Baking Bread
Winter has come to Santa Fe, so it’s a perfect time to bake bread seeing that it’s WAY too cold outside to get on my bike. I’m not desperate enough yet to ride when it’s in the 20’s and 30’s.
This first bread uses a hybrid Wild Yeast Starter (from my Mother Starter that lives in the frig) and a Biga-style which reduces the “yeastyness” a bit. It also uses a combination of bread flour and whole wheat so that it’s a bit lighter than full whole wheat, but still is fairly dense.
It has 4 basic steps: the Pre-Soaker (8 hours day 1), the Soaker and my Hybrid Wild Yeast starter (overnight into day 2), and the final mixture (afternoon of day 2).
The second bread is a gluten-free bread I make for Alison. Most gluten-free breads are, A) stupidly expensive if you buy them, and B) also have the added feature of being inedible.
This recipe I’ve been “perfecting” for about a dozen or more loafs. It doesn’t use arrowroot flour as most recipes call for ’cause that stuff costs too much and has the density of fine cocaine (I can only imagine!), so more ends up on your clothes then in the bowl. This one uses rolled oats and rice flour, plus a bunch of nuts and raisins.
robert j. mang photography 