapes, the apples are dehydrated apples so I figured I’d soak the raisins like I did the apples and everything would be hunky-dory……you’d think….

So, when I got up the next morning the bread, again was a brick and there weren’t any raisins in it but it was this really nice russet color and sweet tasting brick. So, I figured the paddle that mixes and kneads the bread pulverizes the raisins, which is good if you want raisin flavored raisin cinnamon bread. I realized that was what was happening to most of my apples in the apple bread too, but the whole “brick” thing, honestly scared me.

I know that sounds melodramatic, but I just got Frankie up and running again, and now he’s acting like he’s forgotten how to make a whole loaf of bread….so, using a hybridized form of the scientific method and dumb luck I started to postulate what I had done differently between the fully formed, though not totally mixed bread. The only difference is I thought it would be cool if I used half the measure of sugar as brown sugar. Apparently, yeast, as a fungus, is a particular sugar-avore. I tried it twice, and got bricks. (Did I mention the birds and squirrels are eating really well at the Gartner house these days?)

Well, with that deduction deduced I decided to task Frankie with something easy….plain old white bread. No wheat, not funny sugar….just white bread. And might I add, it was the best bread I have ever made. So, I knew Frankie was fine. Thank goodness.

So, then I thought, well, Honey is a lot like sugar, I’ll use that. I’m a purest when it comes to honey, I love the cheap clover honey you get from the grocery store. The stuff we grew up with before the Whole Foods and Organic people introduced us to Lavender and Orange Blossom honey. So, I went back to wheat and added the honey to the water. The first batch came out good, and you could really taste the honey, but having an interruption in my process (putting the sugar in with the water instead of after the flours) I forgot to put in salt. I mention this because though the bread tasted flat, you could definitely taste the honey. So, yes, I cranked up another batch tout suit and the wheat bread and honey with the salt canceled out the flavor of the honey and I still didn’t get the rise that I would prefer for the amount of ingredients put in.

So, after this you’re probably asking, what did I learn….Sugar, nothing special is what I need to feed the yeast. Honey is for the top of the finished bread and though I can’t do a CarFax on my bread machine, I’m pretty sure that it was owned by a little old lady that only used it on Sundays, which is why my loaves aren’t reaching their full potential….the machine is tired. So, to be kind, I’m giving it a rest. But, trust me, when I recall him from his vacation, we’ll be trying toasted wheat and I’m getting enough courage to try the gluten free breads. There’s a new grain that I want to try…It’s like Quinoa or Quinto or something like that. It’s an Indian grain from the mountains of Columbia. It’s like their rice. Gluten free, high in protein and has a low glycemic value. So, it’s sort of a win-win-win. Stay tuned.

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