Challah!

Challah is one of my favourite types of bread.  It makes great toast, french toast, sandwiches, garlic bread, croutons... it pretty much works for all your bready needs.  I've been meaning to try my hand at making it for a while now, but for some reason I thought it was super complicated and the recipe I have calls for saffron.

But today, I got past my mental challah block and dove in!  (Sans saffron)

Challah is actually an amazingly simple bread.  Even the braiding which makes it look so fancy is simple (we all know how to braid, right?)  And with a few birds in the yard, the number of eggs challah requires for its signature deliciousness is no obstacle!

Challah

1/2 c flour

2tbsp sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

Whatever spice you want, however much you want (I used a healthy pinch of cinnamon)

1 packet or 2 1/4 tsp yeast

1/3 softened butter

Sift together dry ingredients and thoroughly mix in butter.

1 c water (105-115 F)

3 eggs

1 egg white (save yolk for later)

1/2 c flour

Add water to dry ingredients slowly while mixing - either by hand with a wooden spoon or with your electric mixer.   Add eggs and egg white.  While getting mixy, add flour.

More flour!

(about 4 c)

Continue mixing.  Add flour, 1/2 c at a time, until you have a good dough.  

Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until stretchy and smooth.  If you have a mixer with kneading hooks, use that, cause, way easier.  This will take around 10 minutes.

Grease a large bowl.  When dough is kneaded properly, place in greased bowl.  Roll dough around to ensure that all sides get greasy.  Cover and leave in a warm place.

Do something else for 1 hour.

After your hour is up, find your dough and punch it in the face a few times.  Split your dough in half  and flour a flat surface for some braiding fun!

Split half the dough further into thirds.  Roll each third out into a 12" long dough-string.  Braid them together and pinch together the ends.  Place your braided dough onto a greased cookie sheet and repeat this step with the second half of the dough.

1 egg yolk

1 tbsp cold water

Some kind of seeds - poppy, sesame, anise, whatevs. 

Beat the yolk and the cold water together.  Brush on the tops of your braids.  Sprinkle whatever seeds you chose on the top until it looks good to you.

Cover and leave in a warm place.

Walk your dog or something for another hour.

Preheat your oven to 400F.  Bake 20 minutes.  Remove from sheet and allow to cool on wire racks.  Share - or not, depending on how hungry you are.

Nut Teas and Nutella

I've had a pretty bakey week. I didn't make any bread this weekend, because we're still working on that Spiced Honey Wheat Bread (another advantage of making it by hand over using a bread machine : 2 loaves!)

However, I volunteered to host the February board meeting of the Northwest History Network, which meant I had to bake to impress! Or, at least, I wanted to. So I made cookies: LeChuck Chips and Nut Teas. (Every battery in the house was dead, so no pictures. Sorry.)

LeChuck Chips (so named because when I first made them, I was playing a lot of Monkey Island) are basically Chocolate Chip cookies with coconut flakes added, and coconut extract instead of vanilla extract. One could go even further and use coconut oil instead of butter - but I'm much too cheap for that.

I found the recipe for Nut Teas in a cookbook by the Overlook Women's Club from the 1950s - although I can't imagine anyone thinking that "Nut Teas" was a good name for food back then either. The cookbook also didn't think it necessary to give many actual directions beyond a temperature and an ingredient list, but I managed to wing it ok:

Nut Teas
from the Overlook Cookbook ca. 1950
submitted by Mrs. G. A. Baley

1 c firmly packed brown sugar
1 c ground nuts (measure after grinding)
1 unbeaten egg white
pinch salt

Preheat oven to 275F. Mash lumps in brown sugar. Add egg and salt. Add nuts and form into balls. Bake 30 minutes.

What the recipe doesn't tell you is that since these cookies contain no butter and only egg whites, you need to be sure to heavily grease your cookie sheet and be VERY careful removing them after they're done. Make sure to allow them to cool completely on the sheets before chipping them carefully off. Several of mine fell apart because I didn't know this. But they were still delicious, and soon disappeared.

Since I used hazelnuts in the above recipe, and I had a great many of them all ground up and leftover, I decided to attempt to make my own nutella (Recipe found here).

Seen here on my delicious Spiced Honey Wheat Bread (now that batteries have been recharged):

Warning: if you attempt this at home, this recipe is a little too sweet for my taste. I'd recommend using more cocoa powder and less powdered sugar.

Me vs. The Bread Machine

For Xmas and my birthday, my mom got me a Breadman breadmaker.

I've been making bread by hand for a while now, so I think that's why she was so inspired. A few years ago, I had found an old Sunbeam Mixer (circa 1970s) at the Goodwill for $15 - one that came with kneading hooks! Just recently, I had gotten into the habit of making some bread every Sunday afternoon, with my own hands. So when I opened up the giant box on Xmas morning, I was a little confused and disappointed.

"Just give it a try," my Mom implored. "At the very least you can use it for mixing the dough and letting it rise."

I have to admit, the thing looks pretty cool. It's got a gajillion settings, a collapsible kneading paddle, so it won't leave a creepy hole in your bread like most machines do, and a fruit and/or nut and/or chocolate chip auto dispenser. Plus, it's awfully shiny. So, I plugged it in and gave it a try.

Round 1: Chocolate Hazelnut Bread.
Me: 0
Breadman: 1




For my first try, I thought I'd make something sweet. I'm a huge Nutella fan, so I thought I'd try out the Chocolate Hazelnut Bread recipe.

Well, the bread didn't rise. The kneading paddle didn't fall like it was supposed to, so my bread had a gaping hole in the bottom. And the nut dispenser just dumped all the hazelnuts into one side of the bread. And, lastly, it had some kind of weird burnt flour shell.

I figured maybe I had mis-measured the liquids, and that maybe my yeast was too old for the machine to work with. So, I went out and bought some fresh bread-machine yeast.

But it was still delicious, at least.


Round 2: Honey Wheat Bread.
Me: 0
Breadman: 2



This time, I needed a recipe that would use milk, but not eggs. I had just bought some local honey, so...

This one was a disaster. The kneading paddle popped out in what appears to be the first kneading cycle. The chickens had a feast that day.

This time, I thought maybe I didn't put the kneading paddle in firmly enough. Next time, I thought, I'll be more careful.


Round 3: Andama.
Me: 0
Breadman: 3

It's hard to see what went wrong in this photo. But the bread rose, and then collapsed in on itself. The sunflower seeds are all on one side of the bread. And the kneading hook popped off again, this time in the second kneading cycle, so it's baked somewhere in the center, but at least it looks relatively bread shaped, this time.

Maybe I used too much yeast. But I sure as heck made sure that kneading paddle was secure.

At least, once again, the bread was still delicious.


In conclusion: Breadmachines, at least this one, appear to require so much babysitting that having a machine do the work for you appears to be pointless. The results are much much better when I do it myself. I've NEVER had my bread not rise or collapse when I'm in charge of it. If I have to check on the machine every 20 minutes to make sure it hasn't screwed itself up, I fail to see where the convenience is.

Whaddya think, should I return the thing, or keep trying to make it work?