Bread Chapter

When I was a young cook, learning to bake from my Grandmother, I was very careful to follow her recipes and technique.  I was confident that the recipe would never let me down if I followed it exactly.  Now that I am less fearful of failure and with the benefit of my chef training a the New England Culinary Institute behind me, I can approach the recipes differently.  I find that the heart of her recipes is the technique and there can be freedom in the selection of ingredients.  The Bread Chapter will start with her tried and true recipe for White Bread handed down through generations of her family.  Once that list of ingredients and the techique have been mastered to produce the perfect loaf, we can be adventurous in the manipulation of ingredients to create a wide variety of yeast-based bread products.  The first example is the photo posted below of the Cinnamon Sticky Rolls.  I will post more photos as I work through all the manipulations of this classic bread recipe.

Evidence of Baking

 

Cinnamon Rolls:  Beautiful and Delicious!

Recipe Testing

Writing is hard work, this is fun!  I have started revisiting my Grandmother's recipes starting with the bread, which is where we began so many years ago.  This time I am approaching it with an eye to adapt the recipes to my uses and see additional uses.  This afternoon I made a two loaf batch of her white bread.  If I was being faithful to the recipe I would have used all bread flour and added a few tablespoons of yellow corn meal and shaped two loaves.  This time I used half bread and half AP flour and skipped the corn meal.  The softer dough made one gorgeous loaf and 9 cinnamon sticky buns!  Yum.  The original recipe and the adaptations will all be in the book.

Return to writing

Thank you for your patience!  It has taken quite some time for me to return to the discipline of writing.  The new page entitled "Family" is my latest effort to define the project and why I must pursue it.  I am deeply grateful to all those who have expressed their interest and support for this project and I hope to reward us all with more rapid progress.  Strangely enough, I find the process of transcribing and refining the recipes that I hope to include the most difficult part of the project.  I would have thought that would be easy!  But it demands my full attention on a regular basis to plow through it.  Not something that comes naturally.  I will persist.