Thursday, January 19, 2012

Mellow Bakers in Januari ....All Breads baked!!!

This is the last month of the Mellow Bakers Challenge: Baking "Bread" by Jeffrey Hamelman. All done!

It all started April 2010 and 84 recipes later we've reached the conclusion. A wonderful book with great recipes and technics to understand, make and bake bread. It still is -in my humble view-  thé book to purchase when you want to understand how to and bake good bread. My book had it hard, it fell apart during this challenge. The middle part fell out, and however much I glued, it never really stayed put. Lost some of the colour pages that came loose, but it's still sort of together, so I can keep on baking from it. And here are the last breads from this book (all baked a few years back):

Semolina Bread. Here I found out I went wrong. The semolina (durum) bread (page 135) I baked in June last year, was the bread I had to bake this month. So I place the Semolina bread (page 171)here, that I should have used in June.

Semolina (durum) bread with a whole grain soaker. I had to use a little more water to get a good dough. As said before, the use of soakers are really a great way of adding grains and so on to your breads. Love the crunch of the millet.
Five grain levain. A great loaf, though personally I prefer the 5-grain bread with pâte fermentée (p.129).

Roasted garlic levain. A beautiful loaf as well, soft garlic taste and a great accompaniment for soup or stew. Lovely oven rise.

And that's it, done. We can applaud ourselves :) All the breads can be viewed HERE.
Rumour has it that the next Mellow Baker challenge will be baking through the entire book by Dan Lepard "The handmade loaf". I think I'll bake along again. I have the book, I like the book, did bake a few recipes (not many) from it already, I think I'll give it a go. So the Mellow Bakers story will be continued....

6 comments:

NKP said...

Yay! Congratulations for completing the whole book!!!!!
The breads are simply beautiful, such elegant shaping and slashing.

MarjoleinB said...

Proficiat, een hele prestatie!
En zo te lezen heb ik een goed keuze gemaakt.
Ik ben aan het wachten op de postbode die één dezer dagen mijn exemplaar van dit boek komt brengen.
Het wordt mijn eerste broodbakboek dat geen gebruik maakt van een broodbakmachine.
Of ik ook alle recepten ga bakken is de vraag maar ik heb heel veel zin om een start te maken!

Lien said...

@ Natashya, Yay for both of us!

@ Marjolein, je zult er zeker geen spijt van krijgen. Mijn persoonlijk favoriete hoofdstuk is 'breads with pre ferments', ben benieuwd welke jouwe wordt!! Veel bakplezier.

Yumarama said...

Congrats, Lien! A fine way to fisnish up the book - even if the book itself is somewhat finished too!

As soon as enough people say they're on board for the next run, we can get things going. We welcome everyone, even if writing English isn't your strongest pojnt: speaking "bread" is pretty much international!

Come one, come all and join us, including Lien of course, on our next adventure through Dan Lepard's very highly praised "The Handmade Loaf". Visit MellowBakers.com and make wonderful breads with us.

MyKitchenInHalfCups said...

Bravo my friend! Fabulous.

Lien said...

In retropect I will not join the Mellow Bakers baking through this book. I wasn't planning on publishing Lepard's recipes for this challenge as I didn't for the Hamelman challenge. But I've been asked to remove the two (adapted) recipes that I baked from Lepard's book from my blog, in fear of people not buying the book(s) anymore, I don't feel like baking from this book and advertising for it. Because as all bloggers know, seeing some recipes being tried out is making them wanting to buy the book. So sorry Mellow Bakers, I'm out.