So, I put a roast in the slow cooker and thought about accompaniments for Sunday dinner. I’m thinking a pear and balsamic salad with bread, but not the normal, happy, spongy bread but something heartier, something designed to sop up the juices and maybe even make a pb&j a little more interesting.
To make finding the general recipe easier in my house I took a sharpie and wrote it on the inside of the cabinet (don’t look at me like that, the wood is porous so I’ll be able to clean it off before I move out). Instead of putting in the 2.5 cups of white wheat flour, honey and so on I did the following to give it a darker, deeper taste and texture.
Calls for/Changed
1.5 cups warm water/1.5 cups warm water
3 tbls honey/3 tbls brown sugar
1 tsp salt/1 tsp salt
none/1 tsp molasses
2.5 cups white wheat/1 cup coarse red wheat, 0.5 cup roasted red wheat, 1 cup rye
.33 cup gluten/0.5 cup gluten
1.5 baking flour/1.5 baking flour
1 tsp. breadmachine yeast/1.66 tsp. bread machine yeast
The course red wheat is the wheat my sister ground in her VitaMix Blender that I talked about in my blog a few months back called Vitamix vs. Grinders. Though it wasn’t a total waste in grinding it the texture was more of a fine cream of wheat than the pastry flour consistency that I prefer. But it does make good bread (and good cream of wheat), especially when you add gluten and regular flour. The toasted red wheat and the rye flours were both pastry grade. I added the extra gluten to off-set the gritty red wheat and the extra yeast because the red wheat I know is heavier than the white and I figured, eh, what the heck. It’s not like it’s going to grow out of Charlie and take up the whole kitchen like in I Love Lucy. (If you don’t know the reference, shame on you.) And if it does grow a little too big it means the top is still a little doughy, which I like.
I’ll let y’all know how it turns out and if I get adequate praise from the Alpha tester (Mom). I’m just hoping it turns out, this has been my first experiment in a long, long time.
*Her Dark Materials is a nod toward the cover of a single volume trilogy which includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, not that I’m stirring up some sort of alchemists brew.
