This is the first recipe for a new blog club I belong to called Tuesday’s with Dorie. We are baking along to recipes in the cookbook Baking with Julia, written by Dorie Greenspan. There are over 300 bloggers joined together from all over the world attempting to bake every recipe in this book. I am not one to shy away from a challenge, so of course you could count me in! Plus, you should all know about my infatuation with Dorie by now. If you search her name on my blog, multiple results will appear. I heart her and her recipes.
We will be posting twice a month, on Tuesday obviously. Our first post is White Loaves, a.k.a. white bread. I took the advice of some of my fellow bloggers and created two different loaves of bread. The recipe yielded two anyway so I kept one as traditional white bread but added a cinnamon-sugar swirl to the second one. Both were equally delicious in their own right. Not many baked goods rival freshly baked bread just out of the oven. I used to work at a bakery when I was 15 years old so I knew what it should taste like. I’m glad I got to experience that in the privacy of my own home this time around. I’m not a bread-person but this was YUMMY!
This recipe is for those who are fearless in the kitchen. Baking bread from scratch is no easy task but it is worth all the effort. I jumped at the opportunity to experiment with yeast for the first time and bake these loaves. It’s not “hard” to make this bread necessarily, but it does require a lot of time and arm muscle, even though I used my Kitchenaid mixer for the bulk of the preparation. By no means did my bread turn out perfect either. I did something wrong when kneading my bread because when I tried rolling it out it would not stay together as one piece. You can see that I had a random growth coming off one of my loaves when they came out of the oven. Oh well. I just pulled it off and ate it for a snack while the bread was cooling.
This recipe can be found on the website of our hostess’ this time around, Laurie and Jules.
Tutti Mangia!
As far as bread goes, I’m convinced that as long as it tastes good then it’s a success! And that one loaf I would have devoured — extra crust!
Lovely cinnamon swirl! Glad you are baking with us!
Pretty is as pretty tastes. That bread looks good and like it has a perfect texture! See you next time.
For your first time with yeat, it looks like you did admirably well! Both loaves look perfectly scrumptious.
This recipe was a little “odd” in that the butter was added after most of the kneading was done – most recipes have it worked in sooner.
Very thoughtful post and I agree that the lines are lrirbung, especially as higher-quality ingredients and equipment become available to home cooks. I also feel that while there are certain things that just can’t be replicated at home, there are also certain things that can’t be replicated at a restaurant. We’ve already eaten all our tomatoes, but I can’t wait to make them again! I am getting so many great ideas how to use them by reading all the FFWD posts.