I recently stumbled across a new website, ruhlman.com, and, in particular, this recipe for buttermilk rolls. I liked the rolls so much, I’ve made them several times since Christmas. These aren’t light-as-a-feather rolls. They are dense and soft, almost a bit heavy. They have fantastic flavor from the buttermilk, and they stay soft for days.

As I’ve played around with this recipe, I made a few changes. First of all, I halve the recipe and still get eight good-sized rolls out of it. The second thing I do is use a 13″x9″ pan to bake the rolls. I tried using a springform pan, but I had a hard time getting the rolls completely baked before the tops burned (did I mention this is a dense dough?). Spreading the rolls out helps them baking more evenly.

Currently cooking from Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce

I feel like I made mostly pancakes and waffles out of this book, so I wanted to end with a yeast bread.

Unlike the previous oatmeal pancakes, this bread only has rolled oats in it. No snot or oat flour. The brownness comes from whole-wheat flour and molasses, both of which give this bread a dark, almost bitter flavor. And I mean that in a good way.

This is a pretty standard bread recipe with one exception. Boyce has you stir together the wet ingredients (yeast, molasses, water and melted butter) and the dry ingredients (whole-wheat flour, bread flour, rolled oats and salt) just until everything is moistened. Then the mixture sits, covered with a towel, for 30 minutes, a method called autolyse. This gives the flour and oats time to absorb moisture and build flavor. At the end of thirty minutes, the bread is kneaded and set out for its first rise. After the dough has doubled, it is shaped, left to rise in the pan, then baked.

My finished bread was moist and flavorful. It looked dark, almost burnt on top, but it had a lot of flavor. It made really good toast (spread either with homemade peach jam as pictured, or, my favorite, peanut butter and nutella). Even with that extra step, this was a very easy recipe that yielded great results.

I’ve enjoyed cooking out of this book. Until you become familiar with how different flours react, working with them can be a bit of a crapshoot. Boyce takes most of the guesswork out, giving you recipes that really work. The only thing I would have liked to see is some sort of chart listing each of the different flours and their properties, flavor pairings, etc.

I think my favorite recipe out of this book was the flatbread; I’ve made it several times. My least favorite, by a mile, was the quinoa and beet pancakes. Beets in my salad? Yes. Beets in my pancakes? No, no, no.

I haven’t picked my next book yet. Any suggestions?

Currently cooking from Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce

The first time I made these flatbreads, we ate them so fast I didn’t have time to get a picture. They are that good. They are also my favorite recipe out of this book, so far.

These flatbreads introduced me to a new flour—amaranth. Amaranth has been used for thousands of years. According to Boyce, the Aztec empire was built on amaranth; when the Spanish came through, one of the things they did to destroy the Aztecs was to burn, and later ban, their amaranth crop.

Like other flours in this book, amaranth is gluten free, so it needs to be mixed with wheat flour in order to develop any sort of structure. It has a very unique smell; it reminds me somewhat of beets. The flour tastes sort of malty and has a sweet, nutty flavor. According to the information on the package of amaranth flour (from Bob’s Red Mill), you can substitute up to 1/4 cup of amaranth flour for wheat flour when baking.

This flatbread recipe calls for 1/2 cup of amaranth flour to 3 cups of all-purpose flour. Yeast, salt and a bit of honey round out the ingredients. The dough was soft and supple and easy to work with. After two rises, the dough is rolled out into rounds, brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with herbs and salt. The flatbreads are cooked on the stovetop, just a couple of minutes per side. They are best eaten immediately, as they tended to toughen up as they cooled, becoming extremely chewy.

I couldn’t really taste the amaranth flour in the finished bread. It just added a little something extra, gave the flatbreads a little more oomph. The first time I made these flatbreads, I sprinkled them with all different sorts of herbs and spices, such as seasoning salt and sumac. The second time, I stuck to oregano as its flavor matched the bread’s flavor really well.

Currently cooking from Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce

No more cookies.

Well, not for a little while.

And definitely no more cakes, especially ones that have more than 1 layer in them.

I’m moving on to my next book, Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce. As the name implies, this book is all about baking with whole grains, from Kamut flour to quinoa flour to spelt flour. I’m excited to experiment with different flours, and I hope to find some new favorites.

The first recipe out of this book had to fit two criteria. First, it couldn’t be a cookie or cake. Secondly, it couldn’t be sweet. I’m over sweet, after overdosing on the last two books.

I expect this no-sweet thing to last for about 24 hours, after which I’ll be munching on chocolate chips.

So, bread. Specifically, Kamut challah bread. Kamut (pronounced ka-MOOT) is a type of wheat that traces its ancestry back to emmer, a grain grown thousands of years ago. Kamut flour is very mild, with a fine texture. According to Boyce’s notes, Kamut goes especially well with recipes that contain lots of butter. You can find Kamut in the health food section of grocery stores and sometimes in the bulk aisle.

This isn’t the first time I’ve played around with Kamut; remember that Kamut pound cake? Well, this bread was even better.

You start off by making a sponge of yeast, milk, honey, Kamut flour and millet flour. A sponge is basically a really wet dough that sits around developing flavor. In this case, you let the sponge sit for about 30 minutes, then you mix in the rest of the ingredients, which are all-purpose flour, eggs, salt and butter. The dough in kneaded until it is silky smooth and soft. After a couple of risings, the dough is braided and baked.

The finished bread had a soft, tender crumb. The flavor was very buttery thanks to the Kamut flour and butter. If I hadn’t known about the Kamut flour, I probably couldn’t have told you what was different. Like most challah, this loaf was best the day I made it, and it started to dry out pretty quickly. It makes marvelous toast, though, especially if you happen to have homemade peach freezer jam . . .

Seriously, these are good. The sweet, tangy filling is encased by a soft, just slightly sweet yeasty bread. The lemon flavor is everywhere. There’s lemon zest in the dough. The filling is made up of sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice. And the cream cheese glaze has lemon juice in it.

You can find the recipe here.

The only change I made to the recipe was to increase the oven temperature to 400 degrees and bake the rolls for about 15 minutes. The higher oven temperature seems to keep the rolls more moist inside.

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Making this focaccia was a mistake. A HUGE mistake. See, Bryan is trying out a gluten-free diet, so anything I bake I try to get rid of before he gets home. So I made this focaccia, and all my regular baking recipients weren’t answering their phones or doorbells. For awhile, I thought I’d have no choice but to eat it all myself. In fact, I gave it a pretty good shot before my neighbors got home and took the rest of the bread away from me.

Oh, this was good. So good, in fact, that the next day I made another batch of the dough and froze it. This focaccia will be the first thing I make  when Bryan reintroduces gluten back into his diet.

The recipe starts out by mixing up a biga. A biga is a runny combination of flour, water and yeast. The almost liquid dough is left in the refrigerator for up to four days. This resting period gives the yeast time to ferment and creates a lot of flavor.

So the day before I baked these beauties up, I mixed up the biga and left it overnight in the fridge. The next day, I took about half of the biga and added more water, flour and yeast to create the focaccia dough. The dough was soft and smooth and a dream to work with.

After the initial rising, the dough is divided in half and pressed out into oval shapes. After another rest, the dough is dimpled with your fingertips, brushed with olive oil and topped with whatever strikes your fancy. The bread is baked for about  25-30 minutes, or until it is golden brown.

Since Mackie’s recipe made two focaccias, I wanted to try something different. For the first focaccia, I followed her instructions to top the dough with thinly sliced roma tomatoes, salt and pepper. The only change I made was to use fresh rosemary instead of basil. This focaccia was very tasty. I liked the freshness of the tomatoes. My only quibble is that the dough under the tomatoes remained kind of wet and soggy. Mind you, I still ate almost half of it, so it didn’t bother me all that much.

For the second focaccia, I brushed the dough with melted butter instead of olive oil and covered it with thinly sliced pears and cinnamon sugar. Yes, it was very, very good. Yes, I ate more than half of this one. Yes, I had a hard time handing it over to the neighbors, and yes, I will be making this recipe over and over again. The possibilities are endless as far as toppings and flavors go.

This is the last recipe out of  Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook. Overall, I really liked the book and had mostly successes. I think Mackie did a good job converting her bakery-sized recipes to ones the home cook can easily make. This is a cookbook that I’ll return to over and over.

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Challah (a traditional Jewish bread, usually braided) was one of the first breads I learned to make in baking school. We liked making it, because it could be mixed, left to rise and then baked in the five hours we were in class. Some of the other breads took days before they were done.

Me, impatient? Nah . . .

Mackie’s challah recipe is pretty straightforward. Challah is an enriched bread, meaning the dough contains some fat and sugar. Besides the usual flour, yeast and water, this recipe calls for eggs, honey and some vegetable oil. The dough is kneaded, then left to rise. After the first rise, the dough is divided into three parts. Each portion of dough is rolled into a rope and all three ropes are then braided. Before being baked, the dough is brushed an egg wash and sprinkled with poppy seeds.

The dough was easy enough to mix and knead (thank you, Kitchen Aid mixer). The only problem I had was that it was incredibly sticky and soft. I even added another 1/4 cup of flour to the recipe. Mackie states that the dough will be wet, so I wasn’t too concerned. After the first rise, the dough was easier to handle, but it was still very, very sticky. I had to use a lot of flour in order to roll and braid the dough.

The bread baked up very nicely. It had a dense crumb with a firm bite to it. It was soft and fairly neutral flavored – perfect as toast or spread with butter and jam.

Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Some day I will have my own bakery, and when I do, I want it to just like Seattle’s Macrina Bakery. I haven’t actually ever been there, but based on the cookbook, which is based on the recipes that the bakery uses, I think I’d fall in love with the place and never leave.

Hmmm. Maybe it is a good thing I haven’t been there . . .

The first recipe that caught my eye was this chocolate yeast bread. Chocolate. Yeast. Bread. I was smitten. The recipe was pretty easy, and I had all the ingredients on hand. It is a basic enriched yeast dough that has some cocoa powder added to it. This version also adds chopped almonds and chopped bittersweet chocolate (I used chocolate chips).

The only problem I had with the recipe is that I wasn’t sure what the kneaded dough was supposed to look like. Mackie says the dough will look satiny and stringy, and mine was, but it was also more like a cake batter then a bread dough. It wasn’t very cohesive, and I ended up adding almost another cup of flour to the dough before it started balling up and acting like a normal bread dough. At this point, I could knead it by hand, although it was still pretty sticky.

Warm from the oven, this bread was very, very good. As it cooled down, however, it became slightly dry, so I may have added too much flour (or overbaked the bread). I guess I’ll just have to try this recipe again. Darn.

Currently cooking from Tasty by Roy Finamore

Why make English muffins? Well, why not? I had the ingredients (flour, yeast, salt and water) and instead of heating up the house with the oven, these little babies get cooked on a cast-iron griddle on the stovetop.

The simple dough is mixed up and left to rest overnight in the fridge. The next day, the dough is divided into 10 pieces, rolled into balls and flattened and left to rise until almost double. The dough is then cooked (I used my electric griddle) for 8-10 minutes per side. Presto! English muffins.

These were really, really good, especially toasted and spread with butter and jam. Next time I make these, I’ll divide the dough into smaller balls (12, maybe, instead of 10) since some of my muffins were pretty big. Also, during the cooking, you are supposed to press down the dough to flatten it. My English muffins were very, very flat, so next time, I won’t press them as hard.