Bread Baking Babes in September

 This month a bread with a story, not mine, but Elizabeth's, who is proudly wearing the apron of the kitchen of the month. She ate it in a restaurant and the chef was kind enough to give her the recipe. I love that, just immagine when she bakes this bread, memories of that wonderful restaurant and the time they spent there will get back to her. Love the fact that the chef was willing to give the recipe too, very generous!

And now for the bread itself. First of all there is fennelseed in it: great! I love that a lot. Then there is blackstrap molasses. There is no blackstrap for sale here in the Netherlands, so I had to improvise. I had some molasses in my cupboard, but that is the real dark and salty one. I have it because there have been some recipes that called for it, but I really dislike it. So I only used 1 large tablespoon of that and added normal brown "cane molasses" or "rietsuiker/keukenstroop" that we use on pancakes and/or bread. That is brown, but sweet. Next were Thompson raisins, and what a coincidense, I really had real US Thompson raisins in the house, bought from the organic store the week before. They are darker then normal raisins and a bit larger. But you can use whatever raisins you have. So far so good.

Whole wheat; check, AP flour: check.... rye flour: o no not rye flour. I don't like rye flour. Not only I'm not a fan of the taste, but also American recipes, that contain (more that a little) rye flour, really tend to ruin the bread. Most of the time I get in trouble with the liquids, the Dutch stuff just doesn't seem to take as much as it should and also rye flour makes it very dense, which I don't like a lot. But as there is only one cup here, I thought it would be OK.

But during kneading I quickly noticed that it was going to be a very very wet dough. I held back 110 ml of water and still had to add over 100 gr of extra bread flour. It all went 'bread dough as usual' from there on, until I forgot to set the timer (ahem....chatting away on the computer) and they turned out pretty dark. Still very usuable and edible though. My man is the rye-eater here, so he ate the bread and like it. I did throw out what was left of that salty molasses this time, I don't think it -even though it was just a TB- was the right thing for this bread and I just decided to never use it again.

Molasses Fennel Rye Bread

You can check out the recipe on Elizabeth's blog "Blog from our kitchen". And if you like to bake along and become a Bread Baking Buddy this month, you're very welcome too. You know the drill: Bake, taste, blog and tell us about your bread, send your details to Elizabeth, who'll reward you with a Buddy badge to add to your post and add your entry to a round-up later this month. DEADLINE: September 29.