Tuesday, February 7, 2012

White Loaves-Tuesdays with Dorie

Tuesdays with Dorie...and so it begins. My friend Beth and I have teamed up to bake along with the Tuesdays with Dorie group.  We are baking from the Dorie Greenspan cookbook entitled "Baking with Julia".
Our first endeavor was to make white bread.  We had quite a few good laughs along the way.  Beth is less of a "measurer" than I am and I tend to be a little messy along the way so we should have quite an adventure on this journey.
White Loaves.  We too experienced what others did with the KitchenAid heating up and whining while kneading the dough so after about 4 minutes we took to the hand kneading process that so many others also undertook.  Since we were baking as a team, we kneaded in one minute increments.
We were like little kids jumping up and down when the 2nd rise happened and everytime we looked at our bread we were wide-eyed with excitement.  The smell overtook our kitchen and we could hardly wait to take the loaves out of the oven. Imagine our surprise when we felt "success"! (We did do as suggested and turn the loaves out on to the oven racks to bake for the last 10 minutes).

The one thing we did different from the recipe was we "buttered" the plastic wrap during the 2nd rise and the directions said to oil the plastic wrap.  We think that maybe we might have had a shinier crust had we actually used oil.

Unfortunately, although our mouths watered for the taste of hot bread right out of the oven, we both felt the taste was a little bland, even when slathered with some beautiful European salted butter.  I ate mine fairly warm out of the oven, Beth ate hers much later that same evening, and we both made toast the next morning.

All in all, we had a great time making the bread and the directions were easy to follow. But, we did find the taste a little disappointing!