Sunday, August 06, 2006

Rustic Bead II
















This recipe for wheaten rustic bread came from Floyd at The Fresh Loaf.

A few observations about this bread:

I wouldn't try this as your first attempt at bread baking. The dough is quite wet, sticky and difficult to handle. After a while, you'll have picked up a few handling techniques that can't really be translated into directions, but by "feel" you'll sort of know what to do. A year ago, I could not have managed this loaf.

I baked this on a hot day with high humidity and I should have used a bit more flour to compensate.

I opted for a heavy, commercial jelly roll baking sheet lightly tossed with cornmeal, rather than a stone-the results were good though I did not get as much spring as I might have hoped for.

Two cups of water thrown into a pan that pre-heated along with the oven did the trick for steam-the crust was perfect.

Using an exacto knife for scoring does not work as well as one might think.


I'll attempt it again later this week and post results.